Elder Dragon Highlander

A love letter to Magic: The Gathering

I have been playing Magic for a very long time now, since the summer of 2006. I'll never forget when a friend of mine introduced me to the game. He had a bunch of cards from his older brother, made up mostly of Mirrodin block and Ninth Edition cards. He had one deck that used the Urza lands to deploy random big artifact dudes, the crown jewel being Clockwork Dragon. That card was unbeatable.

I really got into the game maybe a year and a half or so later during Lorwyn. I started to go to my local game store after my friend had found out about it and we went to an FNM together. It didn't take long after that for the game to sink its neon claws into me, I had become unbelievable hooked.

I start to go to FNM nearly every friday, using the change I would save from what my mom would give me for friday lunch at my high school to buy booster packs. It was a slow process but it worked. We would play totally free form decks, one on one, multiplayer, star, emperor, basically any random made up format you've heard of. I grew up in a small town so it was only a handful of us that would show up each week. Sanctioned standard and draft events were far and few between since we rarely had 8 people playing. It was the best.

I moved to Toronto for college and my first introduction to a local game store was when a friend brought me to Hairy Tarantula North for a Scars of Mirrodin draft. It wasn't too far from where I lived at the time so I started to go quite regularly. They actually had more than a handful of people who played in events, so I had to move from mostly casual decks to more constructed ones. At this point in my life pretty much all I did was go to school and play Magic. I was fully invested into the competitive ecosystem and learned a lot about the game, myself, and other people. I traveled to Grand Prix, PTQs, was a card trading addict, I did everything that I could afford to. It's a memorable part of my life and I look back on it very fondly. I even have the core cards from my first real competitive standard deck framed and on my wall.

While I may have been a competitive grinder, Elder Dragon Highlander (EDH) was what I enjoyed about the Magic the most. It was the wind down game mode, where people would chill out after playing in an event (or after dropping out of) and play with cards or combos that they couldn't or wouldn't normally. Decks were made up of cards and strategies that people simply liked, ones that didn't have a place in a competitive environment. They were a handful of good cards held together by sticks and glue. It was a trade binder format, decks made up of junk you would find in other players trade binders and cards you had never heard of. It was pure, undistilled, joy.

The game has since changed and Commander, what was once EDH, is essentially the new face of Magic. It's cool to see that something which was once considered a time killer format is now why the game is thriving. One of the beautiful things about the format is that no matter how old or bad your cards may be, they can always have a place in an EDH deck. The nature of the format afford you the time and ability to do what you want and play how you want, even if the power level of the game has exploded.

One deck to rule them all

I started a Sharuum the Hegemon deck sometime in 2011. It wasn't my first EDH deck but it would soon become my favourite. I'm a huge fan of artifact based strategies, loved combo decks, and like cards that make you jump through hoops for a payoff. This deck was everything I loved about the game all rolled up into one. Over time I slowly built out the deck, traded for foils of cards, had them signed by artists at events, it became a personal project to pimp it out over time. I did this all with one restriction: that I couldn't simply buy the cards that I wanted online. Everything had to be traded for in person or bought from a store / vendor in person.

While I may not play in person much anymore, I do try to bust it out when I can. I love showing off the cards. Many cards have come and gone over time and while an EDH decklist is in reality ever changing, this one has remained fairly static since the mid 2010s. I do still occasionally change cards out, with a few changing most recently as the early 2020s. But that's beside the point. The point being that while I may grow and change and the game that I fall in and out of love with grows and changes, I have a small collection of 100 cards full of memories and stories that mean the world to me.