For this
blog's inaugural post, I am going to talk about a subject that has grown on me
throughout my years in college: Magic: The Gathering. I was introduced to this
game during my sophmore year of college and have been playing ever since. I
should follow this statement with a disclaimer; I am no tournament player. I
much prefer casual play amongst my friends where cards from many different
Magic sets can combine in unique, fun, and sometimes, as I will demonstrate
later in this post, ridiculous ways. I am a big fan of EDH, or Commander, since
it allows many cards that don't normally see a lot of play their chance to
shine, and have created four of my own decks following this format, with a
fifth in the works. My latest creation, featuring Melek, Izzet Paragon as its
illustrious commander, is the focus of the rest of this post.
While
hitting random on the Gatherer website one night (a wonderful way to find
interesting cards), I came across a card from the original Ravnica set called
Eye of the Storm. For those who aren’t familiar with the blue enchantment, the
exact wording of the card is as follows: “Whenever a player plays an instant or
sorcery card, remove it from the game. Then that player copies each instant or
sorcery card removed from the game with Eye of the Storm. For each copy, the
player may play the copy without paying its mana cost”. I had also recently
picked up a card called Hive Mind, another blue enchantment that says, “Whenever
a player casts an instant or sorcery spell, each other player copies that
spell. Each of those players may choose new targets for his or her copy”. Since
the Izzet are one of my favorite guilds from Ravnica, I immediately began
thinking of a spell-focused blue/red deck where my objective wasn’t necessarily
to win, but to give everyone the opportunity to “have fun”. Upon doing an
advanced search for cards containing spell randomizing effects, I finally ended
up with the following build for my “Chaos Deck”:
