Hi! I’m Heartwood Storyteller, and I only play Bracket 1 Commander. I’m starting this blog because I simultaneously have a lot of thoughts about Bracket 1 but not enough time to create video content about it. Additionally, due to my rather verbose way of talking about Magic, Commander, and Bracket 1, I think the written word is a more appropriate medium for me to present my points. It’s also a lot easier to cite than a video essay.
For this first installment, I want to talk about winning. More specifically, I want to talk about how little I care about winning if it has to come at the cost of depriving other players of play.
Let’s get into it.
Winning isn’t playing. The two are separate phenomena that a player may experience in a game of Commander, but they don’t (and can’t) exist at the same time. Each is predicated on the other: you have to play to win and you can’t win unless you play. But one key difference between the two is that while you may not experience the feeling of winning a game of Magic, you still experience play. We don’t say “we win Magic”, because it doesn’t always happen; we say “we play Magic”, because we always get to participate in the play of the game.
It might seem obvious to say, but winning ends the game. It’s not much of a leap to reframe this instead as the act of winning ending the act of play. You can’t have both at the same time because winning requires players to stop playing. In this way, winning is somewhat selfish, because it insulates the experience of one player from the play experiences of the other three. If everyone is participating equally in the pursuit of winning, then at least the assumption of selfishness is mutual, but this approach to playing Magic: the Gathering turns players into opponents.
I find some amount of cognitive dissonance in the idea of “playing to win.” I think it’s a little awkward to functionally say “I’m playing to end play”, because that doesn’t feel like play matters unless it is a vehicle for actualizing the feeling of winning. So does admitting to caring about how the game ends and who ends it undermine the experience of play itself? Does play without winning eliminate the excitement of playing writ large? Why play if not to win?
There’s a great German term that comes to mind called vorfreude — literally, pre-pleasure. It’s the joyful anticipation in the period before a vacation, the giddy surprise in unwrapping a gift, or the escalating expectation of a maybe-win from a gambling at a slot machine. Regardless of the outcome, the experience of vorfreude can often be more rewarding that the experience of what is anticipated itself.
In the words of Natalie Wynn, the great (though occasionally thoroughly cancelled) philosopher and creator of the YouTube channel Contrapoints:
“Gambling is addictive because the vorfreude — the anctipation of a maybe-win — is more compelling than the win itself… Uncertainty sustains the bittersweet mix of hope and anxiety, which is ruinous when it leads to the junky behavior of gambling addicts and serial adultery, but which I think can be safely simulated in art.”
- Wynn, Twilight
The ludological (and paraludological) experience of Magic: the Gathering is full of vorfreude. Each time we buy a booster pack and open it, we experience the vorfreude in the chance of pulling an expensive or interesting rare or mythic. Deckbuilding is an exercise in vorfreude, each card an opportunity to imagine how it will feel to slam it down upon the battlefield or resolve it from the stack. And I think a lot of people experience the play of Commander itself as vorfreude, a pleasant wonder at whether or not one will become the winner standing among three or more other losers. For many Magic players, each game is so influenced by the vorfreude of maybe winning it that it becomes an exciting series of if/then situations that result in tension at the question of who will win and release at the answer of who did.
Vorfreude in individual Magic: the Gathering cards is most effective in cards that create the emblematic anticipatory uncertainty akin to gambling. Ad Nauseam springs to mind as a card that creates a condition of vorfreude with each card revealed resulting in both loss of life and card advantage.
Ad Nauseam is exciting because it engages with an existing presence of vorfreude, gambling one's life total away to get closer to cards needed to actualize winning. Most decks that play it use as few cards with higher mana costs as possible to maximize Ad Nauseam's effect, thus extracting the most value from its exercise in vorfreude towards winning the game.
When I play Magic: the Gathering, I do not experience this vorfreude. I rarely open sealed product for the anxiety of putting even more money into the game and pulling a bulk rare, building a Bracket 1 deck is more about being a Vorthos or art curator than imagining a card’s strategic impact on the board, and, for me, the experience of vorfreude during play is more stressful than pleasurable. I get caught up in the tension and with each incremental move towards winning, I experience a rise in my blood pressure, I start shaking, and I walk away from the game (regardless of outcome) requiring some degree of self-care before I play again. Magic: the Gathering-based vorfreude is disorienting and overstimulating for me.
Because I don’t experience the same kind of vorfreude that other players do, I typically prefer centering an experience of play over prioritizing the experience of winning. Taking the pressure of winning away from playing Magic alleviates the tension I experience on the rare occasion I participate in a competitive environment, and it results in longer, splashier, and more memorable games of Commander. I don’t care who wins and I certainly don’t need it to be me, and since I have adopted this position, much of the vorfreude I experience in Magic has disappeared.
Centering play allows players to fully participate in each game they are involved in. There have been so many games in which I have walked away disappointed; not only did I not win, but my deck was prevented from doing what it wanted to do because someone else prioritized their experience of winning over my experience of play. Diminishing the group dynamic of play as a result of the overzealous pursuit of winning undermines the phenomenon that occurs when everyone is equally contributing to play so eloquently described by Bernard De Koven as ‘coliberation.’
Bernard De Koven (1941-2018) was a pioneer in the field of ludology (the study of play and games) who coined the term coliberation to describe a heightened sense of mutual play. From his posthumously published book The Infinite Playground:
“I think of [coliberation] as a shared transcendence of personal limitation, of our understanding of our own capabilities; a sudden, momentary transformation of our awareness of the connections between ourselves, each other, and the world we find each other in, between the actual and the imagined.”
- De Koven, The Infinite Playground, 83
For me, the experience of coliberation is an opportunity to escape together through play. We have already suspended disbelief in order to play the game before us and we allow ourselves get lost in playing it, actively encouraging other players to more fully immerse themselves in the act of playing Magic. Coliberation is a heightened state in which players can simply play, and things like who wins and how they do cease mattering in these moments of play intensified to the point of imagining together.
Coliberation is represented in cards that encourage (or require) participation of all players. A good example of a card that requires participation of all players is Endless Whispers.
Endless Whispers requires that players distribute their nontoken creatures to other players when they die, resulting in game that produces a heightened sense of play. It's the kind of card that encourages players to let go of strategy and give in to a dynamic of group play that includes everyone.
Now, can one play Endless Whispers with cards like Leveler or Eater of Days to punish one's opponents? Yes, but that's not in the spirit of coliberation — it's in the spirit of vorfreude. The impulse to play Leveler and Eater of Days is exemplified by how the vorfreude of how an opponent will react to having the card's effect forced upon them turns to schadenfreude when the effect resolves, not the coliberation resulting from a shared immersive experience of play itself.
In my experience, the constitutive experience of playing Bracket 1 is coliberation and the constitutive experience of playing Bracket 5 is vorfreude. Bracket 5 encourages statistics, a heavy focus on a shifting metagame, and calculating the best way to extract as much pleasure from the maybe-win as possible, whereas Bracket 1 encourages slow, meaningful play that includes everyone and creates opportunities become absorbed by novel play experiences without them needing to also result in the end of play.
From my experience playing Magic as terminally online person, I think a lot of people active in the discourse around winning are more interested in the experience of vorfreude than the experience of coliberation. How the game ends and who ends it matters more to Bracket 4 and Bracket 5 than it does to Bracket 1 and Bracket 2, and that is reflected in online conversations about the interaction of winning and play. The reality is that Bracket 1 and Bracket 2 are simply less represented online, so a viable replacement ideal for Magic-based vorfreude is never presented.
One of the reasons why Bracket 1 has struggled to find its identity online is because we do not yet have a community consensus on how to evaluate its experience. We know what it is like to play a game of cEDH, but we continue to struggle on how to understand what its polar opposite looks like. Perhaps Bernard De Koven’s coliberation could be a vision for the goal of playing Bracket 1 could be, though I like to think of playing Bracket 1 in even simpler terms.
Winning isn’t playing. Playing is playing. Let’s play.
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Thanks for reading my first blog post! If you have any feedback, you can find me on Bluesky. I would love to hear your thoughts on vorfreude vs. coliberation. Let me know what you think!
Citations:
Wynn, Natalie. “Twilight.” YouTube, ContraPoints, 2024, youtu.be/bqloPw5wp48?si=ax_UBLZWGj1b7dP4.
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