Asking them to bring precons sounds good. UT at least two of the people in that group don’t even own any precons. For them, the deckbuilding is the fun part, so they’d just as well not play than run someone else’s deck.

I think trying to proxy something more powerful is the last chance here, and if I still don’t “get” commander after that, I’ll probably just throw the towel in and do something else when they break out the commander decks.

Another friend (not in this pod) pointed out that it’s for cards you love, a commander youre dying to build around, etc, so if you have to ask where the fun is, it’s not the format for you, and I guess I get that.

I’ve been thinking about your comment and I started to wonder if maybe the politics is what’s actually keeping me from enjoying the format. I’ve tried some of that but I get swung at anyway, often because I’m the least dangerous/easiest to attack at any given moment (no blockers, no reach, etc). Even as much as I point to the Muldrotha and say “hey I’ve played that deck and none of you have targeted that player, it could get wild” it never seems to work. If I’m bad at the political game, maybe the rest of the game just kind of crumbles around me? I hear these stories of people “not looking like a threat” but when i try to do the same I think it looks more like I’m a soft target.

I will definitely proxy those and test out this version of the deck next time we play. And if it feels better, I’ll get the real ones.

Hm…we may be onto something, then…

We tried that early on, where I’d get stuck, show my hand and they’d go “oh…” I think part of it is that my luck might just be really bad, and the first precon I picked up on my own is apparently really quite terrible, so that didn’t help either. On board wipes, it’s not that I have much of an issue with them, it’s just that so far they seem to only come right before I’m able to do something, and it’s incredibly frustrating to have never had an opportunity to actually affect the game. Although by the sound of it, maybe that’s actually normal? The very mean part of me wants to put together 99 cards worth of board wipes, targeted removal, land destruction, stun counters, you name it and take an “If I can’t play, nobody can” approach. But that’d be very very un-fun for everyone else, so I shan’t.

Just for completeness’ sake and to hopefully give context to what the rest of the group is playing, I tried to remember what card caused the Pantlaza situation, and it appears to have been Expropriate. Stuff on that order is what I’d consider normal for the power level here. Lots of things that can destroy one’s chance of playing in a single turn.

I’ll take a look, but I do wonder if maybe Prosper just isn’t resonating with me and I should just look elsewhere.

There’s some incredulity that there’s nothing I can do or have no answers in hand, and then encouragement to stay in because there somehow might be a comeback when I’ve missed 4 land drops and none of my mana rocks have come out. Or similar. I think there’s a certain amount of feelsbad that commander is not catching with me, or how often in collateral damage in such a way that I don’t actuality get to play even though I’m technically in the game. Probably a little over half the games so far have resulted in that.

Just this weekend I played the Pantlaza deck and it got removed early, I played it again and started building up a board, then the next turn it and the rest of my creatures got sent back to my hand, then I had to discard half of them for hand limit, and one I finally got it back out again, someone could either take it or get an extra turn. That deck basically ceases to function without its commander, so I waited another hour and a half being completely unable to affect the game state at all. In hindsight, I should’ve scooped to deny that player the resources. After 3 consecutive turns, they didn’t even win!

But yeah it’s not about winning, it’s about sitting there bored out of my skull not being able to affect the game. At this moment I would rather play any other format because commander has been unbelievably boring in every one of the dozen plus games I’ve tried.

It’s just an unmodified precon.

https://moxfield.com/decks/3JwMHo6ANUeV4t-0eNLA5A

Any tips on that then? I really don’t want to spend more than $15-20 tops (although I realize this is impossible hecause of shipping, so I guess as little as possible will have to do) and it has to function without the commander (which seems to defeat the purpose of the format but whatever) because no matter who I’ve played, it just gets removed to the point where the tax makes it unplayable (Kess, Muldrotha, Pantlaza, Prosper, Hakbal…several more).

Also maybe you can answer, what happens when you are technically not dead (>0 life) but can’t take any useful actions? Friends seem upset when I say I’m ready to scoop, but I’m also not interested in sitting there for another hour not being able to play. I guess they want my life total to stay for damage triggers maybe? Or they think someone can come back from an empty hand and a recent board wipe?

I’ve never understood the “these people hate Star Trek!” take I’ve seen around the new shows. It’s clear that nobody working on these sets out to intentionally make a bad show. Some of the Easter eggs and references are deep cuts, so it seemed obvious to me that the people working on these are big fans.

I’m going to be honest, Klingons in the TNG era always felt too goofy to me. They weren’t a proud warrior culture so much as borderline clownish space vikings who spent more time getting drunk than actually conquering anything. A redesign and change in how their culture(s) present on screen was welcome for me, and I think Discovery did a great job. I even liked the way they recontextualized the Klingon language, to make it sound more alien and more threataning than the staccato, oft-mispronounced mess that we got in the TNG era.

That said, I also think there was a missed opportunity with them. For a long time, I’ve had a head canon of the different looks of Klingons throughout all of the eras could be chalked up to these all being distinct peoples from within the Klingon Empire. It stands to reason that over a long enough time scale, an empier spanning multiple stars would start to consider people not originally from their homeworld “Klingon,” even if they might be genetically different. I always thought it would be cool if the TOS smooth forehead Klingons were actually just one species that were culturally Klingon, where the Worf-type were another, and the General Chang type was yet another. It would provide a way to smooth over the aeshetic differences with an in-universe explanation that doesn’t require any retconning except for a handful of episodes from ENT that die-hards didn’t like anyway.

But oh, well. One can dream.