Tales from CommandFest

[Morganator 2.0]

A while back I went to one of the many CommandFest tournaments that happened this year. If you haven't been I highly recommend it, even though it does cost a pretty penny. If you have been to one, share your stories here.

Here are my stories. For the sake of hiding identities, I've changed the names of my friends to their favorite commander.


You wanna go outside?

This happened to my good friend, Abomination of Llanowar. He enters a Baldur's Gate draft and when it comes to game-time he's put in a pod with a boyfriend-girlfriend couple. During gameplay, the boyfriend is instructing her on what moves to make. Not helping her decide which moves, but telling her how to play, and it's giving himself an advantage. This irked Abomination, so he spoke up.

"Hey man, just let her play the game."

"Fuck you, that's my girlfriend!"

"Do you want to take this outside?"

Dude was shook. He called the judge over.

"This guy wants to fight me. He said he wanted to 'take me outside' ".

"Yeah... for a friendly chat."

Judge looks back and forth between them, nods, and then walks away. He didn't want to deal with this. Dude behaved himself after that.


We don't talk about it

We were given name-tags for the event. Because I'm weird I wrote "Morganator 2.0" on my badge instead of just Morgan. My friend Kenrith and I were browsing the counter for singles when the vendor saw my badge.

Vendor: "Morganator 2.0 huh?"

Me: "Yep. Second version."

Vendor: "What happened to the first Morganator?"

Me and Kenrith, simultaneously: "We don't talk about it."

We didn't plan this, we just both had the same idea of what to say at the same time. Pretty sure we creeped out the poor guy.


The Grand Melee

Look up section 807 in the official rules to find out more about the Grand Melee variant format. Short version: You have range of influence 1 (your spells can only effect the people next to you), you can only attack the person to your left, and everyone plays in one massive pod, with turn markers so that multiple people will take their turns at the same time. We had over 20 people playing.

I pulled out Krenko, Mob Boss. I wanted something powerful, but not so powerful that it would be difficult to stop. It was also the deck that would give the most fun interactions with this format. Sitting to my left was Giada, Font of Hope and to my right was Najeela, the Blade-Blossom.

The game itself was chaotic. I managed to get out Goblin Chirurgeon, Goblin Sledder, and a hasty Krenko pretty early. And instead of attacking Giada, I helped them. When one of their attacking angels was blocked and going to die, I used Goblin Chirurgeon to regenerate it. They can't attack me, so I planned on using them as a protective shield.

And then I did something hilarious. I managed to push through Najeela's interaction and play Thornbite Staff with Skirk Prospector. That's an instant-speed infinite damage combo. Instead of taking the two players out, I passed my turn. On Giada's turn, they attacked the person to their left with an angel. I used Goblin Sledder to sacrifice 40 goblins to buff the angel to +40/+40, one-shotting the poor guy. And because I'm outside their range of influence, they can't interact with my board.

A judge saw us pull off that move and thought it was hilarious. Second judge not so much.

"Hey guys if I can a moment to talk to you. I can see that you're having fun but we don't think that this is in the spirit of the kind of event we're trying to run here. I would like to ask that you don't do that again."

I was the first person they'd have to give that warning to, but not the last. My friend Garna, across the table was also doing an instant-speed infinite combo. There was another dude doing an instant-speed infinite combo. There was a fourth person who had infinite turns. My friend Kenrith was trying to go infinite, but instead played Pramikon, Sky Rampart which had the judges arguing for minutes on how that works with the Grand Melee.

So all-in-all, pure chaos.