Old school chaos

When I come up north to visit my family I usually end up at a game night at my brother's place.  This week was no exception, and last night we ended up playing a five player game of Magic.  I haven't played Magic much in the past 15 years at least, so I had to shake off the rust.

I remember playing in high school, where some of our games were the standard 1v1 game, but many were just silly group games.  The most extreme of these was a 100 person tournament where we all played a game with custom rules simultaneously.  After half an hour or so the tournament director announced that somebody had won by taking infinite turns, so we gave them the grand prize, kicked them out of the tournament, and kept playing.  I ended up getting beat out of the tournament on the back of an incorrect GM call after outlasting about 60 players.

This five player game reminded me of those old times.  One player declared that he didn't know the game well, so he was just going to draft to try to screw with other people.  Partway through the first game I had a 8/10 creature in play that made a fresh 2/2 every turn and blew up a permanent of my choice every turn.  Nobody else had anything in play but land.  This is obviously fantastic, but in a five player game somebody is going to have an answer.... except that the random guy played Armageddon, destroying all the lands in the game.  I quickly killed the random guy and one other person and was declared the victor.

Random guy seemed extremely pleased, because his plan of screwing with people had come to fruition.  I felt unfulfilled with my victory.

I guess this is what I should have expected.  Group games where you can directly go after people always devolve into dogpiling or kingmaking, that is just the nature of the thing.  Nothing I can do about that.

While I enjoyed the game night overall, this certainly reminds me why I have shifted away from playing group Magic when we have a bunch of people together.  These days I like my games to reward skill a lot more than luck and political posturing.  You can make a good political game (Diplomacy says hi) but Magic isn't it.