Look how they massacred my boy, Archenemy

I love goofy Magic: The Gathering formats. There is a particular joy in reappropriating all that costly and competitive cardboard in service of a deeply unserious style of play. This once included Commander’s 100-card singleton arrangement, tasking players to rummage through cards that had rotated out of the competitive Standard format in order to cobble together a Frankenstein deck helmed by a legendary creature. Commander-nee-Elder Dragon Highlander’s design space has calcified somewhat in recent years thanks to Wizards of the Coast’s official “support” of the community-created mode.

Player-created cubes, composed of cards curated around a theme (e.g. a certain set, power level, or even cards modified by permanent marker), provide a replayable draft experience suited to each playgroup’s whims. The best version of this, The Magpie Cube, sees players cutting and gluing parts of cards together in a living cube that changes with each game—absolute chaff can accrete enough power and notoriety to be eventually “retired” via votes to the Hall of Fame. Even smallish game modes with official product support, such as Planechase, have their charm and can cleanse the palette of 2-hour long Commander slugfests.

But my personal favorite was always Archenemy. This 3-on-1 variant was originally designed to course correct what designers Mark Rosewater and Aaron Forsythe characterized as “head design”,  which emphasizes mechanical satisfaction and balance over the rule of cool’s “heart design”. Archenemy was advertised as quintessentially heart design: give one player, the titular Archenemy, a separate deck of Scheme cards that could orbital blast one player’s entire board or steal another player’s army of creatures and unleash them upon their allies. It was swingy and unbalanced on purpose. It wanted to create a situation where one person felt like an all-powerful villain, while the rest were hanging on by the skin of their teeth.