Fandom. It’s such a strikingly simple word on the surface. If you like something well enough, you’re a fan of it. You enjoy what that something is or does. You can be a fan of people, of places, of ideas, and of course, of tangible items. You can be a fan of 80’s hair bands, of Jane Austin novels, of NASA. From Buffalo (the animal), to Buffalo (the city), to the Buffalo Bills football team, fandom can take many forms and be expressed in myriad ways.

However, fandom isn’t merely the appreciation of something. You can like your morning coffee, but that usually doesn’t mean you’re standing there cherishing the percolator. Unless, that is, what you’re actually a fan of is the coffee maker company. For something to truly have fandom, it needs to have two things. The first is that your relationship to it needs to go beyond mere enjoyment and actually create a positive emotional response. Creating emotional attachments, however mild, invests you in the well-being of that thing. You want it to succeed and are concerned when something adversely affects it. With people, that’s how we get celebrity worship. With products, it engenders brand loyalty. Fandom needs that emotional connection to sustain its appeal, whether it’s Tom Hanks, BTS, or an iPhone.

Secondly, for fandom to thrive and grow, it needs a community of similarly like-minded people. While it is entirely possible to be an individual fan of something, it is only once you have enough individuals championing that object of appreciation for it to find new audiences and further propel its raison d’etre – be it financially, artistically, or culturally. The more people who aware of it, the more its potential appeal grows.

That isn’t to say that there aren’t limits to the size of fandom, especially the more niche something gets. Tabletop gaming is a prime example of that. While thousands of board games, card games, and RPGs are released every year, very few of them have grown in fandom to such an extent that people outside the hobby have heard of them. In the US, for instance, most people have at least heard of Chess, Bridge, Cribbage, and/or Monopoly as the fanbases grew over decades (and even centuries). Yet far fewer actually play them, and the only time they make the leap to the larger public consciousness is when something notable happens, such as when a chess master is defeated by a supercomputer, or Netflix makes a show about it.

In all the thousands of games over the last few decades, only two have successfully gone beyond the confines of the hobby and reached a broader cultural awareness: Dungeons & Dragons, and much more recently (and to a much smaller extent), Settlers of Catan. After more than 25 years in existence Magic: the Gathering is poised to becoming another…but that’s also been said before.

Still, even if it doesn’t make its way into the larger zeitgeist, Magic has done quite well over the years at creating and growing its own fanbase. One major advantage it has is that it shrewdly taps into more than just one aspect of its own existence. The vast majority of Magic fans are its players, true. But there are also many fans who love the artwork and worldbuilding of the game, focusing almost entirely on the look and artistry of the game than the game itself. Others adore the advent of unique and memorable characters, going so far as to write fanfiction and engage in cosplay.

And then there are the stories themselves. The lore of the game. The narrative purpose for any given set on that particular plane. Magic is, first and foremost, a tactical game whose new card releases provide new opportunities and ways to win, and it’s understandable why many players pay little more than lip service to the intricacies of the story taking place beyond the cards in canonical novels and short fiction. To many, what a Nicol Bolas planeswalker card does mechanically takes precedence over his literary motivations. Yet to quite a few within the fandom, Magic’s stories are the true foundation of the game. The cards may be the mechanical core, but the flavor and stories taking place on the worlds depicted helps hold the larger fandom itself together.

This doesn’t imply to mean that all Magic players need to be intricately invested in every nuance of the story and every secondary character in existence. Will your knowledge about Feather, Taysir, or Feroz make you a better player? Will being aware of the story of the Mox Beacon, the plight of Sarkhan, or the dangers of the Mirari elevate your tournament standing? Absolutely not. But it does allow for a deeper appreciation for the game writ large and keeps its fanbase engaged on multiple fronts – especially with new products.

Speaking of which…

With the next sets on the horizon once again taking us back to the gothic world of Innistrad, a lot of lore-based questions have arisen about the state of the plane currently. When we were there last, Avacyn was killed and the Eldrazi titan Emrakul lured there to ostensibly corrupt and destroy the world. The plane itself was succumbing to her influence as depicted through its cosmic horror themes. It was only through the intervention of several planeswalkers, and the unexpected acquiescence of Emrakul herself, was the threat stopped, and Emrakul sealed away in Innistrad’s moon.

Many were wondering if we would see the fallout of these events or if they would simply hit the proverbial reset button as they did with Zendikar and return us to the original Innistrad tropes that made the set so popular in the first place. At the moment, all signs point to the latter, but we will see soon enough.

In the meantime, this week’s pick looks at an excellent example of a card that succeeds in both form and function – especially in EDH:

Today we have: Imprisoned in the Moon

Name: Imprisoned in the Moon

Edition: Eldritch Moon / Forgotten Realms Commander

Rarity: Rare

Focus: Board Control

Highlights: Throughout the years, one of the most perpetually recurring debates among players is the notion of exactly how much of a response Blue should have to what its opponents do. There has been a begrudging (though not universal) acceptance that Blue’s most efficient means of stopping a spell is by countering it before it can resolve or the permanent reach the battlefield. The tradeoff to this ethos is that this requires Blue to leave mana open and therefore forgo being proactive in casting their own threats. If something does hit the battlefield, bouncing permanents is usually seen as the second best option – a potent but ultimately temporary solution in most cases. For most of the game’s existence, Blue rarely got straight up spot removal. In recent years, a handful of new cards have appeared that do exactly that, which has rekindled the debate anew. Imprisoned in the Moon is among those often cited in the debate, because even though the permanent affected is not exiled or destroyed, it is nevertheless nullified so long as the Aura exists.

And a darn good job it does of it.

In truth, the argument over this card has less to do with the fact that it can cage up a creature and more that it can also target lands and planeswalkers. Blue has seen an explosion of transformation style Auras over the last few years that shrink and remove a creature’s abilities, which is seen as a better color pie representation of its polymorph powers than, well, Polymorph – because it doesn’t actually kill the creature. But it is still occasionally receiving removal cards too during this experimentation period. Messing with a creature’s existence has been a mainstay of the color for a very long time, and though the flavor may change, it’s still very much a Blue thing – much to the consternation of many nonblue players. How much to push that, though, is actively being explored these days.

Nevertheless, the neo-polymorph option is incredibly helpful at handling a particularly dangerous or powerful creature on the battlefield without needing to resort to a board wipe entirely, which can be quite handy in Commander games for both strategic and political reasons. In that sense, Imprisoned in the Moon works wonderfully. This three mana Aura just happens to turn the targetable creature into a land instead of a creature. Which if we’re being honest in some ways is actually more fair of a tradeoff: if you don’t have a means of enchantment removal would you rather have a 1/1 with no abilities or a land? The latter actually seems more beneficial, no?

The part that supposedly gets a bit more murky from a color philosophy perspective is the fact that Imprisoned in the Moon can also target lands and planeswalkers. Yet while nullifying a useful nonbasic land in a duel could be a painful moment, the sheer abundance of them in most EDH games ensures that only the most concerning lands on the battlefield would even be considered – especially once factoring in the typically greater needs of creature removal. Planeswalkers do seem like a straight up useful addition to the color’s arsenal, and one can see why there’d be some concern there. Blue has always been able to bounce any permanent, true, but bouncing a walker and pseudo-exile are indeed two similar but separate things.

Still, in practice this card is much much close to a color bend than a break (not that either will stop most from adding them to their Commander deck anyway). For minimal investment Imprisoned in the Moon is well worth consideration as a card (though not game) warping Commander option that has made fans out there already of its efficacy, ourselves included.

Keep an eye out for us to be regularly featuring other more accessible-but-worth-it Commander cards going forward. In the meantime, we’ll keep the light on for you.

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