Threats Around Every CornerThreats Around Every Corner | Art by Andrea Piparo

Hello, and welcome back to How To Be New, a series for players who, only after three mulligans, suddenly realize that the problem they're having with their brand new deck isn't just unfortunate luck of the draw.

I hope you had a wonderful time over the holidays, and I'm looking forward to another year of Magic with you. And it's starting fast, with Lorwyn Eclipsed prerelease events already happening this weekend! What is Lorwyn? What is it being eclipsed by? I'm not sure, but apparently the set was codenamed "wrestling," which gives me some ideas.

And, wait a second, oh my god they made a JIM HENSON COMPANY PUPPET TRAILER?! Alright. Might be a pretty fun year.

Today, we're going to talk about a term that you'll hear pretty often in nearly every Commander pod: Threat Assessment. Is it a skill? Is it a card? Is it one of those overpowered Warhammer precons that people mutter rumors about in hushed whispers where the Wizards of the Coast can't hear them? Well, it's sort of complicated. So let's dive in.

What Is Threat Assessment?

On its face, "threat assessment" refers to the act of looking around a game of Commander and determining who, if left unchecked by the other players, is most likely to win the game. It's important, because shutting down threats will not only keep you in the game long enough to hopefully get to your own win condition, it will also ingratiate you to your fellow players at the table.

And getting an invite back to the pod is really one of the biggest wins you'll have in Magic.

Threat assessment is often used to answer one or both of the following questions:

• Is anybody close enough to their win condition that the rest of the table should team up against them?
• Who should I attack, or who should I hit in the face* with damage?

*"hitting in the face," "going face," "taking damage to my face," are all phrases that refer to damage which will be dealt directly to a player's life points, rather than to a creature. In this way, Magic: the Gathering operates a lot like The Three Stooges: If I can't block it, it's hitting me right in the face.

But there are a lot of things that factor into threat assessment. And there are darker truths that lie just belowlie just below all the facts and figures that go into a good threat assessment. Here are some tips for properly assessing the threat at your commander table.

Threat Assessment Is (Mostly) Not Based on Life Total

I'm sure even a relatively new Commander player can identify that a player with eight life and a Krenko, Mob BossKrenko, Mob Boss who's churning out 36² Goblin tokens on every player's turn is much more of a threat than a person with 40 life who hasn't been able to play a land since turn two.

That's because life total is not how you keep score in Commander. It's merely the clock which tells you how long you have left to win the game. And until that clock strikes midnightclock strikes midnight, Cinderella still has plenty of time to break a glass heel off in your sternum. Always remember that the only important life point is your last one, and until then, anything can happen.

Also consider that games of Commander almost unilaterally devolve into a heavyweight slugfest akin to the end of a Rocky movie, where jabs have long been abandoned in favor of big, meaty haymakers. Which is to say, games will much more often end with a person attacking with 30+ power rather than a four-power attacker that just manages to slip through the opponent's defenses.

So rather than assessing threats by comparing life totals, let's look instead at the way players will gear themselves up for that 30+ swing.

Note: Many players will insist that leaving life total outliers is also bad threat assessment, and insist that the table's life totals be whittled down with some sense of equilibrium. This, I argue, is a matter of defensive threat assessment, which I will be discussing later.

Resources Are a Threat

There are two things necessary to win a game of Commander, and neither of them are Deflecting SwatDeflecting Swat. They are cards and mana. Every single deck operates on those two things as its lifeblood. Think about it, why are people so wary of blue players and green players? Because blue has a reputation for dominating on cards, and green has a reputation for dominating on mana. We often see these players as threats simply because they have better command than anybody else over the two most foundational parts of the game.

Does that mean that blue and green players are obvious threats and should be treated as such? No**. But they could become threats if those parts of their engine start coming together. However, this is also true for a player in white who has Trouble in PairsTrouble in Pairs and Smuggler's ShareSmuggler's Share both up and running.

At this point, every color and combination has access to these tools, and any deck worth its salt will have pieces to create these advantages for itself (have you ever seen a precon deck without Sol RingSol Ring?).

So, if a player has something that is creating free mana or card draw at a rate that outpaces the other players, that player should be seen as a threat. Even if their threatening pieces aren't on the board yet, they're coming, and the statistics say that they will see the battlefield before your answers do.

This is especially true of players who are creating a lot of TreasureTreasure tokens. A person playing extra lands must use cards from their hand. This also creates an easily surveyable mass of cards in front of your them that you can eyeball to determine their relative level of available mana. Lands are like poker chips in this way: You don't need to know the specifics to understand that more is generally better. But Treasure tokens are typically tracked by incrementing a spindown die perched innocently on a Treasure token. It's very easy to lose track of just how much mana your opponent is amassing, which makes that mana all the more threatening.

**Yes

Board State: Clear and Present Danger

The most common way to do a quick threat assessment is by surveying what each player currently has on the battlefield (often referred to as their "board state"). And while there are plenty of nasty creatures that can make a player a threat just by hitting the battlefield (so precious few will see a Craterhoof BehemothCraterhoof Behemoth land on the table and live to tell the tale), the real skill is in identifying impending threats.

One thing to keep an eye out for is any creature that is growing stronger each turn, and how fast they're doing so. For example, creatures that accumulate +1/+1 counters quickly need to be watched. There are a lot of countercounter doublersdoublers in Magic, so while a single +1/+1 counter doesn't seem like much, with just a simple enchantment or two, Ms. BumbleflowerMs. Bumbleflower can grow from a friendly 1/5 into a world ending 45/49 before you can say "I'd love to draw a card."

This applies to anything that amasses tokens as well. I mentioned Krenko, Mob BossKrenko, Mob Boss earlier, as he's the commander that teaches many new players this lesson, myself included.

Another thing to watch is anything that's gaining layers of protection. Voltron decks (decks which involve outfitting a single, terrifyingterrifying creaturecreature with every shiny piece of Equipment that's ever been printed) for example, are big on layers of protection. Things like hexproof, ward, shroud, indestructible, will all make removal opportunities few and far between.

Oftentimes, Voltron creatures will require a coordinated effort to strip away a few protective pieces of Equipment so that someone else can remove the creature before its owner can replace those defensive layers. And that requires artifact and enchantment removal, both of which are largely underrepresented in commander deck lists.

So be sure to deal with those creatures before you lose your chance.

Threat Assessment for the Neurodivergent: The Person Whose Turn Takes Too Long

This isn't necessarily an official tip, but it has served me well as a person with ADHD. If there's a person whose turn is taking so long that you take out your phone to hop on Reddit, they need to go. Lots of game actions usually means that person is making progress towards a win condition of some sort. And if they aren't meaningfully moving towards a win condition with all of those game actions, that's all the more reason to take them out.

If a person digs through their discard pile five times per turn, kindly remind them that the Yu-Gi-Oh! tables are across the store and send them to the shadow realm however possible. Threats to your mental health deserve assessment too.

The Unspoken Truth About Threat Assessment

Now, all of these are perfectly fine ways to go about threat assessment, and should help you to identify where your attention should go in your next game of Commander. But there's another layer to threat assessment, and that's the social deduction aspect. A lot of the things we do at a Commander table, like spreading around damage, not going all out with early attacks, these are things we do in an attempt to label ourselves as not the threat.

You may notice that when going through a threat assessment at the table, nobody ever really admits that they're the problem. At most, the player who's ahead will say something like "Yeah, I had a good opening hand," and leave it at that (with the exception of a guy at a game recently who pointed out the infinite combo he was going to pull off next turn as he passed, allowing us ample time to thwart it. It was the most bizzarely honorable thing I've ever seen at a Commander table).

So no threat assessment will ever be perfect. And like anything, opinions will differ around the table due to perceptions and biases and obfuscations. But if you can back up your point of view, and continue to improve as you go, you'll get the all-important invite back to the pod.

And until you're a master, you can just point fingers at the mono-blue and mono-green players in the meantime. It may not be perfect, but it's a time-honored tradition for a reason.