Good morning (or evening?) dear card game competitor. This week we’ve got two pieces on parts of the competition that live in your head. Our cEDH writer Talion breaks down “foothold theory,” how to get your opponents to do your bidding for you.

Jon Rosum returns this week and gets honest about tilt, and how to manage it when the going gets tough.

Let’s get into it.

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The art of making your opponents do the interacting and keeping your seatbelt buckled while they fight.

By Talion

The goal of midrange decks in cEDH is to ensure you aren’t driving for as much of the game as possible. Let me explain.

As a midrange player, your chances of victory go up the longer you spend accumulating resources without being forced to spend those resources by interacting. Or in other words, the longer you watch your opponents playing Magic without participating yourself. Or in other other words… sitting in the passenger seat, with your seatbelt buckled, sipping a $12 milkshake you didn’t pay for.

The problem with this is that everyone else is also trying to be a passenger princess, and the shotgun seat is not that roomy. In my experience, you can fit two people on there max, and even that is quite a squeeze - all four players are constantly trying to force each other to interact. The hierarchy of “who is supposed to interact here” is determined by whichever player is perceived to have the most resources, or by whoever doesn’t have an obvious win lined up for next turn and is susceptible to peer pressure.

Most of the interaction we see in cEDH is fundamentally… clunky. In other formats, counterspells are precision instruments, but we don’t wield them with precision - we throw them at every problem, and rely on sheer volume to ensure they do the job. The fact that most of our countermagic only hits noncreature spells chokes our interaction points even further, forcing everyone to grasp for the same interaction points. But there is another way.

I used to run Talion (who’s surprised), and took them to my first ever tournament way back in 2024 - in fact, I still have the list I used. Back then, I didn’t fully understand what I was doing, as might be evident from looking at the decklist, but the deck was a great poster child for what I now internally refer to as “foothold theory”.

As a control player, I think of any point that allows other players to help you fight as a “foothold.” By dumping permanents like Grafdigger’s Cage or Cursed Totem into play, or playing weirdo cards like Stifle or Louisoix’s Sacrifice, you can create barriers for your opponents in unexpected places.This forces the other players at the table to fight on your terms rather than allowing them to bully you into fighting them on theirs.

To illustrate what I mean, let me use the classic example of one of the most well-known win conditions in cEDH. Your opponent puts a Thassa’s Oracle trigger on the stack, and responds with Tainted Pact. Usually, this would be your interaction point. Counterspells and removal don’t help you against a Thassa’s Oracle trigger. There is usually some table talk, the three other players trying to size each other up and determine who should be interacting.

If you are holding countermagic, this is probably the point where you might feel compelled to step up, or perhaps offer a draw if another player is close to winning. However, if you can confidently pass on the Pact, you force the other players’ hands, and remain firmly planted in the passenger seat.

Of course, the only way to ensure you can convincingly pass without just… lying about not having anything is by playing something that interacts at a later point. In my Talion list, that thing is Trickbind, but it could just as easily be something like an Endurance or even a Consign to Memory if you’re feeling extra spicy. As long as it provides a spell on the stack that people are forced to fight over - a foothold - we can use it to resource-check our opponents by passing on their interaction point.

Permanent-based footholds require more politics, but fundamentally do the same thing. By presenting a Cursed Totem in a pod with Sisay, for example, you create a roadblock that must be dealt with via interactible means before Sisay can pull off their usual uninteractible winline. You can then leverage other players to ensure that roadblock remains in place, because you have given them a clearly defined thing to fight over. One of the best feelings in cEDH is having other players fight to keep your stax piece in play because it’s stopping a mutual opponent from winning.

Of course, I would be remiss to end this article without mentioning the ultimate foothold - flash enablers. Foothold theory is the reason these are so potent - in decks that are set up for them, a flash enabler effectively allows you to wait until the very final moment before you need to do anything, let alone something so pedestrian as interacting with the active win attempt. Why take the driver’s seat when you can watch from the sidelines, only swooping in once everyone has finished throwing countermagic at each other?

The next time you’re building a deck, after you add all the normal interaction, just take a second and see if you can’t fit in one or two footholds - or identify the ones you may have already included without even realising. Being able to pass priority will win you games of cEDH, and identifying these cards in deckbuilding and in gameplay is one of the core skills that will allow you to keep your ass firmly planted in the passenger seat.

Shotgun!

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Former SCG grinder Jon Rosum on the year competitive success broke him and the four things that pulled him back.

By Jon Rosum

Card games have always been a huge part of my life. I think back to the time when I first started playing Magic: The Gathering when I was 12 years old in one of the smallest game stores ever every other day after Jr. High School and I was hooked immediately. As somebody who really gives his all in his passions this would end up being no different and I would just get better and better over the years to the point where I was actively traveling and competing every other weekend. 

That being said, there was a time I felt like I was on top of the world with my game, I was one of the best grinders on the SCGTour in 2018 and I felt like I was just dominating the competition both in part because my technical play was sound and I practiced a lot, but then something switched in 2019 where I felt like I couldn’t buy a critical win and that ended up destroying me mentally. 

I feel like I see a lot of TCG-gamers fall into the same trap that I did, you get a glimmer of success and even repeated success and you expect that to just be the norm when in reality that isn’t the case. It’s good to care about your game but you need to be able to accept when things don’t go your way. As somebody who spent 2019 being very frustrated and not the same person I felt like I was when I was dominating it was really eating away at me. 

It’s a good thing to care, but you need to be able to channel both the good and bad energy into something productive, and this took me many years but something I feel like I have been able to do in Riftbound. At the end of the day, we are all human and we want to succeed but we need to be able to take the good with the bad. 

It’s really hard to change once you find yourself in this loop and requires a lot of cognizant effort but I assure you that it is worth it, here are some things that worked for me. 

I’m writing this off the back of a not very successful set 3 in Riftbound where in set 2 I won a 25k and 10k back-to-back and T64’d the Vegas Regional. I am grateful to be in the position I’m in but also being able to deal with the swings has been critical in making sure that I stay level-headed. I hope that this piece resonates with some of you, and I know the 20 year old Jon Rosum who was malding off the face of the earth would be very proud of who I am now at 27 and I know there is even still more room to grow.

Keep caring, Keep training, keep showing up and I promise you will find some form of success but remember to keep enjoying the hobby.

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