Your first night at a store

The three nights you will meet

Advice, not a rule

• —Friday Night Magic: the weekly event. Most stores run a Standard or a draft night. It is the cheapest way to play against people who are not your friends.
• —A prerelease: the weekend before a new set arrives. You open six packs and build a deck of 40 cards or more from them. Nobody has played the cards before, so a first-time player starts level with everyone else.
• —Commander night: usually a weekday evening. Four players a table, games of 60 to 90 minutes, and no entry fee at many stores.

What to bring

Advice, not a rule

• —Your deck, in sleeves. A store will sell you sleeves if you have none.
• —A way to track life. A notepad works. A phone works.
• —Some cash or a card. A draft costs about the price of three booster packs.
• —Nothing else. You do not need a binder, a playmat, or a second deck.

• Track the life of every player on your phone with the life counter

The conversation before a Commander game

Advice, not a rule

Players talk about their decks before they shuffle. The table agrees on what kind of game it wants.

Say what your deck does, roughly how fast it wins, and its bracket from 1 to 5. A precon deck against a tuned deck is nobody's good evening, and one sentence prevents it.

Worked example: Ana goes to her first Commander night

1. 1Ana finds a Commander night on the calendar of her local store. She brings her preconstructed deck in sleeves, and her phone to count life.
2. 2She tells the organizer that it is her first time, and she joins a table of four.
3. 3Before anyone shuffles, the table talks. Ana says her deck is a precon in bracket 2 that wins slowly.
4. 4Each player starts at 40 life and draws seven cards. Ana does not like her hand. Her first mulligan is free, so she keeps seven new cards.

Your turn: sit down at a Commander table

Ben joins a table of four at a Commander night.

Check yourself