Magic the Gathering

Casual

Primer for Elder Dragon Highlander

By Ben Mcdole ⋅ September 28, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment ⋅

I’ve been tapped by Trick to write a primer on Elder Dragon High­lander (EDH) and I’m pretty excited. I’ll delve into the game play aspects another time, but first I want to quickly skim over the rules and phi­los­o­phy of this great format.

While there are a set of rules that have been set forth for league play I’m going to cover the more casual aspects for right now and leave the league to a dif­fer­ent day.

Deck Con­struc­tion:

Your deck for EDH needs to be 100 unique cards (except basic lands) exactly… sort of. In order to con­struct your deck you first need to choose a General.

Your Gen­eral must be a leg­endary crea­ture and the mana sym­bols in their mana cost will gov­ern how you build your deck, but more on that in a sec­ond. Though most leg­endary crea­tures are per­fectly fine for selec­tion there are a few no-nos.

Mem­narch and Bosh, Iron Golem both vio­late some of the rules for deck con­struc­tion and as such are unfor­tu­nately not allowed. The rea­son Mem­narch and Bosh are ille­gal is because the mana sym­bols in your general’s mana cost are the only mana sym­bols which can be played any­where in your deck. Both Mem­narch and Bosh have no col­ored mana sym­bols in their costs but they do have col­ored mana sym­bols in their textboxes they break their own rules. You should also prob­a­bly avoid Braids, Cabal Min­ion for the social aspect alone.

It’s also worth not­ing that, no mat­ter how much we want them to be, Planeswalk­ers are not crea­tures, nor even are they leg­endary (though their rules mimic the Leg­endary rule in some ways) and as such are not allowed as Generals.

There are a few more points to take into con­sid­er­a­tion. Hybrid mana sym­bols need to both appear in your general’s mana cost. So if I’m using Eladamri, Lord of Leaves as a Gen­eral I can’t have Selesnya Guild­mage com­ing to hang out. Also, the Onslaught cycle of “fetch lands” and lands sim­i­lar in nature don’t have a mana sym­bol, they name the cards search­able. So it’s per­fectly accept­able to run Blood­stained Mire in your Maga, Trai­tor to Mor­tals deck (in case you want mul­ti­ple ways to find that Leechrid­den Swamp!). As far as deck con­struc­tion goes that’s it!

Well, almost. You want to try to keep your card selec­tion to things that are legal in vin­tage though there is an excep­tion, Shahrazad is per­fectly legal, though no less frustrating.

Start­ing the Game

Now that we can build our EDH deck let’s talk about a few of the nuts and bolts aspects of actu­ally shuf­fling up. The first thing you need to do when you sit down is announce your Gen­eral and pull them out of your deck into the ‘com­mand zone.’

The com­mand zone is a sep­a­rate zone where your gen­eral likes to lounge when­ever he’s not in play. One ver­sion of this I’ve found to be very help­ful is to put the four (or more) gen­er­als in the cen­ter of the table in a cor­ner to cor­ner fash­ion, sort of like you’re sum­mon­ing Cap­tain Planet in card form.

Each player then draws their open­ing hand and gets to take any mul­li­gans. Mul­li­gan is a four let­ter word in tour­na­ment magic, but in EDH it’s really not so bad. EDH’s offi­cial mul­li­gan is the “par­tial paris” mul­li­gan. Each player may exile any num­ber of cards from their hand face down and then draw one fewer than they exiled. This sim­u­lates a mul­li­gan with­out the ran­dom­ness of poten­tially los­ing all your lands.

The exiled cards are then shuf­fled back into the library. There is also another form of mul­li­gan used in my local play­group, the “Gis” mul­li­gan, named after for­mer L5 super-judge Gijs­bert Hoogendijk. The Gis mul­li­gan requires each player to exile their hand face down and then draw a new hand of seven. Each player may repeat this as many times as nec­es­sary and then the exiled cards are shuf­fled back in. To pre­vent ram­pant abuse our group has a gentleman’s rule where if you have 3 or more lands in your hand you can­not Gis mulligan.

Game Play

Fan­tas­tic! Now it’s game time, and I can prac­ti­cally hear Mills Lane growl “Let’s get it on!” But unfor­tu­nately we have a few more things to learn first.

Gen­er­als can kill play­ers all on their own, just by deal­ing 21 points of com­bat dam­age. That can be an impor­tant fact, because each player is going to start at 40 life rather than the nor­mal 20. It’s also nor­mal to see some pretty wild life totals in EDH.

In addi­tion, your Gen­eral has a few other spe­cial things about him/her/it/whatever-gender-dragons-have. Your Gen­eral has a spe­cial prop­erty of “Gen­er­al­ness.” It can’t be over­writ­ten or lost. So if I man­age to turn your Gen­eral face down, or make it into a copy of a dif­fer­ent crea­ture (hello Mir­ror­weave!) then the dam­age your Gen­eral is doing still counts toward those 21 points.

Gen­er­al­ness can­not be copied, so that Clone you have that’s copy­ing my Gen­eral? Not count­ing toward those points of Gen­eral dam­age, sorry.

Speak­ing of Clone, though your gen­eral is neat and unique it is not immune to the leg­end rule. Clones, shapeshifters, and just plain hav­ing some­one cast their own copy will all kill your gen­eral if it’s on the battlefield.

This brings up an impor­tant point, how exactly does your Gen­eral get into the bat­tle­field? When you cast it! You can cast your Gen­eral any­time you have the mana and you would nor­mally be able to cast that spell. Teferi as your Gen­eral? Sure, flash him in at the end step!

Now there is a lit­tle some­thing extra about your Gen­eral, when it dies you get to decide where it goes. If your Gen­eral would be put into a grave­yard from any­where instead it can go back to that com­mand zone, ready to fight another day. If you’d rather have your Gen­eral go to the grave­yard that’s fine too, but prob­a­bly a lit­tle less relax­ing. I always like to have a few saucy look­ing cards in the com­mand zone for my gen­eral to relax with. Lady of proper eti­quette? She’s def­i­nitely a stern taskmaster.

Unfor­tu­nately for us there’s a small catch about your gen­eral being recast. Each time it goes to the com­mand zone it’s a lit­tle less happy about com­ing back. So much so that you need to pay two more mana for each time it’s been cast this game. So if Venser is your gen­eral he’ll hap­pily keep bounc­ing things when you cast him, just for 4UU the sec­ond time, and 6UU, the third, and so on.

And with that it about cov­ers all the wacky dif­fer­ences between EDH and a reg­u­lar game play-wise. There are a few other things to consider.

Wrap-up

EDH is meant to be a casual and socially friendly for­mat. When you sit down at a table for a game of EDH be sure to leave your inner Spike at home and have a lit­tle fun. I’ve par­tic­i­pated in games where Eter­nal Domin­ion has been copied by Hive Mind, Kresh the Blood­braided has been flung at some­one for well over a hun­dred points of dam­age, and there have been 12+ co pies of Blood Tyrant on the table.

When you play EDH the goal is for every­one to observe a social con­tract and have a good time. It’s very easy to assem­ble a bro­ken combo very quickly when every tutor in magic his­tory is avail­able and no one is hyper aggres­sive. If some­one is ruin­ing the fun of your groups EDH expe­ri­ence, do not be afraid to let social pres­sure han­dle the sit­u­a­tion. One of the eas­i­est ways I’ve found is to sim­ply say “good job, you’ve won, we’re going to play for sec­ond place.”

It turns out win­ning on turn 1 isn’t quite as fun when you’re sit­ting watch­ing every­one else have fun for the next 2 hours. There are so many more things I want to say about this for­mat, and I will in upcom­ing weeks, but for now I think I’m going to leave you with a sam­ple deck­list. Don’t let the card types/prices con­cern you, my deck was built over time, pick­ing up cards piece by piece until I found what I really liked. I plan on tak­ing a look at some bud­get options that let every­one have fun for a frac­tion of the cost of this monstrosity.

My name is Benjamin McDole and I’m a level 2 judge from Tampa, Florida. When I’m not teaching math at a local college or spending time with my wife I’m usually playing EDH at Armada Games or running some events. My long term goal is to make sure everyone enjoys Magic and especially EDH as much as I do. I’m a member of a few organizations, Team Lives in the Red Zone and the American Association for the Advancement of Pie (I’m the only member!)

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