When you do anything long enough you will reach a natural point where you feel that you need to stretch your efforts in order to maintain the same level of passion and enthusiasm it once brought as a novice. At first, the pure thrill of a new activity is enough to sustain and fuel your interests. Assuming you stick with it, in time that raw vigor evolves into dogged determination to develop your skills as you move from novice to expert – which in many cases can take years to accomplish.

Once you reach the point where mere basics are long mastered and you’ve built up considerable expertise on the matter though, there develops an inevitable itch to try to shake things up. Becoming a skilled expert in something – anything really – is a laudable accomplishment and is not something to casually dismiss. However, to avoid becoming bored it’s also only natural to want to find new ways to grow and explore those skills even at the upper tiers of your field. It’s why a movie actor may want to switch to a stint in live theater, or a longstanding genre musician experiments with different styles: it’s a way to broaden your horizons while still being able to apply a multitudes of lessons learned over time.

Or, in my case, learning how to deftly navigate multiplayer Magic: the Gathering.

It’s a niche and minor pedigree I grant, and not really something that’s championed even among Magic players. Sure, the game has its share of notable gaming figures, but they almost all exist within the sphere of professional duelists and judges. Yet even after all these years there remains a presumptive mindset that the kitchen table and multiplayer focused side of the game by contrast is bereft of expertise unless it’s how to operate more expeditiously and cutthroat – i.e. more like a duelist. But ask anyone who plays multiplayer Magic regularly and they’ll quickly point out that key cards, specific deck builds, and whole playing styles that work in such hyper-competitive arenas are frequently far less effective in longer games with multiple opponents.

Multiplayer is, by its sheer existence, more nuanced and requires more adaptability from both the player and the deck they’re using. Mostly due to the much higher degrees of variance you’ll experience. It necessitates a different style of battlefield tactics, including the need to factor in table politics and the meta game in which you’re playing. Sometimes what is the optimal and correct move in a one-on-one game will be the wrong one in the larger field, and though it seems self-evident, it can take time to adapt to that change in mindset. Multiplayer, and Commander in particular, are one part grand melee, one part courtly intrigue, and one part doomsday prepping. All while still trying to have fun. In effect, mastering multiplayer Magic is giving yourself the best means at manipulating the situation into your favor while also engineering in contingencies to roll with the punches when things inevitably go sideways on you.

And they will. Frequently.

This is the standard multiplayer scene. As was already mentioned, however, sometimes when you’ve been at it long enough the tact and methodology you use to this end can manifest in ways that aren’t always the most direct or obvious. After so many years at the helm, I personally love using cards that come out of left field which can disrupt a player’s plans but still maintains a viable strategic purpose. That is, cards that can be unconventionally disruptive but aren’t necessarily random just for random’s sake.

Say, for instance, by using a conventionally defensive minded card to routinely flummox a player from doing a litany of low-level and taken for granted actions.

Today we have: Earnest Fellowship

Name: Earnest Fellowship

Edition: Odyssey

Rarity: Rare

Focus: Board Disruption

Highlights: Since the very beginning I have been a big proponent of Protection. Though comparatively complex compared to most modern mechanics due its four-pronged effect, it is this complexity that also gives it such ample versatility when properly utilized. Most of the time Protection is thought of as a defensive deployment – preventing your creature from being targeted or damaged from a particular color or source type. From beneficial Auras to one-shot spells, Magic has long provided cards to this end. Odyssey’s deceptively worthwhile Earnest Fellowship, on the other hand, inverts this idea.

Coming as part of Odyssey’s tribal-heavy setting, Earnest Fellowship in retrospect seems like an odd time to be printed. It was, in essence, a response card given that immediately preceding Odyssey was the multicolor heavy Invasion block. Because of that, the Fellowship was modestly used at the time but then has proceeded to largely be forgotten. Which makes it a splendid card for the era of Commander.

On the surface, Earnest Fellowship is remarkably straightforward single sentence card: at a mere two mana, it states that all creatures gain Protection of their own colors.

What this doesn’t do is convey the apple cart upsetting implications of such a statement.

For starters, this subtly worded card stipulates that creatures which share a color can no longer deal damage to one another. Red creatures have Protection from Red, Green creatures have Protection from Green, and so forth. Tied into this is the stark reality that this also means such creatures no longer can be blocked by creatures of that color either. Thanks to this enchantment, suddenly your Black creature can no longer be blocked by your opponent’s Black creatures – and vice versa. This can significantly upend the typical assumptions about what constitutes a useful table presence and who is a threat to whom – and creates a less rote board state in the process.

At the same time, Earnest Fellowship’s Protection granting boon can cut the other direction too, as a creature with its own color protections can no longer be targeted by spells and abilities of those colors, nor can they be enchanted or equipped by them.

Put both together and Earnest Fellowship can be particularly devastating in Commander regardless of whether you’re sporting a multicolor or monocolor deck. Monocolor decks, for instance, essentially get locked out entirely of being able to target their own creatures with spells or effects (as well as those of an opponent’s matching their own). Yet only having a single color on the battlefield also significantly increases the chances you’ll still be able to block with creatures per normal.

At the other end of the spectrum, with this enchantment on the battlefield the more colors a creature has the higher the statistical odds of it essentially being unblockable to an opponent…but it also means it’s that much easier for people to attack you with unblockable creatures too. Yet having more colors at least allows for some possibility of spell / ability targeting – assuming it’s of a non-matching color. If you have a tricolor deck and it’s a tricolor creature, well, you’re still just as out of luck.

For such a little card Earnest Fellowship can throw a massive wrench into normal Commander games by forcing tradeoffs and upending the balance scales of normal gameplay.  By taking what is traditionally a defensive mentality and scaling it up into a table-wide set of restrictions (which with all color-related antics will be slightly unpredictable and uneven in execution), it has the potential to significantly hamstring certain decks styles and card responses just by sitting there. And while it’s hardly impossible to remove, the manner by which it alters the normal flow of the game is not something that many players are prepared to deal with.

Except perhaps, you know, for the person using it…

Keep an eye out for us to be regularly featuring other more accessible-but-worth-it Commander cards going forward. In the meantime, we’ll keep the light on for you.

350th Showcase Celebration!

In honor of recently hitting 350 Showcase articles, and as an appreciation to readers in following along after all this time, I’m raffling off a pair of fun prizes to one lucky winner!

• A $25 store credit to TCGPlayer.com to let you get some all new (or old) cards for your own Commander decks.
• A copy of the latest webcomic book by Cardboard Crack – giving you something to do if you’re still not able to play Commander as often as you’d like these days.

All you have to do to enter is fill out the form below and tell us a little bit about some of your own Magic favorites:

The contest will run through the rest of November, so don’t miss out on a chance to enter. Thanks again, and good luck!

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