Back in high school, a couple friends of mine and I started playing a little known computer game that goes by the name of Dwarf Fortress. It’s possible that none of you have heard of it, but if you have, you’ll know that it has a wonderful motto: “losing is fun.”

I wish that I had learned to apply this wonderful life lesson to my magic playing sooner, but over the last year or so when I started playing more free for all EDH, I learned to stop caring about winning, and just to enjoy playing the game. Now I play EDH for big plays, and to enjoy watching other people make big plays. It really doesn’t matter who wins a 4-player FFA game, that just isn’t what’s important. Most people that write or speak about the format hold the same view, that it’s a social game and that players should treat it as such. Even the godfather of EDH makes this claim. Oddly enough the attitude about EDH that bothers me the most comes from those same people. They speak of “douche bag card” and douche bag plays” and things that are “anti social.” The biggest offenders that I’ve come across are cards like [card]Armageddon[/card] and also combo play styles. I’ve even had people complain to me about playing basic things like [card]Counterspell[/card] and [card]Damnation[/card]. This makes sounds like these players only want people to play derpy aggro decks that just sort of mash faces against each other and try to win with the biggest fatties.

Don’t get me wrong, I love combat heavy games as much as the next person, but it’s more important to respect all styles of play than it is to try to “discourage unsportsmanlike play” and be rude to players for playing cards that you don’t like. What is really important to the health of the format are people’s attitudes about the game, and not the cards that make it into their decks. For a quick example, one of my favorite games in recent memory was a 4-player game that ended in one of my opponents pulling off a triple [card]Time Stretch[/card] with a [card]Nicol Bolas, Planeswalker[/card] sitting in front of him. To be perfectly honest, once he resolved the first time stretch, there wasn’t much that any of us could do once he resolved the first [card]Time Stretch[/card], but we all stayed in the game and enjoyed his fantastic victory with him instead of angrily scooping out to the ten-mana sorcery. I have met some players who would have gotten mad at the kid for making the play, and he knew that some people weren’t comfortable with that type of move because he was reluctant to make it, but I encouraged him to do it, because it sounded AWESOME.

This format is about doing awesome things and making awesome plays. You know what else is awesome? Omelets. You can’t make omelets without breaking a few eggs, and you certainly can’t have awesome EDH games without playing a few terribly powerful spells. We all play this game to have a good time, no one is making any money playing EDH, so they’res no real reason to care about who wins or loses, and there is certainly no reason to get mad when someone plays [card]Obliterate[/card] on turn ten for no real reason. Why? Because it’s awesome. Very strange and very awesome things happen to the game when people play intensely warping spells like that. Some people are going to whiff super hard on their lands, and someone else is going to hit all their land drops and maybe hit their [card]Sol Ring[/card]. Yes, the game might get a little one-sided at that point, but at least the game wont drag on forever, and the ending to the game will be EPIC.

So, next time that you get [card]Mindslaver[/card] locked just enjoy laughing about how terribly vulnerable your deck is to someone else controlling it, and enjoy watching the game unfold in a humorous way. As long as everyone plays nice together, all the cards are fun to play with (with the notable exception of [card]Icatian Moneychanger[/card]). If you can remember that losing is just as fun as winning, you’ll have at least four times as much fun playing than you did before.