Mechanical Memories - Win Conditions and Endings

May 27, 2024 by Jubilee Finnegan

Happily Ever After | Art by Matt Stewart

All things must come to an end, whether it is a game of Commander, a period of your life, or a movie about three tennis players who just really need to sit down and talk (Am I the only one who thoughts Challengers kind of circled around the same points? Just me?). Today, we’re talking about how we bring games of EDH to an end in a very special finale episode of Mechanical Memories.

Yes, you heard that right! This is the last Mechanical Memories — the series where I take you through the history of Magic design and its effects on Commander and casual play design — article for the foreseeable future. I’ll get more into why that is in the conclusion, but for now we’re going to talk about this silly card game. Can you imagine making a living off this thing?

Beginning with the Ending

Richard Garfield (ever heard of him?) was designing Magic in the early 90s and ran into the problem of making games end. The main goal of the game at this time was attacking with creatures or direct damage spells to reduce an opponent’s life total to zero. While combat damage is still a key component of the game today, it seemed like this early iteration of Magic wanted to replicate the feeling of miniature wargames or other tactical tabletop systems. Big, beefy creatures would be backed up with a suite of protection spells that mimicked combat maneuvers in wargaming or RPGs. Your Serra Angel would charge in, protected by a Red Ward, forcing your opponent to sacrifice their legion of Giant Spiders.

However, early Magic had a lot of hate cards that would lock players out of playing spells or taking advantage of their cards’ abilities. For example, say you were in the late game against a Merfolk deck. Your Circle of Protection: Blue would be able to effectively stall out the game with enough mana, rendering your opponent’s Merfolk unable to damage you. If nobody had something to break the stalemate, you’d wind up in a never ending game akin to Pro Tour: Honolulu. That meant that the game needed a failsafe for when players were locked out of actually playing Magic.

From Magic’s first release, the other way a player could lose would be attempting to draw from an empty library. While initially implemented as a way to bring unwinnable games to a close, this quickly spilled out into its own strategy. With enough mana and control spells, a massive Braingeyser could force a player to lose the game on the spot. This was expanded with the printing of Millstone, the namesake for contemporary mill strategies. We were starting to realize that games could be won without “big creature go brrrr.” Decks could design their own, unique win conditions that matched their particular strategies.

The concept of a win condition is a fairly common discussion point in modern Magic, but it was a novel idea in the early days. However, it’s important that we define the ideas we’re talking about. People use the word “win con” all the time, but I’ve seen varying perspectives on what that actually means. For these purposes, I’m describing a win condition as the state of a game that a deck wants to create that allows it to win. An Elf deck’s win con would be a wide board of Elves alongside a Craterhoof Behemoth. A Breach deck could have the win con of a massive graveyard, Underworld Breach, and Lion’s Eye Diamond. You could say Craterhoof or Underworld Breach are the win cons of these decks, but they’re more like the battery to power the win. If a win con was a cake, Thassa’s Oracle would be the icing.

Bringing in the Alternates

Speaking of that Merfolk Wizard, new players may be surprised to see the words “you win the game” on a card. Alternate win conditions is a catch-all term that refers to ways of winning the game outside of life loss or decking an opponent. The majority of these are cards that just say “you win the game” or “you lose the game,” though you could argue that poison, commander damage, or even mill fall into this category.

We wouldn’t see a card with the words “you win the game” printed into eternal Magic until Invasion, though a version of this ability appeared in Weatherlight. Goblin Bomb has the potential to deal twenty damage to a player following five successful coin flips. Considering the dominant way to play Magic at this time was twenty-life constructed, this acted as a game-winning effect outside of lifegain strategies. The problem was the relative inconsistency of this effect. Yes, a player could build a deck that wants to protect themselves until the Goblin Bomb is ready, but the card’s effectiveness comes down to random chance. There isn’t much of a board state for you to push towards. No matter how much work you put into it, you’re at the mercy of a coin flip.

The banned-in-Commander Coalition Victory did give a way to win the game outright, though you needed to play every single color alongside ramping into a massive sorcery. Invasion had the Domain mechanic as a way to represent the uniting forces of the Coalition against the Phyrexian Invasion. Coalition Victory acts as a representation of the culmination of their efforts. To effectively utilize this card as a win condition, a player would need to construct their deck around the central mechanics of Invasion block. Alternate win conditions tend to have some sort of flavorful bend towards their origin, encouraging you to lean into the mechanics of whatever environment they were first printed in. If someone was running a Coalition Victory ~~Standard~~ Type II deck, that deck would likely mirror the efforts of the Dominarian Coalition in the lore.

If Gerrard, Sisay, and the rest of the crew can unite the disparate peoples of Dominaria under a single banner, they’ll be able to turn the tides of the war against the invaders. Controlling all five basic land types and permanents of every color forced you to bring together opposing factions in deck construction. Your Wood Sage and Blazing Specter could join forces and defeat Yawgmoth together. That is, unless Gerrard and Urza end up fighting in the death pits for their lives.

Coalition Victory’s banning in Commander is. . . divisive to say the least. I’m not going to tell you what to do, but I personally agree with the decision to keep the card banned. Magic design has recognized that cards that win the game on the spot tend to be problematic. Sure, you have to build a hefty board state to win with Coalition Victory, but once its on the stack, you need a Counterspell or removal. Similar cards like Phage, the Untouchable or Helix Pinnacle telegraph their victory, giving opponents enough time to develop counterplay. A Coalition-winning board state would just look like another powerful board until it wins out of nowhere. Luckily, design has avoided these kinds of sudden win-the-game cards and promoted a more interactive path towards victory.

Sometimes they do.

If we want to build an alternate win condition deck, I at least want to make it more interactive than these sudden victory cards. Winning can be fun, but I prefer to lose the vast majority of my games and win a handful with style. If Coalition Victory wants us to control permanents of every color, we can find something comparable in the Commander-legal Happily Ever After. Controlling a card of every color should be easy, right? But what if it was in a mono-white deck?

A Compleat Disaster

A Happily Ever After for New Phyrexia might be rough for most of the multiverse, but it’s the goal of this Praetor’s deck. Elesh Norn, Mother of Machines is an absolute powerhouse from Phyrexia: All Will Be One, and I’ll be pairing her with the card Happily Ever After. If we control a permanent of each color, six or more card types among permanents and cards in our graveyard, and have a life total greater than or equal to our starting total, we’ll win the game! It also draws everyone a card and gains five life when entering.

Normally you’d want to play this card in a deck with easy access to all five colors. Frankly, it seems like it was built for Kenrith, the Returned King to have a flavorful way to win the game. It certainly isn’t easy to satisfy this card’s needs in mono-white, but it is far from impossible. All it takes is some careful card selection and a willingness to play really, really bad creatures.

We play the usual suite of mono-white staples. Swords to Plowshares, Smothering Tithe, the works. However, we want to keep a wide array of card types rather than siloing ourselves into the most efficient options. For removal, we’re running the slightly-less-powerful Lay Down Arms over something like Path to Exile to ensure we can get a wide spread of card types. Some cards like Reduce to Memory can even give us a red creature by targeting our own permanents, acting as a backup for our color creators.

There’s plenty of cards in white that get supercharged by Elesh Norn’s ability. Solemn Simulacrum, Archaeomancer’s Map, Authority of the Consuls, and many more go from amazing to compleatly devastating with this commander. Because of this, Elesh Norn has gained a bit of a fearsome reputation among players, making us a big target from the outset. If we want to keep our life total above forty, we’re going to have to gain life fast and make opponents attack elsewhere.

Soul’s Attendant and Soul Warden give us life when creatures enter, negating aggro decks that churn out creatures. We can also push players to attack elsewhere with Teyo, Geometric Tactician, an overlooked card that fills an esoteric card type. However, the best way to get people to stop hitting us is to give them a benefit. Happily Ever After draws everyone a card and gains everyone life, so doubling the trigger with Elesh Norn, flickering it with Flickerwisp, or recurring it with Hall of Heliod’s Generosity keeps the cards flowing for the whole table.

Then there’s the trick of ensuring we get every color in a mono-white deck. Michael Celani has used the tech of Mascot Exhibition in the past, but I want some more contingencies in this build. Angelic Sell-Sword from Outlaws of Thunder Junction Commander creates multiple red creature tokens and can be doubled with Elesh Norn. Invasion of Belenon is one of our few battles and also creates a white and blue Knight. Finally, a bit of light reading can get us whatever color we’re missing with Sarpadian Empires, Vol. VII.

Since Happily Ever After also counts our graveyard for card types, stocking it up with self-mill and sacrifice effects is a useful path to victory. Codex Shredder and Perpetual Timepiece might look more at home in a Golgari deck, but they provide a valuable service here. Fetchlands in a mono-white deck might look like some cEDH tomfoolery, but they put a land in the graveyard to reanimate and can fetch cards like Mistveil Plains. Finally, if you’re struggling to get that last piece of the Happily Ever After with your own cards, try stealing! Debt of Loyalty is a mono-white theft effect(?!) that pairs amazingly with someone removing a creature. Oh, you’re going to Murder their Yidris, Maelstrom Wielder? Don’t mind if I borrow that! It’s a delightfully devilish way to snag a win with a Phyrexian deck.

So Long, Farewell

This brings us to the end of my final Mechanical Memories article, but it’s not the last of my Magic writing. Soon, I’ll be joining the DailyMTG team at Wizards of the Coast and be writing alongside the folks who actually make the game. I previously worked with Wizards as an intern, and I'm beyond excited to join the team full-time. This is a huge moment, but also a somber one. EDHREC and Commander’s Herald are what made me passionate about writing for this game, and it’s sad to say goodnight to this series. But I’ll always remember the great times writing here and all the friends I’ve made. To my fellow writers: You’re the best, and I’ll definitely be pestering you for games at MagicCons in between my shifts.

Below, I’ve included the Elesh Norn decklist and some of my favorite articles by other Magic creators on EDHREC and Commander's Herald. Give them a read! ~~As #WoTCStaff I cosign everything they've written~~. Now, it’s time for me to sign off for one last time . . .

What do you mean we’re doing Modern Horizons 3 set reviews?

View this decklist on Archidekt