As a tabletop game, Magic: the Gathering is one of extensive renown and tenure, by all accounts a massively successful game for nearly 30 years. It invented what we now think of as a collectible card game and pretty much made Wizards of the Coast as a company. It has generated extensive stories spanning several years across several planes and fostered an equally extensive tournament scene. It has inspired and entertained thousands of gamers for a variety of reasons over its lifespan, and it has no signs of slowing down anytime soon.

At the end of the day, though, Magic is essentially just a tactics-driven card game – one among hundreds. One with a pedigree, sure, and with a rather steep buy-in by comparison to comparative self-contained titles. But if you look at board gaming as a whole, you can find plenty of two-player-centric games focused around casting spells, summoning monsters, and bringing your opponent’s life total to zero the fastest. It’s not a criticism by any means, but we should be comfortable putting Magic into perspective within the larger hobby.

One of the chief reasons Magic has continued to dominate that particular design space (other than inertia and the endless release of new expansions) is that victory doesn’t solely exist across one axis. There are numerous strategies you can employ to ride your way to winning. Taking your opponent to zero is the dominant and easiest to understand victory condition, but it importantly is not the only one. Poison and alternate win condition cards exist, as does the means of ‘decking’ your opponent by making them unable to draw a card from their library. In Commander, you also have the threat of death by Commander combat damage – yet another factor when plying your deck against others. The methodology to accomplish each of these approaches also varies wildly from one person and one deck to the next, offering up extensive variability.

Magic is, was, and likely always will be a game about being the last person standing, but it provides ample flexibility on the means and methods you wish to utilize to accomplish it. Unlike most stock tactical fighting games, it’s not only about scoring a set number of points or losing all your health. It’s much more robust than that.

In all the different facets of the game, however, be it manipulating your hand, library, graveyard, type of damage, and more, one key feature traditionally underutilized is your life total itself. In most cases your life total is treated merely as a clock. It determines your relative safety with respect to your chances of losing. To most players life is either a tangible point of attack they need to focus on or as indications of attrition while you trade swings at one another until one person falls. Compared to Magic’s overall card catalog, the number of cards that manipulate life totals is comparatively small, with the vast majority mostly about gaining small amounts of life and giving you a slight buffer in your card-driven jousts. Fewer still are those which actively manipulate life totals in notable ways or use life itself as a weapon, generally because Wizards has a tendency to see life as mostly a timer themselves and are loathe to do anything – especially these days – that would seemingly prolong duels beyond the time it takes to heat a Hot Pocket.

However, in games that are inherently longer, particularly in multiplayer settings such as Commander, that concern is moot. Games already are going to blow past the time of your average duel, and mucking with one’s life total is not all that different than other tactics you can leverage to draw the game out and give you some kind of tactical boost. Even if it’s as simple as staying alive. A sizable (non-infinite) life total swing can be just as potent and devastating to the status quo in a game of Magic as any board wipe or planeswalker ultimate. Often it can be even more so, as gaining (or regaining) a good chunk of life effectively undoes all the damage dealt and resources spent of your opponents to that point. It shifts the scales from attrition to a clear advantage in your favor.

Both numerically and psychologically, boosting life totals is more than a merely a barometer of how much time you have left. So…why not explore that more as a strategic option?

Such as with this week’s pick?

Today we have: Oketra’s Last Mercy

Name: Oketra’s Last Mercy

Edition: Hour of Devastation

Rarity: Rare

Focus: Life Gain

Highlights: Generally speaking, cards that work around changing life totals fall into three categories. The first are your typical cards with have you gain or lose small amounts of life at a time. The second are the rare handful of cards (e.g. Blessed Wind, Sorin Markov) that set someone’s life total to a specific number. The third are those that manipulate your life based on your “starting life total”. Oketra’s Last Mercy, part of Hour of Devastation’s “Last” cycle, very much fits into that third camp.

The main difference between the latter two can seem one of inches but makes for an important distinction. While setting a life total to a specific number seems simple enough, it can have radical differences in application in formats where your life total isn’t 20. Say, for instance, Commander. In normal games of Magic, Blessed Wind setting a life to 20 is a reset in most cases. In Commander, that could be a late game move of cutting someone’s life total in half. On the other hand, such cards are also potential answers to players who end up with arbitrarily high life totals, forcing them to come crashing down to reality. They’re a niche answer to a niche situation, but they can and do have their purposes.

Oketra’s Last Stand is much more focused on your own life total, which scales depending on whatever your starting life total is. For a staggeringly cheap three mana, this benevolent card resets your life total back to the beginning. While this can certainly be helpful in normal Magic games, going from, say 5 life back to 20, it can be a game-changing move in Commander bouncing that same 5 life all the way back to 40. Such a reset potentially stops you from having your back against the wall and puts you back in the game to fight another day. For just three mana, it is quite literally the most efficient unconditional life gain card in the Commander format – if you’re in dire straits.

Yet to many players, Oketra’s has become almost a throwaway rare. Which boggles the mind.

Part of this is because many Magic players have a reluctance to slot too many (if any) life gain cards, as there’s the aforementioned propensity of seeing life gain solely as a defensive move, a delay tactic, rather than viewing it as turning your opponent’s resource expenditures into a net negative. They would much rather put in other cards to fuel their combos, focus on their deck’s theme, or choose other defensive answers instead. But for most, it’s the second line in Last Stand that gives them significant pause: your lands don’t untap during your next turn.

Essentially, like all the Lasts, there’s the notion that you’re doing something amazing and cost effective in the moment, but you risk leaving yourself in a vulnerable shields-down moment the following turn which could completely offset any of their respective color offerings. Especially in the case of something like “mere” life gain.

Of course, the simple answer in this case at least is being aware of its key situational usage. Even with the low casting cost, you’re not going to use this early on in the game. Or even midgame. You’re going to try to save using this until it becomes an absolute necessity to get the best usage out of the card possible.

And if you’re smart, you don’t use your lands for anything else that turn, instead leaving a fairly open pool of mana for other responses over the next round.

Setting your life total back to 40 is already a solid enough move with a single turn to not risk over-extending your hand by casting other spells on top of it – unless you think there’s no better time or have no other choice. But the fewer lands you tap, the fewer stay tapped the next time around. If you limit your spell casting to just Oketra, all you’re really contending with is a de facto Echo cost. Which, while understandable in giving pause (no one likes paying a card cost twice), even a ‘real’ mana value of six is still well worth the investment to be able to hit a reset button on your status in the game.

Consider the audible sighs from your opponents watching all their recent work at whittling your life down evaporate as a nice bonus.

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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