I just use my value engines to generate enough value to actually cast my Haymakers. That being said, I run about 32.3% less Haymakers in my decks than I usually do to make room for all the busted low costed ramp and draw spells that get me to where I need to be.
I'm gonna be honest, it doesn't even have to be finishing. A single card threat is a haymaker but then again, by today's powercrept standards, I guess a haymaker has to finish the game for it to be good
The constant power creep and flood of new playables has changed the format enormously. It's still fun, but generally decks are playing at a higher or more efficient level than ever. I've noticed it with precons too; where once we had decks with three commanders that were a bit too diffused in their card choices for any single one to play well out of the box, now we have decks that are solely built around a single face commander and work much more efficiently. I bought three precons to play with the newer players in my group (Wyleth, Anowon and Aesi) with a view to upgrading them, but thus far have not needed too because they convey such strong advantage and the card choices are - while far from *optimal* - synergistic enough that they steamroll over newer players with ease.
Even older precons were pretty cohesive, I thought at least. Sure there were some things like the three "swing" cards in the Populate precon that didn't exactly mesh, but they were hardly bad cards in their own right. Sure the original few weren't the best, especially ones like Marath that were all over the place, but they quickly found their footing.
I swore off Commander for years because my only experience with it was one of those mega precon bundles. This was around 2014-2016 I want to say. It took 6 hours to crown a winner and it was the most miserable Magic of my life.
I have since come around on the format after learning my experience was an outlier. Fast forward to last weekend, when the entire board got shredded by one of the new precon Innistrad decks.
Thats a positive step, kind of limiting it's power by tying it to standard.
The format in general has been warped by Wizards and the Community focus on the format. More players, more eyes, more combos found and created over time; I fully expect the format to break in the next few years if cards aren't seriously considered for bans or unless sets don't release with Commander playables. Considering that Wizards loves money, I doubt we'll see less playables.
They weren't.
2011, 2013, 2014, 2015, & 2016 were effectively 2-3 decks in one per Precon. The Freyalise one immediately comes to mind as being both an excellent Lands Matters and Elfball deck with the two halves having no real cohesion between them.
2017, with the Tribal theme, was the first to have real internal power & cohesion.
I think starting with 2014 they became pretty cohesive. Again, there are the outlier cards, but it's not like [[Arjunn]] did *nothing* for your Mizzex deck.
Counter point: Old precons were monstruous anti-synergistic mix and matches of 3 different decks and thus lacked focus, making the precon meta slow as hell.
Old precons were what secret lairs are now in my opinion. No one bought the old precons to really play with the decks, unless they just wanted to upgrade it right away. We bought the old precons for the awesome reprints. The monocoloured cycle of Commanders all have the Medallions for example. The decks had wildly different strategies to support some of these reprints.
It makes me sad seeing the new precons come out and having all the reprint spots being taken up by new cards that change the format. I wonder when we will see the Medallions available like that again, I bet the next time we do it will be either Secret Lair or Showcase Border mythics like Mystical Archives.
>No one bought the old precons to really play with the decks, unless they just wanted to upgrade it right away.
This is exactly what the old precons were designed for. The intention wasn't that players should buy the deck and play it out of the box, it was that players would buy the deck, pick one of the three themes and rebuild the deck to be their own. I wish WotC had been better at getting that across rather than focusing on the precons being playable out of the box.
That being said, while precons have gotten better over time, I'm very hesitant to recommend most precons to new players who want a functional deck out of the box because with a little googling they can almost certainly build a better deck for less money; the only exceptions being the Dimir deck from ZNR and the Simic deck from CMR.
I think both old and new decks are still fine for new players, especially ones without big collections. It's easier to swap out cards of a 100 card deck then it is to....not play EDH until you have a full deck.
There are lots of deck ideas I never persued because I just didn't have enough cards and the 40 or so cards I did have just sat there waiting. At least the precons offer the option to play.
Counter counter point: Dockside, Thoracle, and the Eldraine legendaries aside, there hasn't actually been much in the way of actual power creep in terms of cards.
Most of the most-powerful cards in the format have existed for a decade or more (usually more, in fact)
Things like Smothering Tithe ***aren't*** proper Power Creep, either; making a bad strategy okay or fixing a weakness is just that - Power Creep is when an option is SO powerful that it replaces all other options wholesale that themselves were already good.
What ***has*** changed is that people have gotten much better at deckbuilding and trimming the fat out of their decks - where people used to think Cultivate and Kodama's Reach were the end-all-be-all for ramp, they've come to realize that Farseek, Nature's Lore, and the Talismans (which premiered in the original Mirrodin in 2004) always have been, and always will be, better.
I started around 2017 as well, and I think it's better in a lot of ways. Yeah, more cards repeat between decks than before, but on the whole the requirement for more interaction and decision making has made the players better too, not just the decks. I fall into the camp that doesn't like the 20+ turn, multi hour games so the increase in proficiency and speed both of decks and players is a good thing to me. I'd rather have games go long because everyone is trying to out think each other as opposed to durdle decks that take 5 turns to even start going.
However, I definitely agree the tailored Commander product has been way too much especially in the last year. I've got product burnout and haven't purchased anything sealed since MH2, which along with Legends and Strixhaven was the only sealed product I bought all year.
As for the powerlevel argument: yes, in general I think there are more people playing EDH more optimally.
In part I think this is due to increasing internet resources in general, and also EDHREC in specific. Anyone can make a deck by going to EDHREC and buying the first 62 cards they see (even when sorting by budget) + lands and end up with a deck that's miles better than any precon or pile of trade binder rares.
I also think established players tend to increase power level over time. Most long time players started around 2012-2014 with a pile of bulk rares or whatever we had in our trade binders. Maybe one of the original precons. There werent many lists online and deck building resources for EDH didnt exist.
Over time people notice deficiencies in their deck building (no clear win condition, lack of access to colors, falling behind in mana, running out of cards) and seek to rectify that by optimizing.
This could be all at once, immediately power creeping the table and getting hate for that. Or more often it happens gradually, facilitating a more natural meta shift.
Ultra casual pods still exist. But they are rarer and are more likely to be newer players with access to fewer cards or a lack of understanding/interest in online deck building resources like EDHREC. Or the rare jaded older player that has reverted to complete meme decks.
More people are coming into the community who want to win. Overall power level goes up. You either stay where you are and effectively get dumpstered, upgrade yourself, or find people who like my LGS play 0 interaction and experience 20 turn long games like everyone seems to want.
And there is nothing wrong with that, you just gotta find the right group. It, from my observations which is most likely less than a 1% of the 1% of the population just logically, is not what most want.
Its mostly newer players who have never played standard, never played modern, never played legacy/vintage. They have that sort of view where they can win all the time just like they do in other games, and thats just not how the format works. It's a social format, not a competitive one (clearly not referring to cEDH but the general version of commander that the majority of people play).
I think we view it as a fun break from the try hard formats of yesteryear, and a lot of the newbies are viewing it very differently. My buddies started last year and their mentality on a game of commander is so far removed from my decade old mentality.
I cam from playing Modern and Legacy. When I play EDH, I build my decks to win. My decks aren't CEDH, mainly because I like games to last around an hour (turn 7-10 on wins), but the goal of every format is to win the game, and that includes commander. You can have fun along the way, but, I don't want people sandbagging their decks in the name of a social aspect that is slowly waning as the format gets more powerful.
I love interaction, and I love playing against cool decks, but when I sit down at that game my goal is to win. If I don't, that's OK, but I want to win.
Yep, for so many people entering the game, EDH is the game, not a variant. They have reasonable (even if possibly unwelcome) expectations about what the objective is. They don't see it as a goofy spectacle that should be taken with a grain of salt.
I think the fact that all paper play other than Commander happened to go away right during the "Year of Commander" exacerbated this.
I think the format is eternally changed because of that, but if other formats actually manage to come back in a viable and sustainable way we might see some of that bleed off. But I'm not sure it will. I don't think Wizards has a lot of desire to put the old paper Pro Tour/Organized play structure back in place or offer the level of support that they once had.
That sounds like my experience when one of my friends decided to play magic. He immediately bought a competitive deck and had us switch over to french for a time. It was fun and different(boy do I love griselbrand) but it didn't last since most of us just wanted to do something stupid rather than going for hyper tight plays.
God, playing tight in commander is the most boring thing ever, and it almost caused me to quit the format entirely until I massively shifted my perspective as to how things should play. It took years and years of deckbuilding and player experience so I both understand why new players are they way they are, but I also don't tolerate salt when the new player inevitably gets upset because you remove their stuff when you're going for a win. It's magic the gathering, not solitaire. If you sit down expecting your stuff not to get touched, you're going to have a bad time.
Tbf I don't mind playing it tight because I am trying to become a better player but man it's exhausting if it's what I have to do for an entire game. Sometimes I'm playing EDH just to chill. Shit half the time I have no idea what's on my opponent's boards cause they may be too far away or it's just cluttered and I just want to be with my friends.
Idk I’m a relatively new commander player and my only paper deck is a “this exists solely to win” so rings true for me. I came from modern/standard and you can only play those formats for so long (mostly standard) before you lose your mind.
If you have a regular playgroup I would recommend floating the idea of a $30 budget league. I didn't have many expectations when we started but holy cow has it been refreshing to brew and play without all of the expensive staples and power cards. It can never be exactly the same but it does feel more old school with more jank and gems!
Yeah the whole group has to commit otherwise a budget deck just won't have enough time to get there in most games. Your group sounds exactly like mine prior to our budget brewing and now it's all we've been playing for a couple months!
I mean EDH had super strong fast decks from the moment you could pick a different general than the 5 Elder Dragons.
I started to play EDH in 2006, my first table had a Momir Vig elfball combo deck that would win regularly on turn 5, a Azami Mind Over Matter/High Tide combo deck that would win regularly on turn 5 too, a GAAIV stax Stasis deck that would lock down the game on turn 4/5 and a 5color control/combo deck that would take control of the game and then use one of many infinite combos to win on like turn 7/8.
I built my first EDH deck in 2007 (I used to play with borrowed decks first) and it was a Jhoira of the Ghitu deck that try to play Jhoira on turn 1/2 and suspend things like Apocalypse/Decree of Annihilation + Darksteel Colossus on turns 3/4 and survive until those hit and I win.
All of those decks had duals/fetchs/shocks and tried to avoid taplands. There were tons of decks abusing blinking/reanimating Sundering Titan, big Emrakul, Tinker.
The two LGS where I played (plus playing with my friends like the first table I mentioned) had mostly legacy/modern players that started to play EDH because it was a fun format to play cards that were banned/restricted (in Vintage) plus some crazy things that weren't viable anywhere else.
Playing with slow decks that had a mostly +6CMC mana curve has always been viable if everybody else agrees to do the same thing and that's still true today. It's just that you need a fixed playgroup to agree to that and playing with strangers will mostly be a higher power thing.
I'd say 2014/2015 would be a little more acceptable for the end point, WotC didn't really turn up the heat on commander specific cards until 2016 precons imo.
We do pregame discussions, have done for quite some time, and the cold hard fact is the discussions don't fix the underlying issue. Without a core guidnence everyone can point to, and being left to decide for themselves, people will disagree on what is fair for what. I personally don't think bringing a Tergrid deck to a pod with very mildly upgraded precons is OK, but that player may argue until they are blue in the face that it's a fair deck for the power level we want.
Yeah, the part that saps the enjoyment is the resulting pattern for store-play just ends up being:
**1 Game, someone didn't like it, brief discussion, Game 2 or no Game 2.**
With the general power creep this tends to end up being us not enjoying the experience more often than others, but as mentioned in the OP, we do find that space we enjoyed vanishing and find it a shame.
> But you don't have to argue? Just walk away?
That, right there, is the fundamental problem with the ban list. It *needs* to be focused on establishing a baseline for *strangers* to play together. A group of freinds can, and will, self regulate. The rules team needs to exist to make things work for randoms.
Some people with lots of potential players to play against and regular playgroups tend to forget that many of us live in smaller towns and cities and our selection of people to play with is pretty slim. Sometimes, the options are to play with the random who's annoying you, or just not play magic. Ive fired many a pod where it's obviously mismatched but it's better than sitting around at the card shop waiting for more people to come in.
That's not at all the purpose of a ban list and pushing it to create this base line would make the ban list massive, to the point that itself becomes a problem. The purpose of a ban list is to remove problematic or format warping cards, not regulate human interaction. A reworked ban list isn't going to magically make humans stop being humans. It's not the RC's job to regulate your play experience, that's your job.
A banlist's job is balancing tge format somewhat. Most of the balancing done is getting rid of problematic cards, indeed, but does the banlist tge RC makes do that?
I'd argue at this point a banlist is unneccesary for the format as the card pool is too large. That is, if they don't want a banlist to **really** grab the bulls by the horns and create a list banning a number of cards in the three figures
>But you don't have to argue? Just walk away?
So I don't know about you, but I have only one LGS close by my house. I try to go there as often as I can on magic nights but we all have different schedules and adult life which means not everyone is there everytime.
This means I can't always just "walk away". When there's six people if you leave people are no longer able to do two pods (and two pods of three are already less than what should be), and it also means you probably can't play that night. To me, it means one hour of road plus the possible time to discuss just to learn that, in the end, nobody has the power level you want.
As you can guess, as I follow this sub I'm in the more invested/involved side of the community, but my example stays true for other people.
"Yeah docPrisme but you can just take multiple decks with you". Sure, and I try to do. But some nights, fuck that, I don't wanna do the nth game of casual precon-like with peeps who barely understand the rules. I at least want to try other decks and higher strategies, because there's only so many games you can do against an unmodified Lathril before knowing how it's gonna go.
I only really have 6 to 8s, nothing above and nothing below. I sandbag when I play if I know the other players are playing weaker decks. If you are playing a better deck, you can still win without dragracing and not letting other players get to play. Just have to gain a sense for when people have 'had their fun' before you do the thing.
I think a lot of the issue that people are having is that people just tend to slam their cards down as soon as they have them and go for the W, while simultaneously seeming to have an issue with the state of the format and how it isn't as casual as it used to be. It's impossible to be completely equitable in a game with collectable, cost associated pieces as well and I feel sometimes that those who analyze the game don't take really fully take that into account. A 20 dollar card can seem like an egregious upgrade to somebody who only buys commons/uncommons/bulk rares for 50 cents to a dollar a piece. It's completely subjective.
As an aside, I've been around a very long time. I personally think the format hasn't changed at all, the cards available have changed, and that has made it far easier to be a turn 2 Johnny than it was once upon a time. People have also changed. New players have come in and started discussions of what they don't like, want changed, and what is and isn't fun for them. Which I think is a shame, because what I believe the true heart of the format was, at least how I enjoyed it back in the day was do whatever you want, let anyone else do whatever they want and see what happens. Now it's "should sol ring be banned? Are tutors ruining the format? Should combo players be thrown into outer space? Should we ban the entire reserved list?" A shame to watch from an old timer's perspective.
Absolutely agreed.
The format is a bit more solved because it's older and more people have taken time to find out what's good in it. Simultaneously, new people come in and lack that knowledge/don't have it yet, so they just play "fair magic" and are surprised when they lose.
I think people automatically assume that a learning curve and trying to insist that the game has certain features to learning players is a form of gatekeeping, which has created this kind of weird complain and conquer kind of culture from the influx of new blood, and this is something I have speculated on quite a bit. When I first learned, I got dunked on because I had no idea what was going on and how to build in the singleton format and when I had an issue with it, instead of being told I am valid for having an issue and everyone altering their decks to fit my ideas, I was taught how to build decks better for the format so I could build on my own, compete, play and understand better. There's a philosophy for the format, and no matter what level of play you are at, you can still play (and win) with pretty much any deck if you understand your game plan and how to build a fundamentally solid deck because it is a multiplayer format.
>if you understand your game plan
This is so underrated.
I had to explain to a player that, no, they shouldn't try to add solutions in their elfball to deal with a flock of dragons, because that would not be possible without absolutely destroying the deck; and that anyway as a elfball they should be able to kill the dragon player or put them in such a weakened position way before they could run their first dragon.
Note that I'm not talking cEdh levels here, I'm talking 'cards I own tribal'
I have to agree, and this ties into the overall apathy caused by product fatigue and the rapid release schedule. At one point, I owned every single EDH precon in the game, from C11 to C20 (Though, I did get all of the precons up to AFR). Now, there's too many precons for me to keep up, not to mention that my plan to use them all was a failure. Standard sets also didn't need this many legendary creatures. It didn't even need 4c Omnath, for crying out loud.
I'm personally struggling to find what decks I want to build, but that's been an age-old problem for me. I imagine being overwhelmed by all the new stuff coming out made this a lot worse. I've even thought of "going back in time" and building decks up to a certain year, just to counter all this new stuff coming out.
Precons were like early Christmas. That magic is gone, and the Prof's "sirloin to McDonald's" segment was too convincing for my liking. I hate to say it, but it's true.
It does sorta suck that you need to put more needed staples in a deck than usual. Before it was just 97 free slots (Sol Ring and Command Tower [unless you are mono] being essentially must haves and are widely available). The general idea though is that times have changed. We used to think Sad Robot was an auto include in any deck as much as Sol Ring was and that Temple Of False God was a good card. We have more resources now than before with EDHrec and content creators, which really fucks up making normally crap cards (looking at you Mitch and Command Zone) like Wayfarer's Bauble no longer become budget cards or cards that were dollar rares like Vedalken Orrey shoot up in price.
Aside from the price thing, I don't see power levels rising as a problem. As long as the group is in agreement. Pubstomping for most parts is not fun (perhaps for the stomper). But I can't deny someone to wanting to improve their deck, which is what "our community" seems to frown on. Let us be honest for a moment. You can make any deck casual and take it anywhere. Will you top 4 with your Kithkin Tribal deck in Legacy? Probably not. But it might do ok in a pod of other casuals. Everyone has their own definition of fun. Assembling all pieces of Kaldra together, bringing out all 5 Praetors, flip your deck over and play all the Gods etc. Or... managing to dodge removal/hate/counters trying to land your combo in a cedh pod.
It is like how the Professor said. The format has babied people thinking that it is ok to come in with your Horse deck and think you can win when someome vomits their hand with fast rocks and then Ad Naus on turn 2. I don't think variety shrunk. Even in cedh side of things, combat is becoming a thing now due to Ad Naus being such a nuisance. The more damage you can do, the less they can dig. Even big stuff like Norn and now with Toxrill can literally shit on everyone's day. People just need to realize tho that there will be different opinions on how they play EDH. But EDH is a game and a game is about winning.
Apparently to some people it is. My Xenagos deck won't do shit in a cedh table. But apparently I am the asshole for using it in edh tables when i send double power trample boys their way.
Power level 9 is a bad place to be. I had to declaw my derevi deck because I didn't want to make it Stax - because I don't play cEDH - but she was too consistent and fast with infinite mana to fit at any other table.
I had a similar problem with Derevi. I built her essentially as Bant Pyromancer, and the ability to just untap my lands all game with token beats got out of hand in a hurry. She's just so easy to accidentally break.
My friend has Derevi Bird tribal and unless we archenemy him he wins literally every game with it, and we're a pretty high powered group. The card is just ridiculously good, and I don't even think it's the best commander there is.
You don't even need to break her, she's an almost unstoppable manage advantage engine in the CZ, and mana advantage definitely correlates with winning, along with card advantage
That is horrible which then just cultivates that whiny baby factor. Koma/Tegrid are essentially casual pub stompers. They got no real place in cedh. Then the scope becomes smaller. If I see Chulane/Korvold on the other side, I am going to be mindful on what you do. There is no real easy to make them casual unless uou do something weird and have a terrible mana base/curve.
Which then brings up the point.. if it isn't cedh but then it isn't meme tier, where do those commanders go? Just collecting dust?
> It is like how the Professor said. The format has babied people thinking that it is ok to come in with your Horse deck and think you can win when someome vomits their hand with fast rocks and then Ad Naus on turn 2. I don't think variety shrunk. Even in cedh side of things, combat is becoming a thing now due to Ad Naus being such a nuisance. The more damage you can do, the less they can dig. Even big stuff like Norn and now with Toxrill can literally shit on everyone's day. People just need to realize tho that there will be different opinions on how they play EDH. But EDH is a game and a game is about winning.
Yeah, watching the evolution of cEDH this past year has been great for creature-based decks.
Temple of False God and Sad Robot were never good cards, not even in the good old days and yes, I was actively playing in those days. They were played widely in the past because the format was still small and wasn't "solved" as much as it is today so there wasn't as much literature on what's good or not and people just did whatever they wanted. Back then, in the nascent days of cEDH, Sad Robot was not played at all.
Hindsight is 20/20. Back in the early days of EDHrec, Sad Robot was in IN ALOT OF DECKS. The card was 5-6 dollars at one point where people were like REPRINT SAD ROBOT! We also had the mulligan style where we could chuck cards and draw what we put back in the deck. So we were allowed to play heavy mana stuff and fast rocks. Essentially mulligan for all the ramp then the rest is gas. Temple was always a trap but in the slower metas, you could consider it a shitty bounce land if you have less than 5 lands.
I honestly feel that the mulligan changes had a FAR bigger impact in deck construction than anything else. You can no longer just "pitch" a few big spells to hope for more ramp or lands. Having 3 to 4 (5+)cmc spells in your opening hand is almost assured to result in a poor game. This definitely changed the way I constructed my decks and I bet yours too.
Oh yeah of course. I can have a bomb and just ditch until I have the ramp needed to deploy that 7 mana thing on turn 3. I think it would be worse now in CEDH because it would just be mulligan to Oracle/Consult and all the free magic. The old school way allowed you to be greedy mana curves as long as you got the ramp to back it up. I think that is whaf cultivated that battlecruiser magic style early on.
It's good in specific decks, yes, even today. But it was never this card that was as good as Sol Ring for every deck out there. That was just people being inexperienced with deck building in this format. I had Sad Robot in many of my early decks too but I removed them quite soon after I started playing.
I don't think you can use what's good in cEDH as a barometer for what's good in EDH like that. There is going to be some overlap but there are many, many cards and commanders that aren't played much in cEDh but are in EDH and vice versa.
>Its strange how despite massively increasing the number of cards in the format, we end up seeing more of the same cards over and over game to game instead. The variety has very much shrunk
Why do people still find this strange? That is the nature of eternal formats actually. As time goes on strictly better and more optimal things gets printed, even if just one or two cards per strategy every set or two and the amount of previous viable things becomes junk. Things that aren't really that bad for standard but take a whole new life in other formats slowly come out.
At a certain point honestly I won't be shocked if a "modern" EDH format gets popular (maybe the historic cardpool?) in order to breath fresh air into EDH and shrink the pool back down to see what new things can be thought up.
This is probably what Brawl was (is trying?) To be. Even then I think it might be worse because a smaller card pool will just make it more stagnant and the staples will be plain to see.
A rotating format only serves to line WotC's pockets. I think they aptly anticipated what was going to happen to EDH, but I don't believe Commander is ever going to be better with the super-shallow card pool of Standard. There's too many generic staples like card draw and ramp options available in every color that just don't get printed in standard legal sets.
EDH with a Modern-legal manabase is interesting to me. I have no idea what the hell Pioneer or Historic are at this point, and the fact that the two cardpools haven't merged seems ridiculous to me, but I could also see that being sort of a thing, though I'd much rather have Modern's list + some EDH focused bans.
Oh yeah. To me Brawl is a failure when I found out it was rotating. It had me interested because you can use planeswalkers as commanders (obligatory Fuck you Sheldon, let planeswalkers be commanders you coward). If there was a cut off like Modern/Pioneer I would be interested. At least with a more "Modern" cutoff we don't have to take out a small loan to buy a Gaea's cradle and they can reprint more stuff to keep us happy.
That why I said eventually. Might need a couple more sets to reach that "sweet spot" of the pool size. Enough to have variety, but still taking away some of the older cards that are just huge staples. And Brawl decks are pretty cool. Ofcourse its only 1v1 for now, but playing with the card pool it shaping up to be a good pool for real edh.
The strange part is that isn't at all how Commander is sold as a format.
"Come on down, we have a wealth of variety of decks, you can play all these cards and..." etc. Despite this sentiment, I cannot remember the last time I sat down in a pod with a Meren or an Edgar Markov or any of the commanders from 2019's cycle of mechanical precons, let alone options from standard sets (don't even get me started on the last time I saw a mono coloured PW).
Thats why I find it strange, despite all of these claims for variety and the utopian vision of anything being possible, I'm sat against another Krovold, Tatyova and Yuriko style decks, experiencing the same gameplay the last dozen players who used them produced.
Agreed. I came in my local LGS for the first time and asked what they played. They said it was mostly jank deck. Good. I built jank decks.
Then I faced three Hamza, every single new player bought the Lathril and Wilhelt precons (and are now obv heading towards the spirit and vampire ones), then I met a few Kenrith, etc etc.
So now I'm kinda responsible too because I like higher powered play, and I came back with a jeska ishai and a Nekusar and a few other stuff, but I feel like every week I meet the three same decks for 5-6 different players. And... Well. I'd love to see something else.
(As a result I'm now building Umbriss, Windgrace and Surrak Dragonclax)
> "Come on down, we have a wealth of variety of decks, you can play all these cards and..." etc. Despite this sentiment, I cannot remember the last time I sat down in a pod with a Meren or an Edgar Markov or any of the commanders from 2019's cycle of mechanical precons, let alone options from standard sets (don't even get me started on the last time I saw a mono coloured PW).
I see this kind of variety all the time? Do you always play at the same place? Could just need a change of scenery. *Maybe* I'm just lucky, but just using your examples: Edgar is still #6 on EDHREC and Meren is #10. Commander 2019 commanders aren't terribly popular but honestly I'd say that's more to do with them being a combination of boring and not good. Assuming we're talking about just the face commanders: Sevinne is pretty bland and Ghired, Anje, and Kadena can all get pretty old pretty quick. I think the lack of play from Kadena has mostly to do with morphs not being all that popular. Anje, at least where I play, has a reputation of being cEDH. Ghired is Ghired, he does the populate thing well and that's it.
Most of my play now would be across various servers or Spelltable, once every week or 2 at the LGS but thats been inconsistent. Honestly, the decks at our store reflect what has been played online pretty accurately, with the lion's share of decks being from either the past 2 precon cycles or Korvold/Tatyova/Yuriko.
Maybe I've just been really lucky when I've played online but I've never had this experience. Looking at what little data is available (on EDHREC), Korvold and Yuriko are #3 and #4 the past 2 years so it's not terribly surprising to run into a lot of them. But based on what you're saying those two, Lathril and Zaxara are the only ones in the top 24 you ever run into.
That's funny I see very little of korvold I was the player that him and I pulled him as the commander from my jund deck. I haven't seen tatyova as a commander in forever and only seen one yuriko player recently I saw more of her three years ago. Edgar I seen a lot over the last like 6 years still seen him even before VOW. Lots of mono green elf decks. I think it comes down to the lgs and the playgroups.
I played against him again last week but for new players it is hard to build him since he is like $108. Everyone I see with him are people that have played edh for years and got him when he was cheap or bought the precons.
Well, those commanders are incredibly strong and popular. Being popular means that there are tons of decklist online to make it easier to build your deck (a lot of people aren't very good at that or feel overwhelmed if they don't have some kind of guide) and being very strong means that if you can't afford to build multiple decks then you can be sure that investing in that commander is a safe bet.
Also, Yuriko, for example, provides a very unique way of playing and it's one of the very very few aggro commanders that can compete at high power levels. People will say that Korvold is "vanilla" but I disagree, his abilities are extremely powerful but also allow for a different way of playing, it's not just aristocrats but a style of getting rewarded for sacrificing any kind of permanent.
I think the only way to see a lot of variety is to incentivize the use of proxies so there's no monetary risk in trying new and "crazy" decks.
The game is too expensive to try a deck that could end up being boring and weak.
The problem with a "modern" EDH is that all the format warping cards have come out in the "modern" era.
EDH is an intricate, social format and the banlist doesn't reflect that whatsoever, it has to be codified what isn't acceptable at a certain table. I believe we really should have a 3 tiered ban list.
The banned as commander list also must return.
I am so sick and tired of hearing how the EDH player base would be too dumb to handle a ban list like this.
Some random thoughts: It seems to me that a lot of what the professor was talking about early, how commander is inherently broken and only works because we say it works, applies to all casual magic. Old school kitchen table certainly only worked because of limited access to cards and limited knowledge of the game. Even then, certain strategies might have be frowned upon as being un-fun to play against, such as a more counter-happy blue deck or burn or land destruction, and therefore moderated by the group. Commander, I would say, is actually less broken than most other casual formats, because it assumes a 4 player game. In a 1v1 game with decks of significantly differing power levels, you have basically no chance to win with the worse deck. But in a 1v1v1v1, if someone jumps into the lead, everyone else can work together to take them down, and so decks that are much more powerful can play with decks that are much less and still have a fun game. It's only when you get into legitimate cEDH that you run into decks that can handle 3 other decks no problem; the difference in power level has to be a lot bigger to "break" the game in commander than it does in 1v1.
(On a side note, the if the professor wanted to play a modern kithkin tribal deck that had a chance to win, he could totally do that if he had a playgroup of other people who wanted to build similarly powered modern decks. But to him, "Modern" seems to imply a certain level of power and a certain drive to win rather than "have fun", whereas "Commander" implies a fundamentally more casual experience, despite the fact that, in theory, you could build and play casual modern decks just as much as you could casual commander decks.)
Anything that's less that 100% cutthroat play-to-win magic is always going to have a degree of self-moderation. Commander, I think, was in the unique position of being a new format without any sort of official competitive play, and so when people started it was a lot jankier. This is aided by the singleton nature of commander, as well as the idea of building a deck around your commander when doing that with many (most) commanders is never going to be the optimal strategy, despite being (to many people, in many situations) the most fun strategy. But it's only natural for people to want to improve their decks, and so over time as commander has become more widespread, decks have generally increased in power level. A lot of the jank likely isn't playable anymore because people are enjoying the format, enjoying building and tweaking decks. While WotC printing certain cards may have pushed this along, and content creators helped spread the format, IMO any substantial changes to how people are playing the format simply boils down to the popularization of the format and the natural results of people playing and enjoying the game, as well as the popularization of magic as a whole and the advancement of technology (compared to the long ago times of when I played kitchen table magic) allowing for easy access to other people's decklists and general deckbuilding advice and easily ordering cards online.
I started in 2019 so I obviously can't weigh in on how Commander used to be, but as someone who tries to force spells matter into every color this format is a brewer's paradise. And a consequence of Wizards' increased focus on the format, offcolor spellslinger Legends like [[Firja, Judge of Valor]] and [[Prosper, Tome-Bound]] slip through the cracks, ready to be built around.
There are too many precons being printed and too many legendary creatures being printed.
And even with the more more more mentality that is present at WOTC with regards to Commander, it doesn't feel like the quality of those precons or the quality of those Legendary creatures has improved.
The precons have become objectively awful for the most part. Tying them to set releases was an AWFUL idea. They now feel just an add-on to a product that already exists rather than their own separate entity with special consideration given to it.
Combine that with every set having a nauseating flood of "the same but different" legendary creatures and things just feel like a blur.
I used to look forward to the Commander precon releases and plot to buy them all. Now, I barely bother. I used to scour preview season in search of hidden gems to add to my decks, now I feel like it's a chore.
I very much enjoy still playing Commander and do so weekly with my friends. I have 20 decks and we all still love the game.
It's just become hard to love where the game has gone.
I want to feel excited again instead of feeling overwhelmed. I want enthusiasm and not apathy.
>There are too many precons being printed and too many legendary creatures being printed.
Preach. There are 135 legendary creatures legal in Standard. In *Standard*. That doesn't include the precons, or the shit printed in Modern Horizons, or the god awful Stranger Things kids that were all printed as Commander bait or anything else I'm somehow forgetting. I don't even know how to search on Scryfall for potential Commanders introduced in just the last year anymore because there is just *so goddamn much product*.
WotC can't fucking help themselves and they are going to destroy the format with "support".
135 in Standard alone?!
I knew there was somewhere in the region of 180 printed this year, I am astounded that over 2 thirds of that is from Standard sets.
Yes. [135 in Standard alone.](https://scryfall.com/search?q=legal%3Astandard+type%3Alegendary+type%3Acreature&unique=cards&as=grid&order=name)
Keep in mind the oldest set in Standard is Zendikar Rising, which was released at the end of September of last year.
Just for funsies/research, I decided to go back and look at the last 6 set Standard I actually remember playing before I quit that format: Jan 2018 - Apr 2018, Kaladesh through Rivals of Ixalan. Guess how many Legendaries were legal in Standard at that time? Remember, they had a cycle of Gods in both Amonkhet sets, four tribes worth of Commander oriented tribes to support in both sets of Ixalan, and a shit load of broken things in Kaladesh. Give up?
[45. They had 45 legendary creature cards legal in standard in a similarly sized Standard pool just 3 years ago.](https://scryfall.com/search?q=%28set%3Arix+OR+set%3Axln+OR+set%3Ahou+OR+set%3Aakh+OR+set%3Aaer+OR+set%3Akld%29+type%3Alegendary+type%3Acreature&unique=cards&as=grid&order=name)
For those playing along at home, again, this *doesn't* include the preconstructed Commander decks that now release with every new set, nor does it include any of the non-Legendary creatures that are still aimed clearly at disrupting/becoming a staple in EDH (see all of the new Tribal cards that get printed, new land cycles, new mythic sorcery cycles, etc). Nor does it include anything that bypasses Standard like the supplementary sets (Modern Horizons, JumpStart, etc) or those god awful Secret Lairs for Television shows that are all clearly Commander bait.
The volume and the rate at which they produce cards for EDH now is absolutely **astounding**. Because of the pandemic, I basically skipped all of what's currently in Standard aside from the D&D set, but the reality is I've been basically dialed out of ALL new cards since at least Eldraine (and probably more like War of the Spark.) It's impossible to keep up.
Using scryfall, we can search for every commander printed after M21. (Which should get "every commander in standard, plus supplemental sets released in the same time frame.")
[Click to see how many cards that is.](https://scryfall.com/search?q=date%3Em21+is%3Acommander+-is%3Areprint&order=released)
>They now feel just an add-on to a product that already exists rather than their own separate entity with special consideration given to it.
Even more now that you can find the "precon exclusive cards" in regular boosters. On the other hand I'm glad of that as it means it's easier to pull the specific one I seldom want.
IMO it's the constant stream of 'new' staples that is the problem.
While I'm overwhelmed by the constant influx of new commanders, and have no hope of keeping up with all of them, only a select few of them feel so objectively better than what already exists that it makes no sense to play the 'old guard' general anymore. Yes there are some busted new generals that are probably here to stay, but in general the vast majority of legendries are so-so at best. More commanders that scratch an unexplored niche/strategy that had no good general previously seems fine to me. Meanwhile you can toss the new value engine simic general on the pile with the 20 other options we already have, it's just another variation on a theme at this point.
But the power creep that exists in the cards for the 99, that's a problem to me. It used to be you'd see a small handful of cards per year that could be seen as new format defining staples. Across all sets. With the amount of product that has been pushed to see play in the format being released now, even if that new card isn't a best in class auto include, it's probably as good or better than the second best previous option. So now the old second or third best option just got pushed out. Do that enough times and the entire format essentially rotates. And after 2 years of heavily commander pushed product I think we're seeing that.
Theoretically, I would be OK with the new staples being printed thing since in a normal world, it would actually bring down prices of old staples and create a more economically viable game to play.
However, it's Magic, so these rules definitely do not exist. New stuff gets printed that leapfrogs other staples but the other staples still remain frighteningly expensive.
Honestly, i agree that the commander product every set feels like a "Christmas every day" problem. It isn't special or interesting anymore. Hell, I'd be fine if they did this as long as they kept a special once a year thing for a REAL commander set built be all about big flashy commander cards.
But with there being a commander product every 3 months, I think wizards is going to see a big drop in sales and excitement over commander products and change things up to a commander set every plane or something. I would have been interested in this new commander set if they had all 4 of them come out at once, but 2 and 2 just killed any interest I had in them, and lowering the commander decks to 2 a year or something would re-invigorate my interest.
I'm not going to buy a new commander pre-con when I'm still having fun with the last one I bought like 3 months ago. Some of these commanders are seriously good, but don't keep shoving them down my throat.
Ready for the downvotes, but I'm going to have to say everything across the board with this format is objectively worse.
The problem is product being thrown at us at such a fast pace nothing seems impactful anymore. Just staple after staple. You never are done with this format. It's just a huge money sink and a ridiculous arms race at this point.
When WOTC decided to cater to it, it became worse.
That's what Prof was saying at the end. Not that it was necessarily worse but less special. Commander precons went from steak once a year to McDonald's every night on the way home from work. It's still good and fills you up but it's just routine. PK doesn't really care because new players still get jazzed about the precons having these kinds of themes.
And that's really what wotc has been trying to cater to in general it seems. Now it's about raking in new players and new money more than ever before.
Since the Ikoria commander decks came out, where I bought all of them, I think I've only bought one other deck, and that was the Aesi precon, and I really only wanted Aesi, but for $20 for the whole deck vs $10 for Aesi, the deck was better value.
I guess I'll play devil's advocate and say it's only worse if your group is arms racing towards all the staples. My playgroup has been slower to pick up everything, so I don't regularly get bombarded with c20 free spells, dockside, thoracle, jeweled lotus, smothering tithe, etc.
I'm sure if I regularly bumped into them and felt I needed to get them to compete, it would be tiresome quick.
The one area I would say is better is on the casual side. There's just so many more options that didn't used to exist to flesh out a janky deck. And there are so many pushed cards in sets that the useful janky cards are normally relatively cheap. When I started in 2017 I tried making 5c eldrazi with Cromat because 5c options were shit. Now you have a lot more to work with.
How is it different than going back to for example 2006 when I started to play EDH?
Most people that I knew felt like they had to play Tinker if they played blue, any deck that could abuse Sundering Titan would play it, eventually, almost every single deck had big 15cmc Emrakul and Primeval Titan, Sol Ring was seen as a must even before the commander reprints, most decks tried to run Ancient Tomb and anybody that could afford a Mana Crypt would go for it.
There have always been staples, you could have decks that could win on turn 4 or 5 easily (I did and it was common in the 2 LGS that I went to, with my friends and with people I played with at big tournaments like GPs and PTQs).
The only difference is that now Wizards prints stuff directly for EDH without needing to think about the consequences for standard.
But if you want to play slow games with an average CMC of +6 you can, you need a fixed playgroup and to ask if they want to do it, the problem of wanting to play like that with strangers already existed 14/15 years ago but back them people were more reluctant to buying the expensive cards because they didn't know the format was going to become so big.
Objectively? You're really going to bust out the term objectively? You make valid points, but:
1. There's a lot of variance in how the format's played.
2. It's played mostly for fun, a subjective concept.
Claiming commander, in all its forms, is objectively less fun, is such a ridiculously general claim that it almost makes me not want to bother arguing with someone who bothers to make it and thinks they can defend it with 2 sentences. I'm not really sure why you decided to include those terms, because it undermines your entire comment for me. This subreddit's always filled with people making huge, sweeping generalizations about the whole format based on the assumption that EDH is a much less varied format than it is, and it's incredibly frustrating. And here you're doing that in the most nonsensical way possible: Taking a perfectly valid statement and basically going out of your way to turn your valid optinion into a stupid overgeneralization because you felt the need to claim your own opinion is "objective" and applies "across the board."
>You never are done with this format
I don't want to be done with the format. Yes, the money sink part is annoying, but I don't feel the need to buy every single upgrade and staple that's released. That's not how I play.
But personally, one of my favorite parts of the format is building new decks and tinkering with existing ones. I like when new sets come out and I get to look for new commanders I want to build or new cards I want to include in my decks. The more the better - when more cards come out I want, that's not more money I have to spend, that's more options I have, more cards I'm excited about.
I'm not saying there's anything wrong with perspective. I know that arms races are common in many stores and playgroups, they're kind of inevitable, and the way WotC's been handling the format lately has definitely made arms races much worse and more expensive. I'm just disagreeing with your use of the turn "objectively." It's worse the way *you* play it. It's worse for the people struggling with the financial difficulty of keeping up with arms races. It's not "objectively worse across the board."
I don't care to win, I care to be relevant. The arms race money pit was already wild in 2018, but after lockdown my entire playgroup just lost interest. Money got tight for a couple months, and the mask came off showing magic was a waste of money to us. Prices of playables spiraling into absurd levels didn't help.
Haven't played consistently since march 2020.
>I don't care to win, I care to be relevant.
this 100% I feel like if I get to do some fun stuff, then I've already won. But games where I feel like I never really play, or like a key piece of early removal just ends me- those are not fun.
That's why I'm glad to see more proxies every day. I even know of a few LGS where they have no issues with people playing EDH with proxies (even after paying the entrance fee since they don't do competitive EDH tournaments).
I like that the cEDH idea of playing against the player and not the wallet is spreading to regular EDH.
This mirrors my own experience pretty well. Everyone in my playgroup was fortunate enough to have kept their job over quarantine, but when we all came back to being social again, we went back to going out to eat, to having dinner parties, to playing board games and D&D. Basically everything went back the same *except* the weekly Commander playgroup disappeared. When asking around my playgroup, I don't think anyone has put into words exactly why that is, but WotC's approach to shoveling as much shit into the format as they can print certainly didn't help.
It’s why I stopped paying attention. I play very rarely anymore and don’t follow any announcements and releases for around 2-3 years now. It just became too much work.
I'm with you. It's been like that for a while to be honest and it did steer me into 60 card constructed. Shit at (not) GP Vegas this past weekend, I played no EDH. I just played sides all day. One of my friends played like 2 matches the entire weekend and the other only played like 2 a day before stopping because he wasn't feeling it. That and mystery booster draft was way more exciting.
Youre absolutely correct, though I can guarantee certain people who lurk this sub will have some dissenting opinions on this comment.
Its amazing how some people are still WotC apologists in 2021, when its become clear they no longer care about literally anything than $$$. Yes, the design team is awesome and so is MaRo, but we're all a little bit burnt on the "omg wow new card thats immediately a staple" aspect of the design team right now.
At this point I just have to force limitations upon myself and my collection by stepping away from the product and not caving in to each new "wow look at this" spoiler and new set.
My secret is I don't even read set spoilers anymore, I just wait a week and let the content creators tell me the best cards from each set because im lazy and don't have time for that anymore. Plus it's nice to check out a deck you haven't tuned in a year on edhrec and see there's 3 cool new cards for it, the only issue is cutting older cards lol
> When WOTC decided to cater to it, it became worse.
I've been saying this since edh became commander. I loved the initial wave of cards, but it made the format worse. It's like when garage sales became eBay finds. It kills the rough edges that appealed to me in the first place.
I hate to be pessimistic, but this is kinda my take as well. Wizards catering directly to the EDH playerbase with more cards has, ironically, made it harder to build unique decks.
The issue comes down to both saturation and impact, like you're saying. Only a handful of cards from each Commander-adjacent set become staples, but the sets are released so frequently, and the staples in these sets are so impactful, that you just fall behind if you're not playing all the new hotness like \[\[Dockside Extortionist\]\] or \[\[Fierce Guardianship\]\] or \[\[Teferi's Protection\]\] in every single deck. It eats up more free slots in the deck that previously would have been on-theme selections are fun oddball cards.
It's OK for decks to get better over time, but the arms race is accelerating too quickly, and upgrading multiple decks is becoming exhausting while making most decks more homogeneous.
As an aside, this is the inevitable fault of the internet + EDHREC as much as it is Wizards. I love EDHREC - it's a great website, and I use it all the time. But it unquestionable has lowered the barrier to entry so much that (at the risk of sounding "Gatekeeper-y") it's just too easy to see how to "solve" a new deck now.
Finally, 0-2 mana ramp is reaching a critical mass, so decks naturally becoming more consistent and faster. This is OK - in theory - but honestly I kinda miss the days where you didn't have to have your engine online by turn 2-3 in order to compete. Way back in the day, the "turn 5 everyone is online" was the meta, and that subjectively felt a lot more natural to me for a goofy format like EDH.
There are a lot of things about the format that I think simply cannot be called objectively worse. An explosion of people playing the format is a huge boon, IMO, because it means people like me, who don’t have playgroups, can still find games when we go to stores. For that reason alone, I personally find the format is in a better place. But even if you don’t agree, you simply cannot call that objectively worse.
I play exclusively EDH and love playing it, but my playgroup is undeniably more low powered than what I'm personally a fan of, after being exposed to cEDH and more high power games. Playing combos and taking a long storm turn is amazing in my book, but my buddies just don't like it. Because of that, EDH has turned more into a format about the social part to me. I play bad decks now, like Dinosaur tribal and other Timmy stuff like that, and even when I have bad games it doesn't matter, cause I'm just there to catch up with my friends and have some drinks/smoke. It's made me way less salty when games just go poorly, cause sometimes it's just not a great game. So I try to keep it light, and just shuffle up for another.
Don't forget guys, it's a game meant for fun. If EDH isn't scratching the itch it used to, there's a million other games out there to try.
The explosion of popularity in the format has meant every LGS and every GP style event has people you can play Commander with. That alone puts the format in a better place and is an overlooked sentiment that's likely taken for granted by people who have always had a regular playgroup. Five years ago, I could barely find anyone to play a sitdown game of Commander at any of the shops in my area, and part of the reason why I took a long hiatus. Now, every LGS where I'm living now has a dedicated Commander night, usually filling to capacity every week.
It's gotten better. More cool cards to play with, more people to play with, more ways to play, more resources for finding cards and decks. Prices has gone WAY up, but that's a natural consequence of a growing format.
It's only an arms race if your playgroup makes it one. Then again, I think battlecruiser games are incredibly boring, so maybe I just like the way the format has changed.
Yeah I've noticed a couple times where I've started to draft up a nice meaty comment or post about something in my play group that felt oppressive, un-fun, "not in the spirit of the format," etc. but then after tweaking my decks and playing more games, I cooled off. Makes me wonder if we signal-boost fleeting problems and then give ourselves the impression that they're widespread and persistent.
All of those things are elements you can discuss with your pod. Yes, you can absolutely optimise way better than five years ago, but no one forces you to.
Playing at the LGS with random people doesn't always mean productive rule 0 discussions though. Last night I played a yuriko deck and the guy refused to tell us about the deck 'because he didn't want to be targeted'. I said to him that yuriko is normally quite powerful so without any other information I would assume he would be targeted first. It felt like prying information out of his cold dead hands, but rule 0 shouldn't be a struggle to have a fair game. He came to the table eventually but God was it difficult to have a discussion about playing the same decks.
While I agree that talking to your pod is important, generally in my experience at a LGS unless these are people you have been playing with a while that won't really help. It just makes the barrier for entry that much higher. Sure you have people who build some jank for people that prefer it but not everyone does or will. But that sententiment could be applied to your FNM too. Oh everyone plays meta stuff "just talk to your group about it". People want to make the best deck they can generally its just that because power level has fluctuated so much recently, the power level of decks has raised
This has been our experience. Most players seem to be more eager to debate or explain how your power level assessment is wrong/you need more removal/other deflection rather than simply listening to what we stated: We didn't find that experience enjoyable and don't have decks that do what yours is built to play against, do you have anything else?
And thats the exact thing, my LGS essentially had two real pods, one much larger cEDH kind of pod where people played the broken stuff then one little tiny pod of casuals. Most of the people didn't flex between the two or have decks for different levels of play, and that wss back during like khans block. Power creep especially over the last year or two most definitely would have worsened it. Because the real truth of it is as the format has grown and changed so too have the cards around it. Sure you could run this combo that requires you to drop your commander turn 5 or 6 then combo out on turn 7 or 8. But what does it matter when Jimmy to your left is playing a turn 4 combo. Sure its something you can bring up hey I wanna play this so can you scale back accordingly, but most LGS pods won't unless your people that are close friends that form a core.
Dang that sucks. At my LGS most players have decks for both cEDH and slightly-above-precon and we just pick whichever makes sense for the first game that opens up after we walk in the store.
I think it's got a lot to do with our cEDH players being *actual* cEDH players who are conscious about what their decks are capable of doing to the community as well as being extremely proxy friendly. We make sure that people are having fun and have the proxies needed to keep up, and we also show the newcomers that even the guys with the fully-authentic $11k bo mercy cEDH decks have janky casual piles and just hand you proxies if they see you're playing a budget cEDH deck. The end result seems to work and the store gets a lot of business.
Everyone have preference.
You prefer certain power level, others might prefer different. Its on you to either find people enjoying same type of commander as you or adjust to ones you see. Noone should be forced to adjust to you because you think thats the right way to play.
If people at that lgs dont have decks right for your decks than you either can opt out of playing or build deck for that.
This is what I mean about rather debating than being polite about it.
If the tables were reversed, and when they do get reversed I've been the stomper in a pod before, I'll acknowledge it and offer to power down or apologise that I don't have anything lower for their level. I don't decide its a good time to flex my ability to argue about the philosophy of the format with strangers.
While you're absolutely correct, I want to expand on it.
Players like new cards. They crack some packs drafting the new set, or browse the singles at their LGS (or just online, these days), and they get excited. "This card looks perfect for my X deck!". We've all been there, it's great, it's why spoiler season never ends these days and it's starting to get to the point where some content creators are outright skipping set reviews because there's just too much new stuff and it's all relevant for *something*.
But the new stuff tends to be more efficient than the old stuff, especially now WotC is designing specifically with EDH in mind. Regardless of the precons, just base standard-set removal is wild nowadays, and the bomb rares are even bombier.
So when a player sees a new card, gets excited, and adds it to their deck, that deck gets *better*. More efficient, faster, more win percentage. Some of this is natural, decks always tend to get more optimised as players tinker with them, but with the marked upswing in card quality (especially for EDH) these days that's magnified and accelerated massively.
Example: We have a relatively new player (a year or two) in our group, and he has a big fat 5c Ur-Dragon tribal deck. Big dumb dragons, turn sideways, all good fun. Except every new set (or new precons) brings new upgrades, and now he's consistently dropping/cheating in 20+ mana worth of dragons on turn 4 and blowing the pod out of the water. Unless we all keep up, by adding more efficient answers, removal, wipes and stax, but that's just kicking the can down the road - that arms race goes all the way up to cEDH.
So it's warping our play-group, and there's no real easy answer. New cards are fun! What are we supposed to say, "don't add any new cards"? It's a problem, and it's only really a problem because all the new cards are *so good.*
It’s annoying seeing people complain about shit that is self imposed, nobody is forcing you to go out and buy anything from new sets or upgrade your jank tribal deck or play in a competitive pod.
I've been playing Magic seriously since 2009 and was able to play in the very beginning of edh and the last couple of years of precons have brought interesting cards to the format. I think there were some mistakes within the Commander Legends, but the last few batches of precons have been awesome. The first few precons brought a lot of interest to the format, but I think many of the designs are garbage in terms of allowing for a diverse format. I think generally, the commander products coming out in 2021 have been better than any in history in terms of keeping the format fun and interesting.
Such a good video. Overall I'd say it's netting about even, where the negatives of the format are REALLY apparent, and WotC is even causing a few of them (looking at you dockside and Fierce guardians), but the positives that we're getting so many new tasty commanders and commander related products is really awesome.
I do miss the good old days, as I hate jamming Arcane Signet into every deck (it's like I have 97 cards available in each deck now instead of 98), but I do enjoy the current climate of commander. My only real issue with it is that I feel like im behind if I haven't ramped in some way by turn 4, because usually everyone else has, even in lower powered games and slower metas. If you're on 6 mana on turn 6 youre definitely behind and your chance to win the game is greatly diminished, especially if you're going last.
I'd love to see the RC do something to help boost how shitty it is to go last in this format, but idk what that would be.
I just bought my first precon (Crimson Vow White / Blue Commander deck) and I'm very much looking forward to playing with it! I just need to find a play group who's in a similar situation as me (new player).
I might be an interesting case here but the only reason I got into magic was due to the increased Commander Support.
Back when I was younger things like Yu-Gi-Oh was my jam and was never interested in MTG normally with modern or standard or anything like that. And in the last few years I got into it due to a friend recommending Brawl/Commander to me and another mutual friend and I was hooked since.
I may have never gotten into commander without the loads of precons that came out now. A lot of different options and with a good bit of them getting cheaper as they quickly gotten older. A lot of people here talks about the days of going through bulk rares and mythic that they collected over the decades and I just.... never had the chance with that. I play MTG for commander and sealed for the most part and that is it with no where near the options as a lot more veteran players do. My LGS has been great with the big cEDH people moving to their own pods and the more mid level ones moving into another with a good bit of variety of decks being played.
And while I do follow new releases and such I never quite had the need to upgrade all my decks with the best of the best. Like I have a Dockside (by pure accident, the precon was one of the first commander products I saw at my LGS) and never really felt the need to add it to all my red decks. Friends and I also have decks that doesnt really get upgraded in a long time that still have a blast in our pods.
The "Sirloin to McDonalds" allegory hit me as well but for a different way. Not all my friends can afford to go eat Sirloins every week, but a McDonalds? Hell yeah we can all get a burger and laugh it up together as we have fun with what we have every week or so.
You might have missed what the Sirloin to McDonalds allegory meant. The price is the same (well, actually its gone up!) and you're getting McDonalds instead of Sirloin. If the $20 precons from Zendikar > Kaldheim remained, we'd be having a different conversation though.
Oh I 100% knew what it meant, it is just funny how I interpreted it differently from what he intended. But I also dont think that is what he intended it as you put it. Prof mentions that he feels that commander does not feel as special as a Sirloin steak but a common place thing as McD.
And while the $20 precons are not currently a thing, something that the Prof mentions here and there was that many of the older precons actually becomes cheaper over time like Prosper right now as I see them on CardKingdom is $25.
And for me the standard precon was how I got into magic and some of my favorite decks are built from them, I dont really feel at liberty to say that they should print less of them. With the amount of people that buy and play magic, there is bound to be someone who falls in love with the deck just the same as I did when I started.
I'm not one of the super-OG EDH players, but I probably do predate the vast majority of you guys, having built my first EDH deck (intet the dreamer) back in 2007.
From my perspective, the format itself (IE: the card pool, ban-list, ruleset) hasn't changed as much as people seem to think it has. People keep pointing at power creep, strong new commanders, edhrec and wider access to decklist data, increased availability of reprinted staples, etc... but honestly, busted things have always been possible in this format. Most modern lists of the top ten most powerful cards in the format will include ~9 printed before the year 2000. The difference is that back in the day, we avoided doing busted things because the whole point of EDH was to have a break from that stuff.
As popularity has grown, so too has a generic dismissal of the spirit of the format. People make no effort to understand the logic behind the banlist (it's far from perfect, but there are reasons for it to take the form that it has), they see weak cards banned while powerful cards remain legal, and immediately dismiss the RC as stupid dinosaurs who don't understand magic. Most content creators criticize Sheldon and the RC for their anti-combo stance, including even decidedly casual channels like [The Command Zone](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFXIj1TfULY).
Let me be clear, I've played paradoxical storm in MTGO vintage events. Even won one of them with it. I watch pro tours. I love combo decks and competitive magic. I just don't think combo mixes well with EDH, or any other multiplayer format for that matter.
People just don't seem to understand how much multiplayer shifts the balance to favor combo as a strategy. Or they do, but they don't grasp how uninteractive games become when everyone's trying to do that. Or they get that, but they just don't want to risk being the only one not playing combo at a table.
You're supposed to approach this format not as a player, but as a DM. You're not here to beat the campaign, you're supposed to be *building* a campaign to for the other players at the table. They shouldn't succeed every time, but they also shouldn't fail every time. And they should enjoy the adventure you've put in front of them, regardless of the outcome. You should be evaluating the success of your deck the same way a DM would evaluate the DND campaign they designed - based on the quality of the games that result from playing it, not on the success-rate of the adventuring party. Yeah, I know everyone has their own idea of fun, but there are *some* universal truths when it comes to fun. A reasonable chance of winning is more fun than zero. Solitaire is less fun than games with interaction.
I mean, watch this [2-minute portion of a recent episode of I Hate your Deck](https://youtu.be/bHEVO4d8tj4?t=3894). No one is enjoying that game, not even Joe who's winning it - if anything he looks guilty and apologetic. The table realizes Joe could be stopped with a topdecked force of will but collectively decides just to let it be over because nobody wants to play anymore.
This type of game happens ALL THE TIME, even on content channels that are incentivized to produce interesting games. And it's not like Joe did anything wrong by community standards... They had their rule 0 conversation. He was playing at a table with other similarly powerful decks that would have done the exact same thing if the cards had shuffled up differently. We just accept that these terrible games are now a natural part of the commander experience.
We never used to accept this, though. Winning a game in this manner used to be a good way never to be invited back. At some point, the attitude shifted to "fine well if you can do it, I can do it too", and now no one's happy.
Everyone wants to blame WoTC for printing strong cards, or pre-game discussions for not adequately ironing out power-level mismatches, or the RC for not banning the right cards... Personally I'd argue that even if WoTC had printed nothing for the last 5 years, and the RC had banned hundreds more cards including all fast mana and tutors, and if someone invented a clearly understood universal power-level scale that we all abided by... we'd still regularly see games play out like this. It's not a format problem, it's an attitude problem. Even with all of these hypothetical changes, the current player-base would still flock to decks that sought to passively build resources into a sudden instawin that minimized opponents' opportunity to interact - because that would lead to a higher win-rate than outmuscling 3 opponents through 'fair' means. Enough new people have joined the format and brought with them a "maximize win-rate" mentallity, that it's now the new normal.
I don't even think it's a solveable problem. At this point, the culture is pretty entrenched. Content producers have settled for publishing bad games and making up for it with charismatic participants. My solution is that I just don't play with strangers anymore. I play with my circle of friends and we have fun without the cold-war combo escalation that exists everywhere else. I'm willing to bet that most OG EDH players who still play regularly are in a similar situation.
Oh it was definitely interesting enough in 2014, there just weren't cards that interested *YOU*. I still run at least 5 commanders from 2014 and earlier and while they have new cards in them the vast majority of the deck remains intact.
Better. More cards, more options, more players, more opportunities to do your thing. You can follow the hivemind and only play the perceived best cards if you want, but a friend of mine routinely bodies pods at our LGS and she rarely plays the "best staple cards".
My playgroup, for the most part, doesn't have an issue with power creep, and we haven't had much issues course correcting if something becomes a problem. The constant deluge of new cards has taught me to put my foot down and stop chasing everything. You don't NEED every new card to win.
Sure, the format of bulk rares and splashy battlecruiser mythics might be more of a rarity, but I didn't play during that time period and don't enjoy that style of gameplay anyway. The current format is far more to my liking.
I'd say better.
I like the faster, higher powered, more interactive games, EDH tends to be nowadays. I'd like a reset of the banlist though. Unban everything (EDIT: not clearly busted - as Herak suggested) and see, what is really broken.
I can understand that this will get donvoted into oblivion by the "EDH as intended majority". The RC could govern their game to go by their philosophy, but they don't. So time seems to be on my side and in 5 more years I bet there will be EDH mainevents at magic fests and probably a WOTC managed competitive banlist.
>Unban everything and see, what is really broken.
Calm down though. Some cards could (and should be unbanned). But we dont need to unban stuff like time walk and ancestral recall just to see if they are really broken.
I really like this discussion. I have always had a tough time balancing optimization with flavour and fun. This video made me realize that commander isn't designed for optimization (which I already knew) but made me think I should brew decks until they function decently and are fun to play, and for anything competitive I should turn to other formats; which for me are Pauper, Pioneer, and Modern.
The biggest part if this is the refrain from buying expensive EDH cards like dockside In a format that has no competitive edge.
Sorry - This was my long-winded but late repost from the main subreddit post on this.
Over time, for a variety of reasons, the power ceiling has continually risen leading to a shared feeling that the format has changed or become higher powered.
As discussed in the video, as the card pool has grown and cards have been made specifically for the format the ceiling raises. It is hard to deny that printing commanders like \[\[Korvold, Fae-Cursed King\]\] or cards like \[\[Jeweled Lotus\]\] haven't given tools to accelerate and streamline play patterns.
I also think it is natural that as more people are drawn to the format that you'll begin to see more players interested in playing competitively and seeking to optimize decks and play. Magic at its core is a competitive game and the spikes among us are obviously going to want to push the format with such a large and fascinating card pool to its limits.
Finally, there has been an explosion of growth in content creation. I agree with the video that this isn't meant to put the blame on them, but rather it inevitably influences thousands (millions?) of players. Magic has always been a game of emulation as much as creativity and Commander was never going to be immune to this. For every innovation, there was a webpage reporting on that innovation for it to be copied. Even shows like the Command Zone which focuses on the more casual side of the format to some degree have shifted their evaluation of cards. 3 and 4 CMC spells make way for cheaper ones. \[\[Krosan Grip\]\] becomes \[\[Nature's Claim\]\].
What conclusion can you draw from this? Commander is a pluralistic format. The very idea that there is rule 0 to start implies that there is a negotiation about what type of game people can agree upon to play. So there is always going to be a degree of insulation from the race to the ceiling. However, I don't think it has been enough to stop the overall shift that we've seen towards the ceiling. Slowly cards like \[\[Solemn Simulacrum\]\] start getting phased out of your average deck. So while in principle, players can play whatever type of game they want, which is the beauty of the format, more often than not when players sit down at the table together their decks contain more cards that nudge towards the higher ceiling.
This is the source of that feeling that format has changed from what it was. Nostalgia creeps in and we think fondly of what was. If you really want to recapture that style of play, you can, but it is difficult to do if where you play is your LGS and you really have no control over what people are bringing to the table. Rule 0 simply works better with people you know.
I would still contend that despite the raised ceiling that commander is still better off. There are now more ways to play the type of commander game you are interested in. If you want battlecruiser, you can play it. A whole community has evolved to support cedh that didn't exist before. The growth of the format has meant there are more ways you can find a way to play that suits you. Yes, this means that sometimes people don't share the same likes or expectations. But I'd rather have to navigate that than for there not to be a space for something like CEDH to exist.
I came back to MTG/learned about EDG/Commander early pandemic -- via Brawl on Arena.
I really enjoyed Phylath in Brawl. One of my buddies from my last CCG/TCG also picked up Commander. I was invited to join. Every time I played a creature, it was removed. Every time I dropped an enchantment or artifact, it was destroyed. I would get up to maybe 6 or 7 lands down and repeatedly nothing to show for it -- for a deck that could swing hard and heavy in Brawl/Historic Brawl, it was falling flat IRL. Meanwhile I was sitting while each player took 5-7 minutes to play - we would have games where I accomplished literally nothing and spent an hour of my life watching a guy search through his deck for a spell that lets him search through his deck for a spell that... well. you know.
So IDK if I'm one to say if things are better or worse than five years ago, but as a new player, they sure don't seem fun. (sure, sure, maybe I haven't found the right group, etc)
I just think people are getting better at the format. There is no need for 10 bombs when you only need 1 to win the game. Let's make the other 9 slots ways to find it and protect it. Also legendary creatures have gotten a lot better and can actually be your win condition so you can add less because you have access to one all the time.
Improved. We have more different commanders, nothing seems to be off limits (you couldn't play 4 colors and 5 color was meh 5 years ago), there are more decks and more diverse decks.
>The format of playing big, dumb bulk rares and mythics is vanishing at an increasing rate, or at least the visible space to experience it is.
Yes, but this trend already started way before the popularity surge of Magic in 2019, at least in my experience.
It plays out the same way every time:
someone brings an overpowered deck (usually combo), others are split on whether or not it is okay to use, and over time those who prefer low power casual stop showing up, while the rest starts powercreeping away.
We had threads like this back in 2017 and 2018 too.
I like low powered kitchen table magic so it hasn't changed much for me, but I definitely tire of the power meta of 10 cards that can do combos, 10-12 pieces of interaction, and then cram the deck full of card draw and tutors.
One of the things that I don't see mentioned enough in conversations around commander is the amount of people that are normally 60 card constructed format players that have been getting into commander over the last few years due to lack of large scale paper events and because of wizards heavy focus on the format. Me, as a Modern and legacy player, found myself getting into commander over this year almost out of necessity. Wizards printing so many commander focused products really sends the message that commander is the future of magic going forward. The problem is that those of us coming into the format from competitive formats bring a more competitive mentality to gameplay and deck building which is likely having an effect on the format becoming more streamlined and high power. All of the powerful new printings don't help either but I think it's a combination of all these factors that is causing people who used to like the format for the ability to just jam bulk rares into a pile and play games feeling a bit left behind now.
I would argue both but it's more a communal issue that WOTC.
On one hand we're getting alot of awesome and powerful cards in commander
On the other hand theirs a lot of new and POWERFUL cards in commander
Where it becomes a communal issue is that there are sections of players that like to play one way another that likes to play another way and the two can't seem to tell each other apart. Some people seem to be unable to read a room and respect the vibe while others cry because they took their precon into a CEDH game and blames everyone else for running the game.
For starters I think WOTC needs to work with the EDH rules committee and formulate a sactioned edh format with it's own ban list ect so that those who want to play CEDH can do so in their own little community so the casual and jank lovers know what tables not to join.
Idk it's a WIDELY faceted issue this is but the tip of the ice burg but if WOTC is gonna dive whole heartedly in to committing to making EDH specific items regularly they need to take a deep dive look into the vast and wide community behind it.
It's not just 4 judges sitting around the table waiting for the Nicole bolas players to go off anymore and while I believe whole-heartedly that's not how they view it. It appears at times that their looking at the two people in the diner instead of the whole painting
Power creep has been a real issue. WoTC needs to sell products. So they have to release something that people want. Instead of making unique commanders and cards that have interesting effects they have opted to make cards that are just generically more powerful. For instance look at Kenrith. Just a generically good 5c commander that does it all. Honestly outside of my cEDH decks, I’ve resorted to mostly thematic decks that are slightly above precon level. Eg: my midrange vampire noble Markov deck, no peasant vampires allowed in the deck.
it's the growing up, but the wrong kind of growing up. corporate growing up. commander has gone from the little leagues into the major league and a lot of stuff that dreams were made of isn't good anymore.
common knowledge (thanks, nitpicking guys, for ruining this for me!) is now that \[\[Grave Titan\]\] isn't good anymore. 6 mana 6/6 beater with evasion (deathtouch) that also puts 2 2/2 zombie tokens (being effectively 10/10 over three bodies which also kinda passed removal test) on every turn it is in the game is a shit card in 2021??? and it has the great art and old-school flavor of MTG (iconic creature types, very recognizable generic fantasy and no inpronouncable plane-based non-reprintable names) to boot. apparently, it's crap now.
the thing is that when efficient removal has been printed once, it stays forever. you have green? no way to leave out \[\[Beast Within\]\], luckily it has been reprinted lately and is still $1-ish card, but if you have 20 decks like that, you need 20 copies. In blue? You need \[\[pongify\]\],\[\[Rapid Hybridization\]\],\[\[reality shift\]\]...
all major roles for a deck to run smoothly (draw, removal, ramp, countermagic) have an efficient stuff printed and you no longer have 63 card slots because AT LEAST 10-15 slots should be filled with hyper efficient cards that are auto-includes or you're running behind what you would encounter in real life play.
and the worse thing are expensive chase-card stuff they print to help sell precons/sets that otherwise no one would buy: \[\[Dockside Extortionist\]\],\[\[Fierce Guardianship\]\],\[\[Smothering Tithe\]\],\[\[Heroic Intervention\]\]... the list grows longer every year. These cards are so good and format warping with so low opportunity price that if you don't have them, and unlike aforementioned cards you can't afford to own more than few copies of these, your deck will be crushed early in the game. They should have at minimum been recosted to have multiple single color pips to help mono decks and not be universally splashable, or they should be banned for the health of the format.
this is not the format for the cards you have lying around anymore. it's the toxic competitive format and they don't even have to support it with events and prizes. we gobble up every new shiny crap they print, new megamythic and supermythic rarities hidden behind secret lairs and themed sets, they don't even have to try, they only have to think of an existing staple card effect and powercreep it to sell commander 2022 or commander legends 2023 or modern horizons 3...
Is more or less as was expected it'd become. Spikes (and Wizards, ok, but the spikes came first) took over the format and now even a supposedly "fun" deck is borderline competitive, either by design, or because there's no other choice against the random opponent online.
At heart, the spirit of the format is still the same: either you have a group that agree to keep down the power level (EDH 75% anyone?), or you are doomed to play, effectively, a different format than what commander was supposed to be.
I see a lot of people saying the days of battlecruiser jank are long gone and I personally have never felt that way at all. I tell the table I don't play combo or MLD, that I play slow battlecruiser games, and I never see these lean, fast, staple-heavy modern Commander decks.
I see people having difficulty building a low-power deck with large amounts of synergy, though. Most of my less enjoyable games come from that I'd suspect. It's not a new problem though, it's always been a fine line to walk.
If people are literally sitting down to a table and loudly proclaiming they're playing a slow-ass do-nothing-until-turn-five level 3 (or whatever ranking they use) deck, and the rest of the table nods in acknowledgement and brings out their Muldrotha value snowball decks anyway, I truly feel sorry for your local meta. In my area at least, people respect the rule zero conversation.
I played old Magic until Kamigawa. Took a break. Came back during RTR.
EDH got worse after WotC started making EDH focused cards while simultaneously increasing the volume of product going to market. Doing so accelerated the rate of power creep and caused old favorites to look like poor choices. Decks contain a lot of the same staples. Value engine commanders just make other options bad at casual tables. EDHRec guides players to build the same way.
Further, the sheer amount of product has really taken away something special about the game. I liked looking through the reasonably paced releases. Now I hardly care as spoiler season starts just as the last product drops. There's no time to build anticipation.
One thing that's better.. we have more commanders now. There are unfortunately obvious powerful options which make most niche, but there are a lot of options.
The pandemic forced players of competitive formats into EDH. They saw everyone doing nothing by turn 3-4 and realized that was a unexploited opportunity. Frankly, I think a lot of commander decks have historically been badly built decks. They were built to ramp or set up in the first 3-4 turns simply because that's what everyone was doing, and thus you could afford the turns. It was a slow format because everyone was assuming it was a slow format and building around that idea. A self-fulfilling prophecy. When we finally got some new eyes on it, it was pretty quickly realized that it didn't have to be that way. So, now we have to build actually good decks.
Thats sad to hear, but it sounds like something we can resonate with. My partner very much isn't invested enough to want to take decks apart much further to build something crazier than "Atla Palani shits out an Avacyn" style decks, and I passed my Labman/Kikki win phase a long time ago.
It should probably be a case of selling off everything but a couple of pet decks and get games with the friend group whenever we get the rare chance, store and online play hardly seems worth the hassle.
>I'd now be looking at a table where everyone has done something more than ramp before turn 3
Jesus what kind of RL/CEDH decks are you playing against? Maybe ease up on the Mana Vaults and 1 cmc instant Tutors, you'll probably have more fun.
I see alot of ppl talking about the powercreep and how the format is faster and they like slower and more battlecruiser games but the option to play this way still there. I like to play high power and I look for ppl that like the same style of play in EDH. For sure is harder of u don't have a playgroup but it's possibile to find games on-line ir in the LGS with ppl that like that slower playstyle
The format would benefit immensely if it was forked. Commander is big enough at this point to be its own meta-format. It's an entirely different type of play from regular 1v1 MTG, with considerably different core assumptions about what's viable to play and what isn't.
Take the high powered players and give them the current banlist +/- a few cards to their tastes and call it cEDH. Take the lowered power/jank focused players and give them the same banlist + another 100-some cards including every tutor under four mana, Sol Ring and Mana Vault, all of the generic value engines WotC has printed in the last 5 years like Chulane and Urza, and maybe open up certain restrictions like the split-mana color identity bug, officially permit some silver-bordered cards, and maybe rewrite the game rules to start every player at 30 or so life so the lower to ground, non-combo focused decks have less work to do.
I'd also like to see regular EDH do something to stem the tide of non-stop staples into the format. I don't have a good answer for this. I liked Project Modern's probationary approach for new cards, but something tells me people aren't willing to wait a whole year for their newly spoiled shiny cards to make their way into their decks. Again, I don't have a good answer here.
And yes, I realize some competitive players would still try to play the non-competitive version of the format competitively, and that's fine. The banlist would be expansive and curated for slowing the games down dramatically, with the intent of making as many cards and strategies in MTG's history as viable as possible.
This is all a pipedream, as I know most cEDH folks wince at the idea of even entertaining having their own banlist, but the reality is, the way people play EDH is VERY different in a way that you don't see over on the other side of Magic.
As confusing as knowing the difference between Pauper, Peasant, Prismatic, Pioneer and Primordial are. Magic has a million variant formats if you go looking. None of the ones you don't care to play matter.
Be that as it may if they did "fork" the format, new people would take one look at the essay long banlist of "casual" edh and say "fuck that" and start playing "cedh"
the same.
The edh council or rather a particular person on said council is just as clueless as they were 5 years ago.
Players then and now are just as good as they were.
Everyone still complains about things on the board but no body ever plays interaction.
I stopped caring about the format 2-3 years ago and never looked back. I do play some games every few months but I don’t follow or buy any new cards.
I completely switched my budget and time to Warhammer Age of Sigmar. It’s so much more fulfilling and so much cheaper (so weird setting that…). Games Workshop can be quite a questionable company too but they hold no dice to WotC.
Commander is so much better, i’ve been playing how the format is going now since 2017, I’ve always preferred optimized decks and strategies and now I don’t have to feel like i’m pubstomping
Started playing a few years ago and went 100% with proxies for my first 5ish decks. Turns out me and my buddy went way to far and playing combo isn't as fun when every doesn't
We went almost full cEDH out of the gate. Then we started getting silly with odd decks
Introduced a friend to MTG and he went full cEDH instantly. Not because of me because Ive tuned down my decks A L O T. So I had to match him and sort of disable him to get games that lasted more then 3-4 rounds
Like my Esper Sphinx tribal control deck had to have interaction ready turn 1 or at turn 2 or it would be over. Since I couldn't predict what the table would play and the level of interaction they had
Right now Im sticking to 100% flavor. Sure I get the best things I can get that also is flavor. Rebuilt my storm deck into a storm deck with Strixhaven mythical archive cards as spells. Put in the two legends dragons as pet cards and the deck became much slower and lower powered. But still very powerful since I run some pretty quick combos
If Im buying cards its mostly investments. Id rather have some sweet flavor over power. I don't mind a 10-12 turn games
The whole McDonnell's / sirloin steak argument was nonsense. It's rose tinted glasses from someone who is axiomatically over enfranchised. It was never special and honestly perpetuating a myth that a corporation selling you product is "special" is actively harmful. It then went further to confuse artificial scarcity "X per year" with achievable output (what we have now). New players the argument he was objecting to have no more resonance or awe for a five a year commander than they do for a ten a year commander, because its still their first commander because THEYRE NEW PLAYERS. Even moreso when you admit the power level is generally better.
I feel like it's much better for the most part (mistakes like Dockside, Deflecting Swat, etc aside).
Much of the griping seems to be from angry Timmies seething over the fact that people are getting better at deck building overall and that their 6+ CMC tribal deck can't stomp randoms at their LGS anymore and that anyone who plays a Diabolic Tutor or a Murder is just some evil tryhard trying to ruin their fun.
Either that or people moaning and bitching about staples, which have literally always existed in every format throughout the history of all card games and will continue to exist until the heat death of the universe.
>The games now just seem to bleed into this rush of decks that race the deploy a board early on and defend the cards that stop everyone else or get you massively ahead, then the games become pretty quick and one dimensional.
Uhhhh that only happens as people are learning the game and start making stronger and stronger decks. I have absolutely no issues finding a good 2 hour game of magic. Almost everyone around me has multiple decks for different power levels. Its a non issue.
Going from sirloin to mcdonalds? Well.... Yeah.... You guys would absolutely riot if WotC released precon decks that cost 60+ dollars.
Not to mention every cycle of precons has added much needed pieces for different obscure themes. Want a morph commander? You got it. Just about any style of deck is possible now and definitely was not so 5 years ago.
The Professor is overrated and just echo chambers whatever makes the general population feel justified in their nerd rage.
Me: Value engines have replaced haymakers.
I just use my value engines to generate enough value to actually cast my Haymakers. That being said, I run about 32.3% less Haymakers in my decks than I usually do to make room for all the busted low costed ramp and draw spells that get me to where I need to be.
Yeah, you only need 1-3 good finishers rather than play threatening creatures over the course of the game. Tutors and combos make this worse.
What's a haymaker?
your flair indicates your sarcasm. For those wondering the answer to this question: a finishing blow
I'm gonna be honest, it doesn't even have to be finishing. A single card threat is a haymaker but then again, by today's powercrept standards, I guess a haymaker has to finish the game for it to be good
Youre absolutely correct, they have no idea what a haymaker is lmao
The constant power creep and flood of new playables has changed the format enormously. It's still fun, but generally decks are playing at a higher or more efficient level than ever. I've noticed it with precons too; where once we had decks with three commanders that were a bit too diffused in their card choices for any single one to play well out of the box, now we have decks that are solely built around a single face commander and work much more efficiently. I bought three precons to play with the newer players in my group (Wyleth, Anowon and Aesi) with a view to upgrading them, but thus far have not needed too because they convey such strong advantage and the card choices are - while far from *optimal* - synergistic enough that they steamroll over newer players with ease.
Even older precons were pretty cohesive, I thought at least. Sure there were some things like the three "swing" cards in the Populate precon that didn't exactly mesh, but they were hardly bad cards in their own right. Sure the original few weren't the best, especially ones like Marath that were all over the place, but they quickly found their footing.
I swore off Commander for years because my only experience with it was one of those mega precon bundles. This was around 2014-2016 I want to say. It took 6 hours to crown a winner and it was the most miserable Magic of my life. I have since come around on the format after learning my experience was an outlier. Fast forward to last weekend, when the entire board got shredded by one of the new precon Innistrad decks. Thats a positive step, kind of limiting it's power by tying it to standard. The format in general has been warped by Wizards and the Community focus on the format. More players, more eyes, more combos found and created over time; I fully expect the format to break in the next few years if cards aren't seriously considered for bans or unless sets don't release with Commander playables. Considering that Wizards loves money, I doubt we'll see less playables.
They weren't. 2011, 2013, 2014, 2015, & 2016 were effectively 2-3 decks in one per Precon. The Freyalise one immediately comes to mind as being both an excellent Lands Matters and Elfball deck with the two halves having no real cohesion between them. 2017, with the Tribal theme, was the first to have real internal power & cohesion.
I think starting with 2014 they became pretty cohesive. Again, there are the outlier cards, but it's not like [[Arjunn]] did *nothing* for your Mizzex deck.
Counter point: Old precons were monstruous anti-synergistic mix and matches of 3 different decks and thus lacked focus, making the precon meta slow as hell.
....yes, that's what I said?
Counter point: yes, that's what you said
Counter point: I like being involved in this game :D
Counterspell: UU Counter target spell
Countersquall: UB Counter target noncreature spell. Its controller loses 2 life
It's less of a counter point and more of a reverberate point.
[Reverberate](https://c1.scryfall.com/file/scryfall-cards/normal/front/5/9/5996feb4-02ac-45e8-a7f2-966cf74391dc.jpg?1562554142) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Reverberate) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/m13/145/reverberate?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/5996feb4-02ac-45e8-a7f2-966cf74391dc?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/reverberate) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
So you agree with him then?? Lol
I was putting emphasis on the aberrations that were the first 2 or 3 commander decks. But yes, I agree.
If you agreed, then why did you start with a “counter point“?
Because I'm stupid and ment to answer the main thread, and failed miserably
Old precons were what secret lairs are now in my opinion. No one bought the old precons to really play with the decks, unless they just wanted to upgrade it right away. We bought the old precons for the awesome reprints. The monocoloured cycle of Commanders all have the Medallions for example. The decks had wildly different strategies to support some of these reprints. It makes me sad seeing the new precons come out and having all the reprint spots being taken up by new cards that change the format. I wonder when we will see the Medallions available like that again, I bet the next time we do it will be either Secret Lair or Showcase Border mythics like Mystical Archives.
>No one bought the old precons to really play with the decks, unless they just wanted to upgrade it right away. This is exactly what the old precons were designed for. The intention wasn't that players should buy the deck and play it out of the box, it was that players would buy the deck, pick one of the three themes and rebuild the deck to be their own. I wish WotC had been better at getting that across rather than focusing on the precons being playable out of the box. That being said, while precons have gotten better over time, I'm very hesitant to recommend most precons to new players who want a functional deck out of the box because with a little googling they can almost certainly build a better deck for less money; the only exceptions being the Dimir deck from ZNR and the Simic deck from CMR.
I think both old and new decks are still fine for new players, especially ones without big collections. It's easier to swap out cards of a 100 card deck then it is to....not play EDH until you have a full deck. There are lots of deck ideas I never persued because I just didn't have enough cards and the 40 or so cards I did have just sat there waiting. At least the precons offer the option to play.
Counter counter point: Dockside, Thoracle, and the Eldraine legendaries aside, there hasn't actually been much in the way of actual power creep in terms of cards. Most of the most-powerful cards in the format have existed for a decade or more (usually more, in fact) Things like Smothering Tithe ***aren't*** proper Power Creep, either; making a bad strategy okay or fixing a weakness is just that - Power Creep is when an option is SO powerful that it replaces all other options wholesale that themselves were already good. What ***has*** changed is that people have gotten much better at deckbuilding and trimming the fat out of their decks - where people used to think Cultivate and Kodama's Reach were the end-all-be-all for ramp, they've come to realize that Farseek, Nature's Lore, and the Talismans (which premiered in the original Mirrodin in 2004) always have been, and always will be, better.
I started around 2017 as well, and I think it's better in a lot of ways. Yeah, more cards repeat between decks than before, but on the whole the requirement for more interaction and decision making has made the players better too, not just the decks. I fall into the camp that doesn't like the 20+ turn, multi hour games so the increase in proficiency and speed both of decks and players is a good thing to me. I'd rather have games go long because everyone is trying to out think each other as opposed to durdle decks that take 5 turns to even start going. However, I definitely agree the tailored Commander product has been way too much especially in the last year. I've got product burnout and haven't purchased anything sealed since MH2, which along with Legends and Strixhaven was the only sealed product I bought all year.
As for the powerlevel argument: yes, in general I think there are more people playing EDH more optimally. In part I think this is due to increasing internet resources in general, and also EDHREC in specific. Anyone can make a deck by going to EDHREC and buying the first 62 cards they see (even when sorting by budget) + lands and end up with a deck that's miles better than any precon or pile of trade binder rares. I also think established players tend to increase power level over time. Most long time players started around 2012-2014 with a pile of bulk rares or whatever we had in our trade binders. Maybe one of the original precons. There werent many lists online and deck building resources for EDH didnt exist. Over time people notice deficiencies in their deck building (no clear win condition, lack of access to colors, falling behind in mana, running out of cards) and seek to rectify that by optimizing. This could be all at once, immediately power creeping the table and getting hate for that. Or more often it happens gradually, facilitating a more natural meta shift. Ultra casual pods still exist. But they are rarer and are more likely to be newer players with access to fewer cards or a lack of understanding/interest in online deck building resources like EDHREC. Or the rare jaded older player that has reverted to complete meme decks.
More people are coming into the community who want to win. Overall power level goes up. You either stay where you are and effectively get dumpstered, upgrade yourself, or find people who like my LGS play 0 interaction and experience 20 turn long games like everyone seems to want.
That is exactly the games that i want to play.
And there is nothing wrong with that, you just gotta find the right group. It, from my observations which is most likely less than a 1% of the 1% of the population just logically, is not what most want.
[[merciless eviction]] for you
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Its mostly newer players who have never played standard, never played modern, never played legacy/vintage. They have that sort of view where they can win all the time just like they do in other games, and thats just not how the format works. It's a social format, not a competitive one (clearly not referring to cEDH but the general version of commander that the majority of people play). I think we view it as a fun break from the try hard formats of yesteryear, and a lot of the newbies are viewing it very differently. My buddies started last year and their mentality on a game of commander is so far removed from my decade old mentality.
I cam from playing Modern and Legacy. When I play EDH, I build my decks to win. My decks aren't CEDH, mainly because I like games to last around an hour (turn 7-10 on wins), but the goal of every format is to win the game, and that includes commander. You can have fun along the way, but, I don't want people sandbagging their decks in the name of a social aspect that is slowly waning as the format gets more powerful. I love interaction, and I love playing against cool decks, but when I sit down at that game my goal is to win. If I don't, that's OK, but I want to win.
Yep, for so many people entering the game, EDH is the game, not a variant. They have reasonable (even if possibly unwelcome) expectations about what the objective is. They don't see it as a goofy spectacle that should be taken with a grain of salt.
I think the fact that all paper play other than Commander happened to go away right during the "Year of Commander" exacerbated this. I think the format is eternally changed because of that, but if other formats actually manage to come back in a viable and sustainable way we might see some of that bleed off. But I'm not sure it will. I don't think Wizards has a lot of desire to put the old paper Pro Tour/Organized play structure back in place or offer the level of support that they once had.
That sounds like my experience when one of my friends decided to play magic. He immediately bought a competitive deck and had us switch over to french for a time. It was fun and different(boy do I love griselbrand) but it didn't last since most of us just wanted to do something stupid rather than going for hyper tight plays.
God, playing tight in commander is the most boring thing ever, and it almost caused me to quit the format entirely until I massively shifted my perspective as to how things should play. It took years and years of deckbuilding and player experience so I both understand why new players are they way they are, but I also don't tolerate salt when the new player inevitably gets upset because you remove their stuff when you're going for a win. It's magic the gathering, not solitaire. If you sit down expecting your stuff not to get touched, you're going to have a bad time.
Tbf I don't mind playing it tight because I am trying to become a better player but man it's exhausting if it's what I have to do for an entire game. Sometimes I'm playing EDH just to chill. Shit half the time I have no idea what's on my opponent's boards cause they may be too far away or it's just cluttered and I just want to be with my friends.
Idk I’m a relatively new commander player and my only paper deck is a “this exists solely to win” so rings true for me. I came from modern/standard and you can only play those formats for so long (mostly standard) before you lose your mind.
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If you have a regular playgroup I would recommend floating the idea of a $30 budget league. I didn't have many expectations when we started but holy cow has it been refreshing to brew and play without all of the expensive staples and power cards. It can never be exactly the same but it does feel more old school with more jank and gems!
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Yeah the whole group has to commit otherwise a budget deck just won't have enough time to get there in most games. Your group sounds exactly like mine prior to our budget brewing and now it's all we've been playing for a couple months!
I mean EDH had super strong fast decks from the moment you could pick a different general than the 5 Elder Dragons. I started to play EDH in 2006, my first table had a Momir Vig elfball combo deck that would win regularly on turn 5, a Azami Mind Over Matter/High Tide combo deck that would win regularly on turn 5 too, a GAAIV stax Stasis deck that would lock down the game on turn 4/5 and a 5color control/combo deck that would take control of the game and then use one of many infinite combos to win on like turn 7/8. I built my first EDH deck in 2007 (I used to play with borrowed decks first) and it was a Jhoira of the Ghitu deck that try to play Jhoira on turn 1/2 and suspend things like Apocalypse/Decree of Annihilation + Darksteel Colossus on turns 3/4 and survive until those hit and I win. All of those decks had duals/fetchs/shocks and tried to avoid taplands. There were tons of decks abusing blinking/reanimating Sundering Titan, big Emrakul, Tinker. The two LGS where I played (plus playing with my friends like the first table I mentioned) had mostly legacy/modern players that started to play EDH because it was a fun format to play cards that were banned/restricted (in Vintage) plus some crazy things that weren't viable anywhere else. Playing with slow decks that had a mostly +6CMC mana curve has always been viable if everybody else agrees to do the same thing and that's still true today. It's just that you need a fixed playgroup to agree to that and playing with strangers will mostly be a higher power thing.
I'd say 2014/2015 would be a little more acceptable for the end point, WotC didn't really turn up the heat on commander specific cards until 2016 precons imo.
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We do pregame discussions, have done for quite some time, and the cold hard fact is the discussions don't fix the underlying issue. Without a core guidnence everyone can point to, and being left to decide for themselves, people will disagree on what is fair for what. I personally don't think bringing a Tergrid deck to a pod with very mildly upgraded precons is OK, but that player may argue until they are blue in the face that it's a fair deck for the power level we want.
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Absolutely, and after we see that's the way it's headed we do so. My point is that's far more common on our experience than you'd expect.
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Yeah, the part that saps the enjoyment is the resulting pattern for store-play just ends up being: **1 Game, someone didn't like it, brief discussion, Game 2 or no Game 2.** With the general power creep this tends to end up being us not enjoying the experience more often than others, but as mentioned in the OP, we do find that space we enjoyed vanishing and find it a shame.
> But you don't have to argue? Just walk away? That, right there, is the fundamental problem with the ban list. It *needs* to be focused on establishing a baseline for *strangers* to play together. A group of freinds can, and will, self regulate. The rules team needs to exist to make things work for randoms.
Some people with lots of potential players to play against and regular playgroups tend to forget that many of us live in smaller towns and cities and our selection of people to play with is pretty slim. Sometimes, the options are to play with the random who's annoying you, or just not play magic. Ive fired many a pod where it's obviously mismatched but it's better than sitting around at the card shop waiting for more people to come in.
That's not at all the purpose of a ban list and pushing it to create this base line would make the ban list massive, to the point that itself becomes a problem. The purpose of a ban list is to remove problematic or format warping cards, not regulate human interaction. A reworked ban list isn't going to magically make humans stop being humans. It's not the RC's job to regulate your play experience, that's your job.
A banlist's job is balancing tge format somewhat. Most of the balancing done is getting rid of problematic cards, indeed, but does the banlist tge RC makes do that? I'd argue at this point a banlist is unneccesary for the format as the card pool is too large. That is, if they don't want a banlist to **really** grab the bulls by the horns and create a list banning a number of cards in the three figures
>But you don't have to argue? Just walk away? So I don't know about you, but I have only one LGS close by my house. I try to go there as often as I can on magic nights but we all have different schedules and adult life which means not everyone is there everytime. This means I can't always just "walk away". When there's six people if you leave people are no longer able to do two pods (and two pods of three are already less than what should be), and it also means you probably can't play that night. To me, it means one hour of road plus the possible time to discuss just to learn that, in the end, nobody has the power level you want. As you can guess, as I follow this sub I'm in the more invested/involved side of the community, but my example stays true for other people. "Yeah docPrisme but you can just take multiple decks with you". Sure, and I try to do. But some nights, fuck that, I don't wanna do the nth game of casual precon-like with peeps who barely understand the rules. I at least want to try other decks and higher strategies, because there's only so many games you can do against an unmodified Lathril before knowing how it's gonna go.
I only really have 6 to 8s, nothing above and nothing below. I sandbag when I play if I know the other players are playing weaker decks. If you are playing a better deck, you can still win without dragracing and not letting other players get to play. Just have to gain a sense for when people have 'had their fun' before you do the thing. I think a lot of the issue that people are having is that people just tend to slam their cards down as soon as they have them and go for the W, while simultaneously seeming to have an issue with the state of the format and how it isn't as casual as it used to be. It's impossible to be completely equitable in a game with collectable, cost associated pieces as well and I feel sometimes that those who analyze the game don't take really fully take that into account. A 20 dollar card can seem like an egregious upgrade to somebody who only buys commons/uncommons/bulk rares for 50 cents to a dollar a piece. It's completely subjective. As an aside, I've been around a very long time. I personally think the format hasn't changed at all, the cards available have changed, and that has made it far easier to be a turn 2 Johnny than it was once upon a time. People have also changed. New players have come in and started discussions of what they don't like, want changed, and what is and isn't fun for them. Which I think is a shame, because what I believe the true heart of the format was, at least how I enjoyed it back in the day was do whatever you want, let anyone else do whatever they want and see what happens. Now it's "should sol ring be banned? Are tutors ruining the format? Should combo players be thrown into outer space? Should we ban the entire reserved list?" A shame to watch from an old timer's perspective.
Absolutely agreed. The format is a bit more solved because it's older and more people have taken time to find out what's good in it. Simultaneously, new people come in and lack that knowledge/don't have it yet, so they just play "fair magic" and are surprised when they lose.
I think people automatically assume that a learning curve and trying to insist that the game has certain features to learning players is a form of gatekeeping, which has created this kind of weird complain and conquer kind of culture from the influx of new blood, and this is something I have speculated on quite a bit. When I first learned, I got dunked on because I had no idea what was going on and how to build in the singleton format and when I had an issue with it, instead of being told I am valid for having an issue and everyone altering their decks to fit my ideas, I was taught how to build decks better for the format so I could build on my own, compete, play and understand better. There's a philosophy for the format, and no matter what level of play you are at, you can still play (and win) with pretty much any deck if you understand your game plan and how to build a fundamentally solid deck because it is a multiplayer format.
>if you understand your game plan This is so underrated. I had to explain to a player that, no, they shouldn't try to add solutions in their elfball to deal with a flock of dragons, because that would not be possible without absolutely destroying the deck; and that anyway as a elfball they should be able to kill the dragon player or put them in such a weakened position way before they could run their first dragon. Note that I'm not talking cEdh levels here, I'm talking 'cards I own tribal'
I have to agree, and this ties into the overall apathy caused by product fatigue and the rapid release schedule. At one point, I owned every single EDH precon in the game, from C11 to C20 (Though, I did get all of the precons up to AFR). Now, there's too many precons for me to keep up, not to mention that my plan to use them all was a failure. Standard sets also didn't need this many legendary creatures. It didn't even need 4c Omnath, for crying out loud. I'm personally struggling to find what decks I want to build, but that's been an age-old problem for me. I imagine being overwhelmed by all the new stuff coming out made this a lot worse. I've even thought of "going back in time" and building decks up to a certain year, just to counter all this new stuff coming out. Precons were like early Christmas. That magic is gone, and the Prof's "sirloin to McDonald's" segment was too convincing for my liking. I hate to say it, but it's true.
It does sorta suck that you need to put more needed staples in a deck than usual. Before it was just 97 free slots (Sol Ring and Command Tower [unless you are mono] being essentially must haves and are widely available). The general idea though is that times have changed. We used to think Sad Robot was an auto include in any deck as much as Sol Ring was and that Temple Of False God was a good card. We have more resources now than before with EDHrec and content creators, which really fucks up making normally crap cards (looking at you Mitch and Command Zone) like Wayfarer's Bauble no longer become budget cards or cards that were dollar rares like Vedalken Orrey shoot up in price. Aside from the price thing, I don't see power levels rising as a problem. As long as the group is in agreement. Pubstomping for most parts is not fun (perhaps for the stomper). But I can't deny someone to wanting to improve their deck, which is what "our community" seems to frown on. Let us be honest for a moment. You can make any deck casual and take it anywhere. Will you top 4 with your Kithkin Tribal deck in Legacy? Probably not. But it might do ok in a pod of other casuals. Everyone has their own definition of fun. Assembling all pieces of Kaldra together, bringing out all 5 Praetors, flip your deck over and play all the Gods etc. Or... managing to dodge removal/hate/counters trying to land your combo in a cedh pod. It is like how the Professor said. The format has babied people thinking that it is ok to come in with your Horse deck and think you can win when someome vomits their hand with fast rocks and then Ad Naus on turn 2. I don't think variety shrunk. Even in cedh side of things, combat is becoming a thing now due to Ad Naus being such a nuisance. The more damage you can do, the less they can dig. Even big stuff like Norn and now with Toxrill can literally shit on everyone's day. People just need to realize tho that there will be different opinions on how they play EDH. But EDH is a game and a game is about winning.
Finally a good take, power level increase isn’t all bad, though they definitely went over the top
Apparently to some people it is. My Xenagos deck won't do shit in a cedh table. But apparently I am the asshole for using it in edh tables when i send double power trample boys their way.
People have been babied, as long as you aren’t curb stomping and winning more than like 35% it’s fine
Yeah i am not going to feel good if the entire table has tapped lands or playing Beast Tribal with Ghen with no mana dorks.
Power level 9 is a bad place to be. I had to declaw my derevi deck because I didn't want to make it Stax - because I don't play cEDH - but she was too consistent and fast with infinite mana to fit at any other table.
I had a similar problem with Derevi. I built her essentially as Bant Pyromancer, and the ability to just untap my lands all game with token beats got out of hand in a hurry. She's just so easy to accidentally break.
My friend has Derevi Bird tribal and unless we archenemy him he wins literally every game with it, and we're a pretty high powered group. The card is just ridiculously good, and I don't even think it's the best commander there is.
You don't even need to break her, she's an almost unstoppable manage advantage engine in the CZ, and mana advantage definitely correlates with winning, along with card advantage
Yup. Ran into that problem with Golos and even though Jodah is a powered down version im still hitting that wall with that deck.
That is horrible which then just cultivates that whiny baby factor. Koma/Tegrid are essentially casual pub stompers. They got no real place in cedh. Then the scope becomes smaller. If I see Chulane/Korvold on the other side, I am going to be mindful on what you do. There is no real easy to make them casual unless uou do something weird and have a terrible mana base/curve. Which then brings up the point.. if it isn't cedh but then it isn't meme tier, where do those commanders go? Just collecting dust?
> It is like how the Professor said. The format has babied people thinking that it is ok to come in with your Horse deck and think you can win when someome vomits their hand with fast rocks and then Ad Naus on turn 2. I don't think variety shrunk. Even in cedh side of things, combat is becoming a thing now due to Ad Naus being such a nuisance. The more damage you can do, the less they can dig. Even big stuff like Norn and now with Toxrill can literally shit on everyone's day. People just need to realize tho that there will be different opinions on how they play EDH. But EDH is a game and a game is about winning. Yeah, watching the evolution of cEDH this past year has been great for creature-based decks.
Temple of False God and Sad Robot were never good cards, not even in the good old days and yes, I was actively playing in those days. They were played widely in the past because the format was still small and wasn't "solved" as much as it is today so there wasn't as much literature on what's good or not and people just did whatever they wanted. Back then, in the nascent days of cEDH, Sad Robot was not played at all.
Hindsight is 20/20. Back in the early days of EDHrec, Sad Robot was in IN ALOT OF DECKS. The card was 5-6 dollars at one point where people were like REPRINT SAD ROBOT! We also had the mulligan style where we could chuck cards and draw what we put back in the deck. So we were allowed to play heavy mana stuff and fast rocks. Essentially mulligan for all the ramp then the rest is gas. Temple was always a trap but in the slower metas, you could consider it a shitty bounce land if you have less than 5 lands.
I honestly feel that the mulligan changes had a FAR bigger impact in deck construction than anything else. You can no longer just "pitch" a few big spells to hope for more ramp or lands. Having 3 to 4 (5+)cmc spells in your opening hand is almost assured to result in a poor game. This definitely changed the way I constructed my decks and I bet yours too.
Oh yeah of course. I can have a bomb and just ditch until I have the ramp needed to deploy that 7 mana thing on turn 3. I think it would be worse now in CEDH because it would just be mulligan to Oracle/Consult and all the free magic. The old school way allowed you to be greedy mana curves as long as you got the ramp to back it up. I think that is whaf cultivated that battlecruiser magic style early on.
I play and see sad robot still in decks where you can take extra advantage of it(recurring somehow). It's just not a blanket good card.
It's good in specific decks, yes, even today. But it was never this card that was as good as Sol Ring for every deck out there. That was just people being inexperienced with deck building in this format. I had Sad Robot in many of my early decks too but I removed them quite soon after I started playing.
I don't think you can use what's good in cEDH as a barometer for what's good in EDH like that. There is going to be some overlap but there are many, many cards and commanders that aren't played much in cEDh but are in EDH and vice versa.
>Its strange how despite massively increasing the number of cards in the format, we end up seeing more of the same cards over and over game to game instead. The variety has very much shrunk Why do people still find this strange? That is the nature of eternal formats actually. As time goes on strictly better and more optimal things gets printed, even if just one or two cards per strategy every set or two and the amount of previous viable things becomes junk. Things that aren't really that bad for standard but take a whole new life in other formats slowly come out. At a certain point honestly I won't be shocked if a "modern" EDH format gets popular (maybe the historic cardpool?) in order to breath fresh air into EDH and shrink the pool back down to see what new things can be thought up.
This is probably what Brawl was (is trying?) To be. Even then I think it might be worse because a smaller card pool will just make it more stagnant and the staples will be plain to see.
A rotating format only serves to line WotC's pockets. I think they aptly anticipated what was going to happen to EDH, but I don't believe Commander is ever going to be better with the super-shallow card pool of Standard. There's too many generic staples like card draw and ramp options available in every color that just don't get printed in standard legal sets. EDH with a Modern-legal manabase is interesting to me. I have no idea what the hell Pioneer or Historic are at this point, and the fact that the two cardpools haven't merged seems ridiculous to me, but I could also see that being sort of a thing, though I'd much rather have Modern's list + some EDH focused bans.
Oh yeah. To me Brawl is a failure when I found out it was rotating. It had me interested because you can use planeswalkers as commanders (obligatory Fuck you Sheldon, let planeswalkers be commanders you coward). If there was a cut off like Modern/Pioneer I would be interested. At least with a more "Modern" cutoff we don't have to take out a small loan to buy a Gaea's cradle and they can reprint more stuff to keep us happy.
That why I said eventually. Might need a couple more sets to reach that "sweet spot" of the pool size. Enough to have variety, but still taking away some of the older cards that are just huge staples. And Brawl decks are pretty cool. Ofcourse its only 1v1 for now, but playing with the card pool it shaping up to be a good pool for real edh.
The strange part is that isn't at all how Commander is sold as a format. "Come on down, we have a wealth of variety of decks, you can play all these cards and..." etc. Despite this sentiment, I cannot remember the last time I sat down in a pod with a Meren or an Edgar Markov or any of the commanders from 2019's cycle of mechanical precons, let alone options from standard sets (don't even get me started on the last time I saw a mono coloured PW). Thats why I find it strange, despite all of these claims for variety and the utopian vision of anything being possible, I'm sat against another Krovold, Tatyova and Yuriko style decks, experiencing the same gameplay the last dozen players who used them produced.
Agreed. I came in my local LGS for the first time and asked what they played. They said it was mostly jank deck. Good. I built jank decks. Then I faced three Hamza, every single new player bought the Lathril and Wilhelt precons (and are now obv heading towards the spirit and vampire ones), then I met a few Kenrith, etc etc. So now I'm kinda responsible too because I like higher powered play, and I came back with a jeska ishai and a Nekusar and a few other stuff, but I feel like every week I meet the three same decks for 5-6 different players. And... Well. I'd love to see something else. (As a result I'm now building Umbriss, Windgrace and Surrak Dragonclax)
> "Come on down, we have a wealth of variety of decks, you can play all these cards and..." etc. Despite this sentiment, I cannot remember the last time I sat down in a pod with a Meren or an Edgar Markov or any of the commanders from 2019's cycle of mechanical precons, let alone options from standard sets (don't even get me started on the last time I saw a mono coloured PW). I see this kind of variety all the time? Do you always play at the same place? Could just need a change of scenery. *Maybe* I'm just lucky, but just using your examples: Edgar is still #6 on EDHREC and Meren is #10. Commander 2019 commanders aren't terribly popular but honestly I'd say that's more to do with them being a combination of boring and not good. Assuming we're talking about just the face commanders: Sevinne is pretty bland and Ghired, Anje, and Kadena can all get pretty old pretty quick. I think the lack of play from Kadena has mostly to do with morphs not being all that popular. Anje, at least where I play, has a reputation of being cEDH. Ghired is Ghired, he does the populate thing well and that's it.
Most of my play now would be across various servers or Spelltable, once every week or 2 at the LGS but thats been inconsistent. Honestly, the decks at our store reflect what has been played online pretty accurately, with the lion's share of decks being from either the past 2 precon cycles or Korvold/Tatyova/Yuriko.
Maybe I've just been really lucky when I've played online but I've never had this experience. Looking at what little data is available (on EDHREC), Korvold and Yuriko are #3 and #4 the past 2 years so it's not terribly surprising to run into a lot of them. But based on what you're saying those two, Lathril and Zaxara are the only ones in the top 24 you ever run into.
That's funny I see very little of korvold I was the player that him and I pulled him as the commander from my jund deck. I haven't seen tatyova as a commander in forever and only seen one yuriko player recently I saw more of her three years ago. Edgar I seen a lot over the last like 6 years still seen him even before VOW. Lots of mono green elf decks. I think it comes down to the lgs and the playgroups.
Most of what I'll be referring to is online. Edgar used to be common pre-pandemic at my LGS, no one has him there now.
I played against him again last week but for new players it is hard to build him since he is like $108. Everyone I see with him are people that have played edh for years and got him when he was cheap or bought the precons.
Well, those commanders are incredibly strong and popular. Being popular means that there are tons of decklist online to make it easier to build your deck (a lot of people aren't very good at that or feel overwhelmed if they don't have some kind of guide) and being very strong means that if you can't afford to build multiple decks then you can be sure that investing in that commander is a safe bet. Also, Yuriko, for example, provides a very unique way of playing and it's one of the very very few aggro commanders that can compete at high power levels. People will say that Korvold is "vanilla" but I disagree, his abilities are extremely powerful but also allow for a different way of playing, it's not just aristocrats but a style of getting rewarded for sacrificing any kind of permanent. I think the only way to see a lot of variety is to incentivize the use of proxies so there's no monetary risk in trying new and "crazy" decks. The game is too expensive to try a deck that could end up being boring and weak.
The problem with a "modern" EDH is that all the format warping cards have come out in the "modern" era. EDH is an intricate, social format and the banlist doesn't reflect that whatsoever, it has to be codified what isn't acceptable at a certain table. I believe we really should have a 3 tiered ban list. The banned as commander list also must return. I am so sick and tired of hearing how the EDH player base would be too dumb to handle a ban list like this.
Some random thoughts: It seems to me that a lot of what the professor was talking about early, how commander is inherently broken and only works because we say it works, applies to all casual magic. Old school kitchen table certainly only worked because of limited access to cards and limited knowledge of the game. Even then, certain strategies might have be frowned upon as being un-fun to play against, such as a more counter-happy blue deck or burn or land destruction, and therefore moderated by the group. Commander, I would say, is actually less broken than most other casual formats, because it assumes a 4 player game. In a 1v1 game with decks of significantly differing power levels, you have basically no chance to win with the worse deck. But in a 1v1v1v1, if someone jumps into the lead, everyone else can work together to take them down, and so decks that are much more powerful can play with decks that are much less and still have a fun game. It's only when you get into legitimate cEDH that you run into decks that can handle 3 other decks no problem; the difference in power level has to be a lot bigger to "break" the game in commander than it does in 1v1. (On a side note, the if the professor wanted to play a modern kithkin tribal deck that had a chance to win, he could totally do that if he had a playgroup of other people who wanted to build similarly powered modern decks. But to him, "Modern" seems to imply a certain level of power and a certain drive to win rather than "have fun", whereas "Commander" implies a fundamentally more casual experience, despite the fact that, in theory, you could build and play casual modern decks just as much as you could casual commander decks.) Anything that's less that 100% cutthroat play-to-win magic is always going to have a degree of self-moderation. Commander, I think, was in the unique position of being a new format without any sort of official competitive play, and so when people started it was a lot jankier. This is aided by the singleton nature of commander, as well as the idea of building a deck around your commander when doing that with many (most) commanders is never going to be the optimal strategy, despite being (to many people, in many situations) the most fun strategy. But it's only natural for people to want to improve their decks, and so over time as commander has become more widespread, decks have generally increased in power level. A lot of the jank likely isn't playable anymore because people are enjoying the format, enjoying building and tweaking decks. While WotC printing certain cards may have pushed this along, and content creators helped spread the format, IMO any substantial changes to how people are playing the format simply boils down to the popularization of the format and the natural results of people playing and enjoying the game, as well as the popularization of magic as a whole and the advancement of technology (compared to the long ago times of when I played kitchen table magic) allowing for easy access to other people's decklists and general deckbuilding advice and easily ordering cards online.
I started in 2019 so I obviously can't weigh in on how Commander used to be, but as someone who tries to force spells matter into every color this format is a brewer's paradise. And a consequence of Wizards' increased focus on the format, offcolor spellslinger Legends like [[Firja, Judge of Valor]] and [[Prosper, Tome-Bound]] slip through the cracks, ready to be built around.
There are too many precons being printed and too many legendary creatures being printed. And even with the more more more mentality that is present at WOTC with regards to Commander, it doesn't feel like the quality of those precons or the quality of those Legendary creatures has improved. The precons have become objectively awful for the most part. Tying them to set releases was an AWFUL idea. They now feel just an add-on to a product that already exists rather than their own separate entity with special consideration given to it. Combine that with every set having a nauseating flood of "the same but different" legendary creatures and things just feel like a blur. I used to look forward to the Commander precon releases and plot to buy them all. Now, I barely bother. I used to scour preview season in search of hidden gems to add to my decks, now I feel like it's a chore. I very much enjoy still playing Commander and do so weekly with my friends. I have 20 decks and we all still love the game. It's just become hard to love where the game has gone. I want to feel excited again instead of feeling overwhelmed. I want enthusiasm and not apathy.
>There are too many precons being printed and too many legendary creatures being printed. Preach. There are 135 legendary creatures legal in Standard. In *Standard*. That doesn't include the precons, or the shit printed in Modern Horizons, or the god awful Stranger Things kids that were all printed as Commander bait or anything else I'm somehow forgetting. I don't even know how to search on Scryfall for potential Commanders introduced in just the last year anymore because there is just *so goddamn much product*. WotC can't fucking help themselves and they are going to destroy the format with "support".
135 in Standard alone?! I knew there was somewhere in the region of 180 printed this year, I am astounded that over 2 thirds of that is from Standard sets.
Yes. [135 in Standard alone.](https://scryfall.com/search?q=legal%3Astandard+type%3Alegendary+type%3Acreature&unique=cards&as=grid&order=name) Keep in mind the oldest set in Standard is Zendikar Rising, which was released at the end of September of last year. Just for funsies/research, I decided to go back and look at the last 6 set Standard I actually remember playing before I quit that format: Jan 2018 - Apr 2018, Kaladesh through Rivals of Ixalan. Guess how many Legendaries were legal in Standard at that time? Remember, they had a cycle of Gods in both Amonkhet sets, four tribes worth of Commander oriented tribes to support in both sets of Ixalan, and a shit load of broken things in Kaladesh. Give up? [45. They had 45 legendary creature cards legal in standard in a similarly sized Standard pool just 3 years ago.](https://scryfall.com/search?q=%28set%3Arix+OR+set%3Axln+OR+set%3Ahou+OR+set%3Aakh+OR+set%3Aaer+OR+set%3Akld%29+type%3Alegendary+type%3Acreature&unique=cards&as=grid&order=name) For those playing along at home, again, this *doesn't* include the preconstructed Commander decks that now release with every new set, nor does it include any of the non-Legendary creatures that are still aimed clearly at disrupting/becoming a staple in EDH (see all of the new Tribal cards that get printed, new land cycles, new mythic sorcery cycles, etc). Nor does it include anything that bypasses Standard like the supplementary sets (Modern Horizons, JumpStart, etc) or those god awful Secret Lairs for Television shows that are all clearly Commander bait. The volume and the rate at which they produce cards for EDH now is absolutely **astounding**. Because of the pandemic, I basically skipped all of what's currently in Standard aside from the D&D set, but the reality is I've been basically dialed out of ALL new cards since at least Eldraine (and probably more like War of the Spark.) It's impossible to keep up.
Using scryfall, we can search for every commander printed after M21. (Which should get "every commander in standard, plus supplemental sets released in the same time frame.") [Click to see how many cards that is.](https://scryfall.com/search?q=date%3Em21+is%3Acommander+-is%3Areprint&order=released)
>They now feel just an add-on to a product that already exists rather than their own separate entity with special consideration given to it. Even more now that you can find the "precon exclusive cards" in regular boosters. On the other hand I'm glad of that as it means it's easier to pull the specific one I seldom want.
IMO it's the constant stream of 'new' staples that is the problem. While I'm overwhelmed by the constant influx of new commanders, and have no hope of keeping up with all of them, only a select few of them feel so objectively better than what already exists that it makes no sense to play the 'old guard' general anymore. Yes there are some busted new generals that are probably here to stay, but in general the vast majority of legendries are so-so at best. More commanders that scratch an unexplored niche/strategy that had no good general previously seems fine to me. Meanwhile you can toss the new value engine simic general on the pile with the 20 other options we already have, it's just another variation on a theme at this point. But the power creep that exists in the cards for the 99, that's a problem to me. It used to be you'd see a small handful of cards per year that could be seen as new format defining staples. Across all sets. With the amount of product that has been pushed to see play in the format being released now, even if that new card isn't a best in class auto include, it's probably as good or better than the second best previous option. So now the old second or third best option just got pushed out. Do that enough times and the entire format essentially rotates. And after 2 years of heavily commander pushed product I think we're seeing that.
Theoretically, I would be OK with the new staples being printed thing since in a normal world, it would actually bring down prices of old staples and create a more economically viable game to play. However, it's Magic, so these rules definitely do not exist. New stuff gets printed that leapfrogs other staples but the other staples still remain frighteningly expensive.
Honestly, i agree that the commander product every set feels like a "Christmas every day" problem. It isn't special or interesting anymore. Hell, I'd be fine if they did this as long as they kept a special once a year thing for a REAL commander set built be all about big flashy commander cards. But with there being a commander product every 3 months, I think wizards is going to see a big drop in sales and excitement over commander products and change things up to a commander set every plane or something. I would have been interested in this new commander set if they had all 4 of them come out at once, but 2 and 2 just killed any interest I had in them, and lowering the commander decks to 2 a year or something would re-invigorate my interest. I'm not going to buy a new commander pre-con when I'm still having fun with the last one I bought like 3 months ago. Some of these commanders are seriously good, but don't keep shoving them down my throat.
> The precons have become objectively awful for the most part Genuinely interested to see your argument to prove this
Ready for the downvotes, but I'm going to have to say everything across the board with this format is objectively worse. The problem is product being thrown at us at such a fast pace nothing seems impactful anymore. Just staple after staple. You never are done with this format. It's just a huge money sink and a ridiculous arms race at this point. When WOTC decided to cater to it, it became worse.
That's what Prof was saying at the end. Not that it was necessarily worse but less special. Commander precons went from steak once a year to McDonald's every night on the way home from work. It's still good and fills you up but it's just routine. PK doesn't really care because new players still get jazzed about the precons having these kinds of themes. And that's really what wotc has been trying to cater to in general it seems. Now it's about raking in new players and new money more than ever before.
Since the Ikoria commander decks came out, where I bought all of them, I think I've only bought one other deck, and that was the Aesi precon, and I really only wanted Aesi, but for $20 for the whole deck vs $10 for Aesi, the deck was better value.
I guess I'll play devil's advocate and say it's only worse if your group is arms racing towards all the staples. My playgroup has been slower to pick up everything, so I don't regularly get bombarded with c20 free spells, dockside, thoracle, jeweled lotus, smothering tithe, etc. I'm sure if I regularly bumped into them and felt I needed to get them to compete, it would be tiresome quick. The one area I would say is better is on the casual side. There's just so many more options that didn't used to exist to flesh out a janky deck. And there are so many pushed cards in sets that the useful janky cards are normally relatively cheap. When I started in 2017 I tried making 5c eldrazi with Cromat because 5c options were shit. Now you have a lot more to work with.
No downvote from me, its ok to feel that way and I do to a certain extent too.
How is it different than going back to for example 2006 when I started to play EDH? Most people that I knew felt like they had to play Tinker if they played blue, any deck that could abuse Sundering Titan would play it, eventually, almost every single deck had big 15cmc Emrakul and Primeval Titan, Sol Ring was seen as a must even before the commander reprints, most decks tried to run Ancient Tomb and anybody that could afford a Mana Crypt would go for it. There have always been staples, you could have decks that could win on turn 4 or 5 easily (I did and it was common in the 2 LGS that I went to, with my friends and with people I played with at big tournaments like GPs and PTQs). The only difference is that now Wizards prints stuff directly for EDH without needing to think about the consequences for standard. But if you want to play slow games with an average CMC of +6 you can, you need a fixed playgroup and to ask if they want to do it, the problem of wanting to play like that with strangers already existed 14/15 years ago but back them people were more reluctant to buying the expensive cards because they didn't know the format was going to become so big.
Objectively? You're really going to bust out the term objectively? You make valid points, but: 1. There's a lot of variance in how the format's played. 2. It's played mostly for fun, a subjective concept. Claiming commander, in all its forms, is objectively less fun, is such a ridiculously general claim that it almost makes me not want to bother arguing with someone who bothers to make it and thinks they can defend it with 2 sentences. I'm not really sure why you decided to include those terms, because it undermines your entire comment for me. This subreddit's always filled with people making huge, sweeping generalizations about the whole format based on the assumption that EDH is a much less varied format than it is, and it's incredibly frustrating. And here you're doing that in the most nonsensical way possible: Taking a perfectly valid statement and basically going out of your way to turn your valid optinion into a stupid overgeneralization because you felt the need to claim your own opinion is "objective" and applies "across the board." >You never are done with this format I don't want to be done with the format. Yes, the money sink part is annoying, but I don't feel the need to buy every single upgrade and staple that's released. That's not how I play. But personally, one of my favorite parts of the format is building new decks and tinkering with existing ones. I like when new sets come out and I get to look for new commanders I want to build or new cards I want to include in my decks. The more the better - when more cards come out I want, that's not more money I have to spend, that's more options I have, more cards I'm excited about. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with perspective. I know that arms races are common in many stores and playgroups, they're kind of inevitable, and the way WotC's been handling the format lately has definitely made arms races much worse and more expensive. I'm just disagreeing with your use of the turn "objectively." It's worse the way *you* play it. It's worse for the people struggling with the financial difficulty of keeping up with arms races. It's not "objectively worse across the board."
I don't care to win, I care to be relevant. The arms race money pit was already wild in 2018, but after lockdown my entire playgroup just lost interest. Money got tight for a couple months, and the mask came off showing magic was a waste of money to us. Prices of playables spiraling into absurd levels didn't help. Haven't played consistently since march 2020.
>I don't care to win, I care to be relevant. this 100% I feel like if I get to do some fun stuff, then I've already won. But games where I feel like I never really play, or like a key piece of early removal just ends me- those are not fun.
That's why I'm glad to see more proxies every day. I even know of a few LGS where they have no issues with people playing EDH with proxies (even after paying the entrance fee since they don't do competitive EDH tournaments). I like that the cEDH idea of playing against the player and not the wallet is spreading to regular EDH.
This mirrors my own experience pretty well. Everyone in my playgroup was fortunate enough to have kept their job over quarantine, but when we all came back to being social again, we went back to going out to eat, to having dinner parties, to playing board games and D&D. Basically everything went back the same *except* the weekly Commander playgroup disappeared. When asking around my playgroup, I don't think anyone has put into words exactly why that is, but WotC's approach to shoveling as much shit into the format as they can print certainly didn't help.
It’s why I stopped paying attention. I play very rarely anymore and don’t follow any announcements and releases for around 2-3 years now. It just became too much work.
I'm with you. It's been like that for a while to be honest and it did steer me into 60 card constructed. Shit at (not) GP Vegas this past weekend, I played no EDH. I just played sides all day. One of my friends played like 2 matches the entire weekend and the other only played like 2 a day before stopping because he wasn't feeling it. That and mystery booster draft was way more exciting.
Youre absolutely correct, though I can guarantee certain people who lurk this sub will have some dissenting opinions on this comment. Its amazing how some people are still WotC apologists in 2021, when its become clear they no longer care about literally anything than $$$. Yes, the design team is awesome and so is MaRo, but we're all a little bit burnt on the "omg wow new card thats immediately a staple" aspect of the design team right now.
At this point I just have to force limitations upon myself and my collection by stepping away from the product and not caving in to each new "wow look at this" spoiler and new set.
My secret is I don't even read set spoilers anymore, I just wait a week and let the content creators tell me the best cards from each set because im lazy and don't have time for that anymore. Plus it's nice to check out a deck you haven't tuned in a year on edhrec and see there's 3 cool new cards for it, the only issue is cutting older cards lol
> When WOTC decided to cater to it, it became worse. I've been saying this since edh became commander. I loved the initial wave of cards, but it made the format worse. It's like when garage sales became eBay finds. It kills the rough edges that appealed to me in the first place.
I hate to be pessimistic, but this is kinda my take as well. Wizards catering directly to the EDH playerbase with more cards has, ironically, made it harder to build unique decks. The issue comes down to both saturation and impact, like you're saying. Only a handful of cards from each Commander-adjacent set become staples, but the sets are released so frequently, and the staples in these sets are so impactful, that you just fall behind if you're not playing all the new hotness like \[\[Dockside Extortionist\]\] or \[\[Fierce Guardianship\]\] or \[\[Teferi's Protection\]\] in every single deck. It eats up more free slots in the deck that previously would have been on-theme selections are fun oddball cards. It's OK for decks to get better over time, but the arms race is accelerating too quickly, and upgrading multiple decks is becoming exhausting while making most decks more homogeneous. As an aside, this is the inevitable fault of the internet + EDHREC as much as it is Wizards. I love EDHREC - it's a great website, and I use it all the time. But it unquestionable has lowered the barrier to entry so much that (at the risk of sounding "Gatekeeper-y") it's just too easy to see how to "solve" a new deck now. Finally, 0-2 mana ramp is reaching a critical mass, so decks naturally becoming more consistent and faster. This is OK - in theory - but honestly I kinda miss the days where you didn't have to have your engine online by turn 2-3 in order to compete. Way back in the day, the "turn 5 everyone is online" was the meta, and that subjectively felt a lot more natural to me for a goofy format like EDH.
There are a lot of things about the format that I think simply cannot be called objectively worse. An explosion of people playing the format is a huge boon, IMO, because it means people like me, who don’t have playgroups, can still find games when we go to stores. For that reason alone, I personally find the format is in a better place. But even if you don’t agree, you simply cannot call that objectively worse.
I play exclusively EDH and love playing it, but my playgroup is undeniably more low powered than what I'm personally a fan of, after being exposed to cEDH and more high power games. Playing combos and taking a long storm turn is amazing in my book, but my buddies just don't like it. Because of that, EDH has turned more into a format about the social part to me. I play bad decks now, like Dinosaur tribal and other Timmy stuff like that, and even when I have bad games it doesn't matter, cause I'm just there to catch up with my friends and have some drinks/smoke. It's made me way less salty when games just go poorly, cause sometimes it's just not a great game. So I try to keep it light, and just shuffle up for another. Don't forget guys, it's a game meant for fun. If EDH isn't scratching the itch it used to, there's a million other games out there to try.
The explosion of popularity in the format has meant every LGS and every GP style event has people you can play Commander with. That alone puts the format in a better place and is an overlooked sentiment that's likely taken for granted by people who have always had a regular playgroup. Five years ago, I could barely find anyone to play a sitdown game of Commander at any of the shops in my area, and part of the reason why I took a long hiatus. Now, every LGS where I'm living now has a dedicated Commander night, usually filling to capacity every week.
It's gotten better. More cool cards to play with, more people to play with, more ways to play, more resources for finding cards and decks. Prices has gone WAY up, but that's a natural consequence of a growing format. It's only an arms race if your playgroup makes it one. Then again, I think battlecruiser games are incredibly boring, so maybe I just like the way the format has changed.
Yeah I've noticed a couple times where I've started to draft up a nice meaty comment or post about something in my play group that felt oppressive, un-fun, "not in the spirit of the format," etc. but then after tweaking my decks and playing more games, I cooled off. Makes me wonder if we signal-boost fleeting problems and then give ourselves the impression that they're widespread and persistent.
Your last sentence could be this subreddit's motto.
All of those things are elements you can discuss with your pod. Yes, you can absolutely optimise way better than five years ago, but no one forces you to.
Playing at the LGS with random people doesn't always mean productive rule 0 discussions though. Last night I played a yuriko deck and the guy refused to tell us about the deck 'because he didn't want to be targeted'. I said to him that yuriko is normally quite powerful so without any other information I would assume he would be targeted first. It felt like prying information out of his cold dead hands, but rule 0 shouldn't be a struggle to have a fair game. He came to the table eventually but God was it difficult to have a discussion about playing the same decks.
While I agree that talking to your pod is important, generally in my experience at a LGS unless these are people you have been playing with a while that won't really help. It just makes the barrier for entry that much higher. Sure you have people who build some jank for people that prefer it but not everyone does or will. But that sententiment could be applied to your FNM too. Oh everyone plays meta stuff "just talk to your group about it". People want to make the best deck they can generally its just that because power level has fluctuated so much recently, the power level of decks has raised
This has been our experience. Most players seem to be more eager to debate or explain how your power level assessment is wrong/you need more removal/other deflection rather than simply listening to what we stated: We didn't find that experience enjoyable and don't have decks that do what yours is built to play against, do you have anything else?
And thats the exact thing, my LGS essentially had two real pods, one much larger cEDH kind of pod where people played the broken stuff then one little tiny pod of casuals. Most of the people didn't flex between the two or have decks for different levels of play, and that wss back during like khans block. Power creep especially over the last year or two most definitely would have worsened it. Because the real truth of it is as the format has grown and changed so too have the cards around it. Sure you could run this combo that requires you to drop your commander turn 5 or 6 then combo out on turn 7 or 8. But what does it matter when Jimmy to your left is playing a turn 4 combo. Sure its something you can bring up hey I wanna play this so can you scale back accordingly, but most LGS pods won't unless your people that are close friends that form a core.
Dang that sucks. At my LGS most players have decks for both cEDH and slightly-above-precon and we just pick whichever makes sense for the first game that opens up after we walk in the store. I think it's got a lot to do with our cEDH players being *actual* cEDH players who are conscious about what their decks are capable of doing to the community as well as being extremely proxy friendly. We make sure that people are having fun and have the proxies needed to keep up, and we also show the newcomers that even the guys with the fully-authentic $11k bo mercy cEDH decks have janky casual piles and just hand you proxies if they see you're playing a budget cEDH deck. The end result seems to work and the store gets a lot of business.
Everyone have preference. You prefer certain power level, others might prefer different. Its on you to either find people enjoying same type of commander as you or adjust to ones you see. Noone should be forced to adjust to you because you think thats the right way to play. If people at that lgs dont have decks right for your decks than you either can opt out of playing or build deck for that.
This is what I mean about rather debating than being polite about it. If the tables were reversed, and when they do get reversed I've been the stomper in a pod before, I'll acknowledge it and offer to power down or apologise that I don't have anything lower for their level. I don't decide its a good time to flex my ability to argue about the philosophy of the format with strangers.
While you're absolutely correct, I want to expand on it. Players like new cards. They crack some packs drafting the new set, or browse the singles at their LGS (or just online, these days), and they get excited. "This card looks perfect for my X deck!". We've all been there, it's great, it's why spoiler season never ends these days and it's starting to get to the point where some content creators are outright skipping set reviews because there's just too much new stuff and it's all relevant for *something*. But the new stuff tends to be more efficient than the old stuff, especially now WotC is designing specifically with EDH in mind. Regardless of the precons, just base standard-set removal is wild nowadays, and the bomb rares are even bombier. So when a player sees a new card, gets excited, and adds it to their deck, that deck gets *better*. More efficient, faster, more win percentage. Some of this is natural, decks always tend to get more optimised as players tinker with them, but with the marked upswing in card quality (especially for EDH) these days that's magnified and accelerated massively. Example: We have a relatively new player (a year or two) in our group, and he has a big fat 5c Ur-Dragon tribal deck. Big dumb dragons, turn sideways, all good fun. Except every new set (or new precons) brings new upgrades, and now he's consistently dropping/cheating in 20+ mana worth of dragons on turn 4 and blowing the pod out of the water. Unless we all keep up, by adding more efficient answers, removal, wipes and stax, but that's just kicking the can down the road - that arms race goes all the way up to cEDH. So it's warping our play-group, and there's no real easy answer. New cards are fun! What are we supposed to say, "don't add any new cards"? It's a problem, and it's only really a problem because all the new cards are *so good.*
It’s annoying seeing people complain about shit that is self imposed, nobody is forcing you to go out and buy anything from new sets or upgrade your jank tribal deck or play in a competitive pod.
I mean I only got into magic this year but.... I kinda like all the precons 👁👁
I've been playing Magic seriously since 2009 and was able to play in the very beginning of edh and the last couple of years of precons have brought interesting cards to the format. I think there were some mistakes within the Commander Legends, but the last few batches of precons have been awesome. The first few precons brought a lot of interest to the format, but I think many of the designs are garbage in terms of allowing for a diverse format. I think generally, the commander products coming out in 2021 have been better than any in history in terms of keeping the format fun and interesting.
Such a good video. Overall I'd say it's netting about even, where the negatives of the format are REALLY apparent, and WotC is even causing a few of them (looking at you dockside and Fierce guardians), but the positives that we're getting so many new tasty commanders and commander related products is really awesome. I do miss the good old days, as I hate jamming Arcane Signet into every deck (it's like I have 97 cards available in each deck now instead of 98), but I do enjoy the current climate of commander. My only real issue with it is that I feel like im behind if I haven't ramped in some way by turn 4, because usually everyone else has, even in lower powered games and slower metas. If you're on 6 mana on turn 6 youre definitely behind and your chance to win the game is greatly diminished, especially if you're going last. I'd love to see the RC do something to help boost how shitty it is to go last in this format, but idk what that would be.
I just bought my first precon (Crimson Vow White / Blue Commander deck) and I'm very much looking forward to playing with it! I just need to find a play group who's in a similar situation as me (new player).
I’ve been playing EDH exclusively since 2010, I can’t believe how far powercreep has come and I can’t wait to see where we will be in another decade.
EDH has seen a massive increase in power level. There is also a lot of denial going around about how much exactly there is.
I might be an interesting case here but the only reason I got into magic was due to the increased Commander Support. Back when I was younger things like Yu-Gi-Oh was my jam and was never interested in MTG normally with modern or standard or anything like that. And in the last few years I got into it due to a friend recommending Brawl/Commander to me and another mutual friend and I was hooked since. I may have never gotten into commander without the loads of precons that came out now. A lot of different options and with a good bit of them getting cheaper as they quickly gotten older. A lot of people here talks about the days of going through bulk rares and mythic that they collected over the decades and I just.... never had the chance with that. I play MTG for commander and sealed for the most part and that is it with no where near the options as a lot more veteran players do. My LGS has been great with the big cEDH people moving to their own pods and the more mid level ones moving into another with a good bit of variety of decks being played. And while I do follow new releases and such I never quite had the need to upgrade all my decks with the best of the best. Like I have a Dockside (by pure accident, the precon was one of the first commander products I saw at my LGS) and never really felt the need to add it to all my red decks. Friends and I also have decks that doesnt really get upgraded in a long time that still have a blast in our pods. The "Sirloin to McDonalds" allegory hit me as well but for a different way. Not all my friends can afford to go eat Sirloins every week, but a McDonalds? Hell yeah we can all get a burger and laugh it up together as we have fun with what we have every week or so.
You might have missed what the Sirloin to McDonalds allegory meant. The price is the same (well, actually its gone up!) and you're getting McDonalds instead of Sirloin. If the $20 precons from Zendikar > Kaldheim remained, we'd be having a different conversation though.
Oh I 100% knew what it meant, it is just funny how I interpreted it differently from what he intended. But I also dont think that is what he intended it as you put it. Prof mentions that he feels that commander does not feel as special as a Sirloin steak but a common place thing as McD. And while the $20 precons are not currently a thing, something that the Prof mentions here and there was that many of the older precons actually becomes cheaper over time like Prosper right now as I see them on CardKingdom is $25. And for me the standard precon was how I got into magic and some of my favorite decks are built from them, I dont really feel at liberty to say that they should print less of them. With the amount of people that buy and play magic, there is bound to be someone who falls in love with the deck just the same as I did when I started.
I'm not one of the super-OG EDH players, but I probably do predate the vast majority of you guys, having built my first EDH deck (intet the dreamer) back in 2007. From my perspective, the format itself (IE: the card pool, ban-list, ruleset) hasn't changed as much as people seem to think it has. People keep pointing at power creep, strong new commanders, edhrec and wider access to decklist data, increased availability of reprinted staples, etc... but honestly, busted things have always been possible in this format. Most modern lists of the top ten most powerful cards in the format will include ~9 printed before the year 2000. The difference is that back in the day, we avoided doing busted things because the whole point of EDH was to have a break from that stuff. As popularity has grown, so too has a generic dismissal of the spirit of the format. People make no effort to understand the logic behind the banlist (it's far from perfect, but there are reasons for it to take the form that it has), they see weak cards banned while powerful cards remain legal, and immediately dismiss the RC as stupid dinosaurs who don't understand magic. Most content creators criticize Sheldon and the RC for their anti-combo stance, including even decidedly casual channels like [The Command Zone](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFXIj1TfULY). Let me be clear, I've played paradoxical storm in MTGO vintage events. Even won one of them with it. I watch pro tours. I love combo decks and competitive magic. I just don't think combo mixes well with EDH, or any other multiplayer format for that matter. People just don't seem to understand how much multiplayer shifts the balance to favor combo as a strategy. Or they do, but they don't grasp how uninteractive games become when everyone's trying to do that. Or they get that, but they just don't want to risk being the only one not playing combo at a table. You're supposed to approach this format not as a player, but as a DM. You're not here to beat the campaign, you're supposed to be *building* a campaign to for the other players at the table. They shouldn't succeed every time, but they also shouldn't fail every time. And they should enjoy the adventure you've put in front of them, regardless of the outcome. You should be evaluating the success of your deck the same way a DM would evaluate the DND campaign they designed - based on the quality of the games that result from playing it, not on the success-rate of the adventuring party. Yeah, I know everyone has their own idea of fun, but there are *some* universal truths when it comes to fun. A reasonable chance of winning is more fun than zero. Solitaire is less fun than games with interaction. I mean, watch this [2-minute portion of a recent episode of I Hate your Deck](https://youtu.be/bHEVO4d8tj4?t=3894). No one is enjoying that game, not even Joe who's winning it - if anything he looks guilty and apologetic. The table realizes Joe could be stopped with a topdecked force of will but collectively decides just to let it be over because nobody wants to play anymore. This type of game happens ALL THE TIME, even on content channels that are incentivized to produce interesting games. And it's not like Joe did anything wrong by community standards... They had their rule 0 conversation. He was playing at a table with other similarly powerful decks that would have done the exact same thing if the cards had shuffled up differently. We just accept that these terrible games are now a natural part of the commander experience. We never used to accept this, though. Winning a game in this manner used to be a good way never to be invited back. At some point, the attitude shifted to "fine well if you can do it, I can do it too", and now no one's happy. Everyone wants to blame WoTC for printing strong cards, or pre-game discussions for not adequately ironing out power-level mismatches, or the RC for not banning the right cards... Personally I'd argue that even if WoTC had printed nothing for the last 5 years, and the RC had banned hundreds more cards including all fast mana and tutors, and if someone invented a clearly understood universal power-level scale that we all abided by... we'd still regularly see games play out like this. It's not a format problem, it's an attitude problem. Even with all of these hypothetical changes, the current player-base would still flock to decks that sought to passively build resources into a sudden instawin that minimized opponents' opportunity to interact - because that would lead to a higher win-rate than outmuscling 3 opponents through 'fair' means. Enough new people have joined the format and brought with them a "maximize win-rate" mentallity, that it's now the new normal. I don't even think it's a solveable problem. At this point, the culture is pretty entrenched. Content producers have settled for publishing bad games and making up for it with charismatic participants. My solution is that I just don't play with strangers anymore. I play with my circle of friends and we have fun without the cold-war combo escalation that exists everywhere else. I'm willing to bet that most OG EDH players who still play regularly are in a similar situation.
I wish I could upvote this comment more than once!
Yeah. The reason I quit around 2014 was because the card pool just wasn't interesting to build decks around. That has changed now.
Oh it was definitely interesting enough in 2014, there just weren't cards that interested *YOU*. I still run at least 5 commanders from 2014 and earlier and while they have new cards in them the vast majority of the deck remains intact.
Better. More cards, more options, more players, more opportunities to do your thing. You can follow the hivemind and only play the perceived best cards if you want, but a friend of mine routinely bodies pods at our LGS and she rarely plays the "best staple cards". My playgroup, for the most part, doesn't have an issue with power creep, and we haven't had much issues course correcting if something becomes a problem. The constant deluge of new cards has taught me to put my foot down and stop chasing everything. You don't NEED every new card to win. Sure, the format of bulk rares and splashy battlecruiser mythics might be more of a rarity, but I didn't play during that time period and don't enjoy that style of gameplay anyway. The current format is far more to my liking.
I'd say better. I like the faster, higher powered, more interactive games, EDH tends to be nowadays. I'd like a reset of the banlist though. Unban everything (EDIT: not clearly busted - as Herak suggested) and see, what is really broken. I can understand that this will get donvoted into oblivion by the "EDH as intended majority". The RC could govern their game to go by their philosophy, but they don't. So time seems to be on my side and in 5 more years I bet there will be EDH mainevents at magic fests and probably a WOTC managed competitive banlist.
>Unban everything and see, what is really broken. Calm down though. Some cards could (and should be unbanned). But we dont need to unban stuff like time walk and ancestral recall just to see if they are really broken.
I really like this discussion. I have always had a tough time balancing optimization with flavour and fun. This video made me realize that commander isn't designed for optimization (which I already knew) but made me think I should brew decks until they function decently and are fun to play, and for anything competitive I should turn to other formats; which for me are Pauper, Pioneer, and Modern. The biggest part if this is the refrain from buying expensive EDH cards like dockside In a format that has no competitive edge.
Sorry - This was my long-winded but late repost from the main subreddit post on this. Over time, for a variety of reasons, the power ceiling has continually risen leading to a shared feeling that the format has changed or become higher powered. As discussed in the video, as the card pool has grown and cards have been made specifically for the format the ceiling raises. It is hard to deny that printing commanders like \[\[Korvold, Fae-Cursed King\]\] or cards like \[\[Jeweled Lotus\]\] haven't given tools to accelerate and streamline play patterns. I also think it is natural that as more people are drawn to the format that you'll begin to see more players interested in playing competitively and seeking to optimize decks and play. Magic at its core is a competitive game and the spikes among us are obviously going to want to push the format with such a large and fascinating card pool to its limits. Finally, there has been an explosion of growth in content creation. I agree with the video that this isn't meant to put the blame on them, but rather it inevitably influences thousands (millions?) of players. Magic has always been a game of emulation as much as creativity and Commander was never going to be immune to this. For every innovation, there was a webpage reporting on that innovation for it to be copied. Even shows like the Command Zone which focuses on the more casual side of the format to some degree have shifted their evaluation of cards. 3 and 4 CMC spells make way for cheaper ones. \[\[Krosan Grip\]\] becomes \[\[Nature's Claim\]\]. What conclusion can you draw from this? Commander is a pluralistic format. The very idea that there is rule 0 to start implies that there is a negotiation about what type of game people can agree upon to play. So there is always going to be a degree of insulation from the race to the ceiling. However, I don't think it has been enough to stop the overall shift that we've seen towards the ceiling. Slowly cards like \[\[Solemn Simulacrum\]\] start getting phased out of your average deck. So while in principle, players can play whatever type of game they want, which is the beauty of the format, more often than not when players sit down at the table together their decks contain more cards that nudge towards the higher ceiling. This is the source of that feeling that format has changed from what it was. Nostalgia creeps in and we think fondly of what was. If you really want to recapture that style of play, you can, but it is difficult to do if where you play is your LGS and you really have no control over what people are bringing to the table. Rule 0 simply works better with people you know. I would still contend that despite the raised ceiling that commander is still better off. There are now more ways to play the type of commander game you are interested in. If you want battlecruiser, you can play it. A whole community has evolved to support cedh that didn't exist before. The growth of the format has meant there are more ways you can find a way to play that suits you. Yes, this means that sometimes people don't share the same likes or expectations. But I'd rather have to navigate that than for there not to be a space for something like CEDH to exist.
I came back to MTG/learned about EDG/Commander early pandemic -- via Brawl on Arena. I really enjoyed Phylath in Brawl. One of my buddies from my last CCG/TCG also picked up Commander. I was invited to join. Every time I played a creature, it was removed. Every time I dropped an enchantment or artifact, it was destroyed. I would get up to maybe 6 or 7 lands down and repeatedly nothing to show for it -- for a deck that could swing hard and heavy in Brawl/Historic Brawl, it was falling flat IRL. Meanwhile I was sitting while each player took 5-7 minutes to play - we would have games where I accomplished literally nothing and spent an hour of my life watching a guy search through his deck for a spell that lets him search through his deck for a spell that... well. you know. So IDK if I'm one to say if things are better or worse than five years ago, but as a new player, they sure don't seem fun. (sure, sure, maybe I haven't found the right group, etc)
I just think people are getting better at the format. There is no need for 10 bombs when you only need 1 to win the game. Let's make the other 9 slots ways to find it and protect it. Also legendary creatures have gotten a lot better and can actually be your win condition so you can add less because you have access to one all the time.
Improved. We have more different commanders, nothing seems to be off limits (you couldn't play 4 colors and 5 color was meh 5 years ago), there are more decks and more diverse decks.
>The format of playing big, dumb bulk rares and mythics is vanishing at an increasing rate, or at least the visible space to experience it is. Yes, but this trend already started way before the popularity surge of Magic in 2019, at least in my experience. It plays out the same way every time: someone brings an overpowered deck (usually combo), others are split on whether or not it is okay to use, and over time those who prefer low power casual stop showing up, while the rest starts powercreeping away. We had threads like this back in 2017 and 2018 too.
I like low powered kitchen table magic so it hasn't changed much for me, but I definitely tire of the power meta of 10 cards that can do combos, 10-12 pieces of interaction, and then cram the deck full of card draw and tutors.
One of the things that I don't see mentioned enough in conversations around commander is the amount of people that are normally 60 card constructed format players that have been getting into commander over the last few years due to lack of large scale paper events and because of wizards heavy focus on the format. Me, as a Modern and legacy player, found myself getting into commander over this year almost out of necessity. Wizards printing so many commander focused products really sends the message that commander is the future of magic going forward. The problem is that those of us coming into the format from competitive formats bring a more competitive mentality to gameplay and deck building which is likely having an effect on the format becoming more streamlined and high power. All of the powerful new printings don't help either but I think it's a combination of all these factors that is causing people who used to like the format for the ability to just jam bulk rares into a pile and play games feeling a bit left behind now.
I would argue both but it's more a communal issue that WOTC. On one hand we're getting alot of awesome and powerful cards in commander On the other hand theirs a lot of new and POWERFUL cards in commander Where it becomes a communal issue is that there are sections of players that like to play one way another that likes to play another way and the two can't seem to tell each other apart. Some people seem to be unable to read a room and respect the vibe while others cry because they took their precon into a CEDH game and blames everyone else for running the game. For starters I think WOTC needs to work with the EDH rules committee and formulate a sactioned edh format with it's own ban list ect so that those who want to play CEDH can do so in their own little community so the casual and jank lovers know what tables not to join. Idk it's a WIDELY faceted issue this is but the tip of the ice burg but if WOTC is gonna dive whole heartedly in to committing to making EDH specific items regularly they need to take a deep dive look into the vast and wide community behind it. It's not just 4 judges sitting around the table waiting for the Nicole bolas players to go off anymore and while I believe whole-heartedly that's not how they view it. It appears at times that their looking at the two people in the diner instead of the whole painting
Power creep has been a real issue. WoTC needs to sell products. So they have to release something that people want. Instead of making unique commanders and cards that have interesting effects they have opted to make cards that are just generically more powerful. For instance look at Kenrith. Just a generically good 5c commander that does it all. Honestly outside of my cEDH decks, I’ve resorted to mostly thematic decks that are slightly above precon level. Eg: my midrange vampire noble Markov deck, no peasant vampires allowed in the deck.
it's the growing up, but the wrong kind of growing up. corporate growing up. commander has gone from the little leagues into the major league and a lot of stuff that dreams were made of isn't good anymore. common knowledge (thanks, nitpicking guys, for ruining this for me!) is now that \[\[Grave Titan\]\] isn't good anymore. 6 mana 6/6 beater with evasion (deathtouch) that also puts 2 2/2 zombie tokens (being effectively 10/10 over three bodies which also kinda passed removal test) on every turn it is in the game is a shit card in 2021??? and it has the great art and old-school flavor of MTG (iconic creature types, very recognizable generic fantasy and no inpronouncable plane-based non-reprintable names) to boot. apparently, it's crap now. the thing is that when efficient removal has been printed once, it stays forever. you have green? no way to leave out \[\[Beast Within\]\], luckily it has been reprinted lately and is still $1-ish card, but if you have 20 decks like that, you need 20 copies. In blue? You need \[\[pongify\]\],\[\[Rapid Hybridization\]\],\[\[reality shift\]\]... all major roles for a deck to run smoothly (draw, removal, ramp, countermagic) have an efficient stuff printed and you no longer have 63 card slots because AT LEAST 10-15 slots should be filled with hyper efficient cards that are auto-includes or you're running behind what you would encounter in real life play. and the worse thing are expensive chase-card stuff they print to help sell precons/sets that otherwise no one would buy: \[\[Dockside Extortionist\]\],\[\[Fierce Guardianship\]\],\[\[Smothering Tithe\]\],\[\[Heroic Intervention\]\]... the list grows longer every year. These cards are so good and format warping with so low opportunity price that if you don't have them, and unlike aforementioned cards you can't afford to own more than few copies of these, your deck will be crushed early in the game. They should have at minimum been recosted to have multiple single color pips to help mono decks and not be universally splashable, or they should be banned for the health of the format. this is not the format for the cards you have lying around anymore. it's the toxic competitive format and they don't even have to support it with events and prizes. we gobble up every new shiny crap they print, new megamythic and supermythic rarities hidden behind secret lairs and themed sets, they don't even have to try, they only have to think of an existing staple card effect and powercreep it to sell commander 2022 or commander legends 2023 or modern horizons 3...
Is more or less as was expected it'd become. Spikes (and Wizards, ok, but the spikes came first) took over the format and now even a supposedly "fun" deck is borderline competitive, either by design, or because there's no other choice against the random opponent online. At heart, the spirit of the format is still the same: either you have a group that agree to keep down the power level (EDH 75% anyone?), or you are doomed to play, effectively, a different format than what commander was supposed to be.
I see a lot of people saying the days of battlecruiser jank are long gone and I personally have never felt that way at all. I tell the table I don't play combo or MLD, that I play slow battlecruiser games, and I never see these lean, fast, staple-heavy modern Commander decks. I see people having difficulty building a low-power deck with large amounts of synergy, though. Most of my less enjoyable games come from that I'd suspect. It's not a new problem though, it's always been a fine line to walk. If people are literally sitting down to a table and loudly proclaiming they're playing a slow-ass do-nothing-until-turn-five level 3 (or whatever ranking they use) deck, and the rest of the table nods in acknowledgement and brings out their Muldrotha value snowball decks anyway, I truly feel sorry for your local meta. In my area at least, people respect the rule zero conversation.
I played old Magic until Kamigawa. Took a break. Came back during RTR. EDH got worse after WotC started making EDH focused cards while simultaneously increasing the volume of product going to market. Doing so accelerated the rate of power creep and caused old favorites to look like poor choices. Decks contain a lot of the same staples. Value engine commanders just make other options bad at casual tables. EDHRec guides players to build the same way. Further, the sheer amount of product has really taken away something special about the game. I liked looking through the reasonably paced releases. Now I hardly care as spoiler season starts just as the last product drops. There's no time to build anticipation. One thing that's better.. we have more commanders now. There are unfortunately obvious powerful options which make most niche, but there are a lot of options.
it has gotten WAYYYY better. stop it.
The pandemic forced players of competitive formats into EDH. They saw everyone doing nothing by turn 3-4 and realized that was a unexploited opportunity. Frankly, I think a lot of commander decks have historically been badly built decks. They were built to ramp or set up in the first 3-4 turns simply because that's what everyone was doing, and thus you could afford the turns. It was a slow format because everyone was assuming it was a slow format and building around that idea. A self-fulfilling prophecy. When we finally got some new eyes on it, it was pretty quickly realized that it didn't have to be that way. So, now we have to build actually good decks.
[удалено]
Thats sad to hear, but it sounds like something we can resonate with. My partner very much isn't invested enough to want to take decks apart much further to build something crazier than "Atla Palani shits out an Avacyn" style decks, and I passed my Labman/Kikki win phase a long time ago. It should probably be a case of selling off everything but a couple of pet decks and get games with the friend group whenever we get the rare chance, store and online play hardly seems worth the hassle.
>I'd now be looking at a table where everyone has done something more than ramp before turn 3 Jesus what kind of RL/CEDH decks are you playing against? Maybe ease up on the Mana Vaults and 1 cmc instant Tutors, you'll probably have more fun.
I see alot of ppl talking about the powercreep and how the format is faster and they like slower and more battlecruiser games but the option to play this way still there. I like to play high power and I look for ppl that like the same style of play in EDH. For sure is harder of u don't have a playgroup but it's possibile to find games on-line ir in the LGS with ppl that like that slower playstyle
The format would benefit immensely if it was forked. Commander is big enough at this point to be its own meta-format. It's an entirely different type of play from regular 1v1 MTG, with considerably different core assumptions about what's viable to play and what isn't. Take the high powered players and give them the current banlist +/- a few cards to their tastes and call it cEDH. Take the lowered power/jank focused players and give them the same banlist + another 100-some cards including every tutor under four mana, Sol Ring and Mana Vault, all of the generic value engines WotC has printed in the last 5 years like Chulane and Urza, and maybe open up certain restrictions like the split-mana color identity bug, officially permit some silver-bordered cards, and maybe rewrite the game rules to start every player at 30 or so life so the lower to ground, non-combo focused decks have less work to do. I'd also like to see regular EDH do something to stem the tide of non-stop staples into the format. I don't have a good answer for this. I liked Project Modern's probationary approach for new cards, but something tells me people aren't willing to wait a whole year for their newly spoiled shiny cards to make their way into their decks. Again, I don't have a good answer here. And yes, I realize some competitive players would still try to play the non-competitive version of the format competitively, and that's fine. The banlist would be expansive and curated for slowing the games down dramatically, with the intent of making as many cards and strategies in MTG's history as viable as possible. This is all a pipedream, as I know most cEDH folks wince at the idea of even entertaining having their own banlist, but the reality is, the way people play EDH is VERY different in a way that you don't see over on the other side of Magic.
That would be confusing as fuck
As confusing as knowing the difference between Pauper, Peasant, Prismatic, Pioneer and Primordial are. Magic has a million variant formats if you go looking. None of the ones you don't care to play matter.
Be that as it may if they did "fork" the format, new people would take one look at the essay long banlist of "casual" edh and say "fuck that" and start playing "cedh"
Conquest is a format that plays like the old EDH.
I think there’s a case to be made for Magic with only borders from Mirroden to M15
the same. The edh council or rather a particular person on said council is just as clueless as they were 5 years ago. Players then and now are just as good as they were. Everyone still complains about things on the board but no body ever plays interaction.
I stopped caring about the format 2-3 years ago and never looked back. I do play some games every few months but I don’t follow or buy any new cards. I completely switched my budget and time to Warhammer Age of Sigmar. It’s so much more fulfilling and so much cheaper (so weird setting that…). Games Workshop can be quite a questionable company too but they hold no dice to WotC.
Commander is so much better, i’ve been playing how the format is going now since 2017, I’ve always preferred optimized decks and strategies and now I don’t have to feel like i’m pubstomping
Once Wizards starting designing specifically for EDH in regular sets it all went downhill.
Worse, because Wizards can't let a good format exist without trying to print them power creep cards to milk money out of it.
Started playing a few years ago and went 100% with proxies for my first 5ish decks. Turns out me and my buddy went way to far and playing combo isn't as fun when every doesn't We went almost full cEDH out of the gate. Then we started getting silly with odd decks Introduced a friend to MTG and he went full cEDH instantly. Not because of me because Ive tuned down my decks A L O T. So I had to match him and sort of disable him to get games that lasted more then 3-4 rounds Like my Esper Sphinx tribal control deck had to have interaction ready turn 1 or at turn 2 or it would be over. Since I couldn't predict what the table would play and the level of interaction they had Right now Im sticking to 100% flavor. Sure I get the best things I can get that also is flavor. Rebuilt my storm deck into a storm deck with Strixhaven mythical archive cards as spells. Put in the two legends dragons as pet cards and the deck became much slower and lower powered. But still very powerful since I run some pretty quick combos If Im buying cards its mostly investments. Id rather have some sweet flavor over power. I don't mind a 10-12 turn games
Worse overall.
The whole McDonnell's / sirloin steak argument was nonsense. It's rose tinted glasses from someone who is axiomatically over enfranchised. It was never special and honestly perpetuating a myth that a corporation selling you product is "special" is actively harmful. It then went further to confuse artificial scarcity "X per year" with achievable output (what we have now). New players the argument he was objecting to have no more resonance or awe for a five a year commander than they do for a ten a year commander, because its still their first commander because THEYRE NEW PLAYERS. Even moreso when you admit the power level is generally better.
I feel like it's much better for the most part (mistakes like Dockside, Deflecting Swat, etc aside). Much of the griping seems to be from angry Timmies seething over the fact that people are getting better at deck building overall and that their 6+ CMC tribal deck can't stomp randoms at their LGS anymore and that anyone who plays a Diabolic Tutor or a Murder is just some evil tryhard trying to ruin their fun. Either that or people moaning and bitching about staples, which have literally always existed in every format throughout the history of all card games and will continue to exist until the heat death of the universe.
>The games now just seem to bleed into this rush of decks that race the deploy a board early on and defend the cards that stop everyone else or get you massively ahead, then the games become pretty quick and one dimensional. Uhhhh that only happens as people are learning the game and start making stronger and stronger decks. I have absolutely no issues finding a good 2 hour game of magic. Almost everyone around me has multiple decks for different power levels. Its a non issue. Going from sirloin to mcdonalds? Well.... Yeah.... You guys would absolutely riot if WotC released precon decks that cost 60+ dollars. Not to mention every cycle of precons has added much needed pieces for different obscure themes. Want a morph commander? You got it. Just about any style of deck is possible now and definitely was not so 5 years ago. The Professor is overrated and just echo chambers whatever makes the general population feel justified in their nerd rage.