This video makes me think about the chicken and the egg situation of "Does commander have fourty life because it's a casual game or is commander a casual game because it has fourty life." You briefly touched on it but one of the reason I think commander is so appealing as a casual format is because there isn't any rush so economy is king. If economy is king, and I have the worst deck at the table, I kinda just get to do my thing. Not in the sense that I'll win, I rarely if ever win, but I get to play my spiders or whatever subpar strategy I decided to brew around.
Problem is that to me, my deck winning is my deck "doing it's thing," that was the whole point when I made it. I always view making a deck as "how do I win in a cool way, that's fun for me?"
@@Dingus2Commander can be played as a 1v1 as easily as the 4 player battle royale that it currently is. Just as easily as it could be played as a 40 person battle royale. As easily as it could be played with a 400 person royale. That doesn't mean that they're hating the card pool, or what the rules are. Their complaints about the game are an attempt to better the format.
I find their criticisms amusing, because if it wasn’t for EDH, I wouldn’t care if MtG ceased to exist. Every time I look in on anything 60-card constructed, I’m reminded that the difference between MtG and Yugioh gets smaller with literally every month that passes. Being on the play is a godlike advantage, and Meta Slavery is all but inescapable. Except for WotC/Hasbro being greedier than Konami, of course. And saying that, I loathe the prevalence of dedicated Combo in EDH.
Video request: Balancing games across factions. How do you make some factions better than your balancing reference point without trivializing that mechanic in other factions, without overpowering one faction, and without making the game feel stale?
It's funny because I recently watched a video on Commander deckbuilding and the host was essentially saying that everyone will hate you if you randomly add a 2-card combo wincon in a deck that is otherwise a 'normal' Commander deck. Basically the argument is that if your deck does janky casual stuff 90% of the time but can pull a crazy win 10% of the time, people are gonna be surprised the first time and then you become a lightning rod for interaction in every subsequent game.
Makes sense. It's like how in real-like geopolitics, you don't plan around "average cases", you plan around worst-case scenarios. Also, "suddenly John combo-killed everyone, and so everything other people did all game didn't ultimately matter" makes for a terrible story.
If your deck is casual jank 9 out of 10 games then I'm going to let you get your 10% chance "the starts have aligned" two card combo on turn 3 because you're probably not doing it again tonight and that was likely a fun game for you. If you SAY your deck is casual jank 90% of the time and it's hitting it's crazy win or getting close in 5 or 6/10 games then you're becoming a lightning rod.
From what I’ve heard, mentioning you have any or a few wincons (“going infinite”) it’s nice to mention especially if people can make the conscious choice to go casual or more competitive. Context matters I think. I’m personally not gonna be mad at an Approach of the Second Sun versus a card that puts the whole board on a 1 turn clock the moment it drops with little board interaction.
Ego is the games biggest problem. Peoples ability to be transparent about what they're bringing to the table. Most people now can play the game at different levels. Just hard to keep everyone on the same page.
@chrisjones6792 see I don't think Commander itself is the issue. I just think it's most new players that think they might have figured it out and veteran players that for some reason can't help soil others experience.
Just play fucking cedh, no powerlevel same page bullshit, just play to win like you do in every other format out of any other game. Proxy if you care about budget, not one cares man.
Even if people didn't have big egos, it's not so easy to concisely communicate the power level / kind of deck / strategy / potential feel-bads of 99 different magic cards. There's subjectivity too. What's a 7 / 10 power level deck, really? Even if people try to be objective, different people have different ideas what 7/10 means.
I think the biggest problem is that too many people view the two games as one and the same. There's a saying that all squares are rectangles but not all rectangles are square. As a player who has never who started with edh, I quickly learned when joining competitive events that one cannot put an edh shaped peg into an mtg shaped hole.
Idk, maybe it’s just my lack of experience with it, but I’d find the argument that EDH/Commander is a game rather than a format of a game more compelling if more than 90% of its game pieces and rules weren’t MTG game pieces and rules first, and an individual game of it didn’t end in the same way (the only real exception to this is of course Commander damage, which is notable, but doesn’t feel like enough for it to be considered a different game).
True enough. I think a lot of it boils down to approach as well. I've never played a 1v1 game where my absolute goal wasn't to win. But I approach edh games with my goal being to be impactful. Either by being archenemy, saving the table, knocking a player out or sneaking a win.
Another day of Gavin and Forest dunking on the commander mini game, another day they are richly rewarded with appealing to my own game design baises and now they get a like :)
I'd say the strategy circle still exists in cedh since the hyper combo decks beat the farm value decks which beat the stax decks which beat the hyper combo decks. In casual pods, stax and hyper combo are considered unfun so are basically banned which causes every deck to be economy
Where it gets tough for rush strategies is when you’re trying to fight your way through 3 players worth of interaction. Being the first to try to win usually results in not winning and clearing the way for who attempts to win second.
BDIF is still blue farm, a deck capable of navigating through stax quite well and that benefits from the preponderance of imperfectly-piloted stax pieces. In theory there is an element of RPS, but in practice Tymna/Kraum (and other 4c & 5c piles) are still solidly the boogeymen of the format, with consistently high table placements and almost double the top 16 finishes of the next best option. Just like in casual, drawing 10+ more cards than everyone else tends to be pretty good and as a result stax is pretty widely considered to be "dead" as we used to conceive of it. While decks can contain stax elements, its not uncontroversial to say that pure stax outside of monsters like Najeela isn't currently favored. The meta generally is significantly more midrange. Even in cEDH, drawing a billion cards, sitting on some guys, stopping wins when necessary, and outvaluing the table with your superior card quality is still extremely good.
So I've never really liked this approach to discussing commander as a format, as if cedh is the final goal and everyone playing "casual" is either less legitimate for discussion or somehow missing something. The way I've found to view it in a way that makes it make sense that it's so popular and enduring is you are not really playing magic by even the rules of commander at all most of the time. You are, in a similar way to dnd, working as a group of 4 game designers, each with an audience of 3. That's why most people play in pods with friends, the setup is so much more focused on designing a set of decks that make compelling decision trees happen, and that's why nobody really likes instant wins. Because it's not a game of using the cards available to make the best deck, it's creating a pool of decks where you can craft interesting challenges for the other people around you. I would say a pubstomper with a perfectly tuned deck played with perfect optimization of plays is bad at commander, if that makes sense.
"I would say a pubstomper with a perfectly tuned deck played with perfect optimization of plays is bad at commander, if that makes sense." 100% agree. That's why cEDH needs to be looked at separately. Commander is a casual format. Which inherently means that "Winning" isn't the most important factor. Magic the Game is built around taking your opponent to 0 life. Commander, as self regulated by the players, is not built around that. It is built around deck building, expression, showing off your creations. The main goal is to show off your creativity, and appreciate the creativity of others. If people don't like that, that's your sign. Play any other format, they are all built around getting your opponent to zero and "winning" the game. Now, if your playgroup wants to play like that, that's allowed and wonderful! But all the people who complain about Commander just seem like they don't understand it. I also think Commander could do with some different rules about what "winning" is. I think an achievement or points system would help solve this problem.
Even when it's not as thought-through as that, people in casual pods tend to be bringing wacky, timmy-johnny style decks because their goal is more to entertain people with a cool or strange set of cards they've found.
@@shorewall No, cEDH is an equal way to play the game. It's simply the same rule 0 thing as casual play, people decide to play a competitive game and that's that. It's not a different format or whatever.
This so hard, how I always look at it is winning in commander is often just being able to play more commander since a lot of the fun I've found comes from running weird/janky decks that are often purposefully not using the strongest possible thing. If you come to a commander event (that's not cEDH) with a deck that's designed solely to win, you're probably gonna have a hard time winning real soon because no one will actually play with you!
@@milii113 "you're probably gonna have a hard time winning real soon because no one will actually play with you!" That means you're just winning constantly because your opponents are conceding :D infinite wins hack!
This is why I feel like 30 life might be better for the format. You could maybe actually punish the ramp players with early aggro and at least get their life total low enough that it's easy to finish them off in the late game.
Agreed. Creature-rush strategies are already inherently penalized because it's multi-player. Namely, if you exhaust your resources to kill one or even two opponents, likely the third opponent has spent that time economy'ing up and will then crush you. In multiplayer it's just inherently better to cast a mana rock rather than a beatdown creature on turn two because of this. So, sure, let's use 30 life.
Brawl on Arena has 25 life. It's a good balance for 1v1. Brawl is a better experience than EDH because you can also use a Planeswalker as your build-around.
I have a friend who plays to win with decks deliberately constructed to win fast. The rest of my pod uses precons that run pretty well. I'm playing with an adjusted precon and two somewhat decent original constructions since I had just the right cards to smooth out the fun I wanted from the decks. It's interesting to play because every game ends up being a gang up on the one "powerful" player before the rest of us have a more even playing field. It's certainly interesting, but I play Magic to see what could happen, so I like games with back and forth, with interesting decisions. I guess I prefer to be a performer rather than a victor, so I have a hard time with the idea of competitive formats. I have fun differently, and finding a balance has been important to my growth as a Magic player.
100%. It's more important to me to create an interesting deck and see what it can do, than it is to win every time. And this was my mood even in 1 on 1 Magic. I think a win every 4-6 games is where I feel I want to be, and the randomness in Magic allows for that.
You're bang on. I agree that for me as well, it's not about winning rhe game. It's about the journey and influence along the way. Winning is just a bonus. I personally get 0 satisfaction winning via 2 card combos.
I think a lot of players want commander to be a place where their tier 2-3-4 strategies can have a home. fun deck concepts that are not viable in standard or Modern but they like to play. So when the people bring tier 1 decks/CEDH decks then the format just becomes wacky 4 player modern and not a game where their less powerful decks gets to try stuff.
The two areas where the format is at its best is what you described and cEDH. The middle is where things get rull weird and WOTC seems to print pre-cons on the high end of the middle zone.
Just today I was thinking about how multiplayer FFA is basically the same in every game and genre. This video nails that home even harder. In RTS games the cornerstone of casual games is "No Rush". Some games even have a built in timer setting to prohibit rush strategies. This effectively means economy booming and turtle strategies are king. However, the moment you get slightly higher level turtle strategy falls off leaving only econ. Turtle falls off because the econ player becomes more mobile and just has enough resources to overtakes the turtle player without fail every time, but the turtle player isn't fast enough (often times read as "good enough") to counter the rush player. So building econ then only attacking at max population cap is simply how low level players play. This is VERY similar to how commander is played. Players that don't have the experience of 60 card formats, and/or are just very casual in their play thought process lean very heavily into econ strategies. This causes the more reactive decks built to slow players down to be less effective because you often will just hold onto cards for long periods of time. For the less experienced player they might not know how to use removal and counterspells very effectively so it seems worse. A common trend I have seen is, not wanting to run removal because that takes away from the "main strategy". Essentially, I want to do more of the thing and running removal gets in the way of that. Afterall, why play removal when I can instead just run another big dumb spell? I recall introducing aggro into my playgroup and it kind of upended the group in a lot of ways. If my Rakdos Lord of Riots deck, or my Krenko deck, or my Breya combo deck, or my Henzie blitz deck, etc. pops off then the eco decks just crumble. I had never really made the association before watching this of the strategy triangle in something like MTG. It makes a lot of sense why I tend to be a very dominate player in my group, unless one of the guys we play with that runs lots of removal joins us, then I have to shift into more long game strategy and sandbag a lot in order to win. Also, it really makes me understand why I like the decks I enjoy because I am that RTS player that will rush every game until you figure out how to beat it, then we find out if you can win the long eco game (for my friends/family, the answer so far has been a resounding, no.)
Man, you hit the nail on the head with how I've been feeling about my own decks but hadn't found the words for. The meta very much seems to be centered around mind-range value engines, especially in my friend group. Most of my decks are built to either go under or around that. I win often, but I don't think it's because my decks are better or more optimized, they just subvert the meta and when people don't pack a lot of interaction they can't really do much about it.
I wish you guys uploaded more of these conversations on different streaming platforms like spotify. I'd love to put my phone down and still listen to these conversations.
You guys should explore Oathbreaker. It has a lot of the strengths of commander with a smaller deck size/life total. I've had a lot of fun with my Oathbreaker decks whenever I can find someone to play with me lol
I mentioned Oathbreaker on a previous video and I'd like to see their takes on it too. The format unfortunately died in my area before I got to play it.
Oathbreaker can be a lot of fun. It's also strictly more repetitive, and them having more banned cards(Sol Ring) I assumed they would update the format with more frequent bans to keep the out of hand combos taken care of, but there's always that guy playing Gideon Armageddon, or Jace Treasure Hunt.
@@ruecianbeoulve7770 when the format first hit I sat down playing with 3Feri and Supreme Verdict; I think the person I played against quit magic after that 😬😅
Tiny Leaders is another good format. 50 card decks require focus on the main strategy. CMC 3 or less keeps the spells castable during the game. Everyone gets to do their thing all the time.
Great video! would you be able to do one on designing "powerlevel" for different audiences? Such as the difference between MH# sets and traditional standard sets and if this issue is unique to magic or if it shows up when designing other long lasting games.
My best buddy and I were just talking about this video and the way you guys approach commander, and I think he kinda hit the nail on the head. In his words, every square is a rectangle, but not every rectangle is a square. Commander is a game that uses Magic as a framework, but it simply isn't Magic. You can't really view it through the lens of the same deck archetypes and philosophies that you see in a format like Standard or modern. Aggro decks still exist, for instance, but they're not just low to the ground one drops and bolts for days, they're instead snowballs rolling downhill such as my beloved baby Anim Pakal. Control still exists, but it doesn't come in the form of one for one-ing your opponent into Oblivion, they are instead economy focused decks that are likely to build in a lot of wraths and self protection.
I think as a whole this is one of the best breakdowns of edh and cedh as a whole and how different pods and compositions affect the type of gameplay experience you want. As an almost 100% cedh these are very solid takes (given the background of the people talking which they explain beautifully ) and I think explains the full idea of the pond that elder dragon highlander inhabits.
Honestly, as a commander player I was a bit worried about being offended by some of this, but honestly it was super interesting. Thank you for this talk and I hope everyone who sees this has a great day.
One thing about Thoracle’s ban worthiness is that unlike more flexible, usually commander based, combos is that the cards in it are inflexible. Tainted Pact can sometimes be a risky Demonic Tutor, and Demonic Consultation does have an emergency mode, but unless you’re playing Yuriko Thoracle’s only other utility is being pitched to Force. More defensive leaning decks have been cutting Demonic Consultation, and before the Dockside ban many 5 color decks would cut Thoracle entirely, because in those decks your primary win condition also happened to function as Black Lotus, so why bother running rush cards that couldn’t also engine.
I agree with your description of a race to a wincon like thoracle. If you win the game without needing to interact with your opponents, you're not playing the game, you're playing solitaire. When I play, I want to actually defeat my opponents.
Ya, very few niche decks can pull off 30 lands. My lil brother used to run 25 🤦🏽♀️ in 2 n 3 colour decks no less. I thinn the least i have in a deck is 33 for Yisan, but that is mono coloured n I have enough 1st turn mana acceleration like mana rocks n mana dorks n ramp enchantments that more than half the deck is mana n I always get Yisan out on turn 2.
When I was getting started in the format, 37 was what was recommended to me, and that still felt too low, so I bumped it up to 42. It's good enough for Douglas Adams, it was good enough for my hometown's tragically defunct gaming bar, and by God, it's good enough for my EDH decks.
@@tonysladky892542 is very high unless you're playing a specific land based strategy like Gitrog. My baseline is 35 with a full suite of 0, 1, and 2 mana ramp, and tons of card draw and tutoring. I find myself flooding out far more often than being mana screwed
One problem with cEDH is that, in any deck, you can stick in one Rhystic Study and then, because you have 6-8 tutors in your deck and can fetch it whenever you need, you now have a reliable grind/economy plan. Without tutors a rush deck would have to commit to rush far more
7:00 That's actually one of the counter example, Nadu is a Rush commander 7:40 EDH and CEDH are basically not the same game. You can't talk about CEDH and say you're talking about EDH
EDH and CEDH are not the same game in a sense that players of them are two distinct groups. but design-wise they ARE the same game. people just politely ignore the other side when they play the one kind of EDH they like.
Hell, I'd argue each and every pod is a whole different game. Same game but completely different expectations and rules. It's like how every house has slightly different monopoly rules except more extreme.
A lot of casual players ive played with and witnessed playing seem to believe that commander games need to be a 4 player economy match, and anyone bringing a strategy that is not a long term economy, non-interactive deck will receive complaints from others for various reasons such as: their deck wins too quickly or out of nowhere, it touches the opponents stuff at all/too much, or it doesnt "let their deck do its thing" as if everyones deck should always fulfill its intended strategy every game or something. Id try to simplify it to cEDHs term of "midrange hell" but the term midrange typically implies the inclusion of removal, which many casual players whine about.
Players that complain about removal, or any interaction at all, should be told to find a different game, preferably solitaire. Interaction has been a key component of the game since Alpha. Two types of people complain about it, those who lack the maturity to handle their strategy being disrupted, and those that whine as a sort of meta game political strategy. Both, but especially the latter, should be punished.
Commander is a narrative based multi-player format. You are telling a story with your deck in relation to 3 others, games are supposed to be swing-y. That's why there should be interaction but also why a deck should do it's thing. I won't go out of my way to help you achieve it but I also won't stop you completely. All I'm saying is: it's a game made for humans with empathy, criticized by humans without it.
@@pascalsimioli6777 Narrative based to you, maybe. Personally the only story I tell is "this is how I win (or attempt to win), given some arbitrary self-imposed power level restrictions for casual". Which is how normal Magic formats generally play out, and I think it's silly to demand others approach the game as an RP session the same way you do. And are you really implying that too much removal is somehow psychopathic? I mean, seriously?
The social expectation is stronger in MtG, but even in SC2 paratext (social media posts, commentary, etc) strategies that are textbook Rush like 12-pool, banebust or cannon rush are called Cheese. Edit : The concept of "honest gameplay" and refusing interaction is a bit opposite, though. What do you mean I don't want to measure my micro/macro skills against my opponent if I'm playing to win and I know they're better.
12 pool, 4gat, whatever other rushbstrategy isnt cheese. Proxy rax is cheese. Cheese is something that is unreasonably effective if the enemy dorsnt expect it, and is dead in the water if they do. It is insanely, unreasonably high risk, potentially high reward strategies. You cant just stop a 12pool with a good wall. Well, you dcouldnt, Im not as familiar with LotV mera as I was with WoL.
Love y’all’s videos, very interesting discussion. I wanted to say that thassas oracle // demonic consult is not the main wincon in CEDH, I see this complaint a lot from casual players and it shows a fundamental misunderstanding with the format. We mostly win with breach, and if there’s anything that needs a ban it’s bowmasters
Good point I should have also mentioned breech. I think the point still stands. Wins come from a small package of cards to leave room for tons of economy and counterspells.
I didn't commit to the bit, but I was really tempted since all his Mana pips are hybrid to try and build my Obosh the Preypiercer EDH deck as Mono Red Burn.
Great point about high level decks having multiple archetypes but shifting between them depending on tactics and draws. I am starting to think "you need to kill 120 HP" is a little overblown though. I have a Purphuros deck and I have never, ever, needed to deal 120 damage to win. Your opponents will very reliably damage each other, at least at the LGS I play at. Even in cEDH combat damage is relevant in some games where people drew enough defense (or paid enough life to various things), part of the appeal of Tivit or Atraxa is their ability to just kill someone the old fashioned way. Look at it this way: in 2 player, if all players do a Lightning Bolt a turn, the game ends in 7 turns. In EDH, if all players do your hypothetical 'Big Lightning Bolt' a turn, the game ends in 5 turns (since everyone takes 3*3=9 a turn cycle). So it's really a meta thing, if aggressive decks are acceptable and played they help each other and become more viable vs the economy decks.
This is an interesting analysis. I had already decided on my own that "every deck needs to ramp and draw" is a problem for EDH, but I hadn't associated it with being a consequence of the lack of viable "rush" archetypes. I wonder what the solution is, or if one is even necessary?
I’m not sure it’s really all that solvable outside of combo. Which, like we mentioned, isn’t something most players enjoy playing against. When rush strategy cards have been printed for 1v1 with 20 life they’re not going to be particularly good in edh. Commander damage is a slight work around, but not really all that viable. You still have to deal 63 damage. Though, if I was trying to win with combat damage I would likely look in that direction.
commenting super early so maybe youll say smth like this after, but the problems with burn become very apparent when "every card should be the equivalent of 3 damage" suddenly becomes "every card should be the equivalent of 18 damage" in commander. Suddenly lightning bolt feels a little underwhelming.
Creating my new commander variant called zoomer dragon highlander; your starting and max hand size is 14, you draw 2 cards per turn, and can play 2 lands per turn. Also you now have an attack phase 2 and a main phase 3. This is to compensate for the 40 life per player lol
The first deck I ever built for myself was an attempt at a burn deck for Commander and it was/is not very good. I'll still drag it out for shits and giggles from time to time. But the thing my current play group has come to realize is that with the huge up tick in commander specific cards and wotc pushing commander as the mass market way to play the game (precons every set and power creep), commander isn't as fun as it used to be. We've moved to oath breaker as our preferred format, and while not perfect it's different enough from commander to be fun while retaining some of the things ngs that made commander interesting in the first place.
@@distractionmakers I think OG Purphoros is pretty good at EDH burn. Anything that hits each opponent, or even each player, gets you closer. Add some damage doublers, and you got yourself a stew going!
Would it be at all possible for y'all to make a video on Digimon? 👀I was looking back through the catalogue and ofc the second episode of the og podcast covered it as it re-released. It'd be cool to get your takes now that its been out for so long. A great vid btw, Commander always seems to cause issues and my local commander league has been a huge source of frustration for myself, other players, and organizers alike due to the competitive-casual balance.
it's funny that you brought up the attack defend economy triangle in mtg. the first time i heard of it was from starcraft. the same principles apply and much more strongly in starcraft than i think in most card games but the tempo value trade off is there in probably every strategy game that has some form of resources. go a lot faster and just win the game or completely take over the game or go a bit slower to stay alive while getting more long term value than the opponent.
I think it depends on the individual and their play group too much to necessarily "solve" because it comes down to how much you want to win, and the effort you're willing to put into that win rate. The more you and your opponents want to win, the less casual you're going to play. So, hypothetically, if you want to casually win 60% of the time, you're going to need to find a partner willing to lose that much, or a group willing to lose around 86% of the time. They might exist, but good luck.
It's not a paradox. It's complaining for the sake of a free win in the guise of a format. 'I want a game where I can do my thing, where no one wins too fast, interacts with my stuff, or has a combo to go over the top of my stuff." There is no "casual enough, while still being able to win games" because if your deck beat my deck, then it's cEDH try-harding.
"Casuality" isn't really a measure of how easily a deck wins the game, it's a matter of how transparent and predictable the deck behaves. A casual deck telegraphs its wins so that they only really happen when most of the table is comfortable that the time is now suitable for someone to win.
@@PhoenicopterusR The paradox, is how do you get even games, while not having a powercreep that ultimatly ends in cedh? And that without crushing creativity and too much rules. People being different, is the challange
I play 30-32 lands in most of my commander decks, yes I know it’s insane. My second deck had Sydri as the commander and is full of 2-3 drop mana rocks so it didn’t make sense playing heaps of lands. And now I just struggle to put more lands in a deck
I appreciate the conversation about Commander from a design perspective, even if I don't agree with all of your points. To me, the most fundemental difference between one v one formats and Commander is Commander being multiplayer. I don't think people appreciate how playing the game with more than one opponent fundementally changes the game. Decisions become so much more complicated and players have less information than 1v1. I would compare Commander more to a game of Catan than I would any of the 1v1 format, and I think the analysis should start from that perspective.
Rush strategy is providing a short game experience,and Commander in it's roots is rather longplay, so i suppose it was designed for not supporting rush strategies. As I tried to do a mono-red deck with dubling..., tripling damage with Solphim, Meyhem Dominus and bunch of enchantments - it end up to have to play it as a control deck and stay alive, to the moment when you can blow everyone with one spell. So Commander as a format leads to different play style of decks we play as a two player experience.
Fast mana, card advantage and mana fixing // thinning are so basic, but casuals just avoid it more so than removal. Removal they at least eventually pick up on because it happens to them. Fast mana, advantage and fixing//thinning all just increase the statistical likelihood of your decks consistency by SO FUCKING MUCH. It's been hard to straddle those concepts while staying casual and viable.
I feel like thinning can be so all-or-nothing in commander because you'd need more commitment to see meaningful return than you would any other format. So that why it doesn't get picked up as much. Feel free to correct me though, I've only played one deck that went out of its way to thin.
Casuals tend not to do this because every deck slot spent just drawing and gaining mana is a deck slot not spent on the archetypal cards that interested them in building the deck in the first place.
Interestingly i'm working currently on decks reducing Ramp in casual Commander because i feel too slow. It might be of cause simply a problem of power level (that i run at casual at decks too powerful vs my decks), but i think it is not that simple, because low-cost strategies that hurt the Ramp crowd are possible. Try e.g. Board Wipe Tribal in your casual pods.
They are Jasmine Boreal of the Seven, Ruxa Patient Professor, and Muraganda Petroglyphs. They are the only cards, as far as I can tell, that have abilities that benefit creatures with no abilities.
I don't hear any hate in this I honestly think that more people think about stuff like this when it comes to commander games I know for me I had to learn a lot of hard lessons very early and very quickly if I wanted to even have a chance of playing let alone win
I built a control jeskai planeswalker deck with many effects that block only attack (magus of the moat, etc). I love to see the horror in the eyes of my pod.😂
Just discovered your channel and really enjoying it. I love the human psychology part of your stuff especially. But one of the most interesting psychological components about your content isn’t even related to game theory: it’s reading the comments from people entrenched in how they understand magic. I’ve seen it with other content creators who make similar arguments to you guys, but they’re just regular TH-camrs - you actually design games! I genuinely think Richard Garfield himself would get shouted down if he made a video saying “the math in commander is just completely different”
Some of my decks "rush" to victory via combat. And it shakes things up in a positive way. People have to run removals now and interaction instead of 40 cards slowly going towards their combo engine or cheesecake factory loop. If I murder you in combat by the time youve played a couple set up cards, youll have to build your deck a little differently to be more political or defensive. Sure I might become archenemy and I will probably lose the end game, but that level of influence and interaction in a game for me > a win.
Video has almost nothing related to GREED though. Being greedy is not playing removal, non basic mana bases, not interacting, and relying on the multi-player aspect too much to where the deck wouldn't work in 1v1.
Your thinking is wrong. Aggro (Rush (rock)) beats Control (Defence (scissors)) beats Economy (Combo (paper)). Problem is in commander you can't beat 3 players with a classic draw-go style control Deck.
I haven’t watched the video yet, so I don’t know if you get into it here, but I’m curious based on other videos what you guys like about Commander deck building, because I’m exclusively a casual player, and it’s exactly the format’s deck building restrictions that kill my interest in it.
Interesting. Honestly the idea of building around a commander helping guide players to interesting ideas, or at least that’s the promise, is what we find the most compelling. The singleton 100 deck format is somewhat arbitrary.
The size and restriction adds greater variety into games and allows for more complex deck building. Well, for the most part anyway. Some people like that, some people don't, some people will skirt the rules and put 60 relentless rats and a thrumming stone into a deck and call it a day.
@@distractionmakersAs a big fan of legendary creatures, I do like the idea of a Commander. It’s having to play exactly 100 cards, with no nonland duplicates I don’t vibe with. I’m trying to explore with deck building more these days because the 4 copies, 60 card decks did start to feel really stale. IMO it’s just less meaningful creatively when the format rules strictly dictate deck size and level of variance rather than those things being up to me.
I know you talked about Starcraft really briefly but one of the most popular casual game modes that almost rivaled 1v1 in popularity was Big Game Hunters where your resources nodes are as close as possible to your base and are effectively limitless, accelerating your economy by an insane degree and pushing everyone towards economy. Before Big Game Hunter there were lobbies where any sort of attack before 20 minutes was not allowed, or spoken agreements between friends to not attack early. It is interesting to see the same throughline in Magic, that in a self-governed casual format, players will trend towards allowing everyone to be able to "Do the thing", which seems to almost always be in the economy space.
Because - *spoiler* - doing the thing is fun. Really the only part of gameplay that rivals winning in terms of providing fun, and you can't win all the time (except in PvE, which is why I'm not a PvP gamer).
Great point! Rush strategies tend to subvert our idea of a “fair” game. I think the hard part is shifting perspectives to interaction being “doing the thing” and not getting to play all your stuff every game.
@@distractionmakers If the part you enjoy is directly affecting your opponent, there are extremely deep games out there that are *much* simpler and less expensive to play than Magic. Chess, for example. But if you want to do big elaborate world-shattering combos, you pretty much need to play Magic or a similarly complex game.
@@Ninjamanhammer ...except when the interaction player and the "going off" player both show up at the same table. They're looking for different payoffs, and somebody's not going to get it...which is how you get the current endless debate about what Commander should be. Your Starcraft "BGH" comparison is spot on - some people wanted to play a game of aggression and expansion, and a huge chunk of the players preferred playing SimBase. They couldn't both do what they wanted, but they were in the same player pool and aggravated each other whenever they interacted.
My friend group has 3 entrenched players and me. Im newer but understand the game well enough. One of the entrenched players plays ramp(dot)decks, and will usually attempt to outvalue the table before alpha striking anyone who attempted to stop them/interacted with them. They leverage small bean syndrome the entire game since "all im doing is ramping". The other plays combo, and the third is a timmy. All 3 of them are greedy and will often elect not to interact if it means they can further their own gameplan, and if they take any damage early on they complain. It's tiresome as the combat player, because no matter what im making enemies by putting creatures on the board early.
It boils down to this for me, I don't want to find three other people to play with every time I want to play Magic, nor am I enough of an ADHD riddled autist to enjoy playing against three other people at a time. I want my 1v1 fights to the death.
Things went a lot smoother when modern and standard players played those formats. Everything went wrong when those players begrudgingly started playing commander. Really tainted and corrupted and twisted the edh format. It was so rare to run into combo decks back in the day. Everybody I knew was building jank or just cool idea they had. The modern players idea of a fair deck is still busted and not fun to play against. It made edh players have to catch up, fragmenting the whole format. Almost everybodys deck was within a particular boundary of power level. Now the jank players and high level decks end up being at the same table. Jank players don't want to power up their decks and feel bad about themselves, power players hate being non optimal. I wish that someday modern and standard became the go to again so that edh players can have good times again by themselves.
Yes, you haven't done anything all game, because you build greedy decks, run 20- lands, your ramp combo commander got countered because everyone knows what it does and all your creatures are high cmc five-colors Goodstuff. No, i will not have mercy and wait for you to combo off.
They don’t map perfectly to aggro, midrange, and control. Rush, Econ, Defense is one layer above those archetypes in strategy hierarchy. We have another video about the strategy circle if you’re interested.
@@distractionmakers Yeah, it is counterintuitive to map 1 to 1. Defense seems like Control, but Aggro beats Control whereas Defense beats Rush. Most would think of Economy as Midrange, but Midrange beats Aggro, and Rush beats Economy.
@distractionmakers haven't seen one outside the UK, I remember first finding them way back in 2011 when they were selling from a pop up at a tattoo convention in London. Cool to see them doing so well.
Honestly i dont care if people dont like people comboing off, im gonna do it anyway im quite successful i might add but if anyone gets salty all i say to them is "that sounds like a you problem" its a game there is no reason to get salty cause your deck didnt win there is always the next game i play meren of clan nel toth as a graveyard combo deck and its amazing
99% of my commander decks are battle cruiser decks. Only one deck i have has some sort of combo and thats my Villis deck. Vilis with Krrik and i can draw my deck essentially...thats about it or skirge familiar and vilis does the same thing then a big torment or exanguinate. Thats the only sort of combo i have in all of my decks
1v1 commander can be fun for the same reason that sometimes when playing Age of Empires II you want to start in the imperial age with all techs researched and tons of resources can be fun, as opposed to the standard dark age 3 villagers and a scout. But I personally am not a fan of the way four player free for all warps the game so hard.
The math of the 120 damage to win the game is not entirely accurate if you take into account the damage your opponents will deal to each other. Also, there's a lot of powerful lifegain strategies like Soulsisters or Tokens. So, instead of 120 you would need to deal around 160 damage instead. That's why all my attack decks have either infect or a way to create multiple battle phases so I can actually kill people faster. I remember the original complaint about mass land destruction was that the game extended too much. Nowadays I feel board wipes have the same effect; so people are playing much less board wipes, which causes "Go wide" strategies to proliferate. You'll see these "army decks" ramp and go crazy unopposed. So now there's a mix of Army decks Vs Combo. And the same can be said about combo. It has flourished because people still don't play enough removal for the fear of the feel bads. So no one is doing anything 😂😂😂. I think I'm punishing both strategies and balancing my game plan with Tempo. I play Braids which speeds up the process and the way I play her is I always ramp and play "fact or fiction" type of cards so my opponents aren't scared of me. Then I'll "solve" a problem using a meteor golem against a threat and they're like: " So he just took care of a problem, that's help me develop. And then I wait for their army to grow big enough to use a Reins of power and kill them with their own cards. And the other players will say: "Oh, that's smart and they did it to themselves 😅". At that point they still don't think I'm in control, instead they'll "abuse" Braids to keep getting bombs and kill each other first. At that point I've already drawn my forces to defend myself in the ending stages, or I'll have a bounce wipe loop with archeomancer and Evacuation or something similar. The way you play is trying to use your opponents to beat eachother and then you act like the control player against the most dangerous person to gain the other players favour. Divide and conquer.
I only play board wipes for my interaction. Single target removal just isnt efficient enough. If i spend my mana to remove a threat, the other players just take that as a sign to hit me because now my defenses are down. Commander rewards inaction and punishes action because going for the offensive in any capacity leaves you down for three entire turns
@@thechikage1091fair, I usually play with vaevictis asmadi so when I attack I can force my opponents to get rid of their most threatening cards so the swing back will be lessened, but okay/true
"single targeted removal just isn't efficient enough" this is why you lose. Not every problem needs to be solved with a nuke. A single mana instant speed removal for the actual problem followed by progressing your game plan during your turn is more often than not a substantially better strategy. Card advantage means nothing when your opponent is in the process of winning and your 4+ mana sorcery boardwipe is sitting in your hand.
@@Trisket I have done such things. Very rarely is there ever one piece that, if it gets removed, will stunt an opponent, at least with the people I play with. I don't think you understand how much of a nothing burger single target removal is. Maybe my table is an anomaly, but holy shit does a majority of the advice on TH-cam just straight not apply to my table at all, because I've tried it and it always went poorly and I've always been behind. Me using my removal on someone else's value piece just lets the other two players get ahead and mollywhop me anyway, since they now don't have to use any cards or mana to get rid of that threat, because I already did.
You have an incorrect assumption as a part of your examples. You assume there is only one rushdown player. If there are two rush players, you can each focus one person, then fight each other. You lowering other's life totals helps the other with their wincon as well. When there are three rush decks you might actually try to politic the last person a bit to gain just a bit of advantage.
On my view, Commander suffers from all of the usual pitfalls of asymmetric, multiplayer games (It has intractable balance issues, politicking, has elimination as well as last-one-standing, and requires meta knowledge) but is not like other games that try and, I dunno, try to do anything to at least address these problems. (And not that you necessarily need to. Sometimes you want to play an unbalanced, eliminative, meta-based game, which I frequently do, it's called Magic: The Gathering). When I don't necessarily want to do that is when more than one other competitor is involved and our interests are zero-sum (If I win, they lose and vice versa). Politics then arise where perhaps it is more beneficial to ally with one or against one player, especially in a game with an odd number of players. And it's not like politics in multiplayer games are bad either, just when they are present, usually there is some social contract codified in the rules where Commander is a purely vibes-based.
Playing economy decks is the only “fun” option in commander. Rush/combo is frowned down upon (unless cEDH) and defense Counter/Stax is also frowned down upon. Most causal pods want to have fun and to do that the expectation is that each individual will build economy states like synergistic tribes or themes and then overpower the table with value. The race then becomes value driven. If a player introduces a rush strategy to beat his friends, he starts the vicious cycle of now someone will make a counter spell deck to beat rush and soon the arms race ends with toxins turn 1-2 strategies that try to win before anyone else with free spell interaction.
It is a solitaire play style for sure. It’s strange. Way back in the day we had multiplayer games where we played whatever we wanted. Death cloud, thoughtpicker witch, ink-treader nephilim, no one cared. We all just laughed about it. Im not sure why player sentiment has changed so much.
@@distractionmakers I really feel like player sentiment has changed mostly because people like to win, and there's now a *much* larger body of knowledge on how to do that in Commander.
I feel like most of these comments treat the dichotomy as more absolute than it needs to be. If your playgroup wins on turn 10, build a deck that wins on turn 7, that's a rush deck in context. If no one else is running interaction just run a few and enjoy your value engines pull you ahead.
@@kylekonop4801 I remember watching a Game Knights video, like 5 years ago, where they talked about how they were playing mostly cards at 3 mana and below, because anything else was too slow. And I was thinking at the time, what? Isn't Commander the Battlecruiser Magic format? I resent the competitive players who are trying to change Commander. They have every other sanctioned format. Casuals had to make up formats, which is what Commander started as! But because it became popular, it attracted the morbidly competitive, who are miserable in a casual format, and are making casual players miserable as well. The sooner the competitive players leave for cEDH, the sooner this controversy will end.
As the resident sith lord bringing balance to the force (nobody ever thinks that balance means more evil), play more stax decks. The games are way different, way more interactive, sometimes more political and variant. Stax is a neglected archetype that needs more love.
I love your videos. Keep up the excellent work. I think i find myself in some weird pods compared to the average commander player. 3 different local groups and all of them are in mid power and use all different strategies. 1 group is my family and my mom is a big proponent of a rush strategy. My brother in law loves control, my wife likes all the "mean strategies" and im a typical blue player. We never have any issues and dont find ourselves in "midrange hell" I think enough players in my groups come from 1v1 formats and have helped prevent the creation of the commander stereotypes from taking hold. Not sure if thats accurate or if im making that up 😂
I think the spirit of 1v1 is a very important perspective. Losing is fine. Not getting to do your thing is fine. Someone got to do their thing and that’s awesome.
I'll stick to Cube for now, but I'm always down to learn about some Commander stuff. The description of easily slotting in small packages of card combos sounds a bit too close to how Yugioh has ended up. Not a place we should ever want Magic to be in. =/
I own 3 cedh decks and 5 edh decks, it's hard to build a deck to play with strangers outside of cedh because honestly most decks are "power level 5" rather than the magic "7" everyone talks about. If cedh decks are 9-10 most people can't build a 6. It's plain to see that hitting land drops and drawing cards wins commander games so the format tends towards economy strategies and rush/defence (combo and stax) are frowned upon as "unfun". Personally i include at least one 3+ card infinite combo in all my decks just to end games, i don't always execute the combo if i draw it on turn 3 but i judge my power based on the consistancy of the deck getting to it's win via tutors and card draw. In this world of printed for commamder sets and hurt feelings everyone should pack some removal and stax so people can get used to playing magic, then we can start printing 1 mana enchantments with "cumulitive upkeep - each opponent loses 3 life" so true rush strategies outside of combo can be viable. The multiplayer nature of the format can be seen having an impact even on CEDH decks, you cannot police the entire table and often the 2nd win attempt is the successful one.
@@Ninjamanhammer not all cedh decks are created equally just as not all 1v1 competitive decks are tier 1. Really cedh is just an agreement that we play very powerful decks and try to win with no complaints about "unfun" strategies. Sure bluefarm and rog/si are 10s, but winota is just a commander who's too good for casual, there are plenty of "9" cedh decks in the winota are of power
@@egoish6762 tier 2 cEDH decks are still 10s. Arguably 10 encompasses decks that aren't even cEDH. 7 is your "average" commander deck. Then two tiers can't be spent on cEDH with only one in between.
@@egoish6762 Tier 7 is where people don't want infinite combos, mass discard, repeated land destruction, even some of the efficient hate like stony silence and rest in peace will be frowned upon for shutting down decks. Tier 8 you start adding those in but mass land destruction and hate like humility probably aren't accepted until 9. Tier 7 decks can play against tier 8 decks and win some of the time, but against tier 9 they have basically no chance. Tier 8 decks can play against tier 9 but are gonna have no chance against cEDH decks. 9 you get to "tuned" where you've got a focused and pretty efficient win con, with lots of tutors for it, but you're not as resilient as a cEDH deck and you're not able to fight through the stax of cEDH or interact with them hard enough. I have a Tymna/Kodama deck that is a 9 that I've updated very little since MH1. It wins with Protean Hulk, it has like all the tutors aside from Imperial Seal. It actually plays a lot of the good stax creatures. But the mana base is kind of a mess, Survival is the only reserved list card. There's no mana crypt, no Rector, no Solitude, no Esper Sentinel. People who don't know cEDH think it's cEDH, people who play cEDH would never call it cEDH. That's what a 9 is like.
The immediate surface level thought is maybe the issue is with commander's objective. Expecting players to plow through 120 life is not what most cards are desinged to do. Maybe a system where players earn points equal to the amount of damage they deal to a player, and the first to 20 or 40 points wins? Kinda lorcana system. It would certainly change everyone's strategy.
100%. Being the last man standing out of 4 is hard, and doesn't correlate with who did the most. In a 1 on 1 game, the last man standing beat his opponent fair and square. But in EDH, you can free ride and sand bag and you don't even have to beat anyone, if the others take each other out. I've always thought EDH should have an achievement system, or points system. Hell, even getting points for how many you eliminate would reward some decks for taking out 2 players before running out of steam. But the more options you have, the more fun it can be. Make it a full on board game. Another option I like is the format they did sometimes, where they have an archenemy, but with different rules and cheats, and the players have to team up to take them down. A PvE experience. It doesn't have to be Commander style, but it scratches that social and casual format itch as well.
@@shorewall Yeah archenemy is pretty cool, it's just harder to do because any asymmetrical format requires that a playgroup has two different types of deck available to it. To play commander, you just need 2+ people with any commander decks. To play formats like archenemy, you need exactly 3 people with "hero" decks and exactly 1 person with an "enemy" deck. This was something quite a few early card games learned; there were some games where every match had to be a "light side" deck vs a "dark side" deck, which meant that if you and your friend both liked the dark side more, you couldn't play with each other.
i do wonder if you should specify you're talking about cedh rather than just using "commander" as a term in your videos also gosh how are you talking about cedh without knowing how thoracle combo works lolll
A lot of Commander's problems would be mitigated or outright solved with a lower starting life total, perhaps 30 or so. The RC will never do it because they lack the cajones, but if you list the stuff people typically complain about the connection is pretty clear: 1. Boros colors too weak because they (mostly) suck at doing anything but aggression? Not an issue with a lower starting life total. 2. Simic/Sultai too strong? Ramping and drawing all the cards can't be 90% of your gameplan with 10 less life. 3. Ridiculous cards like Sway of the Stars and Coalition Victory are on the banlist when they shouldn't be? When you start with 30 life 8+ mana sorceries with extra setup required aren't as viable and would definitely come off the banlist. 4. A salty player whines about an overloaded Cyclonic Rift? Getting to 7 mana with less life isn't as easy and feels like more of an accomplishment, rather than a given. 5. Some commanders just keep coming back no matter how many times you kill them? A 30 life version of Commander would have less second and third casts of Commanders because it would be less ramp-heavy and the 2 mana tax would hit harder. 6. Combos make the endgame feel anticlimactic? Give players a more realistic option to kill with regular damage and you'll see less combos... The real draw of Commander to me is multiplayer + singleton with a given build-around card (your Commander). I think that's its core strength. The fact that "economy" is the dominant strategy at casual tables isn't inherent to Commander. It's mainly a consequence of 4x40 life. If somebody created a singleton 4x40 life version of Pioneer or Modern you'd find the same gravitation towards "economy" with combo win conditions at higher power tables.
Reading the majority of comments here I see a lot of hatred for commander. I'll make sure to buy the next UB so I can keep wotc forget about other formats or even about mtg lore ❤️
I’m just hearing two guys that are salty probably because they lose a lot. Commander fixes all the problems that magic had I came back because it fixed all the problems that I hated in the 90s really happy that commander is the number one format and at some point, all the other formats will fall to the side!
Edh is a strange montage. Typically, if you just want to win, play combo/economy. This is Cedh, more or less. The real dilemma for me comes in how average players define "casual" For example, I don't want to see cyclonic rifts, excessive low cost tutoring, fast mana rocks (mana crypt, mana vault etc), rhystic study, mystic remora......basically no Cedh Staple. If I see players do that, I will simply play my Cedh deck, and I think that is perfectly fair. SO many players I have played with jam Cedh staples in their half-assed, or pre-con decks just because they want power to dominate games. That, to me is cheesy because they can't or aren't willing to play the game on a level playing field, they have to have the advantage at all costs because they aren't good at magic. But, alas, so many players will play whatever they have, with no regard for their play mates time or effort, and because of that Edh becomes and arms race.
Finding your way to a turn 2 win isn’t a strategy. It’s a speed run exploit. It’s fine if you want to build a deck geared toward that, but don’t tell me you want to play a game of magic and then make me play against your methed out game of solitaire.
Everyone playing their own game of solitaire is exactly my problem with commander. Most people who play commander just want to take 20 minute turns making their deck "do the thing" and barely interact with other players. This is also why stax and land destruction is frowned on. This is why my favorite strategy is to play stax and chaos. Either we will truly make this a 1 player game or I will force people to interact.
I'm sorry but any format that requires an application for segregation i.e Commander just to play the game is fundamentally flawed. I shouldn't need a 3/4ths vote just to be able to engage with people.
This video makes me think about the chicken and the egg situation of "Does commander have fourty life because it's a casual game or is commander a casual game because it has fourty life." You briefly touched on it but one of the reason I think commander is so appealing as a casual format is because there isn't any rush so economy is king. If economy is king, and I have the worst deck at the table, I kinda just get to do my thing. Not in the sense that I'll win, I rarely if ever win, but I get to play my spiders or whatever subpar strategy I decided to brew around.
If "doing your thing" can be achieved without winning the game, then your deck can be fun every game.
Problem is that to me, my deck winning is my deck "doing it's thing," that was the whole point when I made it. I always view making a deck as "how do I win in a cool way, that's fun for me?"
You guys aren't negative on commander at all. You're consistently highly negative on four-player free-for-all games of magic.
They are definitely negative about commander
@@Dingus2Commander can be played as a 1v1 as easily as the 4 player battle royale that it currently is. Just as easily as it could be played as a 40 person battle royale. As easily as it could be played with a 400 person royale.
That doesn't mean that they're hating the card pool, or what the rules are. Their complaints about the game are an attempt to better the format.
@@aaronwishard7093disagree, it could easily be played 2 players or 4, but good luck reading a board state with 40 players.
It’s funny, I hate commander and this is something I have zero problem with
I find their criticisms amusing, because if it wasn’t for EDH, I wouldn’t care if MtG ceased to exist.
Every time I look in on anything 60-card constructed, I’m reminded that the difference between MtG and Yugioh gets smaller with literally every month that passes.
Being on the play is a godlike advantage, and Meta Slavery is all but inescapable.
Except for WotC/Hasbro being greedier than Konami, of course.
And saying that, I loathe the prevalence of dedicated Combo in EDH.
Video request: Balancing games across factions.
How do you make some factions better than your balancing reference point without trivializing that mechanic in other factions, without overpowering one faction, and without making the game feel stale?
Coming soooon
It's funny because I recently watched a video on Commander deckbuilding and the host was essentially saying that everyone will hate you if you randomly add a 2-card combo wincon in a deck that is otherwise a 'normal' Commander deck. Basically the argument is that if your deck does janky casual stuff 90% of the time but can pull a crazy win 10% of the time, people are gonna be surprised the first time and then you become a lightning rod for interaction in every subsequent game.
Makes sense. It's like how in real-like geopolitics, you don't plan around "average cases", you plan around worst-case scenarios.
Also, "suddenly John combo-killed everyone, and so everything other people did all game didn't ultimately matter" makes for a terrible story.
Snail is smart.
If your deck is casual jank 9 out of 10 games then I'm going to let you get your 10% chance "the starts have aligned" two card combo on turn 3 because you're probably not doing it again tonight and that was likely a fun game for you. If you SAY your deck is casual jank 90% of the time and it's hitting it's crazy win or getting close in 5 or 6/10 games then you're becoming a lightning rod.
If you win with one two card combo I have to assume you have several in the deck.
From what I’ve heard, mentioning you have any or a few wincons (“going infinite”) it’s nice to mention especially if people can make the conscious choice to go casual or more competitive. Context matters I think. I’m personally not gonna be mad at an Approach of the Second Sun versus a card that puts the whole board on a 1 turn clock the moment it drops with little board interaction.
Ego is the games biggest problem. Peoples ability to be transparent about what they're bringing to the table. Most people now can play the game at different levels. Just hard to keep everyone on the same page.
No other magic format has that problem.
@chrisjones6792 see I don't think Commander itself is the issue. I just think it's most new players that think they might have figured it out and veteran players that for some reason can't help soil others experience.
Just play fucking cedh, no powerlevel same page bullshit, just play to win like you do in every other format out of any other game. Proxy if you care about budget, not one cares man.
@@impendio I agree with you in principle, but the problem is that CEDH is a garbage format.
Even if people didn't have big egos, it's not so easy to concisely communicate the power level / kind of deck / strategy / potential feel-bads of 99 different magic cards.
There's subjectivity too. What's a 7 / 10 power level deck, really? Even if people try to be objective, different people have different ideas what 7/10 means.
I think the biggest problem is that too many people view the two games as one and the same. There's a saying that all squares are rectangles but not all rectangles are square. As a player who has never who started with edh, I quickly learned when joining competitive events that one cannot put an edh shaped peg into an mtg shaped hole.
They are two gsmes at this point. They might as well change the card backs to commander the gathering for the commander sets.
@@thebigsquig kinda yea. I mean there's definitely a lot of interchangeable parts but some cards just don't fit or make sense out of the format.
Idk, maybe it’s just my lack of experience with it, but I’d find the argument that EDH/Commander is a game rather than a format of a game more compelling if more than 90% of its game pieces and rules weren’t MTG game pieces and rules first, and an individual game of it didn’t end in the same way (the only real exception to this is of course Commander damage, which is notable, but doesn’t feel like enough for it to be considered a different game).
True enough. I think a lot of it boils down to approach as well. I've never played a 1v1 game where my absolute goal wasn't to win. But I approach edh games with my goal being to be impactful. Either by being archenemy, saving the table, knocking a player out or sneaking a win.
Sadly, legacy gets the short end of the stick from commander mechanics. Monarch was okay, but Initiative was bonkers when it happened on turn 1.
Another day of Gavin and Forest dunking on the commander mini game, another day they are richly rewarded with appealing to my own game design baises and now they get a like :)
I'd say the strategy circle still exists in cedh since the hyper combo decks beat the farm value decks which beat the stax decks which beat the hyper combo decks. In casual pods, stax and hyper combo are considered unfun so are basically banned which causes every deck to be economy
Where it gets tough for rush strategies is when you’re trying to fight your way through 3 players worth of interaction. Being the first to try to win usually results in not winning and clearing the way for who attempts to win second.
BDIF is still blue farm, a deck capable of navigating through stax quite well and that benefits from the preponderance of imperfectly-piloted stax pieces. In theory there is an element of RPS, but in practice Tymna/Kraum (and other 4c & 5c piles) are still solidly the boogeymen of the format, with consistently high table placements and almost double the top 16 finishes of the next best option. Just like in casual, drawing 10+ more cards than everyone else tends to be pretty good and as a result stax is pretty widely considered to be "dead" as we used to conceive of it. While decks can contain stax elements, its not uncontroversial to say that pure stax outside of monsters like Najeela isn't currently favored. The meta generally is significantly more midrange.
Even in cEDH, drawing a billion cards, sitting on some guys, stopping wins when necessary, and outvaluing the table with your superior card quality is still extremely good.
So I've never really liked this approach to discussing commander as a format, as if cedh is the final goal and everyone playing "casual" is either less legitimate for discussion or somehow missing something. The way I've found to view it in a way that makes it make sense that it's so popular and enduring is you are not really playing magic by even the rules of commander at all most of the time. You are, in a similar way to dnd, working as a group of 4 game designers, each with an audience of 3. That's why most people play in pods with friends, the setup is so much more focused on designing a set of decks that make compelling decision trees happen, and that's why nobody really likes instant wins. Because it's not a game of using the cards available to make the best deck, it's creating a pool of decks where you can craft interesting challenges for the other people around you. I would say a pubstomper with a perfectly tuned deck played with perfect optimization of plays is bad at commander, if that makes sense.
"I would say a pubstomper with a perfectly tuned deck played with perfect optimization of plays is bad at commander, if that makes sense." 100% agree.
That's why cEDH needs to be looked at separately. Commander is a casual format. Which inherently means that "Winning" isn't the most important factor. Magic the Game is built around taking your opponent to 0 life. Commander, as self regulated by the players, is not built around that. It is built around deck building, expression, showing off your creations. The main goal is to show off your creativity, and appreciate the creativity of others.
If people don't like that, that's your sign. Play any other format, they are all built around getting your opponent to zero and "winning" the game. Now, if your playgroup wants to play like that, that's allowed and wonderful! But all the people who complain about Commander just seem like they don't understand it.
I also think Commander could do with some different rules about what "winning" is. I think an achievement or points system would help solve this problem.
Even when it's not as thought-through as that, people in casual pods tend to be bringing wacky, timmy-johnny style decks because their goal is more to entertain people with a cool or strange set of cards they've found.
@@shorewall No, cEDH is an equal way to play the game. It's simply the same rule 0 thing as casual play, people decide to play a competitive game and that's that. It's not a different format or whatever.
This so hard, how I always look at it is winning in commander is often just being able to play more commander since a lot of the fun I've found comes from running weird/janky decks that are often purposefully not using the strongest possible thing.
If you come to a commander event (that's not cEDH) with a deck that's designed solely to win, you're probably gonna have a hard time winning real soon because no one will actually play with you!
@@milii113 "you're probably gonna have a hard time winning real soon because no one will actually play with you!"
That means you're just winning constantly because your opponents are conceding :D infinite wins hack!
This is why I feel like 30 life might be better for the format. You could maybe actually punish the ramp players with early aggro and at least get their life total low enough that it's easy to finish them off in the late game.
I agree with 30 life especially because it makes no sense to me that commander damage is so massively privileged
Agreed. 40 life is just unnecessary padding. Most players just take damage in the early game because they can
I’ve thought this many times, I haven’t tried it myself but 30 life seems way better.
Agreed. Creature-rush strategies are already inherently penalized because it's multi-player. Namely, if you exhaust your resources to kill one or even two opponents, likely the third opponent has spent that time economy'ing up and will then crush you.
In multiplayer it's just inherently better to cast a mana rock rather than a beatdown creature on turn two because of this. So, sure, let's use 30 life.
Brawl on Arena has 25 life. It's a good balance for 1v1. Brawl is a better experience than EDH because you can also use a Planeswalker as your build-around.
I have a friend who plays to win with decks deliberately constructed to win fast. The rest of my pod uses precons that run pretty well. I'm playing with an adjusted precon and two somewhat decent original constructions since I had just the right cards to smooth out the fun I wanted from the decks. It's interesting to play because every game ends up being a gang up on the one "powerful" player before the rest of us have a more even playing field. It's certainly interesting, but I play Magic to see what could happen, so I like games with back and forth, with interesting decisions. I guess I prefer to be a performer rather than a victor, so I have a hard time with the idea of competitive formats. I have fun differently, and finding a balance has been important to my growth as a Magic player.
100%. It's more important to me to create an interesting deck and see what it can do, than it is to win every time. And this was my mood even in 1 on 1 Magic.
I think a win every 4-6 games is where I feel I want to be, and the randomness in Magic allows for that.
You're bang on. I agree that for me as well, it's not about winning rhe game. It's about the journey and influence along the way. Winning is just a bonus. I personally get 0 satisfaction winning via 2 card combos.
I think a lot of players want commander to be a place where their tier 2-3-4 strategies can have a home.
fun deck concepts that are not viable in standard or Modern but they like to play. So when the people bring tier 1 decks/CEDH decks then the format just becomes wacky 4 player modern and not a game where their less powerful decks gets to try stuff.
The two areas where the format is at its best is what you described and cEDH. The middle is where things get rull weird and WOTC seems to print pre-cons on the high end of the middle zone.
The issue is the deck construction of edh kinda invalidates your point.
Unless your talking archetypal strategies.
@@joshua_lee732I am talking archetypal since i believe most decks in casual edh is archetypal.
Tldr: Punch your friends, it will make your games more fun 😂
Do it like the yugioh anime, every time you take damage, the damage is felt. Except it's by punching your friends
Just today I was thinking about how multiplayer FFA is basically the same in every game and genre. This video nails that home even harder. In RTS games the cornerstone of casual games is "No Rush". Some games even have a built in timer setting to prohibit rush strategies. This effectively means economy booming and turtle strategies are king. However, the moment you get slightly higher level turtle strategy falls off leaving only econ. Turtle falls off because the econ player becomes more mobile and just has enough resources to overtakes the turtle player without fail every time, but the turtle player isn't fast enough (often times read as "good enough") to counter the rush player. So building econ then only attacking at max population cap is simply how low level players play.
This is VERY similar to how commander is played. Players that don't have the experience of 60 card formats, and/or are just very casual in their play thought process lean very heavily into econ strategies. This causes the more reactive decks built to slow players down to be less effective because you often will just hold onto cards for long periods of time. For the less experienced player they might not know how to use removal and counterspells very effectively so it seems worse. A common trend I have seen is, not wanting to run removal because that takes away from the "main strategy". Essentially, I want to do more of the thing and running removal gets in the way of that. Afterall, why play removal when I can instead just run another big dumb spell?
I recall introducing aggro into my playgroup and it kind of upended the group in a lot of ways. If my Rakdos Lord of Riots deck, or my Krenko deck, or my Breya combo deck, or my Henzie blitz deck, etc. pops off then the eco decks just crumble. I had never really made the association before watching this of the strategy triangle in something like MTG. It makes a lot of sense why I tend to be a very dominate player in my group, unless one of the guys we play with that runs lots of removal joins us, then I have to shift into more long game strategy and sandbag a lot in order to win. Also, it really makes me understand why I like the decks I enjoy because I am that RTS player that will rush every game until you figure out how to beat it, then we find out if you can win the long eco game (for my friends/family, the answer so far has been a resounding, no.)
Great points! Good to hear your playgroup is ok with rush as a strategy.
Man, you hit the nail on the head with how I've been feeling about my own decks but hadn't found the words for. The meta very much seems to be centered around mind-range value engines, especially in my friend group. Most of my decks are built to either go under or around that. I win often, but I don't think it's because my decks are better or more optimized, they just subvert the meta and when people don't pack a lot of interaction they can't really do much about it.
I wish you guys uploaded more of these conversations on different streaming platforms like spotify. I'd love to put my phone down and still listen to these conversations.
You guys should explore Oathbreaker. It has a lot of the strengths of commander with a smaller deck size/life total. I've had a lot of fun with my Oathbreaker decks whenever I can find someone to play with me lol
I mentioned Oathbreaker on a previous video and I'd like to see their takes on it too. The format unfortunately died in my area before I got to play it.
Oathbreaker can be a lot of fun. It's also strictly more repetitive, and them having more banned cards(Sol Ring) I assumed they would update the format with more frequent bans to keep the out of hand combos taken care of, but there's always that guy playing Gideon Armageddon, or Jace Treasure Hunt.
@@ruecianbeoulve7770 when the format first hit I sat down playing with 3Feri and Supreme Verdict; I think the person I played against quit magic after that 😬😅
Tiny Leaders is another good format. 50 card decks require focus on the main strategy. CMC 3 or less keeps the spells castable during the game. Everyone gets to do their thing all the time.
Great video! would you be able to do one on designing "powerlevel" for different audiences? Such as the difference between MH# sets and traditional standard sets and if this issue is unique to magic or if it shows up when designing other long lasting games.
Great suggestion!
My best buddy and I were just talking about this video and the way you guys approach commander, and I think he kinda hit the nail on the head. In his words,
every square is a rectangle, but not every rectangle is a square. Commander is a game that uses Magic as a framework, but it simply isn't Magic. You can't really view it through the lens of the same deck archetypes and philosophies that you see in a format like Standard or modern. Aggro decks still exist, for instance, but they're not just low to the ground one drops and bolts for days, they're instead snowballs rolling downhill such as my beloved baby Anim Pakal. Control still exists, but it doesn't come in the form of one for one-ing your opponent into Oblivion, they are instead economy focused decks that are likely to build in a lot of wraths and self protection.
I think as a whole this is one of the best breakdowns of edh and cedh as a whole and how different pods and compositions affect the type of gameplay experience you want. As an almost 100% cedh these are very solid takes (given the background of the people talking which they explain beautifully ) and I think explains the full idea of the pond that elder dragon highlander inhabits.
Honestly, as a commander player I was a bit worried about being offended by some of this, but honestly it was super interesting. Thank you for this talk and I hope everyone who sees this has a great day.
Thanks for the kind words! Our goal isn’t to offend, it’s to understand Magic’s systems on a deeper level.
One thing about Thoracle’s ban worthiness is that unlike more flexible, usually commander based, combos is that the cards in it are inflexible. Tainted Pact can sometimes be a risky Demonic Tutor, and Demonic Consultation does have an emergency mode, but unless you’re playing Yuriko Thoracle’s only other utility is being pitched to Force. More defensive leaning decks have been cutting Demonic Consultation, and before the Dockside ban many 5 color decks would cut Thoracle entirely, because in those decks your primary win condition also happened to function as Black Lotus, so why bother running rush cards that couldn’t also engine.
I agree with your description of a race to a wincon like thoracle. If you win the game without needing to interact with your opponents, you're not playing the game, you're playing solitaire. When I play, I want to actually defeat my opponents.
30 lands is how you miss land drops.
Ya, very few niche decks can pull off 30 lands. My lil brother used to run 25 🤦🏽♀️ in 2 n 3 colour decks no less. I thinn the least i have in a deck is 33 for Yisan, but that is mono coloured n I have enough 1st turn mana acceleration like mana rocks n mana dorks n ramp enchantments that more than half the deck is mana n I always get Yisan out on turn 2.
When I was getting started in the format, 37 was what was recommended to me, and that still felt too low, so I bumped it up to 42. It's good enough for Douglas Adams, it was good enough for my hometown's tragically defunct gaming bar, and by God, it's good enough for my EDH decks.
@@tonysladky892542 is very high unless you're playing a specific land based strategy like Gitrog. My baseline is 35 with a full suite of 0, 1, and 2 mana ramp, and tons of card draw and tutoring. I find myself flooding out far more often than being mana screwed
@@tonysladky8925I'm so proud of you. 😊
Rogsi plays like 23, most cedh decks play 27-28
One problem with cEDH is that, in any deck, you can stick in one Rhystic Study and then, because you have 6-8 tutors in your deck and can fetch it whenever you need, you now have a reliable grind/economy plan. Without tutors a rush deck would have to commit to rush far more
100%
7:00 That's actually one of the counter example, Nadu is a Rush commander
7:40 EDH and CEDH are basically not the same game. You can't talk about CEDH and say you're talking about EDH
Right, it's like comparing Modern and Kitchen Table Magic.
EDH and CEDH are not the same game in a sense that players of them are two distinct groups. but design-wise they ARE the same game. people just politely ignore the other side when they play the one kind of EDH they like.
Hell, I'd argue each and every pod is a whole different game. Same game but completely different expectations and rules. It's like how every house has slightly different monopoly rules except more extreme.
Turbo decks are kind of rush decks, like they said. Nadu is kind of turbo-y
@@shorewall...which are both the same game?
I'm a simple guy. I see someone talk shit about commander, I click.
A lot of casual players ive played with and witnessed playing seem to believe that commander games need to be a 4 player economy match, and anyone bringing a strategy that is not a long term economy, non-interactive deck will receive complaints from others for various reasons such as: their deck wins too quickly or out of nowhere, it touches the opponents stuff at all/too much, or it doesnt "let their deck do its thing" as if everyones deck should always fulfill its intended strategy every game or something.
Id try to simplify it to cEDHs term of "midrange hell" but the term midrange typically implies the inclusion of removal, which many casual players whine about.
Players that complain about removal, or any interaction at all, should be told to find a different game, preferably solitaire. Interaction has been a key component of the game since Alpha. Two types of people complain about it, those who lack the maturity to handle their strategy being disrupted, and those that whine as a sort of meta game political strategy. Both, but especially the latter, should be punished.
@@Trisket agree 100%, no notes
Commander is a narrative based multi-player format. You are telling a story with your deck in relation to 3 others, games are supposed to be swing-y. That's why there should be interaction but also why a deck should do it's thing. I won't go out of my way to help you achieve it but I also won't stop you completely. All I'm saying is: it's a game made for humans with empathy, criticized by humans without it.
@@pascalsimioli6777 Narrative based to you, maybe. Personally the only story I tell is "this is how I win (or attempt to win), given some arbitrary self-imposed power level restrictions for casual". Which is how normal Magic formats generally play out, and I think it's silly to demand others approach the game as an RP session the same way you do. And are you really implying that too much removal is somehow psychopathic? I mean, seriously?
@@pascalsimioli6777 there is nothing narraitve about commander
The social expectation is stronger in MtG, but even in SC2 paratext (social media posts, commentary, etc) strategies that are textbook Rush like 12-pool, banebust or cannon rush are called Cheese.
Edit : The concept of "honest gameplay" and refusing interaction is a bit opposite, though. What do you mean I don't want to measure my micro/macro skills against my opponent if I'm playing to win and I know they're better.
12 pool, 4gat, whatever other rushbstrategy isnt cheese. Proxy rax is cheese. Cheese is something that is unreasonably effective if the enemy dorsnt expect it, and is dead in the water if they do.
It is insanely, unreasonably high risk, potentially high reward strategies. You cant just stop a 12pool with a good wall. Well, you dcouldnt, Im not as familiar with LotV mera as I was with WoL.
Love y’all’s videos, very interesting discussion. I wanted to say that thassas oracle // demonic consult is not the main wincon in CEDH, I see this complaint a lot from casual players and it shows a fundamental misunderstanding with the format. We mostly win with breach, and if there’s anything that needs a ban it’s bowmasters
Good point I should have also mentioned breech. I think the point still stands. Wins come from a small package of cards to leave room for tons of economy and counterspells.
I didn't commit to the bit, but I was really tempted since all his Mana pips are hybrid to try and build my Obosh the Preypiercer EDH deck as Mono Red Burn.
Mono Red Burn is my EDH White Whale. I like OG Purphoros as the wincon. Damage doublers and tokens, burning the whole table down.
Great point about high level decks having multiple archetypes but shifting between them depending on tactics and draws.
I am starting to think "you need to kill 120 HP" is a little overblown though. I have a Purphuros deck and I have never, ever, needed to deal 120 damage to win. Your opponents will very reliably damage each other, at least at the LGS I play at. Even in cEDH combat damage is relevant in some games where people drew enough defense (or paid enough life to various things), part of the appeal of Tivit or Atraxa is their ability to just kill someone the old fashioned way.
Look at it this way: in 2 player, if all players do a Lightning Bolt a turn, the game ends in 7 turns. In EDH, if all players do your hypothetical 'Big Lightning Bolt' a turn, the game ends in 5 turns (since everyone takes 3*3=9 a turn cycle). So it's really a meta thing, if aggressive decks are acceptable and played they help each other and become more viable vs the economy decks.
This is an interesting analysis. I had already decided on my own that "every deck needs to ramp and draw" is a problem for EDH, but I hadn't associated it with being a consequence of the lack of viable "rush" archetypes. I wonder what the solution is, or if one is even necessary?
I’m not sure it’s really all that solvable outside of combo. Which, like we mentioned, isn’t something most players enjoy playing against. When rush strategy cards have been printed for 1v1 with 20 life they’re not going to be particularly good in edh. Commander damage is a slight work around, but not really all that viable. You still have to deal 63 damage. Though, if I was trying to win with combat damage I would likely look in that direction.
commenting super early so maybe youll say smth like this after, but the problems with burn become very apparent when "every card should be the equivalent of 3 damage" suddenly becomes "every card should be the equivalent of 18 damage" in commander. Suddenly lightning bolt feels a little underwhelming.
Creating my new commander variant called zoomer dragon highlander; your starting and max hand size is 14, you draw 2 cards per turn, and can play 2 lands per turn. Also you now have an attack phase 2 and a main phase 3. This is to compensate for the 40 life per player lol
That sounds like a great way to speed up the game. Haha
The first deck I ever built for myself was an attempt at a burn deck for Commander and it was/is not very good. I'll still drag it out for shits and giggles from time to time. But the thing my current play group has come to realize is that with the huge up tick in commander specific cards and wotc pushing commander as the mass market way to play the game (precons every set and power creep), commander isn't as fun as it used to be. We've moved to oath breaker as our preferred format, and while not perfect it's different enough from commander to be fun while retaining some of the things ngs that made commander interesting in the first place.
@@distractionmakers I think OG Purphoros is pretty good at EDH burn. Anything that hits each opponent, or even each player, gets you closer. Add some damage doublers, and you got yourself a stew going!
Would it be at all possible for y'all to make a video on Digimon? 👀I was looking back through the catalogue and ofc the second episode of the og podcast covered it as it re-released. It'd be cool to get your takes now that its been out for so long.
A great vid btw, Commander always seems to cause issues and my local commander league has been a huge source of frustration for myself, other players, and organizers alike due to the competitive-casual balance.
For mono red look are Neheb it generates mama for damage then you put a lot of wheel/flash backs to look for you win con.
it's funny that you brought up the attack defend economy triangle in mtg. the first time i heard of it was from starcraft. the same principles apply and much more strongly in starcraft than i think in most card games but the tempo value trade off is there in probably every strategy game that has some form of resources. go a lot faster and just win the game or completely take over the game or go a bit slower to stay alive while getting more long term value than the opponent.
The one who solves the "casual game" paradox, should get the game named after them.
What is casual enough, while still being able to win games?
I think it depends on the individual and their play group too much to necessarily "solve" because it comes down to how much you want to win, and the effort you're willing to put into that win rate. The more you and your opponents want to win, the less casual you're going to play. So, hypothetically, if you want to casually win 60% of the time, you're going to need to find a partner willing to lose that much, or a group willing to lose around 86% of the time. They might exist, but good luck.
It's not a paradox. It's complaining for the sake of a free win in the guise of a format. 'I want a game where I can do my thing, where no one wins too fast, interacts with my stuff, or has a combo to go over the top of my stuff."
There is no "casual enough, while still being able to win games" because if your deck beat my deck, then it's cEDH try-harding.
"Casuality" isn't really a measure of how easily a deck wins the game, it's a matter of how transparent and predictable the deck behaves. A casual deck telegraphs its wins so that they only really happen when most of the table is comfortable that the time is now suitable for someone to win.
@@PhoenicopterusR The paradox, is how do you get even games, while not having a powercreep that ultimatly ends in cedh? And that without crushing creativity and too much rules. People being different, is the challange
@@yurisei6732 Let's agree to disagree on that then
acceptable land density is a function of reliability and efficiency of card draw and expected game length. which is why cedh decks are all in the 20s.
I play 30-32 lands in most of my commander decks, yes I know it’s insane. My second deck had Sydri as the commander and is full of 2-3 drop mana rocks so it didn’t make sense playing heaps of lands. And now I just struggle to put more lands in a deck
I appreciate the conversation about Commander from a design perspective, even if I don't agree with all of your points. To me, the most fundemental difference between one v one formats and Commander is Commander being multiplayer.
I don't think people appreciate how playing the game with more than one opponent fundementally changes the game. Decisions become so much more complicated and players have less information than 1v1. I would compare Commander more to a game of Catan than I would any of the 1v1 format, and I think the analysis should start from that perspective.
Rush strategy is providing a short game experience,and Commander in it's roots is rather longplay, so i suppose it was designed for not supporting rush strategies. As I tried to do a mono-red deck with dubling..., tripling damage with Solphim, Meyhem Dominus and bunch of enchantments - it end up to have to play it as a control deck and stay alive, to the moment when you can blow everyone with one spell. So Commander as a format leads to different play style of decks we play as a two player experience.
for any casual formats they should ban infinite combos and these instant win condition
Fast mana, card advantage and mana fixing // thinning are so basic, but casuals just avoid it more so than removal. Removal they at least eventually pick up on because it happens to them. Fast mana, advantage and fixing//thinning all just increase the statistical likelihood of your decks consistency by SO FUCKING MUCH. It's been hard to straddle those concepts while staying casual and viable.
I feel like thinning can be so all-or-nothing in commander because you'd need more commitment to see meaningful return than you would any other format. So that why it doesn't get picked up as much. Feel free to correct me though, I've only played one deck that went out of its way to thin.
Thinning is way overstated.
Casuals tend not to do this because every deck slot spent just drawing and gaining mana is a deck slot not spent on the archetypal cards that interested them in building the deck in the first place.
Interestingly i'm working currently on decks reducing Ramp in casual Commander because i feel too slow. It might be of cause simply a problem of power level (that i run at casual at decks too powerful vs my decks), but i think it is not that simple, because low-cost strategies that hurt the Ramp crowd are possible.
Try e.g. Board Wipe Tribal in your casual pods.
I'm honestly curious about the 3 vanilla tribal cards. Can someone explain?
They are Jasmine Boreal of the Seven, Ruxa Patient Professor, and Muraganda Petroglyphs. They are the only cards, as far as I can tell, that have abilities that benefit creatures with no abilities.
Imodane, the pyrohammer does in fact make your lightening bolts hit all the other players.
I don't hear any hate in this I honestly think that more people think about stuff like this when it comes to commander games I know for me I had to learn a lot of hard lessons very early and very quickly if I wanted to even have a chance of playing let alone win
I built a control jeskai planeswalker deck with many effects that block only attack (magus of the moat, etc). I love to see the horror in the eyes of my pod.😂
0:12 here we go boys
0:24 oh man you had me worried for a second there
Just discovered your channel and really enjoying it. I love the human psychology part of your stuff especially. But one of the most interesting psychological components about your content isn’t even related to game theory: it’s reading the comments from people entrenched in how they understand magic. I’ve seen it with other content creators who make similar arguments to you guys, but they’re just regular TH-camrs - you actually design games! I genuinely think Richard Garfield himself would get shouted down if he made a video saying “the math in commander is just completely different”
Some of my decks "rush" to victory via combat. And it shakes things up in a positive way. People have to run removals now and interaction instead of 40 cards slowly going towards their combo engine or cheesecake factory loop. If I murder you in combat by the time youve played a couple set up cards, youll have to build your deck a little differently to be more political or defensive. Sure I might become archenemy and I will probably lose the end game, but that level of influence and interaction in a game for me > a win.
Video has almost nothing related to GREED though. Being greedy is not playing removal, non basic mana bases, not interacting, and relying on the multi-player aspect too much to where the deck wouldn't work in 1v1.
"WHO THE F*** DO YOU THINK YOU ARE" is a CollegeHumor Troopers reference, isn't it?
Your thinking is wrong. Aggro (Rush (rock)) beats Control (Defence (scissors)) beats Economy (Combo (paper)). Problem is in commander you can't beat 3 players with a classic draw-go style control Deck.
I haven’t watched the video yet, so I don’t know if you get into it here, but I’m curious based on other videos what you guys like about Commander deck building, because I’m exclusively a casual player, and it’s exactly the format’s deck building restrictions that kill my interest in it.
Same.
Being forced to not only build these huge 100 card decks but also having a single copy of each card is insane.
Interesting. Honestly the idea of building around a commander helping guide players to interesting ideas, or at least that’s the promise, is what we find the most compelling. The singleton 100 deck format is somewhat arbitrary.
The size and restriction adds greater variety into games and allows for more complex deck building. Well, for the most part anyway. Some people like that, some people don't, some people will skirt the rules and put 60 relentless rats and a thrumming stone into a deck and call it a day.
@@distractionmakers I wonder how Commander that allowed 4 ofs would play. It would be like the companion mechanic.
@@distractionmakersAs a big fan of legendary creatures, I do like the idea of a Commander. It’s having to play exactly 100 cards, with no nonland duplicates I don’t vibe with. I’m trying to explore with deck building more these days because the 4 copies, 60 card decks did start to feel really stale. IMO it’s just less meaningful creatively when the format rules strictly dictate deck size and level of variance rather than those things being up to me.
I know you talked about Starcraft really briefly but one of the most popular casual game modes that almost rivaled 1v1 in popularity was Big Game Hunters where your resources nodes are as close as possible to your base and are effectively limitless, accelerating your economy by an insane degree and pushing everyone towards economy. Before Big Game Hunter there were lobbies where any sort of attack before 20 minutes was not allowed, or spoken agreements between friends to not attack early. It is interesting to see the same throughline in Magic, that in a self-governed casual format, players will trend towards allowing everyone to be able to "Do the thing", which seems to almost always be in the economy space.
Because - *spoiler* - doing the thing is fun. Really the only part of gameplay that rivals winning in terms of providing fun, and you can't win all the time (except in PvE, which is why I'm not a PvP gamer).
Great point! Rush strategies tend to subvert our idea of a “fair” game. I think the hard part is shifting perspectives to interaction being “doing the thing” and not getting to play all your stuff every game.
@@distractionmakers If the part you enjoy is directly affecting your opponent, there are extremely deep games out there that are *much* simpler and less expensive to play than Magic. Chess, for example.
But if you want to do big elaborate world-shattering combos, you pretty much need to play Magic or a similarly complex game.
@@kylekonop4801 Bad take. Magic is good because you can do both.
@@Ninjamanhammer ...except when the interaction player and the "going off" player both show up at the same table. They're looking for different payoffs, and somebody's not going to get it...which is how you get the current endless debate about what Commander should be.
Your Starcraft "BGH" comparison is spot on - some people wanted to play a game of aggression and expansion, and a huge chunk of the players preferred playing SimBase. They couldn't both do what they wanted, but they were in the same player pool and aggravated each other whenever they interacted.
My friend group has 3 entrenched players and me. Im newer but understand the game well enough.
One of the entrenched players plays ramp(dot)decks, and will usually attempt to outvalue the table before alpha striking anyone who attempted to stop them/interacted with them. They leverage small bean syndrome the entire game since "all im doing is ramping".
The other plays combo, and the third is a timmy. All 3 of them are greedy and will often elect not to interact if it means they can further their own gameplan, and if they take any damage early on they complain. It's tiresome as the combat player, because no matter what im making enemies by putting creatures on the board early.
Ugh, “I’m just ramping” is hilarious. 😆
new commander player, i like your videos a lot,
you should make a video on how to fix rush in commander
I would argue commanders like Imodane are the right amount rush for casual.
Didn’t know this card existed. Looks interesting!
As for the mono red commander your looking for that damages everyone Immodane the Pyrohammer
It boils down to this for me, I don't want to find three other people to play with every time I want to play Magic, nor am I enough of an ADHD riddled autist to enjoy playing against three other people at a time. I want my 1v1 fights to the death.
Things went a lot smoother when modern and standard players played those formats. Everything went wrong when those players begrudgingly started playing commander. Really tainted and corrupted and twisted the edh format. It was so rare to run into combo decks back in the day. Everybody I knew was building jank or just cool idea they had. The modern players idea of a fair deck is still busted and not fun to play against. It made edh players have to catch up, fragmenting the whole format. Almost everybodys deck was within a particular boundary of power level. Now the jank players and high level decks end up being at the same table. Jank players don't want to power up their decks and feel bad about themselves, power players hate being non optimal. I wish that someday modern and standard became the go to again so that edh players can have good times again by themselves.
Yes, you haven't done anything all game, because you build greedy decks, run 20- lands, your ramp combo commander got countered because everyone knows what it does and all your creatures are high cmc five-colors Goodstuff. No, i will not have mercy and wait for you to combo off.
why do you call it rush, economy, and defense when the terms aggro, midrange, and control already exist? kept confusing me the entire video
They don’t map perfectly to aggro, midrange, and control. Rush, Econ, Defense is one layer above those archetypes in strategy hierarchy. We have another video about the strategy circle if you’re interested.
@@distractionmakers Yeah, it is counterintuitive to map 1 to 1. Defense seems like Control, but Aggro beats Control whereas Defense beats Rush. Most would think of Economy as Midrange, but Midrange beats Aggro, and Rush beats Economy.
Is that a La Mort T-shirt?
Yup 👍
@distractionmakers haven't seen one outside the UK, I remember first finding them way back in 2011 when they were selling from a pop up at a tattoo convention in London. Cool to see them doing so well.
Honestly i dont care if people dont like people comboing off, im gonna do it anyway im quite successful i might add but if anyone gets salty all i say to them is "that sounds like a you problem" its a game there is no reason to get salty cause your deck didnt win there is always the next game i play meren of clan nel toth as a graveyard combo deck and its amazing
99% of my commander decks are battle cruiser decks. Only one deck i have has some sort of combo and thats my Villis deck. Vilis with Krrik and i can draw my deck essentially...thats about it or skirge familiar and vilis does the same thing then a big torment or exanguinate. Thats the only sort of combo i have in all of my decks
1v1 commander can be fun for the same reason that sometimes when playing Age of Empires II you want to start in the imperial age with all techs researched and tons of resources can be fun, as opposed to the standard dark age 3 villagers and a scout. But I personally am not a fan of the way four player free for all warps the game so hard.
The math of the 120 damage to win the game is not entirely accurate if you take into account the damage your opponents will deal to each other. Also, there's a lot of powerful lifegain strategies like Soulsisters or Tokens. So, instead of 120 you would need to deal around 160 damage instead. That's why all my attack decks have either infect or a way to create multiple battle phases so I can actually kill people faster. I remember the original complaint about mass land destruction was that the game extended too much. Nowadays I feel board wipes have the same effect; so people are playing much less board wipes, which causes "Go wide" strategies to proliferate. You'll see these "army decks" ramp and go crazy unopposed. So now there's a mix of Army decks Vs Combo. And the same can be said about combo. It has flourished because people still don't play enough removal for the fear of the feel bads. So no one is doing anything 😂😂😂. I think I'm punishing both strategies and balancing my game plan with Tempo. I play Braids which speeds up the process and the way I play her is I always ramp and play "fact or fiction" type of cards so my opponents aren't scared of me. Then I'll "solve" a problem using a meteor golem against a threat and they're like: " So he just took care of a problem, that's help me develop. And then I wait for their army to grow big enough to use a Reins of power and kill them with their own cards. And the other players will say: "Oh, that's smart and they did it to themselves 😅". At that point they still don't think I'm in control, instead they'll "abuse" Braids to keep getting bombs and kill each other first. At that point I've already drawn my forces to defend myself in the ending stages, or I'll have a bounce wipe loop with archeomancer and Evacuation or something similar. The way you play is trying to use your opponents to beat eachother and then you act like the control player against the most dangerous person to gain the other players favour. Divide and conquer.
Even the cedh rush decks still mulligan for the economy cards
I only play board wipes for my interaction. Single target removal just isnt efficient enough. If i spend my mana to remove a threat, the other players just take that as a sign to hit me because now my defenses are down. Commander rewards inaction and punishes action because going for the offensive in any capacity leaves you down for three entire turns
You can go on the offensive if you have enough blockers/can do enough damage to peoples attackers, but fair
@@pokegard going on the offensive means I get swung at 3 times in a row.
@@thechikage1091fair, I usually play with vaevictis asmadi so when I attack I can force my opponents to get rid of their most threatening cards so the swing back will be lessened, but okay/true
"single targeted removal just isn't efficient enough" this is why you lose. Not every problem needs to be solved with a nuke. A single mana instant speed removal for the actual problem followed by progressing your game plan during your turn is more often than not a substantially better strategy. Card advantage means nothing when your opponent is in the process of winning and your 4+ mana sorcery boardwipe is sitting in your hand.
@@Trisket I have done such things. Very rarely is there ever one piece that, if it gets removed, will stunt an opponent, at least with the people I play with. I don't think you understand how much of a nothing burger single target removal is. Maybe my table is an anomaly, but holy shit does a majority of the advice on TH-cam just straight not apply to my table at all, because I've tried it and it always went poorly and I've always been behind. Me using my removal on someone else's value piece just lets the other two players get ahead and mollywhop me anyway, since they now don't have to use any cards or mana to get rid of that threat, because I already did.
You have an incorrect assumption as a part of your examples. You assume there is only one rushdown player. If there are two rush players, you can each focus one person, then fight each other. You lowering other's life totals helps the other with their wincon as well.
When there are three rush decks you might actually try to politic the last person a bit to gain just a bit of advantage.
I think what I'm learning here is that you two either need new friends or you are the problem in playgroups that you're a part of lol
7:30
On my view, Commander suffers from all of the usual pitfalls of asymmetric, multiplayer games (It has intractable balance issues, politicking, has elimination as well as last-one-standing, and requires meta knowledge) but is not like other games that try and, I dunno, try to do anything to at least address these problems. (And not that you necessarily need to. Sometimes you want to play an unbalanced, eliminative, meta-based game, which I frequently do, it's called Magic: The Gathering). When I don't necessarily want to do that is when more than one other competitor is involved and our interests are zero-sum (If I win, they lose and vice versa). Politics then arise where perhaps it is more beneficial to ally with one or against one player, especially in a game with an odd number of players. And it's not like politics in multiplayer games are bad either, just when they are present, usually there is some social contract codified in the rules where Commander is a purely vibes-based.
Playing economy decks is the only “fun” option in commander. Rush/combo is frowned down upon (unless cEDH) and defense Counter/Stax is also frowned down upon.
Most causal pods want to have fun and to do that the expectation is that each individual will build economy states like synergistic tribes or themes and then overpower the table with value. The race then becomes value driven.
If a player introduces a rush strategy to beat his friends, he starts the vicious cycle of now someone will make a counter spell deck to beat rush and soon the arms race ends with toxins turn 1-2 strategies that try to win before anyone else with free spell interaction.
In other words, what happens is the same thing that happens in *every single competitive format*.
It is a solitaire play style for sure. It’s strange. Way back in the day we had multiplayer games where we played whatever we wanted. Death cloud, thoughtpicker witch, ink-treader nephilim, no one cared. We all just laughed about it. Im not sure why player sentiment has changed so much.
@@distractionmakers I really feel like player sentiment has changed mostly because people like to win, and there's now a *much* larger body of knowledge on how to do that in Commander.
I feel like most of these comments treat the dichotomy as more absolute than it needs to be. If your playgroup wins on turn 10, build a deck that wins on turn 7, that's a rush deck in context. If no one else is running interaction just run a few and enjoy your value engines pull you ahead.
@@kylekonop4801 I remember watching a Game Knights video, like 5 years ago, where they talked about how they were playing mostly cards at 3 mana and below, because anything else was too slow. And I was thinking at the time, what? Isn't Commander the Battlecruiser Magic format?
I resent the competitive players who are trying to change Commander. They have every other sanctioned format. Casuals had to make up formats, which is what Commander started as! But because it became popular, it attracted the morbidly competitive, who are miserable in a casual format, and are making casual players miserable as well.
The sooner the competitive players leave for cEDH, the sooner this controversy will end.
I think of commander as a game of munchkin, but we're using magic the gathering cards.
As the resident sith lord bringing balance to the force (nobody ever thinks that balance means more evil), play more stax decks. The games are way different, way more interactive, sometimes more political and variant. Stax is a neglected archetype that needs more love.
I love your videos. Keep up the excellent work.
I think i find myself in some weird pods compared to the average commander player. 3 different local groups and all of them are in mid power and use all different strategies. 1 group is my family and my mom is a big proponent of a rush strategy. My brother in law loves control, my wife likes all the "mean strategies" and im a typical blue player. We never have any issues and dont find ourselves in "midrange hell"
I think enough players in my groups come from 1v1 formats and have helped prevent the creation of the commander stereotypes from taking hold. Not sure if thats accurate or if im making that up 😂
I think the spirit of 1v1 is a very important perspective. Losing is fine. Not getting to do your thing is fine. Someone got to do their thing and that’s awesome.
I'll stick to Cube for now, but I'm always down to learn about some Commander stuff.
The description of easily slotting in small packages of card combos sounds a bit too close to how Yugioh has ended up. Not a place we should ever want Magic to be in. =/
The multiplayer rules for MTG are trash.
That much I can agree with. They were really only implemented for casual play.
As are the multiplayer rules for most games that were explicitly designed for two players.
What are the multiplayer rules that are trash? I never play multiplayer
@@kylekonop4801 Legends of the five rings, shadow fist...
@@joshua_lee732 That's the real trick the rules for mutli player magic are worse for casual play
Dargo + Khediss would be a good examples choice. You can pressure the whole board by turn 4-5 pretty easy with just raw damage.
cEDH: 30 lands?! That's way too much.
normal EDH: 30 lands?! This is nothing.
Me: I find Commander anti-fun so I don't play it.
Distraction Makers: You can't learn to properly despise Commander until you play it a lot.
I own 3 cedh decks and 5 edh decks, it's hard to build a deck to play with strangers outside of cedh because honestly most decks are "power level 5" rather than the magic "7" everyone talks about. If cedh decks are 9-10 most people can't build a 6.
It's plain to see that hitting land drops and drawing cards wins commander games so the format tends towards economy strategies and rush/defence (combo and stax) are frowned upon as "unfun".
Personally i include at least one 3+ card infinite combo in all my decks just to end games, i don't always execute the combo if i draw it on turn 3 but i judge my power based on the consistancy of the deck getting to it's win via tutors and card draw.
In this world of printed for commamder sets and hurt feelings everyone should pack some removal and stax so people can get used to playing magic, then we can start printing 1 mana enchantments with "cumulitive upkeep - each opponent loses 3 life" so true rush strategies outside of combo can be viable. The multiplayer nature of the format can be seen having an impact even on CEDH decks, you cannot police the entire table and often the 2nd win attempt is the successful one.
cEDH decks are 10s across the board.
@@Ninjamanhammer not all cedh decks are created equally just as not all 1v1 competitive decks are tier 1.
Really cedh is just an agreement that we play very powerful decks and try to win with no complaints about "unfun" strategies.
Sure bluefarm and rog/si are 10s, but winota is just a commander who's too good for casual, there are plenty of "9" cedh decks in the winota are of power
@@egoish6762 tier 2 cEDH decks are still 10s. Arguably 10 encompasses decks that aren't even cEDH.
7 is your "average" commander deck. Then two tiers can't be spent on cEDH with only one in between.
@@egoish6762
Tier 7 is where people don't want infinite combos, mass discard, repeated land destruction, even some of the efficient hate like stony silence and rest in peace will be frowned upon for shutting down decks.
Tier 8 you start adding those in but mass land destruction and hate like humility probably aren't accepted until 9. Tier 7 decks can play against tier 8 decks and win some of the time, but against tier 9 they have basically no chance. Tier 8 decks can play against tier 9 but are gonna have no chance against cEDH decks.
9 you get to "tuned" where you've got a focused and pretty efficient win con, with lots of tutors for it, but you're not as resilient as a cEDH deck and you're not able to fight through the stax of cEDH or interact with them hard enough.
I have a Tymna/Kodama deck that is a 9 that I've updated very little since MH1. It wins with Protean Hulk, it has like all the tutors aside from Imperial Seal. It actually plays a lot of the good stax creatures. But the mana base is kind of a mess, Survival is the only reserved list card. There's no mana crypt, no Rector, no Solitude, no Esper Sentinel.
People who don't know cEDH think it's cEDH, people who play cEDH would never call it cEDH. That's what a 9 is like.
@@Ninjamanhammer how is 7 on a scale of one to ten average 🤣
The immediate surface level thought is maybe the issue is with commander's objective. Expecting players to plow through 120 life is not what most cards are desinged to do. Maybe a system where players earn points equal to the amount of damage they deal to a player, and the first to 20 or 40 points wins? Kinda lorcana system. It would certainly change everyone's strategy.
100%. Being the last man standing out of 4 is hard, and doesn't correlate with who did the most. In a 1 on 1 game, the last man standing beat his opponent fair and square. But in EDH, you can free ride and sand bag and you don't even have to beat anyone, if the others take each other out.
I've always thought EDH should have an achievement system, or points system. Hell, even getting points for how many you eliminate would reward some decks for taking out 2 players before running out of steam. But the more options you have, the more fun it can be. Make it a full on board game.
Another option I like is the format they did sometimes, where they have an archenemy, but with different rules and cheats, and the players have to team up to take them down. A PvE experience. It doesn't have to be Commander style, but it scratches that social and casual format itch as well.
@@shorewall Yeah archenemy is pretty cool, it's just harder to do because any asymmetrical format requires that a playgroup has two different types of deck available to it. To play commander, you just need 2+ people with any commander decks. To play formats like archenemy, you need exactly 3 people with "hero" decks and exactly 1 person with an "enemy" deck.
This was something quite a few early card games learned; there were some games where every match had to be a "light side" deck vs a "dark side" deck, which meant that if you and your friend both liked the dark side more, you couldn't play with each other.
i do wonder if you should specify you're talking about cedh rather than just using "commander" as a term in your videos
also gosh how are you talking about cedh without knowing how thoracle combo works lolll
Demonic Consultation got a reprint So its more likly that Thassas Oracle gets a ban 😂 sad but true
A lot of Commander's problems would be mitigated or outright solved with a lower starting life total, perhaps 30 or so. The RC will never do it because they lack the cajones, but if you list the stuff people typically complain about the connection is pretty clear:
1. Boros colors too weak because they (mostly) suck at doing anything but aggression? Not an issue with a lower starting life total.
2. Simic/Sultai too strong? Ramping and drawing all the cards can't be 90% of your gameplan with 10 less life.
3. Ridiculous cards like Sway of the Stars and Coalition Victory are on the banlist when they shouldn't be? When you start with 30 life 8+ mana sorceries with extra setup required aren't as viable and would definitely come off the banlist.
4. A salty player whines about an overloaded Cyclonic Rift? Getting to 7 mana with less life isn't as easy and feels like more of an accomplishment, rather than a given.
5. Some commanders just keep coming back no matter how many times you kill them? A 30 life version of Commander would have less second and third casts of Commanders because it would be less ramp-heavy and the 2 mana tax would hit harder.
6. Combos make the endgame feel anticlimactic? Give players a more realistic option to kill with regular damage and you'll see less combos...
The real draw of Commander to me is multiplayer + singleton with a given build-around card (your Commander). I think that's its core strength. The fact that "economy" is the dominant strategy at casual tables isn't inherent to Commander. It's mainly a consequence of 4x40 life. If somebody created a singleton 4x40 life version of Pioneer or Modern you'd find the same gravitation towards "economy" with combo win conditions at higher power tables.
Reading the majority of comments here I see a lot of hatred for commander.
I'll make sure to buy the next UB so I can keep wotc forget about other formats or even about mtg lore ❤️
Cool video
I’m just hearing two guys that are salty probably because they lose a lot. Commander fixes all the problems that magic had I came back because it fixed all the problems that I hated in the 90s really happy that commander is the number one format and at some point, all the other formats will fall to the side!
These guys just don't get it. I had a big long post written but to sum it up, ya'll can't see the forest through the trees.
Edh is a strange montage. Typically, if you just want to win, play combo/economy. This is Cedh, more or less. The real dilemma for me comes in how average players define "casual" For example, I don't want to see cyclonic rifts, excessive low cost tutoring, fast mana rocks (mana crypt, mana vault etc), rhystic study, mystic remora......basically no Cedh Staple. If I see players do that, I will simply play my Cedh deck, and I think that is perfectly fair. SO many players I have played with jam Cedh staples in their half-assed, or pre-con decks just because they want power to dominate games. That, to me is cheesy because they can't or aren't willing to play the game on a level playing field, they have to have the advantage at all costs because they aren't good at magic. But, alas, so many players will play whatever they have, with no regard for their play mates time or effort, and because of that Edh becomes and arms race.
Finding your way to a turn 2 win isn’t a strategy. It’s a speed run exploit. It’s fine if you want to build a deck geared toward that, but don’t tell me you want to play a game of magic and then make me play against your methed out game of solitaire.
Ermmmm it’s not turbo it’s “rush”
17:99 That is more than enough mana if you have a reasonable amount of ramp and a reasonably coated deck.
All commander decks are mid-range decks.
Everyone playing their own game of solitaire is exactly my problem with commander. Most people who play commander just want to take 20 minute turns making their deck "do the thing" and barely interact with other players. This is also why stax and land destruction is frowned on.
This is why my favorite strategy is to play stax and chaos. Either we will truly make this a 1 player game or I will force people to interact.
I'm sorry but any format that requires an application for segregation i.e Commander just to play the game is fundamentally flawed. I shouldn't need a 3/4ths vote just to be able to engage with people.
Ah yes, the thing that EDH players hate most: interaction and having real wincons.
Excuse me, drawing cards and playing lands until my opponents lose the will to continue playing, IS a win condition.