Pie Break // Commander Sphere

We have Magic: The Gathering Story Lead, Writer, and all around Nice Guy Roy Graham on the show today discussing the color identity of Fast Food. One of the show's first Five Colors makes its appearance here and the world will never be the same.

Today I chatted with illustrator and comics artist Sage Coffey about the color identity of slasher villains! It's a Halloween spooktacular!

Newly minted PT Magic Player and Commander Sphere editor and friend of the show Jake Browne is here to talk about competition reality shows! We also go on a 15 minute digression about how Castaway is an anticapitalist text. Wow!

Welcome to Pie Break! A show where a guest and I take something from the real world and figure out where it falls on Magic's color pie. This show is all about the point of intersection between the game we all love and the things we love outside it.

This has been an ambitious project and it only felt right to start it with a bang. So, I talked to Magic's foremost Color Pie scholar: Lead Designer, Mark Rosewater! Mark is an incredibly passionate person and I was thrilled to be able to get an hour of his time. Enjoy the interview and the beginning of this new project!

As always, we're completely Patron funded, so if you can spare a few bucks a month, feel free to find us over at www.Patreon.com/PieBreak

Been missing regular podcast episodes from the Commander Sphere feed? Well miss it no more, PIE BREAK, Dan's new show about the color pie starts this Tuesday! Take a quick listen and learn more!

Due to his role in a number of different multiversal threats, the silver golem Karn has been the butt of jokes for years. But beneath the jokes and oversimplification lies a richly built but ultimately tragic character. Karn is trying his best to improve a broken world, all while indelibly marked by the sins of his father, Urza.

While other characters have since taken the forefront of Magic's story, Karn has been a crucial part of it since the beginning and his overall arc was recently brought to what many could speculate is a conclusion (at least for the time being). Enjoy this in-depth look at a character near and dear to many.

The uniqueness and versatility of Magic's color pie is a crucial part of the game's success over the years. It's impossible to imagine the game without the constant interplay and competition between the five colors and their conflicting philosophies. But, in this humble writer's opinion, one of these colors has been given a bad deal as of late: It's Green, baby. Green is often maligned as too homogenous or too powerful. Enfranchised players often view it as too simple, or maybe even boring. But what these folks don't know is that Green is Magic's most interesting, flavorful, color. In twenty minutes, you'll agree. This episode breaks down some of the common complaints players have about Green ranging from the somewhat misguided to the completely incorrect. This is a celebration of a color that knows exactly what it is.

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Check out the decklists referenced in this episode on Moxfield: https://www.moxfield.com/users/SweetDaniel

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For about as long as Commander has been a format, power level discourse has been ubiquitous. The more the format grows, the less the standard 1-10 scale of discerning a deck's power level can be relied on. In this video, I discuss the fact that maybe it's time to we stopped trying to evaluate decks and started trying to evaluate the people piloting them. This episode looks at the different things players value and places them into two camps, not as a means of describing the power level of their decks but as a means of introspecting and learning what we as individuals want from our games. This is Sizzle & Steak.

Excited for March of the Machine but don't have enough time to catch up on 30 years of lore? Looking for a quick brush up on the basics? Look no further! This Spring, Magic is going to be more fun if you know the story behind the cards and in just about five minutes, we'll get you caught up! Magic's lore has surrounded Phyrexia and Phyrexian influence for nearly all of its 30 year life span and looking at the totality of the stories told can be intimidating. Take a seat and get a birds eye view so that you can jump on board the lore train just in time for all the payoff!

Give me fifteen minutes and I'll convince you to concede more Commander games