Build Decks for the Moment, Not the Win

Magic: The Gathering · by Higbie · June 19, 2026

"In a game of Magic, there is a finite amount [of Magic] to be played. It is my goal to play all of it."
—Anonymous {Pox} player

I heard this at a Tales of Adventure (ToA) Legacy event circa-2014. It landed in the back of my nerd brain and never moved. In fact, it has become my guiding philosophy. It kicked around for years, seeping into various hobbies.

On the surface (and especially from the mouth of a {Pox} player), the quote sounds a bit tongue-in-cheek. Past the chuckle we all got that day, though, I think it began a fundamental shift in my philosophy: what am I truly trying to get out of Magic: The Gathering? Out of life? Out of anything?

{Lifelace} by Amy Weber

I realized over time, through inward reflection, and, oh yeah, that fucking pandemic giving me a year and a half to stare at my cardboard, that winning or losing an individual game of Magic was not meaningful to me. I had much more fun figuring out a curious strategy than actually executing it in practice.

Commander pods were fun for a bit, but I realized that each player was solely out to do their own thing. There's very little board interaction, and after I passed my turn, I'd often go back to watching whatever I was watching while I waited for someone playing a brew full of cards they'd never read before to try to execute a combo they'd already discarded in a previous turn by accident.

Fifteen minutes later, it's my turn, the rest of the board state is unrecognizable, and one of my opponents is dead on turn three. There were too many cards to keep track of, and the impersonal nature of web camera games was exhausting and boring.

{Exhaustion} by DiTerlizzi

I had basically given up on Magic after {The One Ring}'s release. Legacy was a complete disaster and was only getting worse. Then my good buddies from Eternal Durdles force-fed me a nectar from the gods in the form of 'casting turn one {Ankh of Mishra} off an {Ancient Tomb}' in a format where that isn't a total joke play. Premodern had grabbed me with both hands and shook me violently back into Magic, but from a completely different angle.

One of my biggest complaints with modern Magic, and I'm sure I'm not alone here, is not just the power creep of cards and the invasion of unrelated intellectual properties (IPs). It is the volume and the speed with which these new cards arrive. When WotC's guiding philosophy is to produce so much product that no one person can actually know everything about a format, they lose me as a customer and a fan.

{The Ultimate Nightmare of Wizards of the Coast® Customer Service} by Melissa A. Benson

Premodern solves this problem by eliminating the Wizards of the Coast (WotC) mothership from the circle of play. The format is completely agnostic about what WotC wants to do with whatever they call Magic these days.

As a closed format, even if WotC could find a way to cash in, it would make Premodern more accessible by introducing a new supply of relevant products. It might even be the final nail in the Reserved List coffin one day, though that's an article for a different, angrier time.

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To the outside observer, the closed nature of Premodern might seem likely to stagnate it. With no new cards, how can the format rotate and/or change? How can there be new strategies? Won't it get solved immediately once the internet finds out? I've often heard Premodern described as "the greatest board game ever made."

{Game of Chaos} by Drew Tucker

To paraphrase the fine hosts of Piloting Premodern:

"They haven't made a new chess piece in 500 years, and there's still innovation."

Premodern Magic is chess with 5,300 distinct pieces. There's plenty of room to explore, especially when your goal is not to spike a tournament, but instead be to that person whose deck everyone talked about.

No one cares that you went 2-5; they care that you used a {Lodestone Bauble} as a win condition. Or that you only won two games out of 19, but in those two games, you took infinite turns and left your opponents with no library or board.

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Once your philosophy shifts from "how do I win with these cards" to "how can I have the most fun with these cards", your brewing style shifts, too. This is not to say you should build decks that are bad or ineffective. I build decks that do something specific, regardless of what my opponent is trying to do. If I lose, oh well. If I win, it's a spectacle every time.

{Urza's Science Fair Project} by Claymore J. Flapdoodle

Winning is overrated. Just come up with an idea and chase it. Build sweet brews without win conditions — your opponent conceding out of boredom/frustration is ALWAYS a win condition.

Explore a theme that doesn't seem viable — I'm still looking at you, mill decks — until you find the logical conclusion. Most of the time that conclusion will be "this deck might be unplayable, but it's also insane once every 20 times."

Build Decks for the Moment, Not the Win

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