Game Knights Isn't Scripted, BUT…

Rachel Wheat
This episode is brought to you by Bombus. Ready for a spring refresh? Bombus has absurdly soft new socks, tees, and underwear to help you get your sock drawer stocked for the season, all with a 100% happiness guarantee. Head over to bombas.com commandzone and use code commandzone for 20% off your first purchase. This episode is brought to you by Bombus.

Ready for a spring refresh? Bombus has absurdly soft new socks, tees and underwear to help you get your sock drawer stocked for the season, all with a 100% happiness guarantee. Head over to bombus.com command zone and use code command zone for 20% off your first purchase. Greetings, humans. You have entered the command zone, your destination for all aspects of Elder Dragon Highlander.

Enjoy your stay. Welcome back to another episode of the Command Zone podcast. I'm your host, Rachel Wheat. What's up? I'm Jimmy Wong.

Josh Lee Kwai
How's it? It's Josh Lee Kwai Wheat time. This is a big episode. Secrets sh here. Cause it's a thumbnail.

Rachel Wheat
Yeah, it's a fun one. We're gonna spill all our guts. So the command zone has been making primo gameplay for years and years, and we've been aspiring to record just the most exciting, but also watchable and legible beginner friendly gameplay in the world. That sounds lofty, but that's what we're trying to do, right? When it comes to physical card games on the table?

Jimmy Wong
I think so. I think. Unless it's poker. But that's different. That's totally different.

Rachel Wheat
It's something else. Exactly. I like what Rachel said. We're aspiring to it. There you go.

Jimmy Wong
Yeah. That just means that we've learned a lot of things along the way about what makes good games and what makes for good gameplay. And today, we are going to spill all of the secrets that we have learned over the years, let you know what happens behind the scenes of game nights and all of our gameplay content. Yeah. And I think there's a lot to be learned that can be applied to people who aren't playing for content, because I feel like my games, outside of when we're recording them, have gotten better over the years simply from the lessons learned from what makes good.

Josh Lee Kwai
Cause a lot of times, what makes good content also makes for a good game. When you sit down to play with friends or strangers or whatever. Memorable, exciting, funny. That's what you want in a commander game. Yeah, in a lot of ways, these are our rule zeros for game nights.

Rachel Wheat
Yeah, we're gonna reveal everything, all the secrets every single everything, all of it. Or that. Let's reveal some sponsors. Cardteam.com command is the place to go if you're gonna buy some cards to play like a game night. Or play like a game, not like a game night.

Jimmy Wong
You can actually make that choice too, but you need the cards to do. It like a game, not a game grump. Yeah, or a game grump. Call up Aaron.

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Rachel Wheat
Go to ultrapro.com command for the highest quality magic accessories in the business. You can get deck boxes and sleeves, play mats, binders, card sorter, all sorts of accessories that just make being a magic player easier and sort of safer. You get to protect your game pieces and make sure that when you're storing your cards, you know exactly where they are. Plus they have all of the officially licensed magic art, so you know that the stuff that they make is as beautiful as magic cards. If you're into a specific commander deck, if you're into a specific set, you can always go on Ultra Pro and see what they have available for that set because they've been making some really cool stuff, including set based apex sleeves.

Josh Lee Kwai
Yeah, it's a new thing. Yeah. They did art sleeves for Thunder junction that are on their new primo line of sleeves. So you know you're getting the highest quality sleeves. And it's got new custom art for sleeves.

Rachel Wheat
You're into it. They're sweet. Yeah, the shuffle feels great. Yeah. And of course, the final way to support all of our content is directly.

Josh Lee Kwai
If you go to patreon.com commandzone, you can get all kinds of cool perks, like interacting with Jimmy, Rachel, myself, the rest of our team on our discord. Get access to extra turns and game nights earlier than the general public. We have exclusive content, all kinds of stuff. Again, patreon.com commandzone. We appreciate everybody that supports us that way.

Oh, and one other perk is we shout out one lucky patron every single episode. Who could it be? This episode is dedicated to Jirowat Sunoi. Jirowat, you rock. All right.

Jimmy Wong
You're a game night. You're gonna play, like, one after this one. So, by the way, everyone, this is episode 605. So we crossed the 600 mark. Josh and I used to do special stuff and then kind of sifted away.

Rachel Wheat
Over time, and it was 304. Hundred, 600. But this is my first hundred. Yeah, this is your 1st 100. Big deal.

Jimmy Wong
Wow, that's cool. So this is, like, your 100. We're almost. Yeah, we're very close to ten years old now. I believe in, like, mid July, we will cross the ten year point for the podcast.

Josh Lee Kwai
Game nights has been around a little less time than that. It was. I think it was two years in. So, game night. It sounds like we have to do something for ten years.

We probably should. Probably. It's called game nights live. What about little command zone? Five K event.

Wait, what? Five k? What? It should be a ten k if. We'Re saying ten years.

Rachel Wheat
Come on. Yeah, we've done the one K episode. Wait, how did it go to ten k? Because it's ten years. Please, everybody out there, if you have any ideas that are better than those ones.

Triathlon. Yeah. Three games. Oh, my gosh. They're killing me over here.

Jimmy Wong
Okay, so this is a special episode for the 600 crossing, which is what's in the gameplay secret sauce of game nights. And, Rachel, you have this great story that really kicks us off, and I think about this often. Yeah. So I was trying to remember when this was. I believe it was after magic on Vegas.

Rachel Wheat
I came out of game nights live, and I was still, like, had makeup from, like, the blue makeup on, and we were like, it was such a fun show. And we were walking out of the venue, and a woman came up to me, and she jogged after, and she was like, what an amazing show. That was so fun. I just had one question. Are all of your games like this in front of, like, hundreds of screaming people in full costume with crowd participation?

Josh Lee Kwai
No, not quite. I think she probably meant the way the game played out. It was very. It was a very exciting game. Yeah.

A lot of give and take, a lot of major swings right up to the very last minute. Not sure what's gonna happen, who's gonna win? Would Kathleen be able to pull it off? Yeah, it came down to just a couple of cards, and that's happened many times on game night's life. But I think that's so funny.

Jimmy Wong
And it does signify, though, that the game was entertaining in a way that I think when we play Commander as a group, one thing that you're looking for is everyone at the table going aghast, screaming, excited or something about something, and everyone's having a great time. And that happened like 17 times in every game night's live episode. But it also happens often, but not always on game nights. So that's what this episode is about. It's not necessarily how to teach you how to build or play, but this is how we do it when we play specifically on game nights, the filmed version that you watch on YouTube.

And there's a lot of magic there and a lot of really special guests. So we have a lot of fun stuff coming up. Yeah. If you're seeking to make your games more entertaining, more exciting, more memorable, maybe you can take some of these things into account as well. Yeah, we've learned a few things over the ten years.

Rachel Wheat
Yeah. So I wanted to start with our goal when we're building and trying to cultivate a game night. So I wanted to start with what makes an episode of Game Nights Ideal, and it starts with players, is how our process usually starts, is finding out who's playing in the game, who works well together, who works with the set. Yeah, we would like to find somebody who has something to do with the set, but that's not always possible. And it's important, more or less important to a different degree depending on the set.

Josh Lee Kwai
For instance, we had, like, Aaron from game grumps on the Karloff manor episode. He doesn't have a direct tie to it or anything like that. But, like, we had like, Kyle Hill. Hill. Kyle Hill for the fallout episode.

Yeah. And it was like, there's a deck called science and it was like, we gotta get Kyle for that one. Right? Yeah. So.

But also, I think a big thing is that we try and find people we think are going to be fun for the audience, fun for us, you know, people we know, but it's not always people we know. And there's a lot of people we start off not knowing, like Aaron, and then have come to know over the years. And I wonder if you watch the first bling Miss episode, was it bling Miss Blingless episode with Aaron? And then the most recent one, if you can feel the difference in chemistry based on that. We know him a lot better now than we did then.

We've played magic and drafted with him. He comes and hangs out at our office and plays. Sometimes you can fake that stuff, or sometimes that chemistry comes a lot faster than others. Show low and Jacob are a great example of that, too. But when we did the Lord of the Rings episode, it was like we'd known each other.

Jimmy Wong
It felt like we'd known each other for a decade. Yeah. Really? It's been like a year and a half, two years or whatever. But the call dime episode with Jacob, that was the first time we really had hung out with Jacob.

Josh Lee Kwai
And again, we've hung out with those guys a lot in the in between. So I would wonder, the Lord of the Rings episode versus the Caldheim episode if you can tell the difference in the social camaraderie or not. And I think the people you choose kind of dictate that a lot, too, because Jacob's the type of guy where I feel like the first time you sit down with him, no matter who you are, by the end of the game, you'll probably feel like you've hung out with Jacob for years and years. He's just that type of person. Oh, yeah.

So comfortable. Yeah. He held hands with ad at a stoplight the first time he met him. The first time he met him, he just, like, held my boyfriend's hands. That's incredible.

Rachel Wheat
And ad was like, hello. But that's Jacob. Kids got Riz. Yeah, definitely. So funny.

Jimmy Wong
Well, the chemistry and the Riz actually contributes to the next thing that makes the game nights ideal, which is we get to show off cool cards and having a cool person do a cool thing with a cool card, that's the whole package, especially because new cards are coming out, obviously, all the time. And game nights is a wizards of the coast sponsored show. So we have a bunch of new cards that are really exciting, and if we get to pair them with a great player and have them have a lot of fun at the table and then do this next thing, which is do the thing that really adds to whether or not an episode works, because I think in everyone's memory is probably at least one or two episodes, even viewers. A game where someone just crapped out, didn't do anything, sat there, flooded, or didn't have stuff. Rachel, you recently had this game on card.

So if you don't get to do the thing, then the episode, I think, kind of feels like it's missing a piece. Now, there are four players, so three players can do the thing and still make it feel complete. But if every player gets that chance and to show off what they're doing, then I think that really helps the overall cohesiveness of what an episode of game nights can be. Yeah. And I think everybody doing the thing is part of, like, every commander gets to live its full potential and it makes the game feel swingier and more dynamic.

Rachel Wheat
You never really know how the game is going to end. So that's a huge part of it. And I think a lot of what we're going to refer to is just balance. It's balance between the players. It's balance between the commanders.

It's just balance in what fast starts everybody gets out to. If one person races into the front and then the other three players just never catch up. It's not a great episode. Happens once in a while, but we try to avoid it. Yeah.

Josh Lee Kwai
And I think this is all about what we're trying to aim for here, not what we always succeed at. Because I know people don't always believe this, but we don't script the games. The games happen, how the games happen. What we can control is the setup. So give ourselves the best chance at a good game.

So choose the best guests, choose the best decks and cards, make sure we're considering all the factors. And then you push the first domino, and you hope that everything falls into place, but sometimes it doesn't. And that's okay. That's part of the genuine nature, the authenticity of what makes it what it is. And I think the fact that people say, yeah, game nights must be scripted, I take that as a compliment.

Cause it means we must do such a good job of that setup that most of the time we're having these games, that is a game worth writing. It happens. And often enough that people are like, this can't be real. Right. They can't keep pulling this off.

Rachel Wheat
They can't get it, go away with it. And there's a whole bunch of factors we haven't talked to yet or talked about yet as far as just how we play, when we play, and other ways you can kind of try and keep the game within the bounds of what we'd like it to be. But sometimes it gets out of control, and you're just like, well, it's gonna go there. Yep. Yeah.

I mean, a lot of that is, like, emotionally what we're shooting for in the game, but literally, there is a lot of logistics that go into game nights where we're shooting. We're shooting for eight to ten turns is like, an expected game of game nights. Yeah. These days, yeah. The more turns, the longer the episode, the harder it is on every single aspect of the process as well.

Right. So, like, when a game runs long, which, you know, we don't know how long they're gonna go, it means that the shoot days are longer. It means more time from the guests. It means more time from the editors. It means just more graphics.

Jimmy Wong
Yeah. More facts. Yep. And the interviews are really important, notably. Right.

A long game means the players are more tired. They don't have as much rest between when they have to film their interview. And sometimes a player has to do their interview at eight or 09:00 p.m. After starting at 08:00 a.m. And they have a rest period in between.

But like, you wanna get the fresh reactions and that also makes the overall episode is just making sure that everyone feels good. And so like a 14 turn game can sometimes mentally and emotionally just completely drain you. It's happened before. We move on. What are some like, what games can we point to that were like, this is a game that I remember as like a great game nights.

Josh Lee Kwai
The most popular episode of Game Nights ever is the modern Horizons one. The first modern horizons with Graham and Kathleen from loading. Ready, run. Yeah, that's a great game. Super.

Jimmy Wong
Come from behind, win. Ridiculous hits off of my freaking carmadrid. Don't say the name, don't invoke its presence. A druid that doesn't go out. I've since, by the way, had awful luck with Hermit drew and I built.

I'm like, I'm not playing. This ain't deck with. I only like two basics in this deck and it's still like womp. You just stayed on brand, Jimmy. Yeah, staying on brand.

Rachel Wheat
Not to mention there was great decks. Graham's deck had so much personality and was so memorable. And Graham and Kathleen are hilarious. So funny. So that had a lot going for it to make for a really great game.

Josh Lee Kwai
A lot of ups and downs. Different people had different moments. Everyone felt like they were involved, got to do their thing, had chances in the game and then. Yeah, I think the thing, the cherry on top and the one you really, really can't do much about, you just get it or you don't is some sort of last minute Hail Mary come from behind moment that really takes you by surprise, even takes us by surprise in the moment of like, how it plays out. Like, it just looks like Jimmy's going to win that game the last bit and then boom, at the end, it's like he manages to pull it out.

Sorry if we spoiled it for you. I didn't say who he is. Yeah, there you go. You probably guess. Yeah.

And I think that last component is like, whatever, it's flip a coin, roll a dice, whatever. You get lucky or you don't. But you can set up a lot of the other things and hopefully they fall into place. I think another episode that's kind of like that is the Theros beyond death episode, which has another crazy ending. This is the beginning of your relationship with this card.

Jimmy Wong
The ultimate dimension. Yeah, exactly. It's the beginning of how awful it's been for you. That's the very seed of why I hate it to this day. Yeah.

I also got a shout out. The lost caverns of Ixalan one, because the guests were just so entertaining. Professor and the merfolk voice, we were all doing different, wacky things the whole time, and that adds a lot to it. And plus, people love the professor for a reason. He's great on camera.

He really knows how to bring his presence. And that, again, makes an episode of Game Nights Ideal. And honestly, Prof. Is one of the perfect types of people you want to play commander with. He doesn't care that much about winning.

Josh Lee Kwai
He really is just there for the fun and the yucks, and he wants to make a funny quip and a joke, and he's there. He's present. But the cards and stuff are not as important to professor when you're playing as just the people. And I think that's a really good roadmap to keep in mind for. He just wants to do some stuff and do crazy and, yeah, he would like to win, but he doesn't care that much about it.

Yeah. He just wants to hang out with his friends. Respect. Yeah. Other great episodes, if you just want to watch them.

Jimmy Wong
The first fan episode with Ashlyn and Jacob, neon dynasty with lady Danger and post Malone. Oh, yeah. And the call of episode with aforementioned Jacob and Rachel and me. Yeah, that was a great. That was a great come from behind victory, too.

Rachel Wheat
Was it Paul time one? Yeah, two of those now. And we've. Yeah. The other one was Theros.

Jimmy Wong
Spoiler alert. Sorry. I read somewhere that people enjoy knowing spoilers. Actually, there's a psychological study. Yeah.

Josh Lee Kwai
If you're worried about spoilers for game nights, this is probably not a great episode. Yeah, this is the secret. Just gonna say that. Probably should've said earlier. Obvious part.

Yeah. It's like they won episode. This is the first episode someone's watched. If you're that person, if you click. On the secrets of game Nights episode, you're like, how dare they spoil stuff?

I think that's on you. Yeah, I think that might be on you.

Rachel Wheat
So that's what makes a great game and something that we're really, really aiming for. But a lot of planning goes into that to making all of those things happen. And I think a big one at the very beginning is choosing what commanders, what legendary creatures are in the command zone. Yep. This is pretty simple.

Jimmy Wong
I think, overall, after we explain it, you'll see the image of what we're doing here, and it makes perfect sense, I think, because we want commanders that, again, based on what we just said, the ideal are splashy. They're fun. They can do things sometimes if they're themed around goblins or pirates. That adds to the fun, especially when it's tied to the player. So proactive is the big word here, which is we are advancing the game state.

We are not trying to put the brakes on and make this a drawn out affair. Yeah. I think another thing that we both come into, because I think we both looked at orvar. The all form is me and Rachel. Yeah.

Josh Lee Kwai
We're like, sweet. We were like, we can build. Oh, this goes infinite with everything. Yeah. Like nine things.

Yeah. All right. Yeah. I 100% built the like. Cause we choose our commanders at the start and whatever, and I 100% built the whole deck, looked at it and went, I can't play this on game nights.

Nope. Yeah. Not gonna work. Bananas. I'm gonna build it for myself.

Jimmy Wong
Yeah, bananas. I later took it apart, but I. Did the same thing. We didn't build it for game nights. I built it personally.

Rachel Wheat
Played two games with it was like, whoa. But you want a commander that's, first of all, legible. That's easy to watch and understand what is happening, and Orvar's definitely not that. And also, it's a pretty strictly combo commander, so it's not necessarily an entertaining deck to watch because it's like, oh, you have the two pieces. Well, there you go.

Josh Lee Kwai
Yeah, yeah. You want stuff that's gonna be incremental, if possible, as far as, like, it will incrementally try to take a step towards winning. And then another step and another step. It's less good if it's incredibly explosive. Like, I'll take no steps and no steps and no steps and then 52 steps and just win.

Yeah. Because that doesn't feel, to the audience, very rewarding. It's just like, out of nowhere, this happened. It feels like nothing else before it mattered. So you want all the pieces along the way to matter, because it would feel like your football team scored a touchdown in the first quarter, the second quarter, and third quarter, and then somehow the other team scored one score during the fourth quarter on one.

It's like, well, why did all those other quarters matter? Yeah. Yeah. And I like the proactive word is a word we use a lot. Cause decks that are their game plan is to win by stopping other players.

Those aren't good for gameplay videos on our channel, at least in our estimation, or at least game nights. And I think there's a lesson we learned there for personal playgroups too. I'm not saying those decks are not okay. It's just that be aware that the thing you're doing is inherently, is it a thing where I'm trying to do a thing or I'm trying to stop others from doing things and just know the consequences of. If you're the latter, I think you.

Rachel Wheat
Need to know what you want out of that deck. Right. If you're playing a high control deck, like a grand arbiter deck, and you're seeking entertaining, fun, memorable games, well, those two things are fighting against each other because one is making game actions smaller and more difficult, and one of them is aspiring to big game actions that make for big moments. If you're looking for like a high skill testing, high power level type of commander, then that's where those control type of commanders really shine. Yeah, it's the meta of game nights is not to sit there and deny everything.

Jimmy Wong
Cause if you're watching it, it would. For me personally, I would not enjoy that viewing experience. Eight to ten turns. Yeah, eight to ten turns. That's not gonna fit within that window.

Josh Lee Kwai
Yeah. We used to sort of not know all these lessons when we started. And I definitely like early on, and I think Commander just did take more turns too, for most decks to close out games six, seven years ago than it does now. But I bet you can watch me sort of learn this lesson and eventually take it to heart because I'm naturally more of a sort of reactive controller player. I like to feel safe, be able to answer things.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I'm not sure if it happened all at once. There's probably like a gradual shift over time. But I bet some of the early episodes I'm playing a lot more controlly stuff than I would be willing to do now. So I learned.

So what I'm saying is I learned that lesson through mistakes. And I used to edit every episode through editing and being like, man, I wish I wouldn't. Yeah, I kind of wish I didn't play this deck, maybe. Why did I cast this board wipe screaming. Yeah, yeah.

Jimmy Wong
Games are different when you have to sit there and review them hundreds of times afterwards, right. So that definitely irons in some lessons pretty quickly. Yeah, we used to play the game and that's one day and then I would edit. And that's five weeks. Yeah.

Josh Lee Kwai
Just me living 8 hours a day watching yourself for five weeks. Yes. Just one game. That one game you get a lot of.

Jimmy Wong
So while all the decks are not necessary, we don't go for controlling. They are proactive. But that doesn't mean you can't have any variety. So we are still varying the types of decks we're showcasing and selecting. It's not just like four majorly aggro decks.

There's other cool things that can be done, and generally, I find that these days, a lot more of this decision is in your hands, Rachel, and I think you've done a great job of it. But showcasing commanders that we think are going to at least be popular because people will want to see them played, the set will get spoiled. People will look at and go, wow, I wonder how that plays. I wonder what happens when this is on the battlefield. How can I build this?

So that, I think helps a lot, too, because, again, we're making the show for an audience that plays the game. Yeah. I think as much as we want people to be playing decks that they're entertained by, we do want people to see a commander that they're excited about, get to watch it unfold in real time. So popularity is definitely a part of it. I mean, another thing that we look at is just, you just don't pick a commander that, you know, has a higher ceiling than everything else.

Rachel Wheat
And that's not to say that, like, we play low power or we're trying to cap power, but if there's just one commander like Kinnin, you know, Kinnin was in Ikoria. Yes, I believe, and I'm bad at that. You're not gonna find three other commanders in Ikoria that peek with Kinnan. So you just don't play Kinnan, and you play the next four that you can balance. So cutting out some of those top commanders, like Urza, that you just, I.

Josh Lee Kwai
Mean, we saw Urza, and we were like, it's sweet, but we can't play it because we can't find three other commanders. Bareforce. One was the other deck in that episode, several of us versus a bearjack. Oh, no. There is a winner there, and that's.

Rachel Wheat
Tough because we're seeing the commanders before anybody else's. So you don't, you know, we're guessing. Yeah, I think people would think it's easy to, like, look at the pool of commanders and guess which ones will be the popular ones. And I promise you, it's very difficult. There's sometimes we do, and sometimes we don't.

Josh Lee Kwai
We do our best, but a lot of times we're like, man, this one's gonna be really popular. And then no one talks about it and they talk about some other one that we were like, what? I guess it's cool. Yeah, but I didn't. It wasn't on our radar.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that is a hard part. But we do our best to make sure that what we think will be the more popular ones are represented, but also because there are four decks. I like what you said about differing strategies, and you want to appeal to different types of players, so you don't want all of them to be token go wide decks. And again, we don't want hard control, but it's okay to have a deck that sort of leans a little bit that way.

This one's gonna have more answers than the other ones and be able to sort of stop things. That's not their main game plan, but it is a bigger component of their strategy than the token go wide decks, maybe, or something like that. This is also a token go wide deck, but I think your aulela deck is a good example of that. Yeah. Like the.

Rachel Wheat
From wilds of Eldraine was a great control deck because it moved at flash speed, but you were also making fairies and using, like, flying synergies and had other plans for the deck to make it proactive. That's a really good example. And one of the things I would say is that when we built that deck, we still don't put in a lot of counter spells with a Layla. It's removal more than counter spells, because if you think about a counter. Jimmy cast something, I counter it.

Josh Lee Kwai
Nothing happened. Jimmy cast something, then I kill it. Something happened. The creature was there. Maybe he got an ETB.

He. And then I destroy it. But I didn't. Just let's pretend that never even occurred is sort of a different thing. And we tend to stray away from a lot of counters for that reason.

Rachel Wheat
Yeah. So the next thing I want to talk about is just the process of building the deck. So before we get into our exact guidelines or what we're going for when we're building, we're also going to talk about the house ban list in game nights. I just want to talk about the process that we go through to make a deck because it's not always the same, but generally we have the guests choose. Yep.

Josh Lee Kwai
Yeah. So we get all the legends from the set, we take out the ones that we think veto. There is a. That's usually only it's usually less than two. It's usually one if there's even one.

But once in a while there's two. I don't think we've ever, like, said, oh, there's three in here. Cause if there's three, you may be able to find a fourth and then do a really high power level. Yeah, but you're not putting turgrid in the pod. Yeah, exactly.

Jimmy Wong
Exactly. No, Toxico, we did allow coma, so. Yeah, we did. Well, Jacob got the whole nickname off. It, but we send that to the guests first.

Josh Lee Kwai
If there's multiple guests, then we just say first come, first served. But we let them choose first of all. Yeah, yeah. And then. So they send theirs in.

Rachel Wheat
And then usually either you guys will pick or me or the rest of the team is. Jamie's involved in that. Jamie does a lot of deck building. Even like, Murph and Jake will get involved in this process where we will try and pick the other two commanders to balance out the pod, to try and have, you know, all the things we were talking about before, high variance, fun, entertaining, different kinds of strategies. This next one.

Jimmy Wong
Yeah, go ahead. Go ahead. I was gonna say, this one is important, which is like building the actual deck. So if you wanna say something before that. Yeah, yeah.

Josh Lee Kwai
I was gonna say. And sometimes the guests build their decks and sometimes they don't. We kinda tell them, if you have time to build it, that's fine. Usually on a short timeline, too. Yeah, because we don't get.

We know when the episode's gonna happen and we know when we're gonna film it, but we don't have the card images and stuff that far out. We get them like, you know, a couple of months before we wanna shoot, six weeks before. That leaves you about two weeks of, like, you know, we can show it and you can build it, which two weeks sounds like a lot to a lot of people, but when you're dealing with post Malone or Aaron from game grumps, those people do not have a lot of spare time. So we say to them, if you want to build it, that's totally cool. We will need the list by this date just to have time to assemble the whole thing and get it ready for camera.

Also, our team couldn't just build it for you if you'd like. Or what we can often do, too, is build it, show it to you, maybe make a couple of tweaks, shift out five or six cards, you know, goldfishing online, whatever, email exchanges. Like, hey, what do you want? What do you want to do like, oh, I got it. Cool.

Jimmy Wong
Cause guess what? The team here, I would put them among some of the best deck builders in the world, because you guys have built hundreds of decks now it feels like for game nights and game nights live and just random things around the office. Yeah. Some extra turns even. So that is another thing to factor in, too, is like, sure, maybe you think you can build a deck in two weeks, but actually there's a lot of things that you might miss or have thought, oh, I wanted that.

So I think as long as you. Can get pressure for the deck to work the first time. Yeah. You're not goldfishing it in the same way. You're not gonna have a second chance.

I got a second chance. Yeah. So I think actually having a team here that can do that for you is a huge part of why game nights has worked as well. Cause Josh and I will need help all the time. Cause there's so many in a row, right.

That building that many decks can just lead to burnout, too, by a single person. So building by committee in this way, I think, is really interesting factoid that helps, especially for game Nights live. If you've seen those episodes, the games go evenly because the decks are so balanced. I mean, you and Jamie and our team, you know, have a ton of experience now, more than almost any group out there besides the walls of wizards of the coast, in building a little environment that we're hoping will feel balanced when they play. And you have to factor in the variance of what cards people draw, in what order and everything.

Josh Lee Kwai
And sometimes, I know there's still gonna be always be times where, like, that deck didn't pop off, but we tested it, we played it, and it did sometimes even win, maybe. And that's happened where it's like that. We thought that deck was the strongest in the pod, and it just didn't do anything this game. And that's just magic, right? The variance of the randomness of the cards.

But, yeah, our team does a great, great job of balancing all of these factors and then putting together a pot of decks that for the most part, we have a pretty high hit rate of good games. That process varies from person to person. Jamie and I build differently than Murph would build, but generally, we all do quick rough draft, get 100 together, do a ton of goldfishing, and then we'll usually touch base to be like, how fast are you winning? What are you doing? And then we'll look at each other's lists and then have to make adjustments from there to be like, all right, how much crossover is there between strategies and cards, especially win cons?

Rachel Wheat
And then we'll make adjustments and get it out to the players. Yeah. One thing we should talk about a little bit is knowing all the decks in the pod and what all the commanders are. We try to avoid silver bullet type cards. So, you know, there's a graveyard deck in the podium.

Josh Lee Kwai
We don't want Leyland of the void. Or something in there, but jukebog will still make it in. But specific hate cards against specific strategies. Yeah, I like to have graveyard hate that is overcomeable by the graveyard deck and not ones that are like, hey, I put this one card down, shuts off your whole strategy until you kill that card. It's graveyard removal, not graveyard hate.

Exactly. Yeah, yeah. So we tend not to try and put in specific silver bullet stuff just because it is an environment where I literally know the other three decks that are going to be in the pod. And you could build your deck to try and beat those strategies, but that's not really fair because that's not, when people play commander how that usually is. Everyone's going through their backpack with their six or seven decks and pulling it out, whichever one they've got.

And they didn't specifically prepare for what the other people are going to pull out. Exactly. But that being said, all the players have seen all the other players deck lists, so you can't take a moment to familiar, familiarize yourself with the other decks and what they're doing. So when you're playing live, you're not necessarily, well, not live when you're recording. It works this way in life, too.

Rachel Wheat
Yeah, yeah. But you know what you're in for, and you're not getting a lot of surprises on the game day. You know what their strategy is, what they're generally trying to do. Yeah. If they have specific cards in the deck, you could know that.

Josh Lee Kwai
Although I'll tell you the truth, I'm not that great at memorizing all the 300 cards. My opponent's decks, I'm more about like, okay, I know that what they generally can do, and I might have, like, clawed a couple of specific cards if they were. You don't need to reread the commander, like, six times, you got that far. But if there's a fierce guardianship in one of them, I would probably have clocked that and be like, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. It just gives you an idea for what kind of game you're playing.

Rachel Wheat
If you know, you're playing against free interaction, you play slightly differently than if you don't. Yep. And we do get the decklist shared. We typically try and get those out to the players just so everyone can take a look. Yeah.

All right. So that's the process that we go through. It varies from game to game, and obviously player to player, but we do have pretty consistent guidelines with how we build the decks going through that process, and all of us know these guidelines when we're building, and it's communicated to the guests who are building their own decks as well. Yeah. The main one here is just Wincon.

Jimmy Wong
Right. I mean, this is the thing that you guys are making sure that you deliver on, because if a deck doesn't have a clear way to win, then it doesn't really fit in the pod if everyone else is trying to achieve a thing. We are only playing one game most times, almost always now, I'd say, with these decks on the day. So making sure that a deck has a quit here, like this is my road to victory, is very important. Otherwise, it just can't necessarily hang with the rest of the pod.

Rachel Wheat
Yeah, I mean, I think we just avoid super complicated decks these days. We've been really trying to find stuff that, like, you're playing with this once you're goldfishing a few times, you don't need a deck where you need to know really complicated lines. This is like, I'm gonna make a ton of stuff. I'm gonna win the game with that somehow, or I'm gonna, you know, interact consistently, and that's how I'm gonna move forward. Yeah, but, yeah, having something that's just legible for the day that you're not looking at your hand and going like, I have no idea if this is a good hand.

Jimmy Wong
Why are all these tutors in my hand? That being said, no dedicated combo decks, I think, is important. We typically just don't see infinite combos. Cause, like Josh said earlier, it's very anticlimactic to have a game that's going, you'll know who's winning, and someone goes, two cards, I win, and everything just screeches to a stop. So there's no real momentum that gets built with that sort of deck.

So dedicated combo decks. Again, another reason that orvar and decks like that don't make it into the pod for that same reason. Yeah. When we say dedicated, we mean that that's what it's trying to do, because. Thoracol, sometimes you back into one.

Josh Lee Kwai
Yeah. And if you build decks correctly, with the right amount of synergy, it's almost impossible. For there not to be some amount of like, oh, if you get these four or five things out, you'll sort of go infinite. You really couldn't build a deck where that's not possible sometimes. But we've been pretty lucky and pretty good about that not happening a lot in our game nights episodes.

Rachel Wheat
The next thing we've mentioned already is not having highly interactive pieces. We try and avoid permanents that interact. So collector oofs and rest in pieces stuff that if they're not removed, that interaction will continue. So it's more removal based the interaction rather than, you know, a dowthy voidwalker, which is going to be there and be a problem until it's gone. Yeah, that card is really good.

Jimmy Wong
It's really, really good the whole time. You're really, really. You notice you saw it a couple times after it came out and then you don't see it anymore because we just kind of started steering away from it. We didn't specifically say don't play that card, but it's a silver bullet type card and we don't like to have that because if there's a graveyard deck, you literally say, hey, your deck can't work now. And that's not what we want to have happen.

Rachel Wheat
Yeah. Until you find a removal spell, which is like, okay, your deck is on pause for the next three turns. Great. Yeah, that's just good tv. If we're going to cut to that person's interview, and I don't want them for the second or third time in a row to be going, well, the Delphi voidwalker is there, so I can't do anything right.

Josh Lee Kwai
Yeah. And that's the problem with these permanent based interaction pieces, is like their game stops until it leaves. Yeah. Especially if they're like enchantment as well. And we said this again, we don't really like, play hard.

Jimmy Wong
Control stacks is definitely not going to happen because we need to hit those eight to ten mark and again, interview after interview. Yeah, I drew a card, but then I can't do anything because of five things on that person's board. So I pass the term. Yeah. No winner or no stasis.

Josh Lee Kwai
Yeah. It just doesn't feel like anybody wants to watch that. I don't want to watch it. No. Nor play it.

By the way, we encourage big games. Those kind of cards make the game smaller, like one spell per turn, one card per turn. That makes the game less dynamic than what we're really trying to achieve. Yeah, yeah. And my message to people out there who like those strategies, because I'm one of those people is pick your time and place those decks.

I still have a Derivi stacks decks, and I don't get to play very often, but sometimes we do, and that's when everybody's in the mood for, like. And you can even ask the group, like, hey, you guys want to play a meme game? Yeah. And as long as you say that at the start and everyone's like, yeah, let's do it, then you're cool. And you can play your stack.

Stack once in a while. But I'm sorry, for the most part, you're not gonna be able to play that every single game. I get to play that, like, once every five or six sessions. Not recommended to be your first one game. Yeah.

Rachel Wheat
They're also, like, they're really fun to play. I found. They're just not really fun to watch. Yeah. Which is like, the thing, like, if you're outside that game and you're watching, like, some tiny, incremental decisions get made, it's not as exciting as being like, and then they did this.

I thought they had that. And then five things happened. And that can be fun to play against when you have signed up for it. When you're ready for it. Yeah.

Josh Lee Kwai
When you're like, you went to the escape room place and they were like, well, we have five difficulty levels. We're doing five this time. Yeah, yeah, that was fun. But if you went in and you don't know the difficulty. Guilty levels, and you would have chose one.

Cause you're with people that haven't done it before, and they give you the hardest one possible, then it can be like, oh, this sucks. Because we're not solving anything. And also, I brought my mom, and she has no idea what it is. Yeah, exactly. And of course, every new set that we do play, we try to include some number of new cards from the set into the deck.

Jimmy Wong
Those are usually last minute. Like, cool. Like, oh, this is exciting. I didn't realize this was here. Insert it in day of goldfish it.

Check it out and be on theme. I love that because, for me, part of the fun of new sets is just trying to see these cards in action and see if the evaluation that I have from reading them is. Is actually how the card performs. Cause evaluating a vacuum, we all know it's hit and miss. Good stuff.

Yeah. Yeah. So there's often cards where I thought it was gonna be great, and it's not. It sucks. And the cards where I'm like, I thought that was a nothing burger.

Josh Lee Kwai
And that card is sweet. Yep. It also, I think, adds a lot of variety to the games, because if you're trying to, like, wedge is a strong word, but if you're trying to force cards from a set into decks, you're playing with cards that you're not necessarily gonna play with later. So that means that, like, in the. In the murders at Karloff Manor, he played the fog that redirected all the combat.

Jimmy Wong
Yeah, that was a fun one. That's not a spell that's gonna go in every deck until all time, but it's in that set, so it was a perfect place to play it. Nor was it more variety. It was also played in a weird way. It was like just a fog.

Rachel Wheat
It's a card that you don't often get to see, and it gets featured in game nights. Yeah. And that's another, I think, lesson for the audience out there. Like, try the cards out. Try new cards, for sure.

Josh Lee Kwai
Yeah. For most of us, we're not playing for any sort of stakes or anything, so you may as well, even if you think it's probably not as good, there's no real reason for you not to just plug it in, try it for a few games, see how the card actually performs. You can always pull it out. I probably have, like, five slots in every deck that just belongs to whatever the newest cards gives out. And you're like, I played a couple games with this.

Rachel Wheat
It's fine. I'm gonna try a new one. At least then you could say, I tried that, and it is not very good. But you do often find cards where you're like, no, this card's sweet, and I'm actually gonna try and put in more stuff. If you have a local game store, everyone cracks stuff pre release.

Jimmy Wong
Those cards will be in rotation for you to trade something for, too. If you're really stretching beyond that. We do try and abide by a very similar deck building template, I guess, to what we recommend that people build with theirs. Why would we recommend it otherwise? Yeah, exactly.

Rachel Wheat
But it's like we do angle more toward card draw. I'd say that almost every deck on game nights has about 15 pieces of card draw in it, which we say ten, but 15 is great. And then we usually only do about ten pieces of ramp, which is in the window. But if we were gonna prioritize one over the other, it's always, always card draw. Yes, absolutely.

Jimmy Wong
You want players to be able to dig their way out of any situation, and having some amount of card selection or card draw will be much more fun than them drawing signet on turn seven. It's also like, no player in the game are we trying to. We don't care who wins, but we do care that everyone does stuff. Right. So the worst thing that can happen is we get a guest on and they just don't do anything.

Josh Lee Kwai
And, you know, this happens. Right. And Jimmy and I, it's happened the most, too, because we've been on the. Most episodes and made some questionable decisions in my case. And we're afforded the ability to make questionable decisions sometimes because, you know, I've been on 65 of these.

I can take a risk here. If you're a guest coming in for the first time ever, you don't want to play as riskily. You don't want to keep a risky hand and giving more cardron, you know, we'll tell guests, like, hey, I think you should put more card draw in. Yeah. And we tell guests at the start of the game, like, hey, if you have an opening hand and it's got, like, an extra explosive turn three, but no card draw, don't do it, don't keep it, because if somebody stops what you're doing, then you don't do anything from turn three on.

Yeah, it's way better to have a slower start, but a steady stream of cards coming. So no matter what happens, you are making moves and casting things and doing stuff the whole game. Yeah. And I believe that is the also really good for your actual playgroup commander games. That's why I love card draw.

It's not because it makes me win, although sometimes it does. It's just because I truly don't care that much if I win or lose a game. What I hate is when I just don't get to do many things. You don't get to play. I think that's probably true for almost every game in existence, for every player.

Jimmy Wong
And just not doing the thing you are there to do, it's not great. So it makes sense. Josh mentioned this already, but we're typically counter spell light. If it's the kind of deck that would want counter spells, we usually max out at, like, three. Yeah, we don't like them.

Rachel Wheat
And we would play much more removal spells, like, usually targeted removal spells. Sometimes it'll have multiple targets or whatever, but I would say that our removal count these days is, like, ten. At least. Some decks go more than that, especially if they're instant speed or if they're blue. But I think almost every deck is gonna walk into game nights with ten pieces of removal.

Josh Lee Kwai
But it's mostly single target. Yeah. Yeah. Again, we want the players to do something and then have it be responded to, as opposed to, I want to do something really cool. Nah eh.

Jimmy Wong
BUZZer I think a lot of people. Will hear the number ten and be like, that is a lot. That is a lot of interaction. You said you weren't playing control decks. Why do you play so much removal?

Josh Lee Kwai
Right. Cause it leads to one of the things we really like, which is the ability for the tables to turn and for swings to happen. Like we said, it's not super interesting of one player just gets off to a lead and then snowballs from there and ends up winning. That's going to happen some amount of time, but it's going to happen more often if the other three players just aren't packing any way to stop them at all. Yeah.

Right. Like an unstoppable ulamog with annihilator at the table. That doesn't make for great tv either. Maybe one swing is fun. When it gets to multiple, it's like, why can't anyone get rid of it?

Jimmy Wong
And that's warpack and removal. Single threats that run away with the game. And it's. I think we find this. If someone built a huge combo base like my kumena deck, then single target removal doesn't feel as good.

But if you're able to set it up in a way that large threats become fun and threatening and interact and do stuff, and then they get removed, they still do enough to move the game towards its end state without dominating it. And single target removal helps curb that. And players, again, have the choice as to when they use it and how they're gonna politic using it and what it actually does in the game. So it also allows morpher, I think, play at that sort of danger level, if that makes sense. So the next question is board wipes.

Rachel Wheat
And the answer is, it's varied a lot how many board wipes we tend to put in game night stacks. Yeah, I would guess that in the early days we were much higher. Yeah, like four or five. Yeah, four to five. And that we kind of have curved over to.

Josh Lee Kwai
We're pretty low now, like two or less, right? Yeah. These days, two or three is pretty normal. I think the big thing that we want is if the game needs a board wipe, somebody has a board wipe, it's enough to hit that, but we don't really want everybody to have a board wipe that they cast. So we try and keep the number a little bit low.

Rachel Wheat
Cause what you don't want is somebody to get ahead. Nobody finds a board wipe, and then the game is over. Yeah. Cause that's that snowball thing. We don't.

Yeah, exactly. So you want somebody to be able. To find it, but you also don't want. Don't want. Board wipe.

Josh Lee Kwai
Board wipe. Okay. Then somebody else puts boardwipe. Okay. And then we repopulate our boards.

The third boardwalk is just like. The wind is out of the balloon. It is just flat out. You know what a balloon looks like. When there's no air in it?

Yeah. It's the most depressing thing. And that's what the third board wipe feels like. Yeah. Yeah.

Rachel Wheat
So two to three is about right. I think we've been tipping towards three lately just because there's so many permanents that are difficult to interact with these days. Yeah, yeah. I think we're gonna. I mean, I have been sort of actively supporting the idea of a little bit more board wipes and maybe a little bit less single target removal.

Jimmy Wong
Yeah. It's kind of shifting again. And this is just cause of ward. Yeah, I think cause of ward. So it's a reaction to game design.

Josh Lee Kwai
And I think before we liked single target removal a little better than board wipes. Like, we were trending that way because of sort of big, splashy, important commanders that you're like, cool. You need to be able to kill those, and you kill it, and you're good. There's no reason that you have to wipe the whole board or whatever. And now it's like, kind of.

You can't just pinpoint that stuff anymore as often. Because it's often protected. Yeah. A lot of the most things. The things that you need to remove the most, they have put some form of protection on it, like coma, like Voya, like roaming throne.

Rachel Wheat
All of these protect themselves, and you're like, we have to be able to remove. Yeah. If you're gonna make something that powerful, at least let me be able to remove it. Yeah. Yeah.

Josh Lee Kwai
And so now, out of necessity, we're gonna, I think, start running a little bit more boardwalks, but not a lot. Yeah. Yeah. And we'll test it like everything else we do here. It's all in flux.

Jimmy Wong
Okay, well, there's a lot more coming up, including the ban list, this very specific house ban list, that commander for commander that we have for game nights. But before we get to that and also how we mulligan in the game, let's hear a quick message from our middle sponsors. We'll be right back. It's high slime. I introduced myself.

Josh Lee Kwai
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Rachel Wheat
That's bombas.com commandzone and use code commandzone at checkout. And those lands will trigger tireless provisioner. And I will make two food tokens. Wait, you'll make what? Uh, two food tokens.

But you can make treasure. You love treasure. Oh, God. What is happening? I I didn't have time to eat earlier and I have food on the brain or something.

Jimmy Wong
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Jimmy Wong
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Rachel Wheat
Who are you talking to? Or is that just something you say? Oh, no. I'm on a call with Jimmy. We're building a Chatterfang deck.

Jimmy Wong
Ooh, I just added Toski. That should help, right? Whoa. The card just showed up. Yeah.

Josh Lee Kwai
With architect, you can collaborate in real time from anywhere in the world. Changes show up immediately. You don't even have to reload the page. So it's perfect for brewing with a friend. This is cool.

Rachel Wheat
But isn't Jimmy just upstairs? Yeah, but I'm downstairs right now. I ain't coming downstairs. Architect is the best place to browse, brew, and playtest commander decks. Just go to architect.com command zone to get started.

Josh Lee Kwai
That's archidekt.com commandzone. Welcome back, everybody. We are talking about the secrets of game nights. The secret sauce. We're giving it away.

Rachel Wheat
And this one's the recipe. It's the house pan list. Wowee. Yeah. We banned cards here.

Jimmy Wong
Well, I would say we ask players not to play certain cards. Yeah. And this isn't hard and fast. It varies from deck to deck. It varies from player to player.

Rachel Wheat
But there's a number of these that were just sort of like, there's a. Couple that I would say we're like, yeah, we're asking everybody not to play these specific cards. And then there's a few that are like, for the most part, we don't like these, and we try and, you know, not play them. But if a guest really, really wanted to, we could allow it and we would adjust the other decks to make up for it. Right.

This first category, predictably, is fast. Mana specifically. We do not play jeweled Lotus. We do not play mana crypt anymore. Anymore.

Jimmy Wong
There was a certain point where we crossed the threshold and the banlist again was built over a few years, I believe. Yeah. Some of this is related to Owi Mulligan, which we'll talk about later. But when you allow the types of mulligans that we allow, and you have cards like jeweled Lotus and Mana Crypt in Dex, you tend to have opening hands that have those cards in it way more often than your average game would have. And then you get these games where somebody starts off at this huge lead.

Josh Lee Kwai
And I think there was a period of time, and I'm gonna guess it's in the forties and fifties episodes, maybe the thirties and forties episodes, where there's a lot of games that fit that mold of, like, one person had a really explosive early turn, and it was, the storyline of the episode was the other three players, can they stop that player and get them under control and then get back to a normal game state and then play. And it became pretty monotonous of like, we're doing this again. We're telling the same story at the beginning of the game. And that's kind of the impetus for us saying, like, maybe we don't want cards like mana crypt to exist in our gameplay videos or in the game nights videos. Yeah.

Rachel Wheat
Our decks do play sol ring. Cause most commander decks do. But what you don't want in the kind of games that we're cultivating is multiple soul rings. Yeah, yeah. The repetition of it is the problem.

Josh Lee Kwai
Right. Yeah, yeah. Also, we do have a special mulligan rule for Sol ring. Yeah. So we keep that under control.

We don't ban it. But we have another way to sort of. Yeah, yeah. This next category is also fast mana. Yeah.

Jimmy Wong
And it's a card that's actually more abusable than the mana crypt somehow. It's dockside extortionist. Yeah. You can flicker it, you can bounce it, you can play multiple times, recur it. This one earned its own category.

Rachel Wheat
Cause it's a win con, it's fast mana, it's a combo beast. And it's a little goblin that has nothing to do with it. This has the same problem where, if somebody finds a dockside, they just get rocketed out into the lead and can either capitalize on that and win, or the other three players have to team up to take them down. Yeah. Or it just makes things overly complicated.

Jimmy Wong
Someone now has to take a 20 minutes turn because they just dockside out a ton of mana. There's 1 million triggers usually that go along with Dockside. There's 1 million loops that you can do with Dockside, and they're not necessarily loops that you catch at the time. Yeah, yeah. I played the dockside in the postie episode, the first one, and it gave me so many options that I literally had a combo I could win with, and I didn't see it.

Cause it was so. I was, like, overwhelmed with the amount of opportunity I had from that moment. And then professor plays him in the Brothers war episode and made, I think, eleven treasures on turn five, which is pretty good. They didn't win him the game outright, but it definitely, I would say, assisted him. Definitely helped.

Yeah. And you don't want the same card to play such a large role in a high number of games on the series. Right. So I think Jessica's wheel is starting to get in the category where, like, it feels like it has affected a number of games high enough that we. Again, I don't think we're gonna ban it, but we might be careful with that card in the future.

Josh Lee Kwai
And Dockside crossed the line into, like, let's just say we can't play it anymore. It just feels like whenever people play it, it becomes the reason that they ended up winning the game. And, you know, we'd like to vary the reasons that people win. Yeah, yeah. You don't want to make an episode.

Jimmy Wong
It's like, all right, here's this sets episode featuring dockside extortionist over and over again. All we're learning. Stop watching the dockside show. All we're learning. And here is that doc's eye is good, which we already learned.

We know that we've all. Every single person watching has learned this in a different way. Yeah, exactly. Okay, next up, this one is just another in the form of stacks almost, but also sometimes an editing issue. It's repeatable edicts.

So, very specifically, the cards grave packed in dictate of Erebos. Josh, do you want to talk about this? Cause I think you were the originator of, like, hey, we need to stop playing these cards. Aristocrats is a very popular strategy. But those cards are just brutal for the editing because every time a creature dies, which is very often, all this other stuff happens.

Josh Lee Kwai
So it cascades into everybody else's board. So not only is it just complicated, anytime one of their creature dies, and the fact that they have sack outlets and all this stuff, also, it slows the game down to almost nothing, because. What are you doing? Removing your proactive pieces to get rid of their proactive pieces. Sweet.

You could all be trying to kill each other with your creatures, but instead they're just appearing and disappearing, and then appearing and disappearing, and then appearing and disappearing, and then appearing and disappearing. And it's like, no, nobody has anything. The worst. They're all doing the poof thing on the battlefield. Yeah.

Rachel Wheat
Honestly, I love that. This category of cards are probably single handedly the most expensive cards to produce because they make a game longer, they have a ton of triggers. Yeah. In the production timeline. Yeah, that's a little bit not proactive.

Jimmy Wong
Yeah, yeah, that's true. If somebody plays a dictator, it costs tens of thousands of dollars, probably, or the commands on purchase, we're just like labor. Yeah, labor, mental toll. There's a lot that's going on there.

Rachel Wheat
This next category is not necessarily a hard and fast ban. It's just not cards we put in decks, and it's not cards we encourage, but in decks. And it's tutors. Yeah, they used to again, or in the early days, we used to play a lot more of them, our personal decks and all that. It's just, it, again leads to, I think, sometimes repetitive stay and also just kills a lot of suspense.

Jimmy Wong
Like, I'm just going to demonic tutor the thing to answer the thing. Bye. Instead of having to naturally draw it, having to get there somewhere else, the suspense of, like, all right, five cards off the top, maybe I can get it, I think is much better than. Let me just grab it and figure this out and fix it. Especially a two man with demonic tutor.

Rachel Wheat
Yeah, for sure. I mean, demonic tutor and vampiric tutor are the biggest ones here. But I love what you said about suspense, where it's like a big part of game nights. I feel like it's like, can you find the answer? And if you draw a demonic tutor.

Jimmy Wong
You'Re like, I did, I got it. No problem. Sorry, I wanted. Yeah, no problem. I will solve it.

Rachel Wheat
And then it also leads to, I think, repetitive gameplay where you're always trying to find the most powerful. You're always gonna go find dockside. You always go find dockside, always go find roaring study, it ends up just featuring the same cards over and over again. Yeah. Hey, hey.

Josh Lee Kwai
Don't talk bad about my rhystic study here. Too late. We're allowed to love cards, though. That's a good point. And if we also run the channel, then we don't have to ban those ones.

Rachel Wheat
They're not on the band. I love Darkseid so much. Everybody's allowed to protect one poster at home. The tutors, I would say, is, we don't even tell the guests this, but what we might do is if they put, like, five or six tutors, we might be like, hey, maybe let's take two or three of those tutors out, and then we maybe go put one or two tutors into the other decks, if that's what they want to do. Because it was a thing that Jimmy and I just started doing years and years ago now.

Josh Lee Kwai
But after a certain point, we just started playing less tutors because we found it just more fun. And it was just a personal choice that we didn't even say anything to the guests about. They just built their decks, we built ours. We'd have powerful cards, but just stopped playing tutors, kind of. And I would encourage people out there as a good way to sort of.

If you don't want your decks, especially if you're that player in your playgroup that wins all the games and you know who you are. Cause you email us and say, what do I do? They never let me play anymore. They kill me every time. First.

That's because you were that player. A good way to power your decks down without, like, doing anything that is hard to stomach, like, taking out the cool, fun stuff. Just take out the tutors easy. Yep. And replace it with more cool, fun stuff.

Jimmy Wong
Add car, draw. Yeah. Add card draw. Or just add another, you know, anything. One of the cards that was on the bubble that you just ended up not putting in.

Josh Lee Kwai
Cause it's not optimal. Your optimization was your problem. Yeah. So de optimize a little. We will have, like, conditional tutors sometimes.

Jimmy Wong
Like an equipment tutor or tutor for a lan maybe specifically, but it's just. Yeah. Vampiric, demonic, anything you want the moment you want it to answer the thing to kill the suspense. Yep. The next piece is just obvious infinite combos, just a plus B cards like machaeus and triskelion.

Rachel Wheat
Mike Andreich isn't the combo it used to be, but those are two very obvious cards that are like, oh, you win. Yep. Yeah. Sanguine bond, exquisite blood. Yeah.

Josh Lee Kwai
Normally, if those two cards would go in a deck, we'll be like, you can have one. Which one you want. Especially if there's Tudors also. Yeah. It's such a womp, womp ending.

Rachel Wheat
It's not an interesting thing because we're trying to build these incremental wins where it's like, I'm accruing value to. I am accruing value, and whoever gets. It's a race to the end. Yeah. It's not fun.

Jimmy Wong
If you fly out from Michigan to be on game nights. You have to stay up in the hotel for a bit. You have to change your daylight, whatever. You're just losing it. Hey, what's up?

Welcome. I'm a two card combo, you know. Sick. Nah, you know what it feels like? I feel like we talk a lot about the game narrative.

Rachel Wheat
We talked a lot about it in the unwritten rules episode. It feels like a D and D campaign where you're like, we're doing things and we're walking, and we're doing all this stuff. We're having a lovely time, and then the party just gets one stomped. Yeah. Just like, everybody dies instantly because the DM put an overpowered monster and everybody just died.

You're like, well, we were gonna beat that. What were you thinking? What were we doing this whole time? Yeah, I was talking to a bat. We were having a lovely time.

Jimmy Wong
Shawn was at death saves. It was epic. That's what it feels like. It just blows up the whole story. This next topic, or, sorry, this next category is a fun one, and this is one that has changed again over the years, which is we avoid putting cars that are just explicitly very expensive.

Now, we're not a budget channel, nor are we. We don't also sit there and consider budget while building. You can probably tell our decks are very expensive when you build them, when we build them for game nights. But the original origins of the show is Josh and I just bring the decks we built and had our own personal collections in them and had a lot of cards, like dual lands, the original dual lands that we just had so we could play. But I think in doing so, we don't want it to have a new player play the game, look at the board state and go, I can't do this.

I can't afford what's on that board state. And that's a huge part of just the accessibility of the game itself in that we've taken those specifically dual lanes out of decks. Yeah, I think generally it's like, $100. Is the line, like, even 80 plus? But, like, you know, for a single card for a single card is like, where you start to look closely at cards.

Rachel Wheat
So it's dual lands and grim monoliths. Even, like, Wheel of Fortune is probably the one we're most flexible on. Cause it's the cleanest version of its effect. Yeah, yeah. Gilded Drake is a card you didn't really see.

Yeah. You just don't want a player to, like, learn how to play commander and then look up the decks and be like, it costs $1,200 to play commander. I guess I'm not playing commander. 800 for that single card. That had a huge impact on the game.

Jimmy Wong
Cause it's so powerful. Like a guy's cradle. Yeah. I think that definitely takes away from the glamour of what we're doing. Which is just four players having a lot of fun.

And not necessarily at the expense of not being able to do so as a result of a very expensive deck list. Yeah, yeah. I think it's more. This one's more of a guideline than a rule. We still will allow even gaius cradle or something once in a while.

Josh Lee Kwai
I think part of the allure of magic is that some cards have this mythical quality to them. And in a lot of people's collections that I've played for a long time, there exists a couple of these cards now. Jimmy and I have quite a few because we've been around for so, so long. I literally started playing in 93. And that's why in early episodes, we were just playing the cards we own.

And we've lessened that by a lot. But I still think we're okay with, you know, a one off here and there of one of these, like. Cause they are the mythical cards of commander. And they should show up once in a while. Because they do show up once in a while.

And it's cool that there are guys cradles and things like that that you can play in this format. So, yeah, this, to me, is more about, like, let's just keep it a little bit reasonable, though. Let's not have five of these in attack. Everybody has a guy. Every single player is playing two of them on their battlefield.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Then it gets to be like, the barrier to entry appears to be so much higher than it really is, honestly. Because you saw the budget episode that we played on extra turns. Those decks are amazing. Insanely powerful.

So I don't think that there's a huge power disparity between expensive decks and not. But it can feel that way if we're not careful. Right? Yep. So we talked about this a little bit.

Rachel Wheat
But I do want to hit on it a little bit harder? So what happens when a guest includes these cards? When they're like, okay, I've got three tutors and four free counter spells? That's how I play commander. Cause there are certain, like, there's guests that we've had that play at higher power levels, just generally.

Josh Lee Kwai
Yeah. It depends on the guest. It depends on how well we know them, how many times they've been on, because, you know, there's a whole bunch of factors there. But let's say it's post Malone. Yeah.

And there's a lot of things because post Malone is post Malone, that the rules change. One of them is the expensive cards. No one's gonna look at a deck by post Malone that costs $10,000 and be surprised by that fact. Right. So that you.

It's different rules. It's just. Cause that's who he is. So in those games. That's cool.

That's great. It's a great novelty for us as well, because we go, awesome. Post. He's coming in. Gonna play something with powerful cards, powerful synergies.

Jimmy Wong
It's his own collection. It's sweet to look at. Yeah. We get to go back to our roots out of our old days, pull out our cool cards from our old times, and put them back into Dex now and battle out with him and say, okay, now this game is gonna be played with this type of card and this type of power level. And that's okay.

Josh Lee Kwai
It's just when you're not doing that for reasons that we kind of have a problem with. Yeah, yeah. What's the intention? Right. It adds a lot to the final product.

Yeah. So I think it depends on the guests, but there's definitely guests that have come on where we have said, hey, maybe let's dial it down just a little bit. And usually we meet them halfway. We'd almost never say to a guest, like, let's take out all your tutors and all your expensive cards and don't play this and don't play that. You know, we want to come in.

Rachel Wheat
With seven board wipes. You're like, all right, you're going to cut three. Well, Jacob and coma, I think, is a great example. He wanted to play coma, obviously, very powerful. He had loaded his original deck with, like, 20 counters.

Jimmy Wong
It fell. Force of will. Every single man, fierce guardianship. Yeah, exactly. Horrible.

Josh Lee Kwai
And we looked at it. We said, hey, listen, you can play coma. We're gonna cut about half of the, you know, we made him take out, like, seven or eight cards and just let's put in some more proactive stuff so it's not quite as much permission style and let's take out the force of wills and some other stuff. And he, you know, and it was still plenty powerful. It was great.

Jimmy Wong
It made for a great game. And we also had to go back to our own decks and tune them up a little bit. So we met him in the middle. We didn't say like, hey, take it down to zero. We said, okay, you come down two points, we'll come up two points.

Josh Lee Kwai
And there you go. And that's a rule zero conversation. When you really think about it, it's just we have the ability, which most people don't have, to literally change the decks. Right. We have a rule zero conversation before.

Weeks ahead of time. Yeah. In a way, each game nights is its own environment. Build zero. But you can do something similar if you have multiple decks that sit at different power levels, because that allows you to have that conversation.

Be like, okay, cool, I should actually play this deck based on that conversation we just had. And I think that goes a long way to being like, if you have these expensive cards that you love playing, put those all in one deck so that when you're at a game where that's appropriate, you're like, all right, I can bring out my full speed deck that has all of my super powerful cards in it. Yeah, it's like the stack. Stack I talked about earlier, right? Yeah, yeah.

I'm not saying those two things have to be the same. No, but it's, oh, gosh, that could. Be kind of flex. It could be, but yeah. Yeah, definitely could be.

Yeah. I like that a lot where it's like you have decks that sit at certain power levels, but also that sit in certain places as far as the expensive cards and things like that. And then the strategy, too. After the decks are built, we goldfish them a lot. A lot, a lot.

Jimmy Wong
Architects. Great for this. You just sit there and draw new hands. But in person, too. On the day of, on the day of, the first thing you do in your rapid game nights is you eat a roll and you goldfish your deck of coffee.

Josh Lee Kwai
We have a call time and then we're not going to have a picture of for an hour and a half. So the first hour to hour and a half are meant for the players to goldfish the decks. We set that time aside the morning. Of get some breakfast, say hi, and goldfish the deck, ask questions about it, look through it, make sure you know what the cards do, especially the new ones. And this, I would say, actually has a massive effect.

Jimmy Wong
And there's a whole episode about goldfishing. Oh, yeah. You gotta watch this episode. It's so great. Yeah.

Josh Lee Kwai
If you didn't watch the goldfishing episode, you probably think, I already know how to goldfish, and I know what's important, but I bet there's some stuff in there. We have to do this to a high degree because we're in a situation that most people aren't, which, like you said earlier, rachel, is a lot of pressure for the deck to perform and look really, really cool the very first time it's ever actually played. Yeah. So, yeah. How many times would you say?

Cause, Jim, we talked about the morning of. But there's a lot of goldfishing that takes place as deck. Yeah. How many times would you say you goldfish the average deck before the episode. That morning of, uh, 30, probably.

Rachel Wheat
But I mulligan a lot, and then I make changes in between that. And so I'll usually play like, that's. Like, an advanced form of goldfishing, you know? Yeah, yeah. Outside of just drawing your top seven.

Jimmy Wong
Cause a mulligan kind of counts as a goldfish, too. Yeah. I mean, probably 30 to, like, turn seven to make sure that you like where the deck is winning and where it's setting up and what it's struggling to do. And sometimes you just get a deck to 100 goldfish it and be like, whoa. I totally.

Rachel Wheat
This is way more powerful than this strategy, which I was also doing. I'm gonna scrap this whole thing, put it back up and goldfish another 1015 times. So, yeah, we goldfish them a lot in the deck building process, and some decks are harder than others, I would say. We had decks back in the old days, especially when I was still learning sort of what makes a deck kind of tick and work on the first where Jimmy and I would. Yeah.

Josh Lee Kwai
Scrap the whole deck. Scrap the whole. Oh, we've thrown out lots of decks in the goldfishing process, usually. Yeah, we'd build decks on my deck. It's either not good or it's too good.

Jimmy Wong
It's too good. Both things where you call the other guy and be like, I gotta switch commanders. I'm gonna build a whole new deck. This is not a good idea. Too much.

Josh Lee Kwai
Yeah, yeah. I think for Karloff Manor, we built the morph guy. For you, we built the NYA morph guy. You built two versions of miracle. Voss, too, I think, right?

Rachel Wheat
Yeah, we did two versions of miracle. And Murph was building the morph guy, and he came to me, he was like, nope, not gonna work. All right, throw it out. Yeah. Goldfish.

Jimmy Wong
Yeah. No, go for it. I was gonna say Elle, my girlfriend, she knows when I come home and I've got a goldfish deck for work, we try and go to bed about the same time. She's like, I'm going to bed. I know you're going to be up till two in the morning.

Josh Lee Kwai
I'll goldfish it 5100 times in a row. Yeah. You go fish much faster than I do. I will say I go all the way. Like, all the way.

Yeah. If you're going all the way to seven. Importantly for the guests as well, it's an early day, it's a long day. If you've never played on camera before, under the lights in a room with ten people watching and things happening all the time with production, it can be very stressful as well. And fumbling in that way because of that and not knowing your deck, it just compounds on itself.

Jimmy Wong
So gold fishing really helps get people into their comfort zone so they can also just be themselves at the table, which we talked about earlier, lends to a funner experience overall when you watch it. I love that because I think it's something the audience can take because they're not necessarily performing in front of the cameras and everything, but you are. I know a lot of people have social anxiety and you're interacting with other people socially here. So if you want to get confidence, one of the great ways to do that is to goldfish your deck to the point where you know it well enough that you can have the confidence that, like, I can play this thing. Yeah, I know what the best cards are when I need them.

Josh Lee Kwai
You know how all my cards kind of work together? I don't want to put pressure onto people thinking, like, you have to be perfect and know all that stuff, but it is a way to give yourself confidence. I think that we always use the term piloting when we're talking about a deck. Like, whether you're playing it or you're piloting it, honestly, I feel like there's certain decks or at certain power levels, you're kind of performing your deck where you're like. It's an extension of yourself.

Jimmy Wong
Yeah. Where you're like, here's the joke. And this is where the joke unfolds. And you're trying to, like, when you're explaining it to the people you're playing against, especially if they've never seen the deck before, you have, like, at least I have a little script where I explain what's happening, and it does feel like you're performing the deck. So if you have a little bit of the script memorized, or if you have.

Rachel Wheat
If you know how the first few turns are gonna unfold, it becomes a lot easier to perform. It's like your comedy set. Yeah, exactly. All of, I feel like a lot of mojo set. And you've got your aurvar set, and you've got your.

Jimmy Wong
Some of them from comic, some of them are very dramatic. Some of them are just mean. Some go over better than others. Yay. It is comedy.

Different audience, though, right? It's a long bit and a lot of people don't get it. But I got some ponies. I'm still workshopping it. Yeah, exactly.

Rachel Wheat
The ponies require a whole explanation. Yeah. Incredible. Up next, we're gonna talk about mulligans. We have a very specific in house Mulligan, and it's very permissive.

Jimmy Wong
Yes. And this one's, again, I think, obvious. Given if you've been listening along so far, this one should also make a lot of sense. Do you wanna explain, Josh? I feel like you're the one that kind of came up with it.

Josh Lee Kwai
Yeah, it's pretty easy. You can Mulligan as many times as you like. You keep seven every single time. We prefer. Or we suggest that you get at least one piece of card draw in your opener.

Jimmy Wong
Yep. Ramp. Not even necessary if you have card draw. Yeah, it's don't. You know, we say don't look for a hand that has access to six mana on turn three.

Josh Lee Kwai
That's not what we want, but also not gonna be that good. Just as long as you can draw cards, you will do things in the game. But the rule is, because what we learned is if you say only that first part and not the second part, you will just end up with opening hands that two or three people are like, solaring turn one. And there's some games like that in the panel. You'll see them.

And this is why that happened. Because. Yeah, it took us a little while to. Yeah. Mulligan.

Jimmy Wong
Whatever. Why does everyone have a soul ring opening hand all the time? Oh, it's our Mulligan rules. Yeah. So we made the rule that, like.

Josh Lee Kwai
But if you mulligan even one time, you can't have a soul ring in your opening hand. So you can either take the sol ring out and just take the next card off your library, if you have one, or you can just remold that whole hand when you find a sol ring in it. But either way. So the only way you can have a sol ring open your hand in your opening hand is if that is the natural seven you drew the very first time. The very first time, yeah.

Jimmy Wong
We should know that there is a bit of an honor system with this as well, which is like, don't mulligan a thousand times to statistically craft the perfect opening hand. I think people usually stop at the most, like 8910. That's what I found for myself. But sometimes you just get the best hand the first time around. But again, there's a lot of pressure on oftentimes, too.

I'll be like, Jamie, can you help me? Is this actually a good hand or am I just in my dreams here? And Jamie will look and be like, what are you doing? Please MulliGan this. Thank goodness that happened.

Otherwise I would have played a game and not done the thing I was hoping to. Right. Jamie used a term that I think is really good to describe hands. Is he called them camera worthy hands. Yeah.

Rachel Wheat
And it was like hands that were worthy of being filmed. Yes. If you keep like. And that. Or enjoyed by a playgroup, if you're applying this to your own.

Jimmy Wong
Yeah. That's worth playing a game around. Right. We're gonna. For everybody.

Rachel Wheat
Yeah. We're gonna be recording for. For 7 hours or something like that. If you start with. I know that's a long one.

For a long time. Yeah. But if you start with four lands, you know, four drops. Yeah. And two other, like, minor synergy pieces.

I don't want to watch that game. Yeah, nobody does. I don't want to play that game. Yeah. It's find something that's worthy of, like, of giving this level of attention to, you know, and I think that's a really great thing to think about.

Like, we talk about prioritizing card draw over ramp because it's like if you have a super fast hand and either you play all your stuff, all your rocks, and then you run out of gas and then you just have a lot of mana forever, or you play all your rocks, you draw your thing, you come out to that super fast start that we're trying to avoid in the first place. So find a hand that's trying to play the long game that's gonna do. Stuff in the early game, but that isn't super snowbally. Right. Yeah.

Josh Lee Kwai
That's gonna be a nice, fair start, a nice ease in by turn. Four, five, six. It's impossible for the gaps between the power of what people are doing to not start to form. But we really don't want that gap in, like, the power of Rachel's third turn versus everybody else's to be so great that it feels like she's almost already won. Right.

Yeah, that's just, again, not great on camera. Yeah, it's interesting. The next question, I mean, is interesting, which is, would you recommend this permissive mulliganing to your casual playgroups out there? My thought about this is that this Mulligan rule is like the perfect Mulligan for a precon environment, but it's a really bad Mulligan role. If everyone's playing close to CDH or just eight and a half sort of higher power level, because then it's harder to have the honor system where it's like, I'm just trying to get a playable hand and it can really get into, like, well, I can really kind of sculpt something here.

Jimmy Wong
If I just take a nut. Just give me one more shot at it. So I think if your playgroup is again balanced at the same level and it's slightly lower on the power level, it makes this permissive mulligan easier to stomach than if everyone's already got very highly tuned decks. And if they assemble things correctly, it doesn't matter if they have a solaring or not. They're still popping off by turn three or whatever.

Rachel Wheat
Yeah, I think this is, it's a double edged sword because I think if you're always mulliganing in this way, you can cut lance, you can cut ramps, you can cut because you're used to mulliganing more. It's the partial palms all over again. Yeah. So I feel like the deck builds can suffer when you're very permissive about mulliganing. But if you're in a low power group and you're not really worried, you're like, I don't care if my deck is good.

I'm here to just play with my friends and I want to play magic, then, yeah, that's totally fine. I think having a permissive mulligan just means that nobody's dead in the water on turn one, which is nice, but make sure you're not cutting lance and not cutting ramp and not cutting removal and mulliganing more and more and more times to find them. Yeah, I don't think I would recommend this to normal playgroups. It's so easily abusable. And, you know, let's be honest, there's always that person in the playgroup that's probably gonna abuse it a little bit.

Josh Lee Kwai
Yeah. Be me. What I tend to do that's sort of the cousin to this, I think, is if somebody's gonna mulligan down to, like six or maybe five, I'll try and offer for the group, hey, they can go to seven, right? Like, it's fine. We wanna have a game, right?

Jimmy Wong
Yeah. Yeah. And then if they do it again, maybe. Yeah. You gotta go down now.

Yeah, we gave you one. But, like, try and, you know, if, usually if somebody puts that forward, the rest of the people at the table are not going to reach and be like, I object. Yeah. And you can give them a little extra. Cause I actually don't want to sit down in a casual game, have somebody mull down to five and just maybe not be a factor in that game at all.

Josh Lee Kwai
That's not what I'm there for either. It'd be different if this is like rock, paper, scissors type game where it is over in seconds, but this is an hour, hour and a half, maybe. So having a bad start or getting eliminated early as a result of your mullegating, that's just not gonna be fun. And that allows you to sort of protect yourself from the people that might abuse it. Because you don't have to offer the person that everybody knows is kind of.

You don't have to offer them that extra mole. They go, I gotta go down to six. Oh, that's too bad. Oh, no. Yikes.

Rachel Wheat
Oh, no. I will say we've been playing with just the regular London at lunch a lot, and I think it's good. Yeah, I play with, like, it's a very good mole. Like, my general playgroup is like, just fine to seven, whatever. But at lunch, I like it.

I like that it's like there are stakes, and sometimes you keep a hand that is worse because it's not worse than six cards. It makes you play a little tighter. Yep, absolutely. You do get one free one too. If you're mulling for the third time, and it's really the fourth one, I think going to six is not that bad.

Josh Lee Kwai
It's the fourth one you had to mull four times to get down to five. That's a long time. Yeah, that's bad luck sometimes. But it also could be a deck building thing. And I would say if you're very new to the game, you can definitely have this permissive Mulligan just to make sure they're gonna have a game.

Jimmy Wong
I mean, this is the point, though, where they're also showing your opening hand to be like, hey, is this gonna work? I think we jump down to gameplay mindset here. This one's really important. And we've kind of been dancing around in this whole episode, but it's not. All just about what cards go in.

Yeah, we're not robots when we get to the table because we have to play in a way that is enjoyable both for us and also the person watching. So we found that it's just the number one thing is fun. Can you be have as much fun as you can? And if you do, when you're playing for that thing of fun, you're gonna, I think, overall, almost always increase the quality of an episode. Yeah.

Rachel Wheat
Play for entertainment as much as possible. Even if it means that you might be playing like, without counter spell backup or with, like, maybe you're going for it too early. But if you have the opportunity to do something cool and to show off what your commander is doing, take that opportunity, because those windows can close really fast. Yeah. And also know the other players at the table are there for you to do that.

Jimmy Wong
We're all like, racing along this racetrack and someone's got a cool, they're gonna do a sweet wheelie. No one's gonna sit there and like, crush the car down when it happens. You'll be like, oh my gosh. Did you see the sweet wheelie that just happened? I wanna do a wheelie too.

And that is sort of the playing for fun atmosphere where we're all on a playground of sorts and trying to do fun, cool stuff. Yeah. I think the optimal play if you're trying to win is usually a little bit conservative. Like, sequence very carefully. You know, if you're gonna make a big play, wait a little till you have like, counter spell backup or protection for it, you know, so you can really make those moves.

Josh Lee Kwai
And for gameplay on a video, I like to play a lot more recklessly is what I call it. Just make reckless moves. I see an opening, I can do something cool. Do it. Don't worry so much, you know, about, am I going to be able to follow this up and lead this to a win?

In fact, that can almost be bad. If this play I'm gonna make is huge and splashy, and I've locked the door behind it, so that that's the only thing that can happen for the rest of this game. It's so much better if I'm like, this is gonna be huge and splashy and awesome, and I'm gonna be like, sweet. I did that, but I did it in such a manner that, like, they could overcome it. I didn't I don't.

That's why. Another reason we don't like the free counter spells and things like that, you know? So I tapped out to do it. And normally, what would smart, like, Josh trying to play to windu off camera. I'd wait till a turn or two from now, and I would wait till I had my protection up, but that's.

That's just not gonna make for as much fun. So I'm gonna be bold and reckless here and just, like, go for it. And also, like you said, the windows can close. I definitely played episodes early on where I tried to. You know, I hadn't learned this lesson yet, and my deck didn't end up doing anything for the game because the piece I was counting on got shut down.

And then I never found the window to actually do the cool thing, and instead, I would, you know, go to bed at that night going, like, I didn't show off my deck at all. And, yeah, if I did the thing, I wouldn't have been protected and maybe still didn't, wouldn't have won that game, but they would've seen how cool my deck could be. Right. And I lost that opportunity. So I'd way rather show the potential than potentially not show anything.

Jimmy Wong
Ooh, I like that. Yeah. You wrote here, rachel, be your deck salesman. Yeah, that was something Josh said yesterday. I think that's so, because this is a show that's so tightly tied to a set, and we're showing off new products that a lot of times, people haven't seen in games before.

Rachel Wheat
You're here to be like, all right, I brought this turtle walls guy, and I'm excited about it, and I'm gonna see what this deck can do. And it didn't work out in that case, but Jimmy showed off how powerful he could be. Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah, see, he did something. He just did it on your board.

Jimmy Wong
You didn't realize it, but this was a weird sale. Yeah, but the idea that you bring this thing, and this is the thing that you bring to the table, and you want to show. Yeah. This awesome potential new build that people can build. I think, as creators, my favorite thing about what we get to do is meet people where they're enthusiastic.

Rachel Wheat
So when people come to the channel excited about a set, we get to be like, we're excited, too. Yeah, that's right. And we're not taking it and being like, this set's crap. Find the excitement. Look.

Jimmy Wong
The excitement. Yeah, because that's, like, people come to our video, which are hobby based videos, they're things that people enjoy, and we get to meet with them where they are, where they're excited about it and show them how cool it could be. And you get that opportunity with this deck and hope that you can do it justice. The thing I like here, too, is that everyone plays for fun in a different way. Yeah.

Obviously, if you compare my style and Josh's style, they're very different. Rachel's style, very different. So when we say play for fun, it's like, in Rachel's case, she does want to show you how cool this three key worded animal can be because it's so goofy and fun and silly. I like showing you because it's chaotic and ridiculous. Right.

Josh likes to show you because it's got more control elements or whatever it is. Professor wants to do it. Cause it's got merfolk. So I think everyone is there to play for fun. It also allows everyone's expressions to be seen.

Right. And that's a huge reason that we, game in general, is to feel validated by our contribution into the hobby and then how it expresses outwards. Yeah. We live in such a cynical world. And I like what you said there about, like, it's easy to complain about seven being negative, and we do that sometimes, right?

Yeah. We try to be honest and critique. But game nights is a place to celebrate our joy of the game. It's, you know, we said, have said from the start that it's our love letter to magic and commander, and the goal of the show is to show you why we love it. And that's why I think the salesman thing is, like, such a core piece of it, because to me, like, one of the best comments you can get is when you built a deck, and then you see in the comments, I want to build that deck.

Josh Lee Kwai
Yeah. That means that, like, I sold it to you, I showed you the potential. Yeah. And you get that comment as much from winning decks as not winning decks. It doesn't really have to do with whether the deck won.

When people call it out, it's more about, like, oh, there was a couple key cool interactions where they were like, that looks fun. I want to do that. To me, playing in that way. So again, it's prioritizing something other than winning, which I do think is true to the regular commander experience of casual playgroups, which is, I do think that's what I learned because I didn't used to play that way at all. I think you remember me in the early days of playing Commander with Craig and you know, those other guys.

Jimmy Wong
Well, Craig being there, too, is funny because he also played very differently back then. It was very cutthroat. Right. We all learned a lot, I think, from doing the gameplay. And our off camera playing changed a lot over the first couple of years as we kind of incorporated what we were learning.

Josh Lee Kwai
And that was one of the big things for me, was like, oh, I got, yeah, I'm not playing a tournament, right. I'm playing for fun. I'm gonna be more reckless. I'm gonna let other people have their moments, and I'm gonna have my moments, but I'm gonna have my moments earlier than I normally would. And I'm just gonna be, like, doing cool stuff, you know, not so much like, is it exactly buttoned down so that I can follow that play up with the exact, you know, sequence toward whatever.

Cause I'm not, you know, I'm not. Yeah, I'm never gonna be LSV. Why should I try real hard to do that?

Jimmy Wong
Yeah, I'm aspiring to, like, Kenji level. You know, that's. I'm good if I hit that. Reachable me, I'm still. It's quite far away.

Speaking of that, the next thing about the gameplay mindset is not just fun and reckless, but at the same time, can you play smart? And this is, again, everyone has a different definition of what it means to play well and smart or fun. But the big one here is just like, we're not gonna have a on board misplay. That is just obvious, because not only will it feel bad, but every single commenter in the world will point it out. And so, in general, if it's onboard and it's like, oh, I just didn't see that.

That doesn't lend to good tv either. So that's like a very obvious thing. And because there are players around the table all contributing to this atmosphere, and I find they do this in regular games now. And maybe you're the person that does in your playgroup is to go, hold on, hold on. Don't forget you have a trigger.

This is happening. And so x can't, and y and z can't happen, or whatever it is. Cause that helps maintain everyone just being able to play in a way that they feel good about, too at the end of the day. Yeah. I mean, obviously this isn't perfect.

Rachel Wheat
We're gonna misplay. We're not LSb, and we've had some. Epic ones in the past, some big. Ones, but we just generally try to play in a way that makes all the players look and feel clever, because magic's about that as much as it's about these big, splashy plays. And I think we've prioritized fun.

It is about doing the thing that's neat and finding the line that's like, if it's on board, you're like, there has to be a line. These pieces. Almost.

Josh Lee Kwai
Just one more mana. Yeah. You can name a whole channel after that. Yeah. And the last thing we want is a game to feel invalidated or the results to feel invalidated by just, like, a silly mistake.

Yeah. We talk about fun, but I do think one of the reasons people enjoy magic and the type of personality that's drawn to it are the ones that find fun in cleverness, feeling smart, out thinking their opponents. It's that type of game. So that's. That's a really big thing.

And there's realities, too. Right? Like, a million people are maybe gonna watch the show. Yeah. And it's all, you know, we want people to feel safe, want to come on the show, have fun on the show.

They're gonna have a lot more fun if they're not super worried that they're gonna end up looking stupid at the end of it. So, it's funny Jimmy said this. I find myself doing this just in casual games all the time now where, you know, magic cons or whatever. Yeah. Where I'm very, like, even about my own board, like, don't forget I have this effect.

Do this. This will happen. Me, too. Just absolutely doing that. Yeah.

Like, I'm not looking for onboard trickery to get you. Yeah, yeah. And trickery. Yeah, that's fine. That's hidden information, but known information.

I'm not interested in that being what trips you up and you feeling. I'm not interested in you feeling dumb at the end of the day because, oh, my God, I totally forgot that that card was out there, and I wouldn't have done that thing. Yeah. That's just not really what we're looking for. I don't think there's a bad side to a lot of takes backsies, though, like, off camera games.

So it's a tough balance, honestly. So, on camera, we allow minor take backs. Basically anything we can do, if possible. Can I tap differently? Oh, whoops.

Jimmy Wong
I didn't mean to. X, right? Yeah. And most of the time, all of those are edited out for clarity and to protect guests or protect players to make sure that. That they look and feel smart, but also just so you're not doing stuff and winding it back and doing stuff and winding it back.

Rachel Wheat
It just makes for a weird, confusing story. Yeah. Jimmy and I are the ones that can sort of represent gameplay mistakes or those kinds of mistakes sometimes. Cause we've been on a lot of episodes. Like, if somebody's gonna be on game nights and it's maybe their first time or even their second.

Jimmy Wong
Yeah. You don't want them to create some catastrophic error for themselves. That just is gonna not have them even wanting to watch the episode. Right. Yeah.

Josh Lee Kwai
I mean, that joke can be around forever, too, depending on what is. Craig cracked the fetchland for the wrong thing. We just didn't catch it. We should have protected Craig from that. And we just didn't catch it until it was already out, which is too bad.

It's fine. It's Craig. So he's been around the block and is in the community for a long time. But Jimmy and I are often willing to be like, it's okay. I made that mistake.

This is my 70th episode. The dilution is pretty high. Like, one or two drops of mistakes become flattened. Yeah, exactly. There's a lot of gameplay of me out there, so hopefully I don't do this so much.

Starts to change the narrative. I think. Wow. I think I'm fine. We'll keep this.

Jimmy Wong
Certain narratives have already been said. Exactly. I don't know. It's about the shmanschmops. Yeah.

Schman hops. Yeah. Yeah. Generally, I think we'll wind back what we can and then if we catch big rules mistakes, sometimes in post, sometimes on set. Hopefully on set.

Rachel Wheat
Hopefully on set, we will try to fix it as much as possible. And largely, that's just so we're not spreading misinformation. So we're not, like, showing that a card works one way and it works another way. A lot of people are gonna watch this. We wanna make sure that the way that we're playing is the correct way.

Jimmy Wong
That's so important. Yeah. Or at least very close to the correct way that for your average player, it won't make any difference. Once in a while, people will go, well, technically, this is how it works. And it's like, yeah, we know, but.

Order of the stack doesn't actually matter in the audience. There's stuff that didn't matter here, so we just shortcut it. But, yeah, we definitely. We know a lot of new players find the game and commander through us. And so we don't wanna literally be like, this card is.

Josh Lee Kwai
We're saying it works this way. It works this way. Yeah. We should know that. The number one thing people tell us about game nights at magicons is that they played commander because game nights got them into it.

Rachel Wheat
So we actually. That's another. More. Magic. Magic.

Josh Lee Kwai
Magic. Yeah. And that's. I gotta play commander. Cause I get commands on.

Jimmy Wong
That's great. I didn't know that. That's amazing. But it's another reason that we have to have this level of integrity for take backs and rules mistakes. And it's not just a performance thing.

Right. It actually has to do with the well being of other players entering the game. Yeah. There's that weight of responsibility. When people come up all the time and tell you, like, you're the reason that I learned to play magic or commander, that puts, you know, it's not, like, in a bad way, but it does put a weight of responsibility on you.

Josh Lee Kwai
I was like, there's a lot of people like that. Right. Like, I need to make sure that I'm doing them justice. Yeah. When we make the show, I probably.

Jimmy Wong
Should hit more land drops, if that's the case. Well, the way that we portray it, they know it's bad to miss them, so you're teaching them in your own heart. All right. Sweet, sweet, sweet, sweet, sweet, sweet, sweet. I don't want to be like, jimmy.

Rachel Wheat
I'm down with it. They love it. There can only be one because they. Can all relate late. Okay.

Jimmy Wong
All right. So interaction is the next step of this process of how we play on camera. So everything applies. Guests, we don't really, at this point, tell guests what not to do or what to do. Right.

We tell them, make the best decision based on the cards you have on hand, what you have on the board. If you need some assistance, ask for help. But we're not saying no counter spells, no interaction. None of that. Sometimes these rules are just, like, for myself, Josh, sometimes, Rachel, just to make sure that, again, we are crafting a game that is fun in all the things that we've described so far.

Rachel Wheat
Yeah, I think the mindset is definitely something that we go into it with, and it's not something that we expect guests to keep in mind. We don't talk to them about that part at all. No. They can play how they want, how they intend to, but especially with interaction, I think the way that we use interaction is very specific because with counter spells, I feel like they're largely defensive is one thing. Like, we don't use a lot of proactive counter spells where it's like, we'll stop a thing if we're gonna die to it or if it's gonna blow up a board or something like that.

But it's not like, ah, counter spell your ramp. Right. It's not really die full. Your fans, we're gonna do an interview. Where we gotta pull under evil hats.

Jimmy Wong
I'm also randomly giving people card draw. Like, stuff like that is, again, up to you as the guest to come and do it for yourself. But I'm doing it in a way that's like, I want everyone to have fun. And again, like Josh said earlier, don't really care for the outcome, just that everyone is able to do the thing. I think it was the fallout episode I gave when the guests an extra card that needed it.

Rachel Wheat
Yeah. It's also why I love Lauren of the third path. Great card. Yeah. That card's so fun.

Josh Lee Kwai
Yeah. I think that it's important that when you're playing the game, you think about the other player's experience, and that's what having an audience forces you to do. So there's often times where like, yeah, I could kill that thing. But their deck was built to do this thing. And they're like me.

They want their deck to at least once this episode, do the thing that they built it to do. And if I can at all stomach it, like, it's not gonna kill me. It's not gonna be. It's not gonna end the game on the spot. Yeah.

Hold my removal. The first time that they're gonna get to do their thing now. The second time, it's more fair game. Cause they've done it once, but it would depend on circumstances. I'm not saying I would never, you know, sandbag removal in that case.

Jimmy Wong
Yeah. But if I think, okay, this is gonna be awesome. It's gonna be cool. It's gonna be big. I have this removal.

Josh Lee Kwai
I could stop it in its tracks, but the removal still probably be useful in, like, making sure I don't die from it. Let's let that thing happen. Let's let that big thing happen. Yeah. Yeah.

Rachel Wheat
I think it has a lot to do with, like, what is more awesome? If this resolves or if this doesn't resolve? Like, if you're ahead and somebody finds the board wipe, and it's like, I'm gonna cast the board wipe and I'm gonna, like, we're gonna bring down, like, Josh is really far ahead. We're gonna bring down Josh's board. If you have a counter spell, do you cast that counter spell?

Josh Lee Kwai
Yeah, it would be. Cause it's like. Cause the board wipe's kind of awesome. But also the counterspell's kind of awesome. So it's.

Rachel Wheat
It's such a vibes thing, I think. Yeah, you're catching on to what is happening in the game and what makes sense, and it requires a little bit of disassociation from yourself at the table when it's happening as well, which is, I think, a very. Again, this is very specific to the hosts. So it definitely is an interesting. Yeah, because, like, you don't want to just.

Jimmy Wong
We learned, like, earlier, like, expropriate, not that much fun to cast, super powerful. But then you just.

Yeah, so it's interesting. I think what you said about it being a vibes thing is, I would say we are like bumpers on a bowling alley, and we want the ball to hit. If it's a great game, it hits a strike, everyone cheers. It sounds cool, but if it just goes into the gutter for one reason or another, we're kind of there sometimes as hosts to just add a little bit of buffer, to just nudge things in a certain direction. If we feel like it's going to be for the overall health of a game.

Josh Lee Kwai
Yeah. I don't want to portray it as, like, we don't try to win, because we do try still to win the game, but the show is the most important thing at the end of the day, so there will be moments once in a while, and it's not that often. Yeah. Maybe not even once per episode. Maybe once every couple of episodes, where a decision does get made, where it's like, all right, technically, this is probably not the best for me to win the game, but it is the best for the entertainment of the show.

And it's one of the core reasons why we don't show players hands. Cause magic content always showed every card in players hands up till game nights, basically. Oh, the backseaters would have a field day. Yeah. And we don't want to destroy the illusion.

We do try and win the games, but we do also try and make it entertaining. And to be clear, like Jimmy said, this is a host thing. We always tell, and we specifically say to the guests, like, hey, listen, make the plays that you think are most likely to make you win the game. Yeah. But if all things are equal, or you can't decide, attack me or Jimmy.

Kill me or Jimmy. If you can kill somebody, do it. But we would prefer, if it's equal that you kill me or Jimmy. Yeah. If the guest is way ahead and you feel like your best chance to win the game is to kill the other guests, go again.

Do it. But, you know, just when there are choices to be made. We've been on 70 episodes, and the other guest has probably not been on that many, so. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's go ahead and let them have their time here.

So, you know, it's. Again, all this is a balancing act, more art than science. And I will say I do a lot of this in my casual groups as well. Like, I. Yeah, this is true to real commander.

Rachel Wheat
Like, I don't spend removal spells when I think they're gonna make the game either more boring or just, like, pick on somebody who's already behind or, like, it's gonna make the game longer, and we're all kind of done with it. Like, sometimes you just make social decisions in a commander game because it would be better if you didn't have a removal spell there, or it would be better if you didn't have a counter spell there. And that's a decision that you get to make as a casual player all the time. Yep. So we're making like we're not playing optimally all the time.

I think we're trying to play to win, but we're also trying to play to have a big, fun game, which is how most commander games are for me, anyway. Yeah, it's a good point. Like, I'm playing toward. I'm playing toward this game being worth our time. Like, everybody remembering this game fondly, not like, boy, I didn't play perfectly there, so I'm gonna kick off.

I'm gonna live with that. Yeah. But if it's like, if somebody rips a board wipe that needs to happen, or the game's over, then it's like, I'm gonna let the board wipe resolve because it's a better story. Totally. If it does than if it doesn't.

Jimmy Wong
I guess we should shout out professor again, because not only will he play for fun and just do the fun, interactive thing, but he'll also always try to kill myself for jokes first, without. Fail, always playing white. He's, like, the perfect guest in that way. He just gets it. He's a vibing.

He's vibing, and then he's killing me and Josh. They're a problem. I know they are. I will not listen to their tricks. The thing we got going for us is there's two of us all.

Josh Lee Kwai
Yeah. And sometimes mid game, he changes the distinction. Yeah. Yeah. Actually, I want to kill Jimmy.

Jimmy Wong
And demoralize Josh, but. Kill Jimmy. Yeah. There we go. You spent the first half of the game, and now you're switching.

Josh Lee Kwai
Go for it. All right. We're friends, though, right? What? Oh, man.

Rachel Wheat
I think we wouldn't be talking about game nights fully if we don't talk about the editing portion of game nights. Right. We're not gonna spend a ton of time here because it's not as, like, helpful or maybe even interesting to people at home. But this does contribute to the overall feel of the episode. Sometimes people will comment being like, how did they tutor that land out so quickly?

Jimmy Wong
They just shuffled and put it. Did they even shuffle? It's like, well, dead air is being cut all the time from these. No, he edited it out. Yeah.

No searching. A lot of times someone will go in the tank for five minutes, like, what do I actually get here? We're not gonna show that on camera. It's getting edited out. So that does add to the cohesive and tightness sometimes of game night's games, notably your games at home.

Your results may differ as you actually take the time you need. So I would not necessarily see the editing. And if you're feeling something from that, know that that's where it's coming from. From. Yeah.

Rachel Wheat
It's like, we get to control how much time is spent on certain things, so it's a lot easier to control the energy of the game in post. Like, that's a big thing, is we get to give players as much time as they want to think as they need. Like, Josh took an entire lunch break to think. We literally said, this is going to take forever. Everybody go eat lunch.

Yeah. And I'll sit here while, you know, while that's going on for an hour to try and figure out how this mizzen mastery is gonna, like, happen. Cause it's all on board. Yeah. And that card.

Josh Lee Kwai
Yeah. That's when I realized, oh, I made a mistake. Also on the soft ban list.

That'S what we realized. I was like, oh, crap. I can't just willy nilly do this because they can see everything. Yeah. And then we still screwed it up, by the way.

But at least it was a little bit defensible. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The original concept for the show. And if you go back, we'll link it in the show notes and watch the very first episode, maybe even the first, like, three episodes of the show. We upcut a lot.

Like, a lot. Like, whole turns. Yeah. We skipped turns. Yep.

The whole idea of the show was, can we take a game of commander? Just show the highlight points, the exciting points, explain the context around them enough so that the whole thing, you can watch it very quickly. And what we learned over time is people didn't want that. People were like, well, I want to see every single card that gets played. And so.

All right, cool. But we kept the part, like you're saying, where it's like. But no matter what you do, just watching somebody think is not that interesting. Watching them search through their deck, not that interesting. So all we do is have them say, I'm gonna search my deck, and I'm gonna find this.

Did they actually take a minute, two minutes to look through the deck and decide which card they're gonna pick? Yes, they did. We just didn't show you that part. Cause there's nothing going on there that's worth watching. Yeah, it doesn't really matter.

Yeah. Edited show for entertainment. Extra turns is the same way. Obviously, slightly different philosophies around it, but we upcoming the thinking and a lot of the action. Yeah.

Rachel Wheat
On the show, we search at the optimal time. We tend to catch on end steps and resolve tutors before passing, which is another thing that gets shortcut in Commander games. But I did want to mention that when we're playing casually, when we're not being recorded, we'll fetch on returns and we'll, like, we'll search for a demonic tutor and be like, go ahead. It's we shortcut. When we can't edit.

Josh Lee Kwai
We do all the things like, hey, I'm gonna light and tutor on your end step, and if you do anything, I'll redo it. I'll curb tribelder here. But, you know, I was gonna block. If anything, save us the time. Yeah.

So I can search while Jimmy's deciding what is, you know, what, three drop he's gonna play or whatever. And again, this is for new players, so they can see when you're supposed to do this, how this actually works without shortcutting important things that new players might not actually know. Yeah. And sometimes, as for clarity, as well, with editing, we will do things in the correct stack order on the day or on the day. We'll go like, actually, technically, this fetch land happens before these two.

Jimmy Wong
But for clarity's sake, we're just going to have these things resolved in this order. It doesn't change the outcome. It may not be exactly two rules, but when you're watching it, it will make that much more sense. Yeah. Rhystic study is a really good example of this.

Josh Lee Kwai
So. Yeah. Oh, right. Okay. Rhystic study interrupts everything that's happening to ask, like, hey, do you pay the one?

And on the show, if Jimmy casts this bell and he says, okay, I cast this, and I go, rhystic, study, do you pay the one? And then he says, yes or no? And then I do the thing. And now the thing that he was originally doing actually happens. That makes the impact of the thing he was doing less to the audience.

Cause it was like he started a sentence, I interrupted him in the middle, and then he. To estimate the sentence. It has nothing to do with the sentence. And then he finishes the sentence, and you're like, what was the start of that sentence? I sort of forgot.

Right? Yeah, yeah. And so what we've decided to do in those cases, even though it's not technically correct, unless it matters, since sometimes it does, and you'll notice in the points when it does, we don't do this, but we will just Jimmy cast a spell. It resolves. It resolves.

Jimmy Wong
It does a thing. And then we say at the end, hey, risk excited. You pay the one. So that those two moments are separated and he can have the, like, cool. It was Italy.

Josh Lee Kwai
It came down. Everybody got scared. We talked about how scary Italy was, and then, like, rhystic study, which is not that important. It's the 12th time it's happened, this game, and it's just a throwaway thing. Do you pay the one?

Yeah. And we're keeping still to what the rules the board say needs to be to stay rules accurate. Yeah. Yeah. I think you've unlocked the secret to why people don't like playing against rhystic study.

Rachel Wheat
It just interrupts them while they were doing something over and over and over and over again. I am not listening to d Pa, the one what's being talked about right now, and nobody hates it. It's the best card. Auto include. Auto include.

Speaking of editing, let's talk about this game narrative. Because we don't write a script, I. Don'T know if it's gonna matter to anyone who still believes we are scripted. Cause we've said we don't enough times that they clearly don't believe us when we say it. Yeah, but we make it feel like a script exists because we find a story in the game that happens and then accentuate that story.

Josh Lee Kwai
Yes. So it's like you look for the thread, and then you highlight the thread in the coolest parts, and it makes it feel like a very sculpted story, especially if that's what we're trying to do. Cutaways to edits to interviews that happen after the game, which is additional sculpting. So, yeah. During the actual game, though, there are some things, some sort of concepts that we put into it that we've talked about already.

Jimmy Wong
Right. In terms of playing for fun and playing cleverly, which is, I think, in general, everyone that's we're bringing on is a content creator, typically, or a type of performer. And they already have this baked into their system, which is like saying, yes. Improvisation. Basic rules.

Like, yes. And something happens, not necessarily with gameplay actions, but what? Like someone's putting on a funny voice. It's not like professor's the Murpholk voice. Everyone stops, looks at him, goes, that's dumb.

Stop doing it. That is not what happens. I put on a pirate voice. Right. We're going further into this.

Josh Lee Kwai
Right? We're doing voices. Here we go. And then all of a sudden, all these new doors of possibility open. When the interviews happen later, can you add to that moment now that you know it exists and everyone said yes to it?

Yeah, that's a really good way. For those who don't know, improv comedy sort of has this basic rule that's like the foundational piece of it, which is called yes. And. Or my improv coach called accept all offers. Right.

And this idea can be taken to everything is like, how am I. How can I be additive to anything that happened or occurred? How can I. I not stop it? It's like the reactionary deck versus the proactive deck.

Right. No. How can I put more onto it? And that leads you to bigger and bigger moments. Right.

Cause you're adding to it. So what happened to it? It got bigger. And so that is like a core philosophy of improv. And this is, at its heart, kind of an improv comedy show, in a way.

We play the game. The game is the game. What happens, happens. But there are narrative storylines that can sort of be picked out and then, like you said, accentuated and added onto in the interview process. And I think that's where some of the scripting notes or thoughts come from.

I think there's another reason people think it's scripted, though, and that's when there are close games or crazy things that happen in games. They think there's no way Jimmy would copy the altar of dementia and be able to mill Josh out of nowhere. There. There's no way. Exact.

Jimmy Wong
See, there's no way. Yeah. There's no way. There was a land right on top of his deck when he. But the thing is.

Yeah. That stuff just happens a lot in commander. Yeah. And everyone has a chaos warp story where you flip the same thing. Right.

I feel like almost most players have seen it or had it happen to them. Just happens. Yeah. And those moments stick out in your mind so much that it feels like, hey, they're always happening. But I guarantee, like, most of the chaos warps on our show didn't flip the same card.

Josh Lee Kwai
Yeah, but you're just sticking to that one hermit droid Roman and those one moments, and when something happens, you're like, it's just like the Hermodro moment. They must have scripted it. That Hermadro moment was. Was seven years ago or something, right? Like, yeah, it feels like that happens all the time.

It actually doesn't. Jimmy miss a land drop? He misses it all the time. He's been on 70 episodes. He's been manuscrewed in seven of them.

I've probably been manuscried on the same number, but that just becomes the narrative because we chose to accentuate it a couple of times. And it's funny, and it's very relatable. Everyone can relate to being manuscrewed, so they get to be like, I'm with you, Jimmy. That's happened to me, and I know. It sucks, and it's part of what we do on the show is just make a big deal out of stuff.

Rachel Wheat
It's become kind of a meme that it's like, ah, he played ramp on turn two. You know, that's gotta be better. But it helps build a game. It helps show momentum or give you a scorecard, kind of. Of like, who's doing well in the game, who we should be afraid of.

It helps make the game feel bigger. When you make big deals out of, like, they had this, and I was ready for this, that makes the game feel more impactful and dynamic, which is what makes it, hopefully fun to watch. I think it's one of the big reasons that players who aren't super familiar with magic, we even hear sometimes people learn magic through game nights, which that seems a little nuts to me, but people who aren't super enfranchised watch it. And we always tell the guests, hey, listen, we're going to ask you a question, explain your thought processing behind it, and then tell us the emotion you have at the end of it. I was nervous, I was sad, I was excited, I was stoked, whatever that emotion is, because if I'm a newer player, I can get lost in the gobbledygook and the lingo and mechanic interactions.

Josh Lee Kwai
Yeah, I might not understand all of that, but if at the end of it, Jimmy goes, so I'm really excited, then it's like, okay, cool. I don't know exactly what happened, but Jimmy's excited. About it. That dragon did a cool animation when it came out, so that must be good for him. And if I'm rooting for Jimmy or I'm on his side, I kind of know what the score is, like you said.

So, yeah, I think that, you know. Yeah, we get a little bit of flack for the reactions and the stuff, but that really does help that. That new player experience. And, you know, again, this is our love letter to the game, and one of the things we love about it is the motion of playing it. Right.

Yeah. What does it feel like? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cool. This is a great question.

Jimmy Wong
Do you think playing on camera has made you a more entertaining person to play with? Rachel, you've done it the least amongst the three of us. Yeah. Still a lot, though. Still a lot, a lot.

Rachel Wheat
The funny thing is, I started playing commander in, like, 20. No, 2000. No, 2017. This is Adam. I think it's Ixalon.

Ixalon was my first ad. I think it's 2017. I was a content creator in 2019. Yeah. So I was much.

Most of my magic career, I've been making content, so I played a lot of gameplay. Hey, listen, we've said this. I haven't said it in a long time, though, but when we started the podcast, Jimmy and I had playing commander for less than four months. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what it feels like.

Josh Lee Kwai
Yeah. We're qualified. Yeah. We have to figure it out. We got a camera.

Who else is there? It was mostly. We got cameras and microphones. Yeah. Last about, like, we know what the hell we're talking about.

Rachel Wheat
It's the camera zone. Yeah, it's the equipment zone at my apartment. So. Sorry I derailed you there. Yeah, that's okay.

So I've been doing a lot of gameplay for a long time, but it's made me, I think, maybe less entertaining. Taining is not the word I would use it, but I'm a very clear player. I will untap this. I will draw my card. I walk through every single step, and when I'm playing things, I explain how they're gonna interact.

And I was at a pre release, and somebody was like, you're very easy to play against.

Josh Lee Kwai
I know exactly what's happening. I know exactly what's happening. You're not intimidating. You're not, like, staring. You're just explaining things calmly and kindly.

Rachel Wheat
I know exactly what's going on, and I feel. And I felt excited. And you offered. Yeah. That was their emotion.

As a player, you need to read the card. Oh, yeah. You play the card in pre list. I do this a lot. Play it backwards.

I play it backwards. Push it towards them. Yeah, usually. So it's right side up to them. Yep.

Josh Lee Kwai
Cause I'm like, I don't know all the cards. You probably don't. Here you go. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So half the time I feel like it's like, so I'm not lying.

Rachel Wheat
You can see how these two cards work together. Yeah. A lot of times this one's pretty good. You should probably read it. Yeah, you need to read this specifically relates to that.

Jimmy Wong
And that just. Okay, if you don't know how it works, I do that all the time. You should read this. I don't know how many times I've been like, if you don't know how it works, I can explain it to you. If you don't trust me, you can ask someone else, but I'm not trying to deceive you here.

Rachel Wheat
So, yeah, I communicate very clearly when I'm playing, which makes me very easy to play against a character. You're like the host of the game even when you're playing. I feel the same way. That's what it feels like. I feel like when I sit down to a commander table, I'm like, like, thank you for coming to my table.

Even though it's like a game story, because, like, I usually lead a rule zero conversation, I usually will pick my, like, if we're having trouble picking decks, I usually pick first. If somebody's excited about a deck, then I will pick to match. But, like, you feel like. Because I have the most knowledge, I always feel like I'm guiding how the game happens. I'll ask questions.

If there's dead air, I'm like, tell me about your deck. Yeah, it's almost like they've come to my house and I'm like, let me take your jackets. What would you like to drink? Do you have a deck you'd like to play today? Dice?

Jimmy Wong
I have some infinitokens. That's what it feels like. Do you think that is about, obviously, your knowledge of the game and everything, but is also partially about the fact that at most tables, you are the well known person at the table? I think that's definitely the biggest reason today. But even before that, I feel like I was sort of the reason that my playgroup came together.

Rachel Wheat
I got a lot of people into magic, so generally, I've had the most knowledge at the table, even when I wasn't a recognizable face in gaming places. That makes sense. I mean, you're here at the command zone for a specific reason. Yeah. That reason is tied to who you are as a person that's shown up in these different areas of your life.

And I started making content early, like I said, so I've been really plugged in for a long time, but it's hard to have an expectation socially of what the people that you're playing with are bringing to the table at a game store. You're not really sure how comfortable they are. You're not sure if they're. How communicative they are. So I know that I'm confident driving, so might as well drive.

Josh Lee Kwai
I think, too, I feel the weight of responsibility of, like, you know, we've dedicated a pretty large portion of our life here to this game, and I feel like I want people to walk away from any game of magic that I'm even tangentially related to. Having had a good time. Yeah. Yeah. You know, having had fun, thinking positively about the game and wanting to play more, you know, pragmatically also, because, yeah, those are people that could be audience members and things like that.

But I just think, like, it is important to me that people, like, understand, like, how. How awesome it is and why I love it. And, like, I hope you love it, too. I don't want to be overbearing about it, but also, like, oh, God, I really hope you like it. Yeah.

You know, so anytime, any. I also hope you like me. I'm a normal human being in that way, but it is a lot about, like, geez, geez. I've dedicated a lot to this game, and, man, if a lot of people don't like it, that feels like it might have been a waste, right? Yeah.

Jimmy Wong
Going against that. Yeah. In a way, it's kind of our obligation that we've already signed up for in a different way in many areas of our life, and now it's just with magic, as in, like, we are part of, you know, like, Josh, you would recommend people go to movies when you were an editor, right? Like, I was an actor. I wanted you to go see theater just in general, and don't, obviously, apply this to yourself if you're not that kind of person.

I think, more importantly, it's something that gives all of us energy. It doesn't, like, make us go home and be like, oh, I'm so drained. I had to put on a face all day to play fun games of magic. It's like, no, I got to do a fun thing. I got to travel to do it.

I got to meet some people. I got to play these things. I got to learn these things. It's the additive nature, again, of what game nights is going for. Yeah.

Josh Lee Kwai
I do think the thing that we all talked about, about being very clear about our board state and warning people about our own stuff sometimes is a good way to play in a casual setting so that nobody feels gotchaed, tricked or gotcha for things that are onboard that they should be able to see. And commander is so complicated now, and even we are for a job. Study the cards. There's all the time now where I'm like, what's that card? I don't remember.

From new Cabana. Right. Like, I just barely remember it. Yeah, sure. Sorry.

Yeah. From infinity. What? I talked about it for an hour, but it was a week of my life, you know, three years ago, and then there were 27 more sets, and they all had 700 cards, so I barely remember that. Yeah.

And so if I can't tell you what a decent number of cards on any given board do, you should not be expected to do that. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's better if everybody just kind of generally keeps tabs and warns people about stuff that's important. Yeah, yeah.

Rachel Wheat
Of course, all of this changes when it's live. We wanted to talk a little bit about game nights live because I do. A whole episode on this. I know it's a slightly different. It's a slightly different process because we don't have editing, but basically, we take all the post production stuff that we were talking about and we make it pre prep.

We take a lot longer in deck building. We take a lot longer in goldfishing. We take a lot longer in, like, the players have the decks for longer. Yeah. And goldfishing the decks specifically against each other multiple times, not just in a solo environment.

Josh Lee Kwai
Yeah. A lot of testing. We actually play games with the players that are going to play test games. Rehearsals. We have rehearsals.

It's not that it's scripted. It's this that we want. Boy, game Night's life is so complicated, and I don't want to spend another hour of this episode talking about. I know, but we're going to call people up on stage. We're going to bring out the cube of consequence.

We're going, you know, so we want to generally have some plans in place or loose plans for, like, these type of cards would be ripe for this type of thing, you know? So we play games and we say, imagine the audiences out there. Let's play this game. Let's pretend to call people up on stage. We will have our staff sit out, you know, okay, let's get.

Bring them up here so we can have real people that we're moving around on a real stage, and then they're sitting down in the chair and saying, I attack, you know, this person. Like, we go through all of that and then we keep all that in our back pocket for wins. The performance actually happens, but when the performance actually happens, we've shuffled the decks. We don't know what cards are coming in what order, and we are just flying by the seater of our hands at that point. But we know a lot already.

Jimmy Wong
And we also have Jake and Jamie backstage, and we have a whole crew working backstage. And Jake will, sometimes he's in our ears and be like, hey, this is a great cube of consequence moment. Maybe you should do that then. And again, that's like when we turn from a film show that gets edited into, like you said, post production to pre production, we are now a live, two tape, theatrical, improvisational banger of a game, whatever it ends up being. Yeah.

Rachel Wheat
And a lot of that comes out of just practicing. Like, if we find a joke in a game while we're practicing, we're like, oh, if you have that card, if we can replicate this situation, that was a great situation that we can do on stage. And that makes the density of jokes a lot higher. That means the dead air is a lot is mitigated. And it means that if you draw a card, you know exactly what you're doing with it on top of like, so you're making gameplay decisions, but not necessarily making performance decisions in them.

Josh Lee Kwai
Yeah, you still do have to make some performances. That, too. A lot. But having even just a couple of things in your pocket because, like, oh, we played this card in practice and I know that I said this and that was funny. That makes your life so much easier.

I don't have to think about that part now. I can think about, like, what part am I gonna play in what order here, right? Still playing magic. Still playing magic, right? Yeah.

It is great to shout out Jake and Jamie just cause they are our safety net and will often be like, we haven't called anybody up on stage in a while. Can you do that? Can somebody do that? Or just like, yeah, this is a great moment for that. Or, you know, think about this.

Yeah. Yeah. Murph two. Having a judge on stage who is looking specifically for rules, mistakes. So again, we don't have those mistakes in the game affecting the outcome in some way.

Also, we have 1000 people in the audience screaming at you. Screaming. That helps. That helps Murph also, at one point, I remember, clarified a deal that was made which was so important, it's like, no, you said exactly this because that's the kind of thing you can't rewind. You're so caught up in the moment.

Jimmy Wong
Briefly, there is a difference between game nights and extra turns. People always ask this, but the main thing is that extra turns is where you're going to find games that are a little bit more wacky or that have budget games, Cedh stuff, more groupings that just are different entirely than what you would do on game nights. A lot of the rules around deck building and those restrictions aren't taking place. There's much less cutting to interviews. Cause there are none.

So extra turns, I think it's much more lax in general, but it also allows for a different side of commander to be explored, which is kind of why the show was made in the first place. Go ahead. Extra turns is less about building to balance and it's more about having decks and grouping them. So we have a lot of personal decks here at the office that belong to us or belong to other people or guests, and then just finding a way to showcase those in an entertaining way. And sometimes that's doing a budget game and sometimes that's doing like, all right, let's get all the stranger things decks in a pod or something like that.

Rachel Wheat
But also making sure that those games are going to be fun and relatively balanced. It's not as. It's not an exact science. Yeah, I think our appetite for risk is just higher and extra turns because the amount of resources that is demanded from the production is lower. So we can have games where a deck kind of overperforms the rest of the table and does the thing where it snowballs and ends up winning, and it's fine because that does happen in Commander games.

Josh Lee Kwai
And we like to represent what's true to commander, but we have less new players watching extra turns, so they understand more like that. Yeah, sometimes that happens. And also because the amount of resources expended to make that show is less we get. It's fine if we have kind of what we would say is more of a dud episode once in a while. And yeah, the episodes can be 30 minutes sometimes.

They're often closer to 45 or so, but still, yeah, we can just take more risks, which is nice because it gives us a home to play, stuff that would be tough to do on game nights. It's really tough to do a Cedh episode for game nights because if the one game we play is super duper fast. Then we're in a really weird position there where it's like, well maybe we play a second game. But what if that was super long, right? Also, if the guest, let's say the guest comes on, wins the first game, we play a second game cause it was so fast and they don't win that one.

And then we only release the second game and it's like what do we do to that person? Kind of. That doesn't seem very fair. But we don't really have a good way out of that. That it's just the variance on a CDH game is tough, but it's not as tough for extra turns.

Which is why we are going to do one. Or did that one already come out by the time we're watching this? Maybe, but it's why we can take those kind of risks where game nights wouldn't allow us to really? Yeah, yeah. Notably, the thing that they do have in common is that game Nights has a guest list potential that is like, you know, tens of pages long of people in the community that we could showcase.

Jimmy Wong
Extra turns is another way that we are able to showcase the magic community. We just had BZ and Mia on from nitpicking nerds. So that's just, again, another great way to showcase more people without having to have. Because again, game Nights is a big time production and when we had Kenji on, we could shoot multiple episodes with him. Right.

And game nights is. That's just not possible there. So more showcasing of the community is shared differently. Yeah, they serve different functions. Yeah.

Josh Lee Kwai
I'm glad we get to do both things, right? Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Before we go, we just wanted to talk about some stuff that maybe we're working on improving or like stuff that we're seeking for future game nights. Like we've made some recent changes in deck building where like we said, we're cutting out the more financially prohibitive cards and we're trying to use more cards from the featured sets for all the reasons that we've already talked about.

Rachel Wheat
But there's always improvements that can be made in deck building. I know. Something that we've talked about is varying the cards that we use as like engines. We tend to use sort of the best five board wipes. It's like if you're playing white, you're playing austere command.

If you're playing red, you're playing blasphemous act. Playing black, you talk jewelry or something. Farewell. Yeah, well, just. But I mean, just final showdown.

Making sure that like if there are three black decks at the table, there aren't three toxic tailors. Yeah. Or three black market connections or anything. Exactly. Yeah.

Josh Lee Kwai
We chanted full sent a few too many times, so we had to. We were like, we got to slow that down. Yeah. Less like we'll never notice. Yeah.

Jimmy Wong
We send it to the fullest, actual fullest. That's. Pump the bricks. We'll bring it back. Yeah.

Rachel Wheat
But, you know, it's just so we're getting a chance to show off as many cards as possible, and games don't feel stale. Like the dockside keeps coming up or something like that. Josh and I will also get decks or build decks that aren't necessarily in our favorite colors. I just played the miracle Voss deck. I might play a five color deck coming up.

Jimmy Wong
Who knows that variation, too, because, again, we've been on so many episodes, if we're always just playing the exact thing, that will also grow stale. Yeah. I think there was, like, three or four episodes in a row where I was like, rakdos, boros. Rakdos or boros. Yeah.

Josh Lee Kwai
Cause I was just like. I was like, I gotta break out of this mold of simic every time. Yeah, yeah. And we try and, like, make sure that you're still playing decks that feel like you. Even if they're not in the colors.

Rachel Wheat
Yeah. Like, Josh decks tend to be very engine based or, like. Yeah. I like to assemble some sort of weird puzzle. Yeah.

Instant speed type of stuff. Like, I thought the Golgari deck from Ixalan really felt like a Josh deck microbarran. Yeah. Cause it's a lot of, like, little pieces that you're like, okay, if I mill more, then I have more stuff. And I can reprocess.

Yeah. I just happened to draw that Golgari grapefruit. Like, oh, this is nuts. If you were to make. I know what I'm doing.

Josh Lee Kwai
That was play recklessly, by the way. Yeah, yeah, exactly. That was a good example of that. Wait, what do you mean? They can't block whatever.

I'm still doing it. Yeah. Yeah. So those are some stuff that we're trying, but if there's anything that, like, that you guys have ideas for. For game nights, let us know.

Yeah. We're always trying to grow, and we're. And we're listening. We're trying new stuff. Stuff.

Yeah. I'd say a lot of the changes we've made are direct response to comments that we've gotten, and we definitely read the comments, and it's more about, you know, not any one single one. But when we hear similar things expressed, you know, over a long period of time, it does make us go, like, okay, that might be something we should address here, like, yeah, yeah. What? You know, if a lot of people are saying a thing, they're probably right about it.

Rachel Wheat
Why do you guys always have turn one soldering? Yeah, I know why. That was a comment we started getting, and that made us think, like, kind of. Right. Okay, so what can we do to fix that?

Josh Lee Kwai
So, yeah, definitely let us know when you're noticing things or, you know, things that you think we could improve. Yeah. One thing you mentioned yesterday is just the game is getting more complex, and it's getting harder to represent on screen. So how do you build, play, edit in a way that makes the game actually less complex and easier to understand as the complexity of the game still goes up? Yeah.

We've had a lot of conversations recently with the editing team because it's been noticeable to us in recent years where the gravepack and dictator of Erebos used to be, like, these culprits that were rare, that we used to run in, that we could say, we're not playing those, and that would sort of keep that at bay. But that type of effect where a trigger cascades into another trigger and triggers on other things and interrupts the flow of the game and the narrative and the ability to sort of hold it on your head and really enjoy it. So, yeah, we might start experimenting with shortcutting a little bit more. Yeah. And not fully, you know, holding hands through every exact thing that happens in order to just kind of, like, we gotta get through this so that it doesn't become monotonous and, you know.

Rachel Wheat
Yeah. Finding the line of where that's acceptable and where it isn't, we don't always know where it is. We're gonna do our best, and then we'll have to adjust. So, yeah, help us adjust, help us calibrate, and that's just feedback. Yeah.

I think something that we can do in deck building, too, is just looking for cards that have needless abilities that don't really impact the deck and just eliminating those. So if there's one, like, if there's an initiative card, that it's there to untap something, but it, incidentally, introduced the initiative. Just don't play that card. Play a slightly worse card in its place, in its space, because it introduces a lot of magic gack. That's just difficult to see what actually matters when there's so much stuff.

Josh Lee Kwai
Yeah, I think that's a really good note for people to take to their deck building to help them enjoy playing the game more, because I think we're in an era where it's gonna be easy for the optimal build of your deck to actually not be as fun to play as a suboptimal version because of complexity. Creep. Yep. Wasn't it Garav that had a new year's resolution to, like, reduce the complexity of his decks? And I think that's him having a direct response to, like, I'm having less fun because my decks are so complicated to play that I'm not enjoying it.

And it's exact. I love that example of, like, one off card in your deck that has the initiative, because it's sort of the most optimal way to untap a thing, and it's like, so I'm introducing this really complicated mechanic for this one thing. Carrying a new token. There's 20 other cards that are, like, 95% as good, probably. Yeah, they're not quite as good technically, if the time traveling supercomputer came down and, like, weighed and measured everything, but, like, why don't I just play one of those other cards?

Because the only thing it can do is that. And it doesn't introduce this, like, crazy game mechanic. Yeah, yeah. And you'll even see it in limited. Now, limited is just a screen full of triggers so many times, and that just means if they're doing it at the common, uncommon level, everything is gonna creep into commander.

Jimmy Wong
So, yeah, simplifying your own game. Cause there's been times where I'm like, actually, I have five things happening right now, and I'm no longer having fun. Yeah, it was great. I'm just nervous about getting it all done. Now I'm doing mad.

Everyone's staring at me. I'm starting to sweat. Infinite tokens. Like, what am I doing? The number of times you said sorry during your turn is probably directly related to, like, how complex your deck is and probably how much you need to turn that dial down.

Josh Lee Kwai
Yeah, totally. Yeah. Cool. All right, well, that's it. That was every single secret behind the secrets.

You know them all. We've been laid bare. That's it. But to the listeners, what, did anything surprise you about what we talked about today? Was there anything that shocked you that made you go, holy moly, no way.

Jimmy Wong
Or you knew and you were excited to hear about, and you've incorporated in your own playgroups. Let us know in the comments. What can we work on? What out there is part of the game master? You go, you know what?

This has been something that I've been feeling. I'm gonna tell it to them right now. Unless it's about risk study, then just keep it to yourself. Yeah, or my land drops. Keep it to yourself.

I've heard it. It's like by the time you get to your thirties, every possible version of your nickname has been given to you. Right? Yeah, that's like me and Landrop. Comments.

I've seen them all. You can't surprise me anymore. All right, Jimbo. Oh, yeah. We didn't talk about many magic cards today, but you can tell that we love them, and we know you love them, too.

Rachel Wheat
You can pick them up over@cardkingdom.com command card Kingdom has a huge selection of magic cards. And we know you're picky because you're Commander players. If you want to get exactly the version that you're looking for in the condition that you're looking for to match all of the other cards in your deck, card Kingdom has an enormous selection, so you can always get the card that you're looking for, and you can get a lot of them in the same package. That way you're only tracing one envelope through the mail, and when it arrives, you know it's been packaged professionally. It's got a little token in there with one pecking peanut.

It's lovely. Yeah, they're professionals. Yeah, they do what they're doing. They handle it for sure. We trust card Kingdom with all of our card needs here.

And you can do so while supporting the show by going to cardkingdom.com command. And when you get there and you get those cards, make sure they're protected. Go to ultrapro.com command. They are the game accessories brand that Josh, myself, and Rachel trust our own collections to. Every single one of my binders is Ultra pro.

Jimmy Wong
And for a reason. Cause I can get every color that I want to theme to the colors of the cards that are in there. It's incredible. Ultra bro has so much more than that. They got deck boxes, play mats, sleeves, wall scrolls, you name it.

They might even have something you've never seen but are excited about, like that card sorting tray you mentioned. I love it. It's the most used utility in all my magic collection. So you can get it by going to ultrapro.com command. Support the show while doing so.

And also they might have some great flash deals. They often do that on the website ultrapro.com command for all of those accessories needs. All right, everybody, thanks for tuning in. Big thanks to our amazing team here at the command zone. Damon Lenz, Eric Lim, Megan Yip, Garav Gulotti, Jordan Pridgen, Jamie Block, Arthur Minecraft, Manson Lung, Josh Murphy, Jake boss, Sam Waldo, Evan Lindberger, Katie Cole, and Mitch Trafford.

And you five people still watching. Thank you. Bye bye. You're special. Peace.

Rachel Wheat
Thank you for your attention. For further inquiries, send an email to commandcastocketjump.com or ask us on Twitter and Joshle kwai. See you later, alligator. Greetings, human.

D
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Game Knights Isn't Scripted, BUT… | 605

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2: Production Insights

3: Guest and Gameplay Dynamics

4: Community and Feedback

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