When I first started playing EDH, I was like most Spikes new to the format: pure, unadulterated evil.  My decks read like “top 100 most hated EDH cards” lists: [card]Sundering Titan[/card], [card]Myojin of Night’s Reach[/card], [card]Identity Crisis[/card], [card]Desolation Angel[/card], [card]Magister Sphinx[/card], [card]Sorin Markov[/card], it goes on and on.  Even worse, in my Spikish naiveté, I thought that I was actually a “good guy,” since I oh-so-nobly refrained from using any infinite or instant-win combos.  Which basically meant you got to watch for turns and turns as my decks annihilated your lands, dumped your hand, and bled you dry.

Thankfully, I’ve come a long way since then.  It’s taken a combination of pressure from my friends and opponents, a bit of maturity, and more than a little of my own medicine thrown back in my face, but I’ve finally embraced the concept of EDH as a social format, and not just another venue where I can let my competitive instincts run wild.  While I still build powerful decks that can dominate a table, I’ve been very careful as of late to make sure they don’t try to lock down my opponents, destroy their manabases, or prevent them from casting spells.  While it seems like a simple rule, the complex interactions that a deck is capable of can make the line between acceptable and unfun much harder to define than you may think.

Take [card]Terastodon[/card], for instance.  It’s a staple of most green decks, allowing a player to deal with multiple problem permanents at once while laying down one of the biggest creatures in the game.  Very few players would consider it unfair.  But when it gets played in a deck with access to multiple flicker outlets or a strong sacrifice/recursion engine, all of a sudden that strong one-time effect becomes a three-, six-, or nine-permanent-a-turn meatgrinder that leaves its opponents with very few options (and a lot of elephants).  Neither Terastodon nor the various blink/recursion outlets is particularly broken, but together they make for a particularly nasty soft lockdown.

It presents a charitably-minded Spike with something of a dilemma.  Do you remove the Terastodon, and thus the temptation to blink it ad nauseum, or do you tone down your blink engine?  Just removing the elephant is probably simplest, as recursion engines are notoriously finicky things to tune, and altering your card choices isn’t necessarily going to tone down its power so much as just make it less consistent.  But Terastodon is an EDH card writ large.  It is the kind of card that makes for dramatic turnarounds, deep political choices, and crazy board states.  Somehow, if feels deeply wrong to me to leave it out of a deck playing green.  I could substitute something like [card]Woodfall Primus[/card], but whenever I drew the treefolk I couldn’t help but wonder – what if this was a Terastodon?\

As it turns out, I think the middle path is best.  Build your deck big, mean, and nasty, but play nice.  Put that Terastodon in there alongside that blink engine.  But restrain yourself.  Get what value you can out of the big elephant, and then just let him sit there.  It takes a little practice, honestly, and more than a little self control, but the result is longer, more satisfying games for everyone involved.  And on the off chance that someone shows up at your table looking to close out the game with some obnoxious combo deck, then pull out the stops and grind them into oblivion.  Trust me, there’s very little in this world that is more satisfying.

In the end, I think that the most underappreciated aspect of EDH, both in gameplay and deckbuilding, is charity.  That is to say, leaving room in your gameplan for other people to do their own thing. Giving your opponents a chance to pull some shenanigans of their own, and being flexible enough to survive, adapt, and respond in kind. Really, its the magic that comes out of that back-and-forth give-and-take that we’re all chasing.  We should build and play with that end in mind, and remember that in the end, a victory is nowhere near as meaningful as what you had to do to earn it.