Tonight was the "Commander Presents - Pride" special event, so for two of the three games that I got to play, everybody was making use of the additional "Every Legendary Creature gets Partner" special rule to run multiple Commanders in their decks.
That said, I will only be listing each deck's "normal" Commanders, not the additional Pride Partner Commanders, as I drop the headings for each of the games. I digress.
I joined in with a pod that had 3 going in, and the four of us managed to get three games in tonight.
Game 1: Gogo, Master of Mimicry vs. Sephiroth, Fabled Soldier, Sephiroth, Fabled Soldier, and Kefka, Court Mage
Right out the gate, not one, but two Sephiroth Aristocrat Builds. It was rough going, this game.
For my deck's "Pride Partner", I chose Arcanis the Omnipotent. Mechanically, Arcanis is one of the strongest options I can run alongside Gogo, getting potentially absurd card draw power out of copying Arcanis's innate tap effect. Aesthetically, the idea of these two utter enigmas being "Partners" made me chuckle. Gender? Never heard of her. Sexuality? No thanks. Just two Legendary Creature - Wizards, giving no indication of what can be found under their respective robes.
The long and short of this game is that one of the two Sephiroths found their copy of The Masamune super early and stapled it onto Sephiroth as soon as they possibly could. Even forgetting that Masamune was supposed to be doubling their triggers - which would've flipped Sephiroth super early and generated the Emblem - they still used that to take resounding and utter control over the board by swinging the legendary war hero into any creature that dared to hit the board.
On my end, I couldn't accomplish much because I never really saw any permanents to play, leaving me a depressing lack of abilities for Gogo to copy.
Game 2: Gogo vs. Sephiroth, Fabled Soldier, Dogmeat, Ever Loyal, and Arcades, the Strategist
Not happy with how Gogo ran in the first game, I was the only person to stick to the same deck going into game 2, including keeping Arcanis as my Partner. Dogmeat chose the Commander Precon's Cloud, Ex-SOLDIER for a Partner, Arcades took Tetsuko Umezawa, and Sephiroth opted not to take a Partner for their deck. "Sephiroth is asexual", they said. Which, honestly? Fair. Also, respect for ace rep in the Pride event. I digress.
Arcades having previously been the Sephiroth who ran away with the first game, once again took this game over pretty handily. Turns out that giving them Tetsuko Umezawa to make all of their creatures unblockable, and Arcades making them all powerhouses at budget rates, they just ran roughshod over the rest of us. Sephiroth, formerly Kefka, was able to keep things held at bay for some time thanks to their sacrifice effects, and I dropped an Inundate to slow everybody else down significantly - though Arcades did keep some amount of board state due to being part Blue.
Unlike last game, I did get to do some Gogo Shenanigans, including copying Arcanis's ability multiple times, copying it 3 times on my first use of it (for a total of 4 instances of "Draw 3") and then copying it twice on my second go (for a total 3 "Draw 3"s). Unfortunately, even drawing literally twelve cards in one wack wasn't able to draw me any answers, and I ultimately got run over by the unstoppable force of Arcades's walls.
Game 3: Saheeli, Radiant Creator vs. Xenagos, God of Revels, Ellivere of the Wild Court, and Ziatora, the Incinerator
The one game where none of us used the Pride Partner additional rule, finishing out the night with a relatively quick game.
In short, Ziatora outpowered the rest of us thanks to Gitrog, Ravenous Ride giving them a lot of powerhouse effects from sacrifices, drawing cards and ramping their mana to do a ton of strong plays. For my end, I had a fairly slow start and had pretty minimal Energy production until fairly late into the game, and even worse luck with actually getting Energy payoffs. My one attempt to ease up the damage Ziatora was doing was a Blasphemous Act, but Ziatora top-decked a Victimize and had a cheap creature in hand to play and sacrifice, getting back the worst of what I had removed.
The Demon Dragon mopped us up not drastically long after, thanks to constant recursion of Kokusho, the Evening Star keeping their life total high enough that none of us could quite overcome it and take them down for good.
Conclusion:
Honestly? Tonight was a good, fun night. And in particular, I got to play my Gogo deck twice and get a half-decent feel for it. I don't think I'm going to keep it put together, though, honestly. At least not in its current form. I think that, once I get a few cards that I've ordered, I'm going to heavily modify it and lean more into the spellslinging aspects of it, rather than trying to do funny trigger copying abilities. This will necessitate a change of Commander, either to Baral or to one of two other creatures that are part of the orders I've made.
And, because I'm nothing if not a monster resourceful, I'm likely going to also take apart my Commodore Guff list to get access to its many succulent juices powerful game-changers, going all-in with as powerful a mono-blue list as I can manage to build, which will also free up a number of cards from it for other decks I've been looking into building.
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