As a Chicagoan, next year’s MagicCon schedule has me concerned. There are only three events for the entire year: Las Vegas, Atlanta, and Amsterdam. Now, I can only reasonably attend the Las Vegas event; Amsterdam is out, because travel to the Netherlands is financially exhausting, and Atlanta is out, because travel to Georgia is spiritually exhausting. Where does that leave me with my new fifty-thousand-dollar cardboard bird?
Not since COVID has the library been this stacked against us convention-goers. Magic: the Gathering is my primary hobby — I love blogging about it, creating decks for it, and even programming tools for it, but it seems like this year I’ll have fewer opportunities than ever to actually play the damn game with anyone outside of my immediate friend group.
Perhaps it’s no big loss. I know that these events have been plagued by scandals. I’ve heard of scalpers rushing to buy product at bargain-bin prices only to flip them to the on-site vendors for instant money, and venues literally running out of table space so that people had to play their games on the floors. But to cut the number of events to three?
I was resigned to a year of staying at home, cleaning my apartment on the weekends, and taking my coworkers to Applebee’s because that’s all they deserve, goddammit. Resigned, that is, until I discovered the other side of the coin; the tails to MagicCon’s heads, and I mean that in a shockingly literal way.
People at furry conventions play tons of Commander.
I’m Absolutely Serious
I attended AnthroCon in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania this year. What, does that shock you? Are you telling me you seriously didn’t pick up on any of the signs?
Anyway, I played tons and tons of Commander. Like, way more than I thought would be reasonable for a convention that’s ostensibly about the appreciation of anthropomorphic animals, and actually about unabashed debauchery in hotel suites. (Just kidding; all conventions are about unabashed debauchery in hotel suites).
The convention schedule for AnthroCon 2025 had daily Commander free play (and free Cube Draft, of all formats) — and those rooms were crowded. I’m talking a full-sized hotel event room, packed wall-to-wall with pods of four. I played some great games there, especially a particularly memorable match where my Zaxara X-Spells-For-0 Deck popped off by assembling the five pieces of Exodia (Six, Grim Haruspex, Marionette Apprentice, Intruder Alarm, and Abundance).
I was consistently able to fire games at almost all hours of the day, and AnthroCon isn’t an isolated example for furry conventions. I’ve also attended Midwest FurFest, Furry Migration, and FurSquared, and all of them had vibrant commander scenes regardless of whether or not there were explicit events for the format. In those cases where Commander wasn’t emblazoned in a five-hour timeslot on a schedule, it was rolled into the free-play tabletop gaming room every convention has. Trust me, there will be at least two pods running, and not as many Bloomburrow commanders as you’d think.
Everyone there was present and ready to play — neither to win, nor to prove something, but for the simple fun of it. This might be an anecdotal observation, but I’m convinced that the average furry has some sort of innate expertise in building fun-to-fight bracket two and three commander decks. Most (not all, but most) furries are both good at recognizing others’ sensitivities and invested in being inclusive.. I think that an attitude of radical acceptance borne in the face of widespread derision is a virtue — and it was a virtue that used to be present in nerd culture at large, until techbros invented Bitcoin and ruined everything. What that means in terms of Magic is that furries avoid exploiting bullshit like Mindslaver locks to stop people from actually playing the game.
Not only that, the Dealer’s Den, which is basically a large art/craft fair with tons of independent vendors, had tons of merchandise available that makes sense for a Magic player. You’ve got art printed on playmats, of course, but you also have things like fancy dice bags, custom glass and metallic dice, and even tokens and artist proofs available for sale. Yes, it’s not just amateurs; professional artists do attend, and I saw Alison Johnstun, who has done some art for Magic before, at AnthroCon’s Dealer’s Den this year.
Does This Solve the MagicCon Problem, Though?
If there’s one thing that furry conventions have over MagicCons, it’s that they’re 100% consistent. They aren’t just stable, they’re growing, and that means they’re not going anywhere. Barring some catastrophe, Chicagoans are always going to have access to Midwest FurFest in the winter, just like people in Pittsburgh will have AnthroCon in the middle of the year.
What does that mean to you? Well, if you can swallow your goddamn pride, you can play as much Magic in a convention setting as you want (and although I haven’t attended any, I’m sure most anime conventions are the same, too). It’s not a full-on replacement, of course; you’re not getting a main event, you’re not buying actual sealed product, and you won’t fire drafts. But if you simply want to play cards, specifics be damned, why not throw down against a dude in a red panda suit?