New Year's Resolutions

Happy New Year! I've got a lot to look forward to in 2022, both in Magic and in life. I hope you do as well. While I'm not normally one to make New Year's Resolutions, I do have three Magic-related goals I'd like to share with you that I'll be working on for 2022. These goals are a reflection of where I'm at as a player, the current state of Magic, and the state of the world.

Goal One: Play More Commander

The printing of Garth One-Eye in Modern Horizons 2 last year inspired me to do something I hadn't done in nearly a decade: build a new Commander deck. The few games I played with Garth were enjoyable, but most of the time he died before I could activate him. For whatever reason, the threat of his activation was such that most players would kill him on sight, and fixing my mana to make WUBRG every game was quite tedious. I was lucky enough to open this card in a prize pack though, to get the gears in my brain turning:

Prior to Garth, my Commander of choice for nearly ten years was Nin, the Pain Artist. The deck was mostly a value engine/politicking deck, that could occasionally combo kill if it could make infinite mana, and opponents had creatures on board to target. I built it for our Local Game Store's (LGS) Commander league and left it together, mostly unchanged over the years.

Building Eloise, Nephalia Sleuth I'm going for a similar value engine deck as my old Nin deck, minus the politicking aspect, or the combo kill potential. I just want something that's fun to play, has the potential to win, but won't necessarily have a target on its back from the moment it's revealed.

Commander is a huge part of our LGS community. Not everyone I know plays Modern or Legacy, but every player I know, even more Limited-focused ones like myself, have at least one Commander deck ready to go. I'll have this at the ready in my bag for whenever folks want to get a game going.

While I'm interested in playing Commander for fun, it's also important to me to start playing Commander again regularly as a content creator. Commander is now the most popular Magic format of all. I want to embrace that by immersing myself in the format. Who knows, maybe I'll write about my Eloise deck in a future article?

Goal Two: Organize My Collection

The massive endeavor of organizing my Magic collection has been on my To-Do list for over a year now. With tens of thousands of cards, spread across two rooms of my house, it's not an easy task. There's also the question of how I should sort it. By color? By format? What about by expansion set? There's also the question of how I want to store my collection once it's sorted. For years I've kept the bulk of my collection in 5,000 count cardboard storage boxes. They're not particularly attractive, nor are they utilitarian.

A related concern to organizing the collection is storing all of my decks, and my cubes. My Un-Cube is stored in a Gamegenic Dungeon, but I'd need something at least twice the size to accommodate my Invasion Block Cube. It's currently stored in multiple separate 1,000 count cardboard boxes. In addition, I have about a dozen deckboxes with complete or partially complete decks in them for various formats.

I've seen collectors use converted library card catalogs to store trading card collections. Ultimately when the collection is organized I'd like some sort of classy furniture piece in which to store it.

Goal Three: Play More Magic Over Spelltable/Webstream

With the infection rate spiking all over the world, I'm staying home from playing in-person Magic for the foreseeable future. While I applaud the safety precautions taken by my LGS and other venues, I just don't want to risk getting myself or my family sick. Playing Magic: Arena sustained me through the shutdown of 2020 when there was no chance for in-person Magic. for 2022, I'll still be playing Arena regularly to get my Limited fix, but I also want to be more social, even if it's from the comfort of home. To that end, I want to get into playing paper Magic via webstream.

I have one decent camera, and a microphone which I use for videoconferencing. It shouldn't be too hard to get my office area set up so that I can stream my end of a Commander game. The bigger issue will be cleaning my desk so the mess doesn't enter the battlefield.

Goals and Resolutions

There are plenty more Magic-related goals I could come up with for the year. These are the three that loom largest in my mind on a personal level. What is your New Year's Resolution this year? What are your Magic-related goals for 2022? Let me know your suggestions for accomplishing my Magic goals in the comments or on Twitter.