Number 4
Lift your shirt and ask “Would you really attack these abs?”
Don’t forget that someone out there thinks you’re hot stuff. Mathematically speaking, anyway. So why not test the odds to see if one of those people are sitting at your pod? The next time someone announces their intention to boop you, lift up your shirt and ask, “Would you attack these abs?”
Odds are the answer will be, “absolutely yes” or more than likely, “ew, stop or we’re done here” or the ol’ “you should probably have that mole looked at.” Either way, Magic: The Gathering is a game of odds, and we all know you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.
Number 3
Run distraction by announcing every turn’s draw with “Nice, another combo piece.”
We all tend to give away a lot more information while playing paper. Reactions to a bad or good hand, or a much needed topdeck. Even your facial expressions when discussing politics can give away information your opponent’s need to make informed choices inevitably leading to their victory and your defeat.
One trick to offset this is to make every draw seem like the best draw ever, even if it is just a Rakdos Guildgate. Announcing “nice! Another combo piece,” with every turn might draw ire from your opponents, but it also might keep them on their toes and thus, keep their interaction in hand, waiting for your combo to pop off before spending those cards on interacting with your board.
Number 2
Gaslight opponents on spell table by occasionally switching your feed between two nearly identical board states with subtle differences.
Sure, we all love a good game of commander on spelltable, but politics can be much more impersonal and calculated when you’re not sharing a table in analog meat form. There’s not much you can do to offset this playing via webcam, other than seeing if everyone is willing to display their mug on a separate feed, but even that takes time and setup, and often times isn’t going to be viable.
So instead of fighting against something you have no control over, create your own ways to circumvent the stringent politics of the digital world by creating two different board states on two identical mats with two identical decks with two identical camera setups, only with slight differences. Then, on your end of things, quickly switch between these two and watch you opponents question their own sanity.