Elder Dragon Highlander
Of all the twisted, misbegotten aspects of modern Magic: The Gathering, perhaps the worst is the widespread use of illegal decks in “EDH.” To explain this problem in full we will begin with a brief explanation of dragons and their meaning.
Having spent a misbegotten youth playing the game I remember my first encounter with a dragon well. It was on the box of a fourth edition starter pack — Shivan Dragon. As has become increasingly uncommon the art and the flavor text were perfectly aligned:
“While it’s true most Dragons are cruel, the Shivan Dragon seems to take particular glee in the misery of others, often tormenting its victims much like a cat plays with a mouse before delivering the final blow.”
Shivan Dragon, in the art, is not eating you. It’s not breathing fire at you. it’s using one of its least effective weapons — the claws on its exposed underside — to bat you around the bleak cliffs of Shiv. Much like a cat plays with a mouse before delivering the final blow.
In most games dragons are enemies. Dungeons and Dragons, for example, is predominantly the story of heroic humanoids vanquishing Dragons (after finding the requisite equipment in Dungeons) to satisfy their materialistic impulses. In Magic? The Dragon could be on your side, taking a particular glee in the misery of others.
It is love of these creatures that spawned Elder Dragon Highlander, or “EDH” — an acronym people use to obscure their heresy as if a pile of modern-bordered garbage with Narset, Enlightened Master on top is worthy. Call it Commander — the safe, modern usage — or comprehend the meaning of a format and its rich history.
Elder Dragon Highlander. It’s two parts: highlander, because there can be only one, and Elder Dragon because the biggest and baddest card in your deck looks like this:
What we see when look back upon history is not often pretty. Death and dismay crushed the skulls mixed into the concrete on which you stand. I would ask that you honor your heritage when you invoke ancient terms, because an Elder Dragon Highlander deck damn well better have an Elder Dragon on top of it. Or else you’re just that simpering weakling in the GE commercial that cannot lift his family hammer even as he speaks its name.
The future marches on, and as far as I’m concerned the youth are entitled to it. They can forget and ignore the past, as the past was a brutal era when vicious titans wandered the playground with their sleeveless Leviathans. Every game was for ante when a sixth grade fistfight meant the loss of not one card but your entire deck, partially baptized in noseblood. As for the Elders, well:
Elder Dragon Highlander is not my creation — and in fact it is an institution that has decided to live and grow with the times under the banner of “Commander.” Sharuum decks can kill you on turn one; Narset decks can resolve her and swing until the entire table is dead. Wizards, recognizing a commercial opportunity, will sell you pre-made Commander decks full of pleasure-center targeting reprints to whet your considerable appetite for destruction. I see the work of my children and it is good.
I, on the other hand, have no forgotten the old ways. 93 / 94 is my favorite format, the only non-limited format where Shivan Dragon is a legitimate threat instead of some comical relic. But even 93 / 94 is not quite the magic I remember: the magic of incomplete playground decks stuffed with one-of Craw Wurms and two-of Scryb Sprites because that was all I could afford.
When Richard Garfield started magic he assumed the best and most powerful cards would be the sort of relics we now unearth with considerable greed in our eyes. “A Mox? I’ve never seen that before!” He imagined we would say, with wide eyes. Decks were to be cobbled together from spare parts — we were to work with our hands on hot rods with imperfect curves hammered by human might.
I was working on my 93 / 94 deck — replete with power nine, festooned with four-ofs in every meaningful category — when I realized I may be solving the wrong problem. This arrived in the mail:
Esper cards, from Legends. Then it hit me: maybe this is where history really ended. June 1994: the last set that would feature Magic’s creators looking inward. The majority of the characters were not works of spreadsheets and “Research & Development” but instead simply their personal Dungeons and Dragons characters adapted to Magic’s templates.
The game has changed; time marches on. Success bred success but it also bred a kind of commercialization — the broadening and deepening of Magic’s appeal. But the river of the game did not simply reveal depths of its own accord: it was dredged by the forces of greed and ambition. Complexity was created and engineered where once we accepted the limits of nature in simple cardboard boats whose hulls never dreamed of scraping the bottom.
The Alpha rulebook said you should resolve discrepancies with your friends. I am attempting to right a wrong with them; those that remember.
I have an EDH deck. None of the cards are “good” in the sense that they can compete with modern magic. I put Chromium in the “command zone” — a place that never needed a name before — and consider reanimating Juzam Djinn to be an aggressive play. A 4/5 with a drawback? Just another laughable relic, they say, as they hide behind Ghostly Prisons in their quest to “have fun.”
Why do I do it? The looks. Most of the expressions at the tables where I sit down with this…thing…are smirks. Someone rolls their eyes, sometimes, or makes a comment about bad cards. People ask to read the cards and toss them aside without a care for their fragility or age, for they have no need of the past.
Ah, but there is one expression I live for. Sometimes — not often — there is awe. Cyclopean Tomb to fix my mana, or hose that of others? Devious. Skull of Orm to re-buy Oubliette? Imprisoning. Eater of the Dead to invalidate competing reanimation strategies? What does that card DO, again?!
Shades of what were to come, perhaps, but shades that beckon.
