Dear CEOs: Please Find A Cooler Way To Kill Me
Silicon Valley, CA — I, Red of the Commander’s Herald, believe that I speak for the whole world when I come to the various tech and finance CEOs among the billionaire class and say:
Please, we’re begging you… find a cooler way to kill us.
For those unfamiliar, pretty much every tech or finance CEO has a Commander deck, and (perhaps because none of them are at all restricted by budget) they all play some very, very boring decks. For example, former Amazon CEO and current Amazon executive chair Jeff Bezos plays an extremely annoying, linear Treasure deck whose singular win condition is Revel in Riches, which Bezos tutors for every single game. Bezos openly told me that he would gladly Rule 0 the card into his command zone, but he is content to instead play every tutor on the Game Changers list and every expensive treasure generator ever printed. He doesn’t actually spend any of his Treasures, except on attempts to make even more. He also wishes that the card required a higher Treasure count than just ten–not because he thinks it’s unbalanced, but so that he wouldn’t sometimes win the game with only ten treasures if he opens with Revel before any major treasure-makers.
In a move that is similar in concept but different in execution, venture capitalist Bryan Johnson opts for the enchantment Test of Endurance and then plays every boring lifegain card ever. He also, confusingly, runs a lot of Phyrexian Arena style card draw and attempts to simply “outrun” the attrition that he creates for himself, as well as the natural entropy of Commander, where damage is sometimes spread to all opponents. Perhaps by Bezos’ copy of Descent into Avernus, which I believe is the only cool card in Bezos’ deck, and hope he will end up there someday.
Not every noted CEO is present at these events, however. Notorious loser and locker-sized dweeb Elon Musk was, according to other attendees, invited to previous events in decades prior, but has since been unceremoniously uninvited because, as anonymous sources put it, his decks “just don’t work.” It is for presumably the same reason that Musk was not invited to Epstein’s island, despite desperately wishing to be invited there.
“It’s so bizarre,” says one anonymous staffer, who supplies the event with drinks and ketamine, like every event for the ultra-wealthy requires. “Musk always came in saying that he had this super cool Mechanized Production deck, and all the other CEOs for some reason agreed that that idea had merit. But the deck never actually worked. He put way too much effort into making a supposedly ‘cool’ artifact to enchant with Mechanized Production first. I think his most recent build was enchanting vehicles? But he absolutely refused to crew them, only animating them with stuff like Ensoul Artifact. Or, at least, I think that was the weird restriction? He never actually drew any way to animate the vehicles, so he’d just lose every game with a bunch of un-crewed vehicles he couldn’t use.”
Another unverified source claimed that Musk has also tried to win in Commander with Battle of Wits–an obviously-doomed endeavor, considering that the starting library for Commander is well under the 200 necessary cards in library for Battle of Wits to actually win the game. This contradictory impulse may also explain why Musk ultimately decided to buy Twitter, though that is pure conjecture on this journalist’s part.
“They all just have these fuckass ‘win the game’ cards,” says one frustrated Silicon Valley hardware researcher–who, unlike the CEOs mentioned above, actually works for a living, instead of belonging to the aristocracy. “It’s the same shit every game. Bezos and Revel in Riches, Thompson with Test of Endurance, Musk and his stupid Mechanized Production, and even Sam Altman and Dario Amodei are both trying to win with Helix Pinnacle. Peter Thiel is lobbying the government with his Azor’s Elocutors, and he also plays Telepathy and Lantern of Insight, since he always wants to know everything people are gonna play. Y’know, when I was a kid, I saw stories of evil CEOs with decks that would, like, make them a ton of artifact creature tokens, like a blink engine with Urza, Lord High Artificer. You’d think Elon would play a deck like that. Or maybe, I dunno, Altman or Amodei would use all their endless monogreen ramp decks to actually play a dinosaur or something, like any other green player. But nope! It all goes into Helix Pinnacle. These are some of the most boring motherfuckers alive.”
I am afraid that I must agree with my anonymous source here, dear reader. I live in a world where I am not permitted to own software, where my tax dollars fund a genocide, where algorithms decide much of my life, where my politicians are ultra-wealthy criminal monsters–all of these things being true in most gritty works of near-future science fiction a la Cyberpunk–and yet I do not even have a cool robot arm or anything, and it is still generally frowned upon to carry a katana in public. If these monsters really must ruin the world–er, win the game, then the absolute least they could do is look cool while they do it. But they refuse to give us even that.
For my participation in the tournament, dear reader, I brought my budget Prossh, Skyraider of Kher deck to the event, where, rather than using Prossh himself or an aristocrat strategy, I instead use anthem effects like Shared Animosity and Paragon of Fierce Defiance on the kobold tokens. My hope was to trick my far wealthier opponents into thinking I would sacrifice my kobolds to Prossh, like they would, only to instead suddenly buff my kobold proletariat and attack in far greater numbers than my opponents expect.
I was however ultimately unable to secure a spot at any of the tables once my opponents saw my net worth and the topics of my prior articles. It seems they had only mistakenly invited me in the first place because I supposedly resemble Caitlyn Jenner (a woman over twice my age and lacking even a tenth of my charisma), though this was accompanied by the dubious claim that “you [slur redacted by editor] all look the same.”
Despite this disappointing setback, I still think that my deck strategy is sound, and could perhaps be implemented by the public at large. We cannot wait for the billionaire class to finally start playing cool decks–we must instead create the world that we wish to live in, cyberpunk dystopia or otherwise.
