The Spiral of Eternity is Long, But its Artifacts Are Good

If your LGS is anything like mine, it’s hard to overstate the effect that Spider-Man: The Set: The Ride has had on your Commander games. Whether it’s the creative designs, iconic characters, or the fantastic worldbuilding, this set has really gotten everyone’s creative juices flowing. Maybe you’ve enjoyed building around the avatar of a post-colonial superpower grappling with its identity… or perhaps, building around its colonizerKeep your 1/1 tokens away from this guy!?

Does your mind already brim with ideas for decks built around Spiders and Spider accessories? Are you curious about what life is like in the mythical plane of New York City? Or do you suspect that every new set strips away the magic of Magic, leaving only must-run staples and bland references in its wake? Thanks to the one-way nature of the written word, there’s no way to know!

Whether you’re thrilled for your trip into the SpiderVerse™, or worried everything you love is sinking into a terrible morass, there’s one card you just can’t miss:

Even in a set crammed to the gills with exciting, resonant Magic cards, this one is a standout. Imagine Peter Parker taking a picture of Solitude for an extra copy of the trigger. Or maybe Solitude is the one behind the Camera, taking pictures of Spider-Man, and using the… payment to get an extra copy of its own triggerMaybe Solitude is taking pictures of Spider-Man’s sweaty, stinky feet and selling them to planeswalking bloggers for a modest fee?…? There are so many ways to interpret this card’s flavor that it’s hard to choose only one! Enumerating them all sounds like work, and so does holistically examining this card. Let’s just list cards that kind of work the same way!

• Strionic Resonator—The Camera does look a little like this, with the advantage that it copies activated abilities and the disadvantage that it only works up to three times. But when you use Strionic Resonator, it is because it is copying something worth more than two mana: a creature’s ETB or combat trigger that you can’t get without copying the creature or taking an entire extra combat. The same goes for the Camera.
• Lithoform Engine— Or Battlemage’s Bracers, Adric, Mathematical Genius, etc. There are several of these effects that copy activated abilities and all of them cost five thousand mana. I will never put any of them in a deck for reasons I have pontificated on at great lengthThe TL;DR is ‘I actually want to be able to use my cards,’ but if you’re looking for TL;DRs this might not be the right website for you!. But if you can somehow keep them going in the long term, you can copy everything and want for nothing.
• Serrated Arrows— Like Serrated Arrows, the Camera only has three counters on it. But Serrated Arrows was in a World Championship Deck, so isn’t that goodActually, Serrated Arrows was in a championship deck because the rules at the time required having cards from each set in your deck. Serrated Arrows was from Homelands, and the choices from Homelands were, presumably, worse. This is a land I have opened from a Homelands booster pack:? Could accepting such a drawback into our hearts give us the power to win games? Could it give us the courage to talk to that cute girl who calls to us from the space between moments? Could we sink into that place of quiet peace and never emerge?

Perhaps we need a more nuanced approach than shallowly comparing the Camera to its closest relatives. The wretched yoke of subtlety weighs us down again.

It Only Has Three Counters

The Camera comes at a steep discount to its ancestors, and a steep discount is all I want in this worldpresumably due to chronic exposure to goedkoop radiation in the Dutch groundwater. But I can hear your cries of terror: “I can only activate this three times? How can this card be good! Three is so much less than infinity!” But I invite you to get a grip, because I have to ask you: When was the last time you used Strionic Resonator four times in a game? The core of the card’s power is that it comes from paying two mana to do something that normally costs much more: sending someone’s Commander on a fun farming adventure, making your commander’s ward ‘pay eighteen life’, or acting on your crazy aunt’s theories about nonbasic lands being full of 5G towers. Resonator goes in decks because the value of activating it so greatly surpasses the cost of doing so.

But how greatly? The cost is an initial investment (one card, two mana) and additional payments (two mana). We amortize the initial payment over the activations, as well: activating Resonator once means you paid four mana and a card to copy a trigger. Activating it twice means you paid six mana and a card to copy two. To reason about it in the abstract involves a little work:

• Copying one thing with Strionic Resonator costs four mana and one card.
• I don’t really want to do this. Four mana is a lot; I could have just cast something better than whatever trigger I wanted to copy.
• Copying two things with Strionic Resonator is pretty okay. I would pay half a card and two mana to copy a trigger.
• But I only get to copy the second thing with Strionic Resonator next turn. The world might be unrecognizable by then: it could be the tomb of a once-great dream, or birds might be slightly larger. I might not have the thing I wanted to copy available to me anymore.
• This means the ability to copy in the future is less valuable than the ability to copy now.
• This means I need to care more about how much I am getting immediately, because more of the total value of the card is immediate.

The naïve estimation would tell you that this difference in value is not huge, because the naïve estimätor has not played against a Gates tribal deck with fifteen board wipes. Things tend to happen that derail our plans… and by “Things”, I mean POOL PARTIES IN THE FONT OF MADNESS. More than one game in my life has gone like this:

• I play Strionic Resonator, aiming to copy my reasonably balanced trigger.
• The player sitting directly to my left looks at my board state, thinksOr more precisely: does something that appears to be thinking, but most certainly is not., then casts Heartbeat of Spring and passes turn.
• The player sitting to their left proceeds to cast every single dinosaur in their deck, then Naturalizes Heartbeat.
• We spend the next four turns enacting a version of Jurassic Park where the dinosaurs have a trust fund.
• The player sitting directly to my left is then allowed to drive home in their car without a helmet.

No amount of extra triggers would have won this game; it was decided, as many games of Magic are, by an exotic brain parasite native to the Central American tropicsor by being somewhat inexperienced at a fun card game.. But my parasite wants value now: it knows that one less mana now is often the chance to squeeze out a little more value this turn. It knows one mana is approximately four mana less than two mana. You can find one mana in an old winter jacket; for two mana, you must sheepishly talk to your parents. “Shouldn’t you be investing that two mana in your Clue Token?” they will ask you. “Shouldn’t you be holding up interaction?” Then you will go to some kind of… reverse vending machine to find your Camera, and your parents will finally love youIt is possible, though unlikely, that parental love hinges on something other than efficient mana use..

You can accept this argument or not accept it; you can swap Camera for Resonator and win games where you’re able to squeeze out one more trigger or start your hike up Value Mountain one turn earlier. But the infomercial is only halfway over! In addition to our triggers, we also get to copy our activated abilities. And being able to copy your activated abilities is goodsource:

• Fetchlands— One drawback of Myriad Landscape is that it sucks. The colorlessness of it is frequently awkward, and the tap-fulness of the incoming lands makes it clunky. But what if all your fetchlands were also better versions of Myriad Landscape? They come in untapped, meaning it is easier to weave in other instant-speed interaction, or to find surveil lands, or crack one more Food token. Even the Terramorphic Expanses of the world feel a lot more palatable with this extra flexibility.
• Protection— The time when you are about to protect your commander forever is, somehow, the exact moment your opponents send it back to the command zone for zero mana. Without an efficiently-costed furry, you were unable to get around this… until nowBut thankfully, you were always able to complain.. Simply respond to the interaction by copying the trigger, tying your shoes at instant speed. Or just threaten to do this, because your opponents probably won’t walk into your on-board interaction. But the threat of doing so will keep them from doing it in the first place, which means you get to keep your mana and counters for later. Everybody wins, except for your opponents, who did not want your commander to shoot them in the face. Every creature that taps to ruin your opponent’s day gains the ability to battle on the stackThere is also obvious and brutal synergy with ward abilities; everyone’s favorite bear chilling with ward 4 whenever you have the mana often threatens wipe-or-die very fast., for free.
• Crazy Nonsense— Many valuable effects are balanced around tapping your permanents, or removing some counters, or other costs that you can’t pay more than once a turn. This is often the limiting factor of your engine, which is a sterile way to say “this is often the only thing stopping you from going insane.”. Activate Emry twice a turn; tap Krenko, Mob Boss twice for double the trouble. This often looks like a two-mana Time Walk and plays about as fairly.

You don’t need to do anything special to discover this new power. The Camera is about a dollar now and requires no real investment to go in any deckFull disclosure: I bought every copy of this card I could find on Cardmarket and I am planning to develop this equity into an AI-based blockchain that is also a barcade.. To me, this is awesome: it means even cheap decks get to do their thing better. But this makes it a Staple which means our time together is not over. We must examine its greater relevance in the canon: we must decide how this ubiquity weighs on our immortal soul.

But What of the Dreams?

A one-mana artifact that goes in every deck is not an entirely new experience. I played two games last night where a player exhausted their Camera charges, and both games led to victory for its controller. I am told this will usher in a dull, lonely future where the same 99 cards are in the body of every deck, and where Toyota Presents: Flamin’ Hot Ragavan from Modern Horizons 6 will put an end to the Minotaur tribal decks that we all richly expect and deserve. Can the exquisite texture of Commander survive the number of staples ratcheting up indefinitely?

I am old enough to remember when these fears began, which was four to five minutes after Commander-specific product was announced. This was the beginning of the end of days: Commander’s delicate balance and flavor hung off its proponents having access to only one Temur commanderThere were six legal wedge commanders before Commander cards came out.. Adding cards that were designed, or worse yet, playtested for the format that they would be used in would ruin it all. That was fifteen years ago, and those terrors did not quite come to pass.

If this sounds dismissive of the preDH format, that’s because it is dismissive of the preDH format. I was there as Commander exploded, which means I was there as the rapid growth of the format outgrew the community mores that kept its worse impulses in check. In the time of the ancients, commanders that were shuffled into your library stayed in your library, which meant that any deck that relied too heavily on its commander was one Hinder away from being all buns and no hamburger. The functionality of old legend rules also meant every clone effect doubled as inexorable removal: no amount of shroud or protection would stop your guy from dying to the humble Phantasmal Image. This same card could also be used to copy the six-mana haymakers that everyone wanted to play in the first placeI think that if you want to understand how Commander was, you should also have to play with these rules, but that would make the format worse..

But while the world has changed, I have changed too. My preDH contribution does not resemble the Rafiq deck I built back when preDH was just EDH. Part of that is obviously the rules change. But my understanding of what is importantcards this turn and what is not importantcards next turn has also shifted immensely in the intervening years, and my designs reflect that.

I started from the same humble beginnings that most new Commander players do: I just wanted to make a sweet deck that showed how smart I was and also won every game. I fit in all three of Magic’s main phrenological categories because every aspect of everything ignited my interest. My plan was simple enough: I would just remove all my opponents’ permanents, untap all of my lands, and attack my opponents for one thousand commander damage. I filled my deck with haymakers, because I wanted to Do The Thing and those cards were the Thing.

I noticed the same thing most players eventually notice: not all rivers lead to the sea of fun. I cast Sovereign into countermagic and ended up doing nothing for a whole turn cycle; I tried to equip my Sword and my opponents would kill my commander before I made them discard all of their cards. The physics of Commander began to assert themselves, and so I stopped running five-mana spells into two open blue mana for the same reason a child stops trying to catch spaghetti in their open mouth‘Because the haters don’t want you to win.’.

My decks have fewer cards that look fun, but I get to have more fun. I have cast enough five-mana commanders into a board wipe that five-mana commanders no longer have rules text to me. My lists are packed full of sick little freaks that can draw me a card every turn for two mana. A single land every turn for one mana is as far as I usually dip my toes into ramp. My deck’s plan turns on small wheels, but its advantage is that those wheels are always, always spinning. My decks are built to function in the face of opposition, so fewer of my games end with “and then I couldn’t cast any of my spells and died.”

This does not always mean more exciting gameplay. Some unfair cards have been printed between 2011 and 2026 and the game is probably worse for it. While the free interaction I use everywhere is not as powerful as, say, a six-mana board wipe, cards that do Big Things for Small Mana have a tendency to be everywhere and cost a lot of moneyMake sure before you play Magic that your opponents who cannot afford Deflecting Swat are not allowed to play Deflecting Swat. The integrity of the game depends on it.. They also have a tendency to crowd strategies out, since the world where all your opponents have Deflecting Swat is a world where Enchantress is a lot less viable. These are the staples I think everyone is mad about: this group of cards that goes in every deck of its colors lets us make fewer choices individual to us.

The problem with this definition of staple is that it is not as concrete as you might think. Despite an article about how good Skullclamp is, I expect to be defending its merits when I hear the trumpets of ArmageddonThe one people warn you about on the radio before asking for money.. Many of the cards I run everywhere may well be ones you are reading for the first time. There might be fifteen cards I always use and fifteen you always use, but those aren’t the same cards, even if they overlap. We are bringing the same tools to bear on each of our decks, but that is the consequence of trying those tools out and discovering they solve the problems our playgroup presents for us.

I don’t think this means we can outrun homogeneity forever. You can only print so many Esper Sentinels before the format is all Esper Sentinels. The bracket system is an admirable attempt to improve this situation, even if I think it has some deep flawsWhich I hope to address in a future article, to put it mildly.. But if we are building Commander decks to use our commanders, I think they will continue to stay freshOn the other hand, if you were, say, trying to play Commander for money and had no choice but to play the most artless and powerful strategies, maybe things would start to look a little bit grim. But nobody would do that.. In the last two weeks, I’ve seen the Camera copy fetchlands, equipment activations, Mother of Runes, Kambal triggers, Level Up, ward, Noble Heritage, the Initiative, and Skullclamp. It’s a very good card that gets to be good in a lot of different ways, which is exciting to me.

Samsara Awaits

So, I am pleased with the effect of Peter Parker’s Camera. But am I pleased with the Peter Parker of Peter Parker’s Camera? Might something be lost by feeding every semi-popular intellectual property of the last fifty years into a blender? You might have detected a patina of dislike for Spider-Man: The Ride: The Game. I thought at first it was simply because I had little familiarity with the source material; on deeper meditation, I think the answer is that this set is less a coherent narrative and more a vessel for References.

The basic problem is that Spider-Man is not a story; Spider-Man is a coat rack for whatever needs to be hung on his familiar shoulders. He is doomed by design to stumble through Samsara, sick from his own riches. Play Spider-Man. Or play Spider-Woman. What if Spider-Man was a clone? What if Spider-Man was a punk? Do we fondly recall the drama of his love interest’s death, or does its cheapness sit in the pit of our stomach? No need to think too much: she’s also an aggressively-costed threat. Individually, these are years-long efforts to shock the dying heart of the franchise back to life. Crammed into the same set, they are shambolic references to past incarnations of characters I don’t know or care to know. They are DMT flooding the brain of the Spider-Man business as it searches for another way to avoid its own demise.

The endless cycle of life and death has flattened the lore into something unrecognizable. Spider-Man takes place in the sixties, and Spider-Man’s Camera reflects this delightful analogue technology. Except it also takes place in 2099 with a corresponding array of robot-driving friends. Spider-Man is an orphan with very supportive parents. Peter must manufacture his own glue gun to fight a vampire. Is Venom fighting Anti-Venom? Are the dinosaur Spider-Man and the set’s one other dinosaur from the same comics? Somehow, vexingly, the answer is no.

Mashing all these patches, riffs, and mutations together did not work. They are all just kind of… there, like the enchantments in a twelve-year-old’s favorite Commander deck. But even if the set’s designers had managed to thread the ludonarrative needle, Spider-Man and I would still have beef. Even a perfectly designed love letter to Spider-Man would wither before one contemptuous clarion: Why? Why do we need a Spider-Man set? Why was an all-star team of writers and animators hired to compose a feature-length Fandom wiki? Why does our society accommodate and celebrate these rehashes? Why do all of us seem to want them so badly?

These questions deeply permeate human experience. Every time I go back to the homelandAmerica. Not the Magic Expansion., I am astounded by the lateral movement of the Flamin’ Hot gene through the chips aisleBehold, manmade horrors beyond your comprehension:. There are now more flavors of Baja Blast than there are stars in the observable universe, which is maddening for something that was itself a spinoff of Mountain Dew. Cheez-Its are in pizza, and pizza is also in Cheez-Its. Culture has retreated into the narcotic of the familiar because the narcotic of the familiar is very, very marketable.

I do know Parker and Miles Morales are different Spider-Mans. I enjoyed the lovingly animated Spider-Verse movies, and so I dimly understand that they are both Spider-Man. They are visiting the same waystones, but in different eras: they are rebooting the story of Spider-Man. The grammar of this is appalling to me, as if ‘rebooting’ a story is something you do from time to time when it becomes slow or disobedient. You update the parts that feel tired, or insensitive, and it’s like those parts never existed at all. The story can still be new to the reader, but it can never challenge them too much. Straying too far from their sensibilities means death.

Asking if Magic: The Gathering can survive the powerful Fortnite rays emitted from Hasbro headquarters feels silly. A better question is: What sort of society comes out of Narcissus painting a photograph of his reflection? If our best writers and artists are forever in service of telling someone else’s story, what emerges? I think I ultimately cannot be worried about the homogenization of my fancy little game pieces because it is simply unnoticed in the heat of the vile stars that irradiate all online experience.

And so I free you from the burden of wondering if Spider-Man is good for Commander. This isn’t because it doesn’t matter; it’s because it matters too much. In some sense, there is little we can do other than hold hands as the tides of history drag us out to sea. In another, more important sense, you are responsible for growing into a human being with a rich inner world. This means trying a new game even if it isn’t fun; it means reading a new book and discovering it doesn’t have anything new to say. Sometimes we keep the good scraps of the stories we’ve outgrown. Other times we save them for the rainy days when everything feels impossible.

So if you came into Magic from Spider-Man, I welcome you. I am not here to force you to stop enjoying the things you enjoy. There is only one thing I am here to tell you: I am 100% going to counter your seven-mana commander. I’m not reading it.

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