“The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.”

Odds are you’ve come across this longstanding English language proverb at some point. It’s a phase that’s been adopted, adapted, and repurposed numerous times over the last couple centuries, in part because of its sounds of folksy wisdom and an easy to relate lesson. From Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men to a lengthy punchline plot in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the line has been repackaged and repurposed on more than a few occasions – in addition to entering the general lexicon of everyday usage.

Its message also makes relatable sense: no matter how well you plan something, life has a way of things not transpiring precisely the way you intended. It’s essentially guaranteed you’ve had something get derailed due to unforeseen consequences and outside influences. Which ultimately is why the line is so pervasive in the language vernacular. Everyone has had it happen to them at some point. It’s just the way of the world.

That said, the first time you hear it, there is some slight confusion. For one, as many folksy aphorisms go, sometimes it can help with initial clarification.

But then there’s also the whole part about the mice.

Even if you quickly grasp the notion in relation to your own lived experiences, what’s often lost on people is exactly how mice fit into the equation too.

The great comedian Eddie Izzard once did a whole bit about it.

Of course, context is key. For the line comes from the 1785 poem To A Mouse by Scottish poet Robert Burns. In this lengthy soliloquy, Burns laments at length about how in the process of ploughing a field he inadvertently destroys the nest of a mouse preparing for winter. The mouse was just trying to survive, but alas, its plans went astray through no fault of its own. Something else intervened (in this case Burns himself) with those plans.

In a clearly roundabout way, this simple piece of understanding comes to mind particularly in the context of Commander gameplay as well. Because to me it serves to remind people that having plans be disrupted can be processed two different ways. The first is that of the person being affected by it. In games of Commander, the idea of events not happening precisely as a player wants is guaranteed. I’ve written extensively here over the years about the strategic usefulness of adopting a deck building and general gameplay methodology centered around flexibility. If you know for sure that things are going to change, it’s highly beneficial to be able to adapt. Hence the litany of utility, contingency, and reactive cards that have been showcased over the years. It’s not just about being able to roll with the punches – it’s also about being able to block and dodge those punches instead.

However, unlike the field mouse, plans in Commander aren’t just disrupted by an outsized outside, godlike influence. Quite the contrary: most of the time it’s someone else at the table being that force of disruption. Of being the one to scramble an opponent’s intentions. Not necessarily just being proactive, but leveraging resources that can cause deliberate and intentional hindrances.

Such cards vary significantly from era to era and from one color to the next. Black, for instance, is content to punish you for doing the thing you want if it can and blow everything up it can’t. Red is more than happy to mess with comboing and long-term planning by literally injecting elements of chaos into the fold just to see what happens.

And Blue…Blue likes to mess with people’s ability to have reliable outcomes in the first place. Sometimes this manifests in preventing cards from being cast in the first place, or bouncing them at inopportune moments. But then there are cards like this week’s pick. A card that maddeningly just sits on the battlefield making players second guess themselves over and over.

Today we have: Perplexing Chimera

Name: Perplexing Chimera

Edition: Born of the Gods

Rarity: Rare

Focus: Control Magic

Highlights: While not the most common resource in its toolbox, Blue has long had not just the ability to outright steal a spell or permanent away from an opponent, but to actually cause an exchange of card control instead. The reasons and timing around such cards are usually more nuanced and situational than outright thievery, but used in the right applications the effect can range from inconvenient to devastating.

Perplexing Chimera is somewhere in the middle. It’s unlikely to tip the balance of a game’s outcome…but it can. Indeed it can be quite dangerous to ignore it outright.

It’s also such a wonderfully strange card that I can’t help but appreciate for its originality.

At the outset, for five mana all Perplexing Chimera gives you is a 3/3 enchantment creature with a casting cost that make it easily addable to many decks with minimal effort. However, it doesn’t have any activated or enter the play abilities. It doesn’t do any wild antics by itself. Rather, it just enters the battlefield and waits like a landmine in plain sight.

The inherent worth of the Chimera is revealed when an opponent tries to cast…anything. Anytime an opponent casts a card you are presented with a choice: let the spell resolve normally, or trade control of that spell for the Chimera.

Beyond simply exchanging one creature for another, Perplexing Chimera provides the opportunity to gain any creature, artifact, enchantment, or planeswalker trying to enter the battlefield. You give your opponent a 3/3 creature and in turn whatever advantageous card you determined was worth it to you. Given the abundance of lucrative options in Commander decks, that list can be quite extensive.

You’re also able to take control of an instant or sorcery. Although it’s a net loss for you of a permanent, a well-timed spell theft can be very poignant as a two-fer effect in that you gain whatever rewards they may have planned for themselves while denying it to them at the same time. Moreover, as Perplexing Chimera works well both offensively and defensively, it affords you the possibly of disrupting your enemy at a very inopportune time and/or as a means of protecting yourself. It definitely lives up to the idea of being perplexing.

The rub, naturally, is that neither you nor your opponent know for sure until that moment arises what you’ll do. Because it’s staring at them from the battlefield already (unless they forget about it!) they have to gauge the decision on every spell they wish to cast to determine whether they want to risk having that card being stolen away or not – based on the card itself and your whims at that moment. Hard to make plans with choices like that. Then multiply that by the number of players in the game.

The caveat to Perplexing Chimera, such that there is one, is that should you decide to make a trade, that player now controls that dichotomy. Sure it puts you on the other side of that equation, but so are any other players still at the table. Plus one doesn’t use such a card without accepting how it’s capable of altering the standard decision-making process. As a result, it’s not uncommon for the Chimera to hop around multiple times to different controllers the longer it’s alive.

But that’s also sort of the intent. It wants to be exchanged. That is its purpose. At worst you get a useful spell or momentary means of protection from the machinations of an opponent. At best, it can alter the timing and tempo of players as a deterrent even if it’s not under your command. It forces people to calculate the merit of casting any spell they were intending to – at least until the shoe is on the other foot.

Perplexing Chimera has that capacity to evoke the sentiment of best laid plans gone awry, making it an interesting gameplay wrinkle should you choose to utilize it. The mice certainly would.

You know, if they could play Magic anyway…

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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