@@Zarbon000 Completely wrong. I've never seen anyone criticize wotc less than Crim when they deserve it. And he always is hyped for everything no matter what.
Commander not rotating is part of the reason of success of the format... myself I don't play standard because of rotation, get to use a deck once and its done. Commander is what you put into it... I think being able to pick up a preconstructed deck for 25 is prefect way to get them into the format. To be honest if your just getting into the game get a couple Jump/Start packs, they will teach you how to play magic generally. I think that commander can be focus but there does have to be another format to support the game. As for edhrec killing the format, no it up to person building the deck. It was always problem with net decking, does it make it easier to build decks yes. But that is benefit from today, all the infromation is at your finger tips. Standard was in a bad place, but I think not having pros playing (like gps) put it mostly in the grave and covid pushed it the rest of the way by not having tournements. Commander shined because you could take the cards that you have laying around and play via webcam. standard cant have that effect due to rotating out.
Yea I just started proxying stuff when they starting power creeping Commander so hard that my decks effectively were rotating every few months. You have to have a baseline from which you build things. There should be certain effects that never get cheaper in mana, etc, just like they said they’re never going to print something better at making colored mana than a basic land because they don’t like what the dual lands did to the game.
The biggest problem with lack if rotation you run into is that in order to make it profitable wizards feels pressure to make the next product printing more powerful so people buy it, so you get pseudo rotation, yugioh has this power creep problem, card power level constantly raises and old cards become obsolete so it doesn't matter if they didn't "rotate" because they essentially did. You've seen it slowly with like the printing of Arcane signet, three mana costed rocks use to be staples in commander now they're borderline unplayable and to slow.
@@christopherbolanos4695 100% Commander does rotate. It rotates through power creep. Every set seems to introduce some universally good auto-include with no downside. In some colors it's worse than others but when you start a build it's like ok, these 15 staples then 84 other cards.
I’ve just started listening. It’s funny to hear Richard talk about needing to play commander staples. He’s the guy who plays skeletons, birds, etc… when I play at my LGS many decks lack commander staples.
I really don’t know what reality him and Seth live in where every commander player uses EDHREC like a bible and only want/build the most well tuned of decks.
same. I think I've seen darkside once, never seen j lootus, jeska's will once or trice but even then one time it was in exile matter deck so its somewhat understandable. Most people dont use expensive staples
At my LGS most of the players use staples, and the players that don’t play against eachother most of the time because of the way the tournament works out. It feels like a huge problem in that tournament setting, but that is really only a problem for super enfranchised players.
Feel like I've had the complete opposite experience. Every deck I play against at an lgs is dominated by staples. Literally most of them the brewer will describe them as being "a pile of cards from my binder"
I was largely onboarded to Magic via Commander, and even though I had kitchen table YuGiOh experience, I treat Magic is my first real trading card game. I remember playing my first couple commander game and being completely overwhelmed by the board state, not to mention even knowing the different cards. Just having to keep track of THREE other board states made my head spin. I jumped into Arena after being frustrated by tabletop and that's where I really learned to play Magic and where started following different creators. After all that I can now really appreciate commander and I don't really touch arena anymore since it's so expensive.. All that to say, no everyone is gonna stick with it like I did. I refuse to bring people into the game with commander a more people should play jumpstart.
Similar to what I did, except I became Arena Free-to-play and never touched commander again and likely never will. Out of curiosity, why did you go back to commander?
@Joseph Courtright I have a really good lgs with friendly people who make in person commander games fun. That, and it's easier to spend money on real cards rather than digital ones. I have 4 decks of varying power levels, so my experience in commander can be suited to what games I feel like playing. In arena I play explorer, so sometimes I get paired into 4 matches against creativity in a row and feel like throwing my pc out the window.
jumpstart is probably the actual best way. I bought the last good one with an actual variety of styles and got 3 new people to try it and everyone had a blast
Totaly agreed i started mtg six months ago in comander format with a group’of player omg it was painfull but i liked the game so i just started a standard and pionner deck even a duel commander deck to learn to play magic and it’s just way better for enjoying the game at the beginning
Ryan Gomez from Magic Arcanum did a video on exactly this. He calls it the Commander "Ugly Sweater" problem. Pretty neat video. He explains it really well.
The thing that drew me to commander originally was the singleton aspect and the diversity of the format. I only had to buy a single copy of a card instead of a 4x staple. I do feel like over the last couple years I see many more staples than I used to. It has made some games feel same-y as the same staples appear over and over while I feel like I used to see more variance among playing with random pods.
That is because of your play group if you play with a small group of people or random people online you will probably get same-y cards. The first group has their preferences and the second is ussually influenced by Game Knights etc. It is good to: 1) play with different people, 2) introduce some challenges like a deck budget or no cards over a dollar, 3) try different subformats - pentagram is a lot different for example 4) think about your metagame. For example a bunch of the Game Knight staples relly on their very low number of board wipes that kill everything. Add some Oblivion Stones and a lot of those enchatments will be less powerful. Graveyard hate, targeted removal and repeteable removal all can help a lot with that too pushing your metagame in different direction.
Personally, I think if you're calling a card a staple AND complaining that the power level of the format is too high, you just cut the staples to entirely remove the problem.
@@dontmisunderstand6041 You can cut the staples easily, it's getting everyone to agree to that which is the issue. Have fun with no staples playing vs people who have them.
Richard described me perfectly. I woke up one day and just couldn't give myself a good reason for having spent a few grand on cardboard. I've spent the last few months selling everything worth more than £1. Pretty much done now, and I'll be making a pretty huge order to MPC this month to replace my 8 EDH decks.
MTGA single player mode that exposes a story is such a good idea! Mind blown! I recently read the storyline for Tezzeret on a Wiki, which was over multiple blocks, but was very cool. Even the story of Dominaria United, the Brothers War, and All Will Be One are interesting, but I have to care to dig around to know more. It's such a missed opportunity that would get myself more invested in the cards and characters of a point in Magic's history. Seriously, such a good idea lol
Of you want some casual joke filled break downs for several magic the gathering stories, Check out the Lore Boys podcast. They cover tons of game lore across different games and have done a bunch of MTG lore, from old stories to covering newer stuff.
I started playing mtg with duels of the planewalkers 2015, it was a great steady introduction to the planes and mechanics of mtg and I didn't need friends to play
This entire episode has resonated with me so much. - I’ve sold the majority of my collection, keeping 2 decks. - the group at my LGS is _okay_ but not great - def a few really try-hard players who ruin the experience for newer players.
commander is an enthusiast format, so you can't learn the game with it. 60 card formats at least revolve around a small enough card pool (either from rotation or metagame), that new players can at least get a hold of how to play around the game pieces you're expected to see. Commander has so many moving pieces with different mechanics that nobody but studied magic enthusiasts can really understand what's going on, what to look out for while playing, and how to play around it.
You lost the plot a bit when you suggested new players should be learning the meta. No, they learn the basic rules of the game and you let them free. Commander is absolutely a day 2 or 3 format for new players. Commander is so much simpler a format than something like standard or draft.
I disagree entirely. The only time what you said is a concern for commander is when people are playing busted decks. Commander is not about playing around people's outs. It's about playing your deck as best you can and working the table. If you are try-harding in commander, you are playing it wrong.
When I was new at the end of 2022 to commander, I had no friends that played magic. A co worker told me about card shops and the commander format and I built 3 decks and just showed up. The first day was fantastic. The community was so welcoming. When my decks didn't function, because I was new to the format and didn't build the decks "properly", they all quickly offered me thiers to play. I didn't have sleeves, I didn't have a play mat. They didn't tease me or side eye me. They offered me to use their mats and one player about a month into me showing up weekly just bought me sleeves for my deck. Now I'm a player that has bought other new players sleeves for their first decks. The store itself gave me a playmat from there extras. They told me about other shops in the area, and a year and a half later some of my greatest friends are from these card shops. We get together for commander and other games quite often. And this happened when I was 34, so it's never too late to go make friends with people who like the same hobbies as you do.
Limited is by far the best onboarding format with commander as your endgame. You learn one sets mechanics and then You get some cool cards that you can use to upgrade a precon.
limited is the worst though, you need to know a stupid amount to do any good at it and it plays extremely differently than any other format by virtue of being so low power its straight up unfun for many people. standard let's you at least build your own deck
the main issue i had with brawl is that the cost of cards being so high due to it being standard means that its not affordable to survive rotation also maybe rather than a yearly rotation is could be 2-3 years so that you can have a build up of cards in the pool or at least treat it like pioneer
Just add 40 cards once it rotates or play Commander Brawl. The problem people will always have with standard is that it rotates and the solution is to stop playing standard when you don’t want to keep up anymore. It’s meant to be the cheapest way in, not the cheapest way to stay in.
@@deifiedtitan just add 40 doesn't really work as you need to have a legal commander that is the colours of your deck which might not be available also it's more than 40 since it's singleton. even at that you are basically playing a deck forced into the format than building are the commander and a certain playstyle.
21:26 I got into Magic and Commander just over a year ago. When I started playing pickup games on spelltable, I also found a lot of people where EDH was their First magic format. However, they didnt consume all sorts of content like I did. They werent aware of all the social nuances and unwritten rules. This was extremely frustrating having to play against things like Stax, constant edicts, constant discard, etc. It is kind of awkward when people come into EDH as their first format and are like "wow look at all these crazy powerful oppressive cards!" Yes, and theres a reason why most people dont play them.
As someone who is in the middle of year 2 of playing mtg I started off learning the game via commander ( really hard to learn via commander but I learned ) and i played just commander for about 6 to 7 months And then I tried a pauper match and then I essentially just stopped playing commander all together because I can't go back to the 3 hour games and politics. I love pauper, modern and legacy now I love the speed, straight forward gameplay and not waiting 10 hours for my turn and just how intense it is
I started with commander ~10 years ago. I went to Pioneer after getting tired of politics, power level complaints, and losing due to opponent mistakes. Commander will probably self-destruct at some point due to player entitlement. As the video said, there are so many unwritten rules.
So first off, props to Seth for rememebering his conversation with my GF (we were the group you smashed with Infect first thing Sat Morning at Philly) I agree with Tomers point (rare thing that is) that casuals dictate the health of a game, if a game is inaccessible to the regular "weekend warrior", it's not gonna go far. We talk about this a lot in the CoD Fandom, the average player is just some 30+ person with a job and kids and only a few hrs to play this game and doesn't have the time and money to invest in being "sweaty" to use CoD vernacular. Commander is also appealing because for another friend of ours who was new to it, buying one card of each is easier than trying to get playsets often. But Richard does bring up that Arena is a great starting point to this and while my GF is rather new and plays only EDH in paper, I set her up on Arena first to learn the basics of the game rules. So it's a little of both While Standard where you learn to play, but Commander as a non-rotating (huge price point thing) overly casual format, is the premier format for the game
I think the people who describe Commander as a board game are correct. I think that's why it's popular: people love board games and to work together with their friends. Going head to head with your friends can be a giant pain especially if one of you takes it way more seriously than the other. Also, I think the jank element still exists but not for enfranchised players. If you think commander looks cool but aren't completely bought into magic, you can just use what you have and still have that "throw the things that kind of work together" feel that is more consistent because you can always access at least one pretty good card. If you like that, you can stay there. If you don't, you can power up. Wizards can't really ruin commander because commander is already ruined: look at cedh.
This was the original spirit of EDH. It's where all your chaff went to be played. And then WotC started laying attention to it, eventually stealing its soul like they did with modern
@@Blacklodge_Willyyes, it was. I took my old cards, slammed them into a deck, and had fun games without having to buy new cards in order to hold my own. Anyone remember Trygon Predator?
@@andrewwaring3643 What does that have to do with being budget? The whole of EDH was budget because you could put something together from your collection of cards? People still do that to this day.
@@Blacklodge_Willy yes, but the format has become taken over by hyper aggressive pushed cards. The cards from my collection don’t hold up anymore. Don’t get me wrong, not everything wizards has done is bad, but the overall direction has become far more competitive and expensive.
I feel like Seth and Richard are having a hard time understanding that Commander is vastly different than any other 1v1 format. I'm a huge introvert but I find myself smacktalking people I've never met an hour into a commander game and I'm fully comfortable with these new people. Meanwhile in 60 cards formats I'm tense and stressed and so I almost never open up and engage in banter with my enemy. Also that "must play" staple list idea is whatever you make of it. I'm brewing new weird stuff frequently and I value unique synergy cards over 95% of the just good stuff staples.
Exactly... Most of the "commander is dying" part of the episode is in part of the "need" to be up to date with the latest cards, while for most players that is not true. They don't need the newest cards to play the format, and those who find they do can just proxy them anyway mostly without issue
I agree. I’m constantly slapping decks together and only sometimes using stable cards in those decks. I just recently slapped together Yargle and Multani using a bunch of based on power effects, the most powerful probably being greater good along side a bunch of feign death effects and regrow effects and made a house with that random black “dock side” card they printed In kamigawa commander. You can easily just play fun random decks that just happen to be powerful purely from synergy and not power crept cards.
@@bronythekight7369 yeah that seems like an insane card drawing machine. I'm guessing you're using stuff like Jarad and Rite of Consumption to throw your commander at people?
I don’t know, none of that sounds like a specific quality of commander to me, it sounds like the difference between multiplayer and one on one, or even just casual vs competitive. It feels like a self-fulfilling prophesy-Commander is different because you’ve convinced yourselves it’s different. But to me it just sounds like the same way I play 60-card.
i just started playing magic maybe 2 months ago and if it wasn't for commander I probably would have never played at all. what ive learnt for it so far is that its extremally diverse, i can play at a table where everyone has crazy strong decks and feel competitive or ill go over to a friends grab some drinks and we can play all night long with all different decks and someone new wins every time. the second part i love is precons i love buying a new precons playing it and getting a feel for it, then weeks later budget upgrade it and it feels brand new. also the fact you can play 3 games of the same deck and have those games feel completely different is amazing. commander might be the most fun card game ive ever played and i hope it continues to thrive. to the point standard is easier than commander maybe but the experince of standard feels so much worse when you see the same cards being played over and over getting slaped by the same combos is not fun for a new player.
I think the future predictions entirely missed the ascendency of cube (and other kitchen table curated formats like battle box, wizard's tower, or even custom cards). Basically, I think the future of Magic is going to be, "Hey, I have a box of Magic cards. Come over and play them." And I think it will be glorious.
I feel like a lot of the separation is because of arena. Think about it, if you want to talk to people, have a good time, etc you’ll play paper commander because that’s where the human interaction is. On arena, you can be as spiky as you want with 0 drawback. You don’t have to worry about cheating, salty/annoying opponents, or nearly as much about the price point (even for as bad as arena’s economy is).
This is the correct answer. Arena is the TRUE Magic onboarding, and the relative frequency of Challenger decks vs. precon Commander decks determines whether a new player transitions to paper in 60 or 100 card formats. There's 1 Challenger release a year and it's almost immediately made irrelevant by rotation. There are 5+ precon releases a year for commander. I think the issue with this cast is that they're assuming that paper standard and arena standard are equivalent. If people want to play standard they'll play it for free.
Commander cannot be the focus of magic as long as the LGS experience remains the way it is. A lot of people need luck of the draw on being in a good area with an accessible LGS that plays the type of commander that player wants to play. There is a less unified vision of what makes a good commander game compared to any other format, largely because the goals are so different between commander and any 1 v 1 format
@@iNCoMpeTeNtplAyS i think you’re greatly discounting people enjoying playing a physical card game, in person. A lot of people are not motivated to buy cards or build decks to play, frankly, atrocious games on spell table that mirror some of the worst LGS experiences possible (unclear tokens, cheating, general power level mismatch, etc)
@@bahablastfreeze8872 now thats being nitpicky. If you wanted to play commander, you've got plenty of options . If you have goals in commander other than having a good time and socializing, you need some other hobby.
@@bahablastfreeze8872 your first comment had nothing to do with playing with physical cards. Your next one did because you had to look for exactly the thing you had a problem with. That's being nitpicky.
Phil's idea for Arena (a single player campaign mode that tells the current set's story) is amazing. I've been playing since 2003 and I don't follow the story at ALL. I mainly log into Arena for my daily/weekly wins, but getting gold or cards or packs for grinding out games against Corrupted Tamiyo sounds so fun!
I agree with Seth and Phil's early statements. I've been coming to terms with being a magic boomer playing for ~21 years and commander for ~8. It originally felt like we were making the decks out of cards not made for us, piecing together a cohesive strategy out of mismatched bits and pieces from magic's history. Ones that were either nostalgic or never had a home. But the sheer quantity of products are overwhelming, and with so many dedicated to commander the power creep is inevitable and disenfranchising. The same is true with limited to a degree, drafting sets that were made without limited in mind was fun and felt like you were getting away with something. But now every card in a pack is playable in a draft or sealed pool.
A big thing that makes Commander great is that a lot of the time you identify or connect with your commander in a weird way. You connect more closely with the colors and you think about how everything centers around how your Commander works with your deck. It’s more like a video game than other 60 card formats
Commander wins because of two fairly obvious reasons: 1. People want a Representative character. Not only to build around but also because it has their preferred art or ideal. It is that person at a base level. 2. Expense. It is easier to optimize and build around a representative character or theme in a singleton format. This is not possible in other formats- they dont represent you as the main character at all. Either you have the fairly expensive meta cards or you dont. If you can bear the expense you will do moderately well but- if you cant- you are screwed. There is another valid point that tomer made: wotc can make alot of mistakes with printing and powercreep in a format like commander, the magic library is quite vast and absorbent to this. The other formats are wrecked far to easily by even singular mistakes. For example- venerated rotpriest killing on turn 3 with storm effects. Trying to pull off the same trick in a pod of 4 with alot more avenues of response is much harder and more realistic. "Casual" meta doesnt seek the instant win or turn 1-5 win. This is the definition of a casual meta- I simply dont want to see you kill me right away because what is the fun in that. There is no rank to obtain, no money to be won, just friends gathering to throw down the hopefully more splashy and hilarious side of this wonderful game. I think one thing could ultimately ruin commander and it is this: Wotc making a rank system for it. Monetizing its actual power and influence. Nobody cares that they do this to products, nobody cares if a card or two gets pricey- but your average, new and older players absolutely need, want and desire a format that isnt restricted or easily broken by the profit engine that governs and is totally willing to kill happiness when it comes to a silly game. Its bad enough wotc wants data, forces and threatens it out of our lgs's on who or how many are showing up to casual play events. I do see them eyeballing this potential. And when they do try to step into it fully- they will kill it. The destroyer of dreams is greed. Greed is killing the other formats. Predictability kills the other formats. They are solvable. Cedh is solvable, out of the 40-50 players i know- only 3 of them even build for cedh. My collection has many components for cedh building but i will not build for it. I am fine with my 25% win possibility as long as i get to play, that i can be represented by my favorite game characters and that i can play unrestricted with some of the coolest, silliest, scariest, stupidest and funnest cards in the game. And im sorry- 60 card formats just dont cut it. Commander is what magic shouldve been from the start however- it wouldnt be as expansive, random, exclusive, personalized, social nor worthy had it actually been started that way which is the crux of its complexity and yet absolute desirability and playability.
The big problem is that all products are Commander products. So while all the products aren’t for Standard so if you primarily play Standard and they make a Modern set, you can take a break. Commander never gets a break.
I absolutely love Phil’s idea of making magic more accessible through online campaign via MTGA. I LOVED the Magic 2012,2013 ect games that they had for Xbox back in the day. I’ve known how to play since I was a kid. But, those games helped me get my friends into Magic who knew nothing. I think, if they had those kinds of games with the campaigns where you learn the game organically with rewards to help build deck when you get to the point of being comfortable for online play. It would help bring more people into the game as well as be a healthy way to introduce people without overwhelming them. I’d even play it, and you could do the lore for the sets through the campaign story and bring a whole new aspect to players new and old.
I would argue sometimes it is easier to pick up commander than standard. While on paper the card pool is massive, you don't actually need to know all the cards in the format. You don't even really need to know what is in your deck, unless you are tutoring. You draw a card, read the card, and pick a couple in your hand to play, whichever is best for your current board state. In standard you need to properly metagame to win. You need to know based on the open mana what possibly threats could be fielded, and make decision what responses to hold for example.
@49:05 Seth, I started playing 60 card, got tired of rotation then moved to Commander but now they’re doing the same with power creep so I returned to 60 card limited. I just enjoy sets as they are meant to be played and I’m ok with that.
The other issue is my fav formats are 1v1 formats but nobody plays them anymore so my only option to play mtg in paper is typically edh and edh isn't even my top 5 favorite formats.
Phil + Seth + Tomer - Make a video talking about Phil's idea for onboarding players on Arena, and ask for engagement! This is the best idea I have heard about Arena. Single player campaign, earned cards, and story focus would be huge! I hate that Arena is all about grind and dailies. They need to hear this!
I don't think anyone is necessarily expecting wizards to make better and better cards for commander. I believe more so expecting new designs or better supporting cards for less than great archetypes. See the rat commander Phil mentioned. Baldurs Gate and All Will Be One for example are sets that have been fantastic for commander and haven't pushed another hullbreaher into the format. That same design also helps the old school players feel like their draft cards can make a decent commander deck.
i think one thing you guys missed is that Jumpstart is perhaps the easiest newbie way to play magic because it removes deckbuilding skill from the equation even more so than sealed/prereleases, and can thus be even more balanced and simple. So I would make Jumpstart a yearly release. Themes would be tied to specific planes and be a way to check in on everywhere story-wise. I also do not like the current distribution of the jumpstart packs in boxes with some packs being far more common than others. I would design boxes so you are guaranteed not to get any repeat packs in a box. I would also jazz up prereleases as they seem to be one of the most beloved formats. I think the kits could use some cooler swag than just a die. I think the latest sets of Ravnica with their guild packs with special set symbol cards were really cool and should be the new sort of standard level of quality for those. I would justify the increased costs of product with increased print quality. Get everyone to shut up about curled foils and the like. Also every serialized card would go through an in-person inspection/grading before being packaged. If magic has the most expensive cards then they should also be the best cards. I would decrease card varieties but probably not as much as some people want. I think they're a good idea. But they should fit the cards to some level. They should also be meaningfully different. The foil and textured foil DMU stained glass cards were hard to sort out from each other. We want people who buy craploads of product to be happy with it. When designing for commander to avoid power creep I would try to focus on cards that open up less supported strategies like the tier C tribes that don't quite have enough support for a real deck, and other janky strategies like equipment that people like disproportionately to how strong they are. I would also try to add some cards that can bring down the level of the stronger new strategies and cards like treasures, without just also being power creep. things like putting "players can't create more than one token each turn" on a modal removal spell or something. has to be on a card people will actually use, which is where the balancing comes in. I wouldn't stop secret lairs, I would just want to make them thematically stronger. Base rule of thumb would be they could reasonably fit into the same deck. They've gotten a bit better with this lately. I would make sure the commander precons are great out of the box. Some are okay ut some are seriously yikes. If these are one of the main onboarding products for MTG, it can't be something people regret buying and get told 'oh that's a precon. it sucks real bad.' I know they do leave room for improvement in those as a way to encourage people to start buying more cards but I think the initial power level can be higher especially with the lands. good luck finding a brand new player excited to work on their mana base. they'll be happy to spend money on a crazy dragon or whatever but feeling hamstrung by not having spent hundreds of dollars on lands is not an exciting thing to feel. when new sets are being spoiled i would control the process so that the cards are revealed in story order. like that prof's video where he talks about, imagine if the last few cards we saw for Neon Dynasty were the run of cards that included Jin-Gitaxias, Tamiyo's Compleation, and Tamiyo, Compleated Sage. People can't get interested in the story of Magic if they can play the set and read every card and still not even know what the story is. Revealing the set in order with context would help a lot especially with a quick video released on the last day of spoiler season. I also like Phil's idea of a single player arena campaign for each set. Speaking of what Riot did with Arcane, they didn't just hire a studio and say hey make a good show thanks. My understanding is they worked to help build that studio over time starting with things like music videos for the releases of new characters and game cinematics. This helped them not just give the studio experience to make quality animation in a distinctive art style but also help Riot refine the idea of what a good League of Legends show would even be. Magic should do the same thing. They shouldn't make an MTG movie if they can't yet even make an impressive MTG short film. Some of the set trailers are cool, but they're trailers, not complete and emotionally compelling stories. I think it says a lot that there is little hype among the community for any upcoming movie if it even ends up getting made. Make an awesome short and people will change their minds. And if you can't tell people hey make us an awesome short using this story and these characters, and have it work, then it's not going to work spending twenty times as much money on a feature film or series either. But at least the risk is minimized and you get something out of it. Short fan films helped bolster the Warhammer 40k games. Moving on I would also focus more on mid-level competitive play. If the value of 'real' magic cards is that they're tournament playable, then make it so players want to play in tournaments and actually can and do. I would try to do a lot to boost the LGS scene. I agree with what Richard said about Commander, despite being a 'casual format', it's actually kinda the worst to play with strangers. So other formats being stronger helps the LGS scene. There is probably a lot more that could be done and I am sure WOTC has their reasons for not doing these things yet but that would be the main stuff I would be looking to implement.
Commander shouldn't be the main focus due to bad ideals for card design + popularity. Commander overshadowed every other format and has partially ruined formats such as legacy and such and 60 card formats feel like they are looking at new Commander cards often enough. Not only that but I think it's extremely bad for it to be the focus especially when the format is "managed" by people other than wizards. The edh banlist is a sham and it feels like a small subset of people projecting when on average wizards runs their banlists infinitely better. I think magic has many levels and edh also can teach bad fundamentals and pushes out people from learning the game in different ways
I started playing Magic with 60-card decks back in the day when I was a kid, but when I started going to my local LGS I discovered Elder Dragon Highlander and thought it was a fresh and interesting way to play the game and it gave me a way to use my cards that would otherwise be considered jank, or cards that perhaps were good in standard but due to rotation I no longer had a use for. As I grew into Magic as a hobby EDH became my preferred way to play the game to wind down from an FNM (our locals at the time was a very competitive environment). Flashforward through the years EDH grew in popularity and WotC decided to make it an official format and renamed it Commander as they powered out the first round of Commander precons. That was really cool to me. Further on into what is now the present I still have that competitive drive but the game as a whole has almost entirely pushed me out of competitive play. I do not enjoy playing Standard due to rotation making very expensive decks worthless after the fact. Modern is so expensive to get into its ridiculous, but I did try it. Every time I did try to build a deck however the deck I was building at the time ended up either having a card in it banned, went into obscurity due to power creep killing the deck before I could even finish building it, or went through so many different changes it's now a completely different deck after I spent so much money building the previous version. Perhaps my experience with Modern isn't the common experience for most people but it left a bad taste in my mouth. I tried playing Pioneer as well but I just didn't enjoy the environment I was playing in when I'm getting Greasefang Combo'd by turn three half the time. I WANT to be the one to go from Commander to 60-card, but it's just not the right time. The competitive formats are just too abrasive to get into for my taste. I really miss Alara block Standard. That was probably the most fun I ever had playing Magic competitively.
As someone who started playing Magic with Commander, in my opinion it was a lot easier to learn the game without having so many restrictions to worry about such as set rotations. Learning how mana works and how to cast spells in a 4 player format was, in my case, easier. Sure sometimes it would be overwhelming when an opponent popped off and I didn't know why or what was going on, but in those cases I almost always stopped to ask what was happening. I also wasn't worried or focused on learning every single card available because there were almost no cards not available to play(I don't count the cards outside of my budget as playable but that's another topic). My mentality was to focus on optimizing my own gameplay by playing as many games as I could with as many people as possible which would also introduce me slowly to new or cool cards that I'd never seen before. After getting my footing in Magic I started playing arena 1v1 formats and wasn't getting any satisfaction out of it(I'm not good at 1v1) so I stuck to Commander. TL;DR - I think Commander is perfectly reasonable for an entry format as long as you don't go in with the wrong mentality.
Great discussion, guys. Personally, I feel the primary issue that covers all of your concerns is printing too many cards too quickly. That is the process that accelerates power creep. If card printing was reduced by 30%, that will reduce power creep by 30%. It will also reduce burnout, and complexity creep. I am not advocating for going back to 4 standard sets per year, because I don't think that was enough to provide new and interesting commanders that people don't have to fight over. But multiple commander precons, 5 standard sets, modern horizons... it's impossible to keep up and it must be expensive for wizards. I want some time to enjoy my cards. This is enough of a problem that I never buy sealed anymore, because I get too many cards at once, and more will be coming in two weeks.
My group's reason for hopping into commander was the price. It's soooo much lighter on the wallet to buy one good card and proxy or swap it into all our other decks as opposed to buying a full play set of urza's sagas or another expensive card. What sucks now is Wizard's pushing insanely powerful commander cards that are going upwards of $50. It was nice being able to just go to a pre-release, crack the kit, and try to build a deck or two out of the cards I pulled. With the influx of cards printed specifically for the format, the power of a random person's deck has really started to increase. That changes the whole feeling of the game when playing at a local LGS
@@pr0fess0rbadass We like to do it in order to keep power levels in check. Two of the guys in the play group like to build combo based decks, so it keeps them looking for cheaper and inventive combos
Something we have done within our group that has been super successful is we do to keep it balancd and not an arms race... We play standard but mostly we play 2 headed giant, this been the best experience because building a deck with partners in mind is different, certain cards spike in power, also when one team loses the whole table is done and you don't the "commander guilt" problem where you kill someone and they sit around for 1 - 2 hours. I would love to see more people play 2 headed, even did this during the ONE release, a 2 headed sealed again best MTG experience in a long long time.
An importance of Commander is that it's the only format primarily played as semi-competitive. We've heard that the vast majority of MtG play is so-called kitchen table Magic, where power level isn't always topped out at Tier 1 or Tier 2 decks.
Been building a shared deck cube (sdc). True random Timmy magic. One deck all players share, Singleton, no non utility lands. Play any card face down as a nonbasic land that has all types and produces any type of mana, colored, colorless, or snow. Choose what to keep and cast and what to turn into mana. Never get mana screwed, never get flooded. Scy to mess with your opponents draws, bounce lands to recover spells. My SDC is going somewhat for simplicity, to cater to the needs of friends of mine who stopped playing. No search cards, no dungeons, no flip cards. I'm at around 500 cards in my SDC right now and still adding a lot, real variance.
I think Commander is a good beginner format because you can lose and have fun. I started playing at Standard FNMs and had no fun playing because I lost. I stuck around because of the community
I love playing commander over 60 card formats … primarily becuz it’s a singleton format … I don’t like the fact that you can have 4 of each card it seems repetitive and limited … I could care less about staples … if I can win with cards no one uses it’s a win win for me
I think the best answer to the commander power creep is going to pauper commander. Uncommon commander (doesn't have to be legendary) and every card in the 99 are commons. I have had so much fun with it and you get to use so many cards that are never used because of it
Magic 30 was personally my breaking point for continuing to purchase cards. I'm currently only playing EDH, so I've already sold 10g of my 40g+ collection and will proxy from this point forward. It's just not a lucrative investment at the small scale.
Very sobering points from Richard towards the end there, I gotta agree with him about the inevitability of the card value bubble bursting, its how these sort of purely speculative assets work out in the long term
Im so burnt out on commander right now. I went to my LGS on sunday looking to see if anyone wanted to play any pickup 1v1 60 card formats and barely anyone has a non commander deck anymore :c I do enjoy commander and have lots of decks but the 2 main things that have been annoying me about it lately is that I feel like I do more sitting around waiting for my turn that actual gameplay, and that the more I get into the theory of commander I realize it's defined by ramp. I don't love ramp strats and In 1v1 I feel engaged on both players turns throughout the game. commander is just a little bit boring and everyone gets mad.
Run land destruction. Be that guy. If you want 1v1 magic, get a tablet with a good screen that can handle mtg arena and take that to the lgs. You can have a few games of commander and a few games of 1v1 as well. If you want to be a hipster and say" I want 1v1 on paper" tough news bud. You already see people don't really want to play that. People don't like their cards rotating if they aren't grinders or standard lovers.
I run Baneslayer Angel in the sideboard of my Pioneer UW Control deck. I brought it out in game two of a match at my store championship a few weeks ago and my opponent freaked out. He’d never seen the card and he couldn’t believe it was real. He kept saying how busted it was and asking other players if they’d seen the card before even after the championship was over. It made me really happy to know that card could still blow someone’s mind.
Something I think is important to note: When people go from 60-card to commander, they quit the 60-card format. When people go from commander to 60-card, they still have one or two commander decks. I started with kitchen table and standard. When my deck rotated out, me and my dad picked up the 2013 precons and never played standard again. In 2020 I decided to try Pauper, and now I use it as my primary competitive outlet ALONGSIDE commander.
This is not true, I used to have a group of about 5-6 friends that all played magic. Then commander became the dominant way to play and now none of us play any more. In my opinion commander is terrible and not fun and I know plenty of people who grew up on standard that refuse to play commander
My absolute least favorite thing about Commander is the Rules Committee huge and overwhelming focus on established groups of friends playing the format. The framing and ruleset should be designed around pickup and random groups because it is so much easier to self regulate a friend group.
Personal experience as someone who picked up Magic on the side last year (Yugioh is my main game): Commander is genuinely awful if you don't actively curate it with a group of friends, and the idea that it's a good format for beginners is insane. The average field state in Commander is impossible to fully comprehend, and you have to just ignore most of what's going on and assume people know what they're doing. Waiting times on turns get far too long. Magic's lack of a limit to the amount of cards on field on top of its simultaneous creature combat system is absolutely miserable for a format like this. It's exhausting and boring to play more often than not. I want to play Standard and Pioneer, but nobody plays them. In my area it's just Commander and Modern, plus the pre-release Sealed events. That's it.
Does anyone else remember that guy who was making a Commander deck for every legendary in the game? That was like 5 years ago. I wonder where he's at with that now, after hundreds of new commanders a year?
Commander now versus Commander then is summarized by one word: astroturfing. The original joy of commander was taking random cards and making them work, not just making decks with cards that are guaranteed to work.
I don't understand the complaint that commander is suddenly too tryhard... like, you're the one who made your deck. That's not an indictment of Commander, it's an indictment of your approach to the game.
43:45 I really hate Richards argument. No one actually just gets every good card and jams it in a deck. Also I honestly doubt If you did that it's gonna be fun to play or even have a chanve of winning. Even the highest power Kenrith or Najeela cedh deck doesn't just jam every staple and win games. Elesh norn doesn't invalidate your white deck. Clever concealment doesn't make your Flawless Maneuver or Teferis protection unplayable. They're different, not better.
People who go from Commander to 60-card format is usually Pauper from what I can tell. My friends and I only play commander but now we also play Pauper due to how much bulk we have.
It is a great to see Phil on the cast again! Did Crim Sleep in again haha! I listened to his on Spotify already and it was great. If you are all are trying Cast rotations, can you let us know. Like..."Hey all we got the crew and Crim is off this week". Just something to keep us in the loop. Love the podcast and crew!
For brawl; a possible better idea is having the cardpool that is legal be specific rotations OR have a larger than standard card pool. This can revive the format bc the staples of old are no longer expensive bc they have rotated already.
Pioneer/Modern brawl? Crew did an episode with pioneer commander decks and that was pretty sweet. In my area, we are slowly adapting Pauper Edh as an alternative to regular Edh. We also have some actual Brawl Store championships (as people really like cmdr and that is one of the formats that Wizards accepts for Store championships). But it would be a larger success if we had a bigger card pool like you suggest
The idea of story on arena is crazy good. They need to go back and make story content for all the previous sets that people can hop into and rewards people with cards from those old sets. Helps new players get cards and attract new players
So my biggest problem so far watching this is the assumption that everyone is going to play with all the cards. Most everyone I play with limits the cards in one way or another. If it’s irl it’s what cards you have on hand. If it’s online it’s more fun to just pick a block or whatever and only play cards from that block. If you have access to every card in existence yeah it’s going to be pretty overwhelming.
I think it's much better and easier for them to use broad sweeping statements like that because all they can go off is the data they have, which is largely going to be coming from EDHrec and is gathered from enfranchised players. In my local store for example, practically everyone is looking at the data and largely using the staples and there's demonstrable proof that new players coming to the store and playing EDH are getting Bombarded by hundreds of cards that are in the decks. It'd be a much less consumable debate in my opinion if they were mentioning every niche case where some groups are playing block themes and some don't buy singles and only upgrade their decks using cards they get from cracking their three ONE boosters. I'm sure they know those people exist, but they also probably aren't the ones adding to the data.
at 14:30 Richard is trying to explain casual, but he's describing passionate. By definition it's supposed to to be relaxed, which is how he described Commander coming off a day of grinding a PT a few minutes earlier. I think one of the keys to keeping Commander healthy is keeping it casual; i.e. relaxed!
HOLY SHIT Tomer! Ive been playing standard since OG Kamigawa and my terrible shrine deck. Heartless Havengul Myr-chine gun was my all time favorite deck and I developed quite the reputation at my LHS for destroying all the Kessig ramp lists. Since then Heartless and Wurmcoil are easily in my top 5 favorite cards. Was amusing to hear you had a similar experience
Well WotC has effectively killed standard. Nobody I know in my area game stored plays it anymore or pioneer. My options are pretty much modern or commander.
It may be way late but I hear the comments about commander being multiplayer and that maybe being the best thing about it. I know that when I was starting magic I played multiplayer formats all the time utilizing 60 card decks; two-headed giant or some form of grand melee. Added players does change the game a bit but you could always change the 60 card deck requirements (standard, pioneer, modern, or more) so you can rotate things a bit that way. When it comes to Brawl a major failing there is probably the very limited card pool for your singleton decks. In terms of supporting the player base this was put out before we knew that WotC wouldn't be putting out more Challenger Decks which I believe many enjoyed as a way to get into a 60 card format. Far easier to get the taste for thing when you buy that somewhat competitive deck than it is to try building it all by yourself but where can you get them now? The last 60 card "pre-con" was basically a year ago as I post this but how many new commander pre-cons have they put out?
Jumpstart should be more focused on as the on ramp for people. It removes the stress of deckbuilding, it's easy to pick up, can be really fun for veterans, and can can steer people towards both 1v1 formats and commander (especially with the inclusion of cool legends.)
I love the low queue on spell table. Decks run minimal staples and no infinite combos. There’s plenty of new cards to play and breathing room for jankier strategies. Apart from that I loved Phil’s ideas to improve single player support on Arena. I would love an Arcane style show but I have no confidence that could happen.
Commander clash episode idea: only cards that were ever legal in standard can be played. (edit): Commander clash ep idea 2: Ravnica EDH! only cards from the 3 ravnica blocks can be used.
@Gabriel lecureux Well, then they make even narrower card pool restrictions. The guys at Loading Ready Run did an EDH episode where they could only use cards that were from sets set in Ravnica (so the 3 ravnica blocks, essentially). It was a super fun episode. Nice and grindy. Very back and forth. Everyone had their moments. Nobody snowballing and taking 20-minute game-ending solitaire turns.
Just to clarify for Tomer: technically, DotA's predecessor did come from a StarCraft 1 map where the heroes (Kerrigan, Jim Raynor, etc.) were put into lanes to defend their towers. It wasn't popular because Starcraft 1 wasn't hero-focused (for multiplayer anyway). Warcraft 3, on the other hand, was, and so it was much easier to use existing character models and just port them to different heroes. WotC's role in Commander is analogous to if, back in the 2010s, Blizzard had actually seized on DotA 1 and made into a sort of standalone game or gave it more support.
I've been considering this concept but not just for MTG: there's a few different axes of how a game is fun. One is the concept of participation vs. spectacle. I feel like in older days of WOTC, they weren't building for commander and it required a level of brewing and participation that isn't there when they print stuff specifically for commander and it feels more like a spectacle. This is getting at what Phil and Seth were getting at. I think one answer is that there's room for more commander formats. I've seen a ton of interest in Uncommons Only commanders as well as "Pauper Dragon Highlander" which uses any uncommon as the commander with commons in the 99. Most Rule 0 commander sessions solve this but there's a lot of energy here. Commander cubes are also growing a lot with the CMR and CLB sets.
I love brewing and love people having the Options with the number of legendary creatures they print every set (although I still don't think that's exactly healthy to do every single set). I personally have 36 sleeved decks, around 8 of which are constantly being switched out and rotated, cuz I love playing all the different archetypes and having a different experience every game throughout the night. However the Only reason all of this is doable for me is because my group simply wants to play the game, and even though all of us each work 2 jobs we don't want to go broke on cardboard. So we proxy all the new stuff and if we really like a card or want a special version we'll eventually buy it for our personal collection cuz we like it but we feel Zero need to buy the precons as soon as they come out anymore. We literally proxy them, play them as is, upgrade them, slowly buy what we love from the deck then move on and either scrap the deck for the next round, or we love it and slowly finish making it real as the year goes on.
Commander card designs are bad for 60 card formats. Not every card needs to produce two for one and be a source of constant card adventage. Every color and almost every deck in standard is basically a midrange deck because of it.
I just think the core of magic shouldn't be a poorly design format with an abandoned ban list held together by good will, scarcity of staples, and gamers needing to talk to one another.
Standard went for 5 years from 2012-2017 with 0 bannings. Was that an "abandoned banlist", or the golden age of Standard? Now since 2017 on they have to ban multiple cards each year in Standard. And people wonder why everyone fled Standard to play eternal formats instead.
@@Tvboy777 You make the mistake of thinking that I believe Commander has an abandoned ban list because it has no bannings. It has had bannings relatively recently. I believe Commander has an abandoned ban list because there have been problem cards since the format's inception that the RC has admitted to not banning because they expect your playgroup to work it out. That is not an inviting format to new, casual, or sporadic players.
I started with commander but have switched to explorer predominantly. I really like how smoothly and quickly 60 card decks play, and don't really have a local playgroup of actual friends. Much easier to set up a 1v1 online with friends or family.
I think Seth’s point on people starting off in commander and moving to 60 card is definitely a real thing, but rather than move to traditional competitive 1v1 I’ve seen beginner players at both at my lgs and within my friend group move to both limited draft events and “multiplayer” 60 card formats with archenemy, two-headed giant, planechase, etc. with draft decks, duel decks, challenger decks and other “casual” 60 card decks that are played more as traditional “board games” rather than competitive duels.
1:00:00 Yes Phil, exactly this. That could bring interest back into the story of the game. And honestly playing HearthStone adventures single player was one of the most fun I've ever had there, blizzard did such a good job on those and Arena is really losing a lot for not having that. Really seems like Arena is just Wizards wanting to gain the max they can while spending the least they can
Commander was much more enjoyable back when they made 1 set of decks a year. Too many commander specific cards now. Don't want to see things designed for commander anymore.
Phil literally itching to come at tomer for his Fortnite disrespect had me in shreds! 🤣🤣🤣 As for "powercreep" I'd be staring directly at cards like Ancestral Recall, Coffers Combo, Cradle, Craterhoof, Protean Hulk n SOOOO many other cards that still have no equal. EDIT: Also, my conclusion to this whole mess would be having all the Standard brokies who swapped over to Commander go back to their lil GP scene if that's how they wanna play, but they don't cuz it's just gonna cost em 4x as much per card. 🤣 Welcome to reality. 😊
I started out with dirddling around in 60 card formats to getting heavily into commander. But I've recently been playing Pauper to get my 1v1 fix with decks that aren't two grand. I'd highly recommed pauper to commander players looking for a 1v1 format
Commander also self regulates, unlike other formats. Playgroups set their own power level and house bans, just like you guys. Standard as a format is inherently unhealthy. You pay money for cards that lose value after a year or so, where commander or modern staples tend to hold values. Nobody wants to pay $200+ on standard decks just to have them devalue like driving a new car off the lot
I wish I could say the same at this LGS I frequently visit. We have slight precons playing vs budget cEDH decks. I miss old events with points before everyone started to play Thoracle and the like. The Goldfish crew should appreciate how good they have it.
@@greyderpanite3344 Alas. I have been mocked and made fun over it. I am at odds to build a hatebear deck with tons of removal or not, because for them it would be "winconless", as it would win through combat.
If that's the case, the players you sit down with don't respect you as a player. Every store I visit in San Diego has groups that always have rule 0 questions. We always ask how competitive we want to be. Maybe my regular 10-12 opponents are abnormal examples, but we self regulate because we want to encourage repeat players, and we want them to introduce their friends.
I have actually shifted my focus more to Pioneer, because every set is for commander and it's too much to keep track of. Pioneer is the new commander for me because sure there is an established meta but it also pretty open to the jank you want to run.
Phil's idea of a campaign would be amazing. Also would be a neat way to push Brawl, because you could run 1v1 Brawl games (or multiplayer) where you play a deck based on a character and fight the big baddies. That would help Brawl for casual new players too.
Tomer dropping the F-bomb is definitely the highlight of this video.
It's even funnier how casually is comes out - not when he's more charged or emotional.
I must have missed it, when?
@@VexylObby 1:07:09
@@Bmac23111 thx 😂
They didn't even censor it hahaha! Was wondering if any of them swear
Idk how long Richard is gonna be back on the pod but I can't get enough of it
I definitely missed Richard, nothing against everyone else, I just like Richard and his hot takes
Same
Big same
Crim is the people's champ! Richard is good, the others are good, but none of them are Crim!
@@Zarbon000 Completely wrong. I've never seen anyone criticize wotc less than Crim when they deserve it. And he always is hyped for everything no matter what.
I can’t believe how much i want Phil’s idea about a set story campaign on arena. Wizards please!
Commander not rotating is part of the reason of success of the format... myself I don't play standard because of rotation, get to use a deck once and its done. Commander is what you put into it... I think being able to pick up a preconstructed deck for 25 is prefect way to get them into the format. To be honest if your just getting into the game get a couple Jump/Start packs, they will teach you how to play magic generally. I think that commander can be focus but there does have to be another format to support the game. As for edhrec killing the format, no it up to person building the deck. It was always problem with net decking, does it make it easier to build decks yes. But that is benefit from today, all the infromation is at your finger tips. Standard was in a bad place, but I think not having pros playing (like gps) put it mostly in the grave and covid pushed it the rest of the way by not having tournements. Commander shined because you could take the cards that you have laying around and play via webcam. standard cant have that effect due to rotating out.
Yea I just started proxying stuff when they starting power creeping Commander so hard that my decks effectively were rotating every few months. You have to have a baseline from which you build things. There should be certain effects that never get cheaper in mana, etc, just like they said they’re never going to print something better at making colored mana than a basic land because they don’t like what the dual lands did to the game.
that and the Mp, more people more fun, i played in a 8player pod and it was sooooo fun
The biggest problem with lack if rotation you run into is that in order to make it profitable wizards feels pressure to make the next product printing more powerful so people buy it, so you get pseudo rotation, yugioh has this power creep problem, card power level constantly raises and old cards become obsolete so it doesn't matter if they didn't "rotate" because they essentially did. You've seen it slowly with like the printing of Arcane signet, three mana costed rocks use to be staples in commander now they're borderline unplayable and to slow.
@@christopherbolanos4695 100% Commander does rotate. It rotates through power creep. Every set seems to introduce some universally good auto-include with no downside. In some colors it's worse than others but when you start a build it's like ok, these 15 staples then 84 other cards.
Lots of formats don't rotation. Its far more likely that its the social aspect of being multiplayer.
I’ve just started listening. It’s funny to hear Richard talk about needing to play commander staples. He’s the guy who plays skeletons, birds, etc… when I play at my LGS many decks lack commander staples.
I really don’t know what reality him and Seth live in where every commander player uses EDHREC like a bible and only want/build the most well tuned of decks.
Tbf birds only work cause toski and teferis pro
same. I think I've seen darkside once, never seen j lootus, jeska's will once or trice but even then one time it was in exile matter deck so its somewhat understandable. Most people dont use expensive staples
At my LGS most of the players use staples, and the players that don’t play against eachother most of the time because of the way the tournament works out. It feels like a huge problem in that tournament setting, but that is really only a problem for super enfranchised players.
Feel like I've had the complete opposite experience. Every deck I play against at an lgs is dominated by staples. Literally most of them the brewer will describe them as being "a pile of cards from my binder"
I was largely onboarded to Magic via Commander, and even though I had kitchen table YuGiOh experience, I treat Magic is my first real trading card game. I remember playing my first couple commander game and being completely overwhelmed by the board state, not to mention even knowing the different cards. Just having to keep track of THREE other board states made my head spin. I jumped into Arena after being frustrated by tabletop and that's where I really learned to play Magic and where started following different creators. After all that I can now really appreciate commander and I don't really touch arena anymore since it's so expensive..
All that to say, no everyone is gonna stick with it like I did. I refuse to bring people into the game with commander a more people should play jumpstart.
Similar to what I did, except I became Arena Free-to-play and never touched commander again and likely never will.
Out of curiosity, why did you go back to commander?
@Joseph Courtright I have a really good lgs with friendly people who make in person commander games fun. That, and it's easier to spend money on real cards rather than digital ones. I have 4 decks of varying power levels, so my experience in commander can be suited to what games I feel like playing. In arena I play explorer, so sometimes I get paired into 4 matches against creativity in a row and feel like throwing my pc out the window.
jumpstart is probably the actual best way. I bought the last good one with an actual variety of styles and got 3 new people to try it and everyone had a blast
Totaly agreed i started mtg six months ago in comander format with a group’of player omg it was painfull but i liked the game so i just started a standard and pionner deck even a duel commander deck to learn to play magic and it’s just way better for enjoying the game at the beginning
Great video, loved the discussion. I felt represented and satisfied as a strictly spike pauper player.
Phil nails it 6:37. couldn't have said it better myself.
yeah, to me edh is just a fun community format where you build around your favourite character or mechanic
Ryan Gomez from Magic Arcanum did a video on exactly this. He calls it the Commander "Ugly Sweater" problem. Pretty neat video. He explains it really well.
th-cam.com/video/LjzrDOl83d0/w-d-xo.html
Hi Demo!
The thing that drew me to commander originally was the singleton aspect and the diversity of the format. I only had to buy a single copy of a card instead of a 4x staple. I do feel like over the last couple years I see many more staples than I used to. It has made some games feel same-y as the same staples appear over and over while I feel like I used to see more variance among playing with random pods.
That is because of your play group if you play with a small group of people or random people online you will probably get same-y cards. The first group has their preferences and the second is ussually influenced by Game Knights etc. It is good to:
1) play with different people,
2) introduce some challenges like a deck budget or no cards over a dollar,
3) try different subformats - pentagram is a lot different for example
4) think about your metagame. For example a bunch of the Game Knight staples relly on their very low number of board wipes that kill everything. Add some Oblivion Stones and a lot of those enchatments will be less powerful. Graveyard hate, targeted removal and repeteable removal all can help a lot with that too pushing your metagame in different direction.
I agree, for this reason i try to only have one "stapley" deck and the rest are jank, theme or only have at maximum about 10 cards (10%) for staples.
I feel like I'm facing down a Rhystic Study in almost every game now, regardless of power level. People just put it in there. Every deck.
Personally, I think if you're calling a card a staple AND complaining that the power level of the format is too high, you just cut the staples to entirely remove the problem.
@@dontmisunderstand6041 You can cut the staples easily, it's getting everyone to agree to that which is the issue. Have fun with no staples playing vs people who have them.
Richard described me perfectly. I woke up one day and just couldn't give myself a good reason for having spent a few grand on cardboard. I've spent the last few months selling everything worth more than £1. Pretty much done now, and I'll be making a pretty huge order to MPC this month to replace my 8 EDH decks.
This is probably my favorite episode of the podcast so far, this kind of discussion was really nice to listen to.
MTGA single player mode that exposes a story is such a good idea! Mind blown! I recently read the storyline for Tezzeret on a Wiki, which was over multiple blocks, but was very cool. Even the story of Dominaria United, the Brothers War, and All Will Be One are interesting, but I have to care to dig around to know more. It's such a missed opportunity that would get myself more invested in the cards and characters of a point in Magic's history. Seriously, such a good idea lol
Of you want some casual joke filled break downs for several magic the gathering stories, Check out the Lore Boys podcast. They cover tons of game lore across different games and have done a bunch of MTG lore, from old stories to covering newer stuff.
I started playing mtg with duels of the planewalkers 2015, it was a great steady introduction to the planes and mechanics of mtg and I didn't need friends to play
There was a game like that on the Xbox if I remember correctly.
This entire episode has resonated with me so much.
- I’ve sold the majority of my collection, keeping 2 decks.
- the group at my LGS is _okay_ but not great - def a few really try-hard players who ruin the experience for newer players.
I wish draft was the premier multiplayer format again, much better way to onboard players and still a way to do stuff with a lot of friends
Draft is my favorite way to play ❤
Anecdotal, but getting commander players to draft at our lgs is impossible. I have even tried bringing cubes and nah
@@nonstripedzebrasame
They won't play any format without the safety net of a commander
Agreed… especially when you can read the cards in draft it’s where I actually started MTG back on Zendikar
@@nonstripedzebra really? As a Commander player i fucking love cubes, especially vintage cubes, but any well designed one will do tbh
commander is an enthusiast format, so you can't learn the game with it. 60 card formats at least revolve around a small enough card pool (either from rotation or metagame), that new players can at least get a hold of how to play around the game pieces you're expected to see. Commander has so many moving pieces with different mechanics that nobody but studied magic enthusiasts can really understand what's going on, what to look out for while playing, and how to play around it.
You lost the plot a bit when you suggested new players should be learning the meta. No, they learn the basic rules of the game and you let them free. Commander is absolutely a day 2 or 3 format for new players. Commander is so much simpler a format than something like standard or draft.
I disagree entirely. The only time what you said is a concern for commander is when people are playing busted decks. Commander is not about playing around people's outs. It's about playing your deck as best you can and working the table.
If you are try-harding in commander, you are playing it wrong.
When I was new at the end of 2022 to commander, I had no friends that played magic. A co worker told me about card shops and the commander format and I built 3 decks and just showed up. The first day was fantastic. The community was so welcoming. When my decks didn't function, because I was new to the format and didn't build the decks "properly", they all quickly offered me thiers to play. I didn't have sleeves, I didn't have a play mat. They didn't tease me or side eye me. They offered me to use their mats and one player about a month into me showing up weekly just bought me sleeves for my deck. Now I'm a player that has bought other new players sleeves for their first decks. The store itself gave me a playmat from there extras. They told me about other shops in the area, and a year and a half later some of my greatest friends are from these card shops. We get together for commander and other games quite often. And this happened when I was 34, so it's never too late to go make friends with people who like the same hobbies as you do.
Limited is by far the best onboarding format with commander as your endgame. You learn one sets mechanics and then You get some cool cards that you can use to upgrade a precon.
limited is the worst though, you need to know a stupid amount to do any good at it and it plays extremely differently than any other format by virtue of being so low power its straight up unfun for many people.
standard let's you at least build your own deck
Thank you for correcting the DOTA history Phil.
the main issue i had with brawl is that the cost of cards being so high due to it being standard means that its not affordable to survive rotation also maybe rather than a yearly rotation is could be 2-3 years so that you can have a build up of cards in the pool or at least treat it like pioneer
Just add 40 cards once it rotates or play Commander Brawl.
The problem people will always have with standard is that it rotates and the solution is to stop playing standard when you don’t want to keep up anymore. It’s meant to be the cheapest way in, not the cheapest way to stay in.
@@deifiedtitan just add 40 doesn't really work as you need to have a legal commander that is the colours of your deck which might not be available also it's more than 40 since it's singleton.
even at that you are basically playing a deck forced into the format than building are the commander and a certain playstyle.
21:26 I got into Magic and Commander just over a year ago. When I started playing pickup games on spelltable, I also found a lot of people where EDH was their First magic format.
However, they didnt consume all sorts of content like I did. They werent aware of all the social nuances and unwritten rules. This was extremely frustrating having to play against things like Stax, constant edicts, constant discard, etc.
It is kind of awkward when people come into EDH as their first format and are like "wow look at all these crazy powerful oppressive cards!" Yes, and theres a reason why most people dont play them.
As someone who is in the middle of year 2 of playing mtg I started off learning the game via commander ( really hard to learn via commander but I learned ) and i played just commander for about 6 to 7 months And then I tried a pauper match and then I essentially just stopped playing commander all together because I can't go back to the 3 hour games and politics.
I love pauper, modern and legacy now I love the speed, straight forward gameplay and not waiting 10 hours for my turn and just how intense it is
I started with commander ~10 years ago. I went to Pioneer after getting tired of politics, power level complaints, and losing due to opponent mistakes. Commander will probably self-destruct at some point due to player entitlement. As the video said, there are so many unwritten rules.
So first off, props to Seth for rememebering his conversation with my GF (we were the group you smashed with Infect first thing Sat Morning at Philly)
I agree with Tomers point (rare thing that is) that casuals dictate the health of a game, if a game is inaccessible to the regular "weekend warrior", it's not gonna go far. We talk about this a lot in the CoD Fandom, the average player is just some 30+ person with a job and kids and only a few hrs to play this game and doesn't have the time and money to invest in being "sweaty" to use CoD vernacular. Commander is also appealing because for another friend of ours who was new to it, buying one card of each is easier than trying to get playsets often.
But Richard does bring up that Arena is a great starting point to this and while my GF is rather new and plays only EDH in paper, I set her up on Arena first to learn the basics of the game rules. So it's a little of both
While Standard where you learn to play, but Commander as a non-rotating (huge price point thing) overly casual format, is the premier format for the game
I think the people who describe Commander as a board game are correct. I think that's why it's popular: people love board games and to work together with their friends. Going head to head with your friends can be a giant pain especially if one of you takes it way more seriously than the other. Also, I think the jank element still exists but not for enfranchised players. If you think commander looks cool but aren't completely bought into magic, you can just use what you have and still have that "throw the things that kind of work together" feel that is more consistent because you can always access at least one pretty good card. If you like that, you can stay there. If you don't, you can power up. Wizards can't really ruin commander because commander is already ruined: look at cedh.
People do not like board games.
EDH is on rails now. I think that the best versions of the format are budget builds with each deck having the same monetary value.
This was the original spirit of EDH. It's where all your chaff went to be played. And then WotC started laying attention to it, eventually stealing its soul like they did with modern
@@pr0fess0rbadass you really think pre commander was budget?
@@Blacklodge_Willyyes, it was. I took my old cards, slammed them into a deck, and had fun games without having to buy new cards in order to hold my own. Anyone remember Trygon Predator?
@@andrewwaring3643 What does that have to do with being budget? The whole of EDH was budget because you could put something together from your collection of cards? People still do that to this day.
@@Blacklodge_Willy yes, but the format has become taken over by hyper aggressive pushed cards. The cards from my collection don’t hold up anymore. Don’t get me wrong, not everything wizards has done is bad, but the overall direction has become far more competitive and expensive.
I feel like Seth and Richard are having a hard time understanding that Commander is vastly different than any other 1v1 format. I'm a huge introvert but I find myself smacktalking people I've never met an hour into a commander game and I'm fully comfortable with these new people. Meanwhile in 60 cards formats I'm tense and stressed and so I almost never open up and engage in banter with my enemy. Also that "must play" staple list idea is whatever you make of it. I'm brewing new weird stuff frequently and I value unique synergy cards over 95% of the just good stuff staples.
Exactly... Most of the "commander is dying" part of the episode is in part of the "need" to be up to date with the latest cards, while for most players that is not true. They don't need the newest cards to play the format, and those who find they do can just proxy them anyway mostly without issue
@@kedros45 true, that level of min maxing isn't as common as they seem to think and is mostly reserved for good stuff decks.
I agree. I’m constantly slapping decks together and only sometimes using stable cards in those decks. I just recently slapped together Yargle and Multani using a bunch of based on power effects, the most powerful probably being greater good along side a bunch of feign death effects and regrow effects and made a house with that random black “dock side” card they printed In kamigawa commander. You can easily just play fun random decks that just happen to be powerful purely from synergy and not power crept cards.
@@bronythekight7369 yeah that seems like an insane card drawing machine. I'm guessing you're using stuff like Jarad and Rite of Consumption to throw your commander at people?
I don’t know, none of that sounds like a specific quality of commander to me, it sounds like the difference between multiplayer and one on one, or even just casual vs competitive. It feels like a self-fulfilling prophesy-Commander is different because you’ve convinced yourselves it’s different. But to me it just sounds like the same way I play 60-card.
i just started playing magic maybe 2 months ago and if it wasn't for commander I probably would have never played at all. what ive learnt for it so far is that its extremally diverse, i can play at a table where everyone has crazy strong decks and feel competitive or ill go over to a friends grab some drinks and we can play all night long with all different decks and someone new wins every time. the second part i love is precons i love buying a new precons playing it and getting a feel for it, then weeks later budget upgrade it and it feels brand new. also the fact you can play 3 games of the same deck and have those games feel completely different is amazing. commander might be the most fun card game ive ever played and i hope it continues to thrive. to the point standard is easier than commander maybe but the experince of standard feels so much worse when you see the same cards being played over and over getting slaped by the same combos is not fun for a new player.
You just got introduced into a fan-made gameplay and not real magic, and you just got used to it, that's what happened.
I think the future predictions entirely missed the ascendency of cube (and other kitchen table curated formats like battle box, wizard's tower, or even custom cards). Basically, I think the future of Magic is going to be, "Hey, I have a box of Magic cards. Come over and play them." And I think it will be glorious.
Isn't this the past, present, and future of magic?
Cube is great.
I feel like a lot of the separation is because of arena. Think about it, if you want to talk to people, have a good time, etc you’ll play paper commander because that’s where the human interaction is. On arena, you can be as spiky as you want with 0 drawback. You don’t have to worry about cheating, salty/annoying opponents, or nearly as much about the price point (even for as bad as arena’s economy is).
This is the correct answer.
Arena is the TRUE Magic onboarding, and the relative frequency of Challenger decks vs. precon Commander decks determines whether a new player transitions to paper in 60 or 100 card formats.
There's 1 Challenger release a year and it's almost immediately made irrelevant by rotation.
There are 5+ precon releases a year for commander.
I think the issue with this cast is that they're assuming that paper standard and arena standard are equivalent. If people want to play standard they'll play it for free.
Commander cannot be the focus of magic as long as the LGS experience remains the way it is. A lot of people need luck of the draw on being in a good area with an accessible LGS that plays the type of commander that player wants to play. There is a less unified vision of what makes a good commander game compared to any other format, largely because the goals are so different between commander and any 1 v 1 format
Not anymore with spell table and the like. You just need a good internet connection and a phone and you can play commander with anyone that wants to
@@iNCoMpeTeNtplAyS i think you’re greatly discounting people enjoying playing a physical card game, in person. A lot of people are not motivated to buy cards or build decks to play, frankly, atrocious games on spell table that mirror some of the worst LGS experiences possible (unclear tokens, cheating, general power level mismatch, etc)
@@bahablastfreeze8872 now thats being nitpicky. If you wanted to play commander, you've got plenty of options . If you have goals in commander other than having a good time and socializing, you need some other hobby.
@@iNCoMpeTeNtplAyS i don’t think it’s nitpicky to want to play your physical card game, in person. But I won’t tell you to change your hobby fkn lol
@@bahablastfreeze8872 your first comment had nothing to do with playing with physical cards. Your next one did because you had to look for exactly the thing you had a problem with. That's being nitpicky.
Phil's idea for Arena (a single player campaign mode that tells the current set's story) is amazing. I've been playing since 2003 and I don't follow the story at ALL. I mainly log into Arena for my daily/weekly wins, but getting gold or cards or packs for grinding out games against Corrupted Tamiyo sounds so fun!
When is Prof going to be on Commander Clash?
I agree with Seth and Phil's early statements. I've been coming to terms with being a magic boomer playing for ~21 years and commander for ~8.
It originally felt like we were making the decks out of cards not made for us, piecing together a cohesive strategy out of mismatched bits and pieces from magic's history. Ones that were either nostalgic or never had a home.
But the sheer quantity of products are overwhelming, and with so many dedicated to commander the power creep is inevitable and disenfranchising. The same is true with limited to a degree, drafting sets that were made without limited in mind was fun and felt like you were getting away with something. But now every card in a pack is playable in a draft or sealed pool.
A big thing that makes Commander great is that a lot of the time you identify or connect with your commander in a weird way. You connect more closely with the colors and you think about how everything centers around how your Commander works with your deck. It’s more like a video game than other 60 card formats
Commander wins because of two fairly obvious reasons:
1. People want a Representative character. Not only to build around but also because it has their preferred art or ideal. It is that person at a base level.
2. Expense. It is easier to optimize and build around a representative character or theme in a singleton format. This is not possible in other formats- they dont represent you as the main character at all. Either you have the fairly expensive meta cards or you dont. If you can bear the expense you will do moderately well but- if you cant- you are screwed.
There is another valid point that tomer made: wotc can make alot of mistakes with printing and powercreep in a format like commander, the magic library is quite vast and absorbent to this. The other formats are wrecked far to easily by even singular mistakes.
For example- venerated rotpriest killing on turn 3 with storm effects. Trying to pull off the same trick in a pod of 4 with alot more avenues of response is much harder and more realistic. "Casual" meta doesnt seek the instant win or turn 1-5 win. This is the definition of a casual meta- I simply dont want to see you kill me right away because what is the fun in that. There is no rank to obtain, no money to be won, just friends gathering to throw down the hopefully more splashy and hilarious side of this wonderful game.
I think one thing could ultimately ruin commander and it is this:
Wotc making a rank system for it. Monetizing its actual power and influence. Nobody cares that they do this to products, nobody cares if a card or two gets pricey- but your average, new and older players absolutely need, want and desire a format that isnt restricted or easily broken by the profit engine that governs and is totally willing to kill happiness when it comes to a silly game.
Its bad enough wotc wants data, forces and threatens it out of our lgs's on who or how many are showing up to casual play events. I do see them eyeballing this potential. And when they do try to step into it fully- they will kill it.
The destroyer of dreams is greed.
Greed is killing the other formats.
Predictability kills the other formats. They are solvable.
Cedh is solvable, out of the 40-50 players i know- only 3 of them even build for cedh. My collection has many components for cedh building but i will not build for it. I am fine with my 25% win possibility as long as i get to play, that i can be represented by my favorite game characters and that i can play unrestricted with some of the coolest, silliest, scariest, stupidest and funnest cards in the game. And im sorry- 60 card formats just dont cut it.
Commander is what magic shouldve been from the start however- it wouldnt be as expansive, random, exclusive, personalized, social nor worthy had it actually been started that way which is the crux of its complexity and yet absolute desirability and playability.
The big problem is that all products are Commander products. So while all the products aren’t for Standard so if you primarily play Standard and they make a Modern set, you can take a break. Commander never gets a break.
I absolutely love Phil’s idea of making magic more accessible through online campaign via MTGA. I LOVED the Magic 2012,2013 ect games that they had for Xbox back in the day. I’ve known how to play since I was a kid. But, those games helped me get my friends into Magic who knew nothing. I think, if they had those kinds of games with the campaigns where you learn the game organically with rewards to help build deck when you get to the point of being comfortable for online play. It would help bring more people into the game as well as be a healthy way to introduce people without overwhelming them. I’d even play it, and you could do the lore for the sets through the campaign story and bring a whole new aspect to players new and old.
I would argue sometimes it is easier to pick up commander than standard. While on paper the card pool is massive, you don't actually need to know all the cards in the format. You don't even really need to know what is in your deck, unless you are tutoring. You draw a card, read the card, and pick a couple in your hand to play, whichever is best for your current board state. In standard you need to properly metagame to win. You need to know based on the open mana what possibly threats could be fielded, and make decision what responses to hold for example.
god awful take. I've never seen someone do this and play remotely well
@@wldnrkls shrug not great at the game I just enjoy playing.
@49:05 Seth, I started playing 60 card, got tired of rotation then moved to Commander but now they’re doing the same with power creep so I returned to 60 card limited. I just enjoy sets as they are meant to be played and I’m ok with that.
The other issue is my fav formats are 1v1 formats but nobody plays them anymore so my only option to play mtg in paper is typically edh and edh isn't even my top 5 favorite formats.
Phil + Seth + Tomer - Make a video talking about Phil's idea for onboarding players on Arena, and ask for engagement! This is the best idea I have heard about Arena. Single player campaign, earned cards, and story focus would be huge! I hate that Arena is all about grind and dailies. They need to hear this!
I don't think anyone is necessarily expecting wizards to make better and better cards for commander. I believe more so expecting new designs or better supporting cards for less than great archetypes. See the rat commander Phil mentioned. Baldurs Gate and All Will Be One for example are sets that have been fantastic for commander and haven't pushed another hullbreaher into the format. That same design also helps the old school players feel like their draft cards can make a decent commander deck.
i think one thing you guys missed is that Jumpstart is perhaps the easiest newbie way to play magic because it removes deckbuilding skill from the equation even more so than sealed/prereleases, and can thus be even more balanced and simple.
So I would make Jumpstart a yearly release. Themes would be tied to specific planes and be a way to check in on everywhere story-wise. I also do not like the current distribution of the jumpstart packs in boxes with some packs being far more common than others. I would design boxes so you are guaranteed not to get any repeat packs in a box.
I would also jazz up prereleases as they seem to be one of the most beloved formats. I think the kits could use some cooler swag than just a die. I think the latest sets of Ravnica with their guild packs with special set symbol cards were really cool and should be the new sort of standard level of quality for those.
I would justify the increased costs of product with increased print quality. Get everyone to shut up about curled foils and the like. Also every serialized card would go through an in-person inspection/grading before being packaged. If magic has the most expensive cards then they should also be the best cards.
I would decrease card varieties but probably not as much as some people want. I think they're a good idea. But they should fit the cards to some level. They should also be meaningfully different. The foil and textured foil DMU stained glass cards were hard to sort out from each other. We want people who buy craploads of product to be happy with it.
When designing for commander to avoid power creep I would try to focus on cards that open up less supported strategies like the tier C tribes that don't quite have enough support for a real deck, and other janky strategies like equipment that people like disproportionately to how strong they are. I would also try to add some cards that can bring down the level of the stronger new strategies and cards like treasures, without just also being power creep. things like putting "players can't create more than one token each turn" on a modal removal spell or something. has to be on a card people will actually use, which is where the balancing comes in.
I wouldn't stop secret lairs, I would just want to make them thematically stronger. Base rule of thumb would be they could reasonably fit into the same deck. They've gotten a bit better with this lately.
I would make sure the commander precons are great out of the box. Some are okay ut some are seriously yikes. If these are one of the main onboarding products for MTG, it can't be something people regret buying and get told 'oh that's a precon. it sucks real bad.' I know they do leave room for improvement in those as a way to encourage people to start buying more cards but I think the initial power level can be higher especially with the lands. good luck finding a brand new player excited to work on their mana base. they'll be happy to spend money on a crazy dragon or whatever but feeling hamstrung by not having spent hundreds of dollars on lands is not an exciting thing to feel.
when new sets are being spoiled i would control the process so that the cards are revealed in story order. like that prof's video where he talks about, imagine if the last few cards we saw for Neon Dynasty were the run of cards that included Jin-Gitaxias, Tamiyo's Compleation, and Tamiyo, Compleated Sage. People can't get interested in the story of Magic if they can play the set and read every card and still not even know what the story is. Revealing the set in order with context would help a lot especially with a quick video released on the last day of spoiler season. I also like Phil's idea of a single player arena campaign for each set.
Speaking of what Riot did with Arcane, they didn't just hire a studio and say hey make a good show thanks. My understanding is they worked to help build that studio over time starting with things like music videos for the releases of new characters and game cinematics. This helped them not just give the studio experience to make quality animation in a distinctive art style but also help Riot refine the idea of what a good League of Legends show would even be. Magic should do the same thing. They shouldn't make an MTG movie if they can't yet even make an impressive MTG short film. Some of the set trailers are cool, but they're trailers, not complete and emotionally compelling stories. I think it says a lot that there is little hype among the community for any upcoming movie if it even ends up getting made. Make an awesome short and people will change their minds. And if you can't tell people hey make us an awesome short using this story and these characters, and have it work, then it's not going to work spending twenty times as much money on a feature film or series either. But at least the risk is minimized and you get something out of it. Short fan films helped bolster the Warhammer 40k games.
Moving on I would also focus more on mid-level competitive play. If the value of 'real' magic cards is that they're tournament playable, then make it so players want to play in tournaments and actually can and do. I would try to do a lot to boost the LGS scene. I agree with what Richard said about Commander, despite being a 'casual format', it's actually kinda the worst to play with strangers. So other formats being stronger helps the LGS scene.
There is probably a lot more that could be done and I am sure WOTC has their reasons for not doing these things yet but that would be the main stuff I would be looking to implement.
Commander shouldn't be the main focus due to bad ideals for card design + popularity. Commander overshadowed every other format and has partially ruined formats such as legacy and such and 60 card formats feel like they are looking at new Commander cards often enough. Not only that but I think it's extremely bad for it to be the focus especially when the format is "managed" by people other than wizards. The edh banlist is a sham and it feels like a small subset of people projecting when on average wizards runs their banlists infinitely better. I think magic has many levels and edh also can teach bad fundamentals and pushes out people from learning the game in different ways
I started playing Magic with 60-card decks back in the day when I was a kid, but when I started going to my local LGS I discovered Elder Dragon Highlander and thought it was a fresh and interesting way to play the game and it gave me a way to use my cards that would otherwise be considered jank, or cards that perhaps were good in standard but due to rotation I no longer had a use for. As I grew into Magic as a hobby EDH became my preferred way to play the game to wind down from an FNM (our locals at the time was a very competitive environment). Flashforward through the years EDH grew in popularity and WotC decided to make it an official format and renamed it Commander as they powered out the first round of Commander precons. That was really cool to me. Further on into what is now the present I still have that competitive drive but the game as a whole has almost entirely pushed me out of competitive play. I do not enjoy playing Standard due to rotation making very expensive decks worthless after the fact. Modern is so expensive to get into its ridiculous, but I did try it. Every time I did try to build a deck however the deck I was building at the time ended up either having a card in it banned, went into obscurity due to power creep killing the deck before I could even finish building it, or went through so many different changes it's now a completely different deck after I spent so much money building the previous version. Perhaps my experience with Modern isn't the common experience for most people but it left a bad taste in my mouth. I tried playing Pioneer as well but I just didn't enjoy the environment I was playing in when I'm getting Greasefang Combo'd by turn three half the time.
I WANT to be the one to go from Commander to 60-card, but it's just not the right time. The competitive formats are just too abrasive to get into for my taste. I really miss Alara block Standard. That was probably the most fun I ever had playing Magic competitively.
As someone who started playing Magic with Commander, in my opinion it was a lot easier to learn the game without having so many restrictions to worry about such as set rotations. Learning how mana works and how to cast spells in a 4 player format was, in my case, easier. Sure sometimes it would be overwhelming when an opponent popped off and I didn't know why or what was going on, but in those cases I almost always stopped to ask what was happening. I also wasn't worried or focused on learning every single card available because there were almost no cards not available to play(I don't count the cards outside of my budget as playable but that's another topic). My mentality was to focus on optimizing my own gameplay by playing as many games as I could with as many people as possible which would also introduce me slowly to new or cool cards that I'd never seen before. After getting my footing in Magic I started playing arena 1v1 formats and wasn't getting any satisfaction out of it(I'm not good at 1v1) so I stuck to Commander.
TL;DR - I think Commander is perfectly reasonable for an entry format as long as you don't go in with the wrong mentality.
Great discussion, guys. Personally, I feel the primary issue that covers all of your concerns is printing too many cards too quickly. That is the process that accelerates power creep. If card printing was reduced by 30%, that will reduce power creep by 30%. It will also reduce burnout, and complexity creep. I am not advocating for going back to 4 standard sets per year, because I don't think that was enough to provide new and interesting commanders that people don't have to fight over. But multiple commander precons, 5 standard sets, modern horizons... it's impossible to keep up and it must be expensive for wizards. I want some time to enjoy my cards. This is enough of a problem that I never buy sealed anymore, because I get too many cards at once, and more will be coming in two weeks.
Doesn't help that older edh decks didn't have to jam the same 10+ pushed staples for each color.
And now just oopsing into a win is beyond easy to do.
10:49 Sorry to the non-german folks-Grüße gehen raus an Phil für das beste Preisleistungswasser, was die deutsche Discounter Landschaft zu bieten hat.
My group's reason for hopping into commander was the price. It's soooo much lighter on the wallet to buy one good card and proxy or swap it into all our other decks as opposed to buying a full play set of urza's sagas or another expensive card. What sucks now is Wizard's pushing insanely powerful commander cards that are going upwards of $50. It was nice being able to just go to a pre-release, crack the kit, and try to build a deck or two out of the cards I pulled. With the influx of cards printed specifically for the format, the power of a random person's deck has really started to increase. That changes the whole feeling of the game when playing at a local LGS
Why do you need to own a card to proxy it? Lmao. Just proxy regardless
@@pr0fess0rbadass We like to do it in order to keep power levels in check. Two of the guys in the play group like to build combo based decks, so it keeps them looking for cheaper and inventive combos
Then why are you complaining about powerful cards being expensive, if being expensive is how you keep powerful cards out of your games?
Something we have done within our group that has been super successful is we do to keep it balancd and not an arms race... We play standard but mostly we play 2 headed giant, this been the best experience because building a deck with partners in mind is different, certain cards spike in power, also when one team loses the whole table is done and you don't the "commander guilt" problem where you kill someone and they sit around for 1 - 2 hours.
I would love to see more people play 2 headed, even did this during the ONE release, a 2 headed sealed again best MTG experience in a long long time.
An importance of Commander is that it's the only format primarily played as semi-competitive. We've heard that the vast majority of MtG play is so-called kitchen table Magic, where power level isn't always topped out at Tier 1 or Tier 2 decks.
Commander *is* kitchen table magic. Semi-competitive or competitive commander is by far the minority of commander players.
Been building a shared deck cube (sdc). True random Timmy magic. One deck all players share, Singleton, no non utility lands. Play any card face down as a nonbasic land that has all types and produces any type of mana, colored, colorless, or snow. Choose what to keep and cast and what to turn into mana. Never get mana screwed, never get flooded. Scy to mess with your opponents draws, bounce lands to recover spells.
My SDC is going somewhat for simplicity, to cater to the needs of friends of mine who stopped playing. No search cards, no dungeons, no flip cards. I'm at around 500 cards in my SDC right now and still adding a lot, real variance.
I think Commander is a good beginner format because you can lose and have fun. I started playing at Standard FNMs and had no fun playing because I lost. I stuck around because of the community
Losing is not supposed to be fun...its to learn from .
Great discussion this episode
Phil is killing it through out this vidwot
Phil’s idea at the end sounds like so much fun!!
I love playing commander over 60 card formats … primarily becuz it’s a singleton format … I don’t like the fact that you can have 4 of each card it seems repetitive and limited … I could care less about staples … if I can win with cards no one uses it’s a win win for me
I think the best answer to the commander power creep is going to pauper commander. Uncommon commander (doesn't have to be legendary) and every card in the 99 are commons. I have had so much fun with it and you get to use so many cards that are never used because of it
Richard, Seth, Tomer, Phil - the best crew. Can't wait until they are the active Commander game rotation again.
I like Crim a lot, but I do feel like Phil is better in that slot for this discussion.
Magic 30 was personally my breaking point for continuing to purchase cards. I'm currently only playing EDH, so I've already sold 10g of my 40g+ collection and will proxy from this point forward. It's just not a lucrative investment at the small scale.
Magic 30 is WOTC's sad attempt at stifling non-WOTC produced proxies.
Very sobering points from Richard towards the end there, I gotta agree with him about the inevitability of the card value bubble bursting, its how these sort of purely speculative assets work out in the long term
Im so burnt out on commander right now. I went to my LGS on sunday looking to see if anyone wanted to play any pickup 1v1 60 card formats and barely anyone has a non commander deck anymore :c I do enjoy commander and have lots of decks but the 2 main things that have been annoying me about it lately is that I feel like I do more sitting around waiting for my turn that actual gameplay, and that the more I get into the theory of commander I realize it's defined by ramp. I don't love ramp strats and In 1v1 I feel engaged on both players turns throughout the game. commander is just a little bit boring and everyone gets mad.
Run land destruction. Be that guy. If you want 1v1 magic, get a tablet with a good screen that can handle mtg arena and take that to the lgs. You can have a few games of commander and a few games of 1v1 as well. If you want to be a hipster and say" I want 1v1 on paper" tough news bud. You already see people don't really want to play that. People don't like their cards rotating if they aren't grinders or standard lovers.
I run Baneslayer Angel in the sideboard of my Pioneer UW Control deck. I brought it out in game two of a match at my store championship a few weeks ago and my opponent freaked out. He’d never seen the card and he couldn’t believe it was real. He kept saying how busted it was and asking other players if they’d seen the card before even after the championship was over. It made me really happy to know that card could still blow someone’s mind.
Something I think is important to note: When people go from 60-card to commander, they quit the 60-card format. When people go from commander to 60-card, they still have one or two commander decks.
I started with kitchen table and standard. When my deck rotated out, me and my dad picked up the 2013 precons and never played standard again. In 2020 I decided to try Pauper, and now I use it as my primary competitive outlet ALONGSIDE commander.
This is not true, I used to have a group of about 5-6 friends that all played magic. Then commander became the dominant way to play and now none of us play any more. In my opinion commander is terrible and not fun and I know plenty of people who grew up on standard that refuse to play commander
I can’t wait for a commander clash League game some day. With how much you all reference it ha. Really fun conversation to have over the “hot take”
My absolute least favorite thing about Commander is the Rules Committee huge and overwhelming focus on established groups of friends playing the format. The framing and ruleset should be designed around pickup and random groups because it is so much easier to self regulate a friend group.
Personal experience as someone who picked up Magic on the side last year (Yugioh is my main game): Commander is genuinely awful if you don't actively curate it with a group of friends, and the idea that it's a good format for beginners is insane. The average field state in Commander is impossible to fully comprehend, and you have to just ignore most of what's going on and assume people know what they're doing. Waiting times on turns get far too long. Magic's lack of a limit to the amount of cards on field on top of its simultaneous creature combat system is absolutely miserable for a format like this. It's exhausting and boring to play more often than not.
I want to play Standard and Pioneer, but nobody plays them. In my area it's just Commander and Modern, plus the pre-release Sealed events. That's it.
Does anyone else remember that guy who was making a Commander deck for every legendary in the game? That was like 5 years ago. I wonder where he's at with that now, after hundreds of new commanders a year?
Commander now versus Commander then is summarized by one word: astroturfing. The original joy of commander was taking random cards and making them work, not just making decks with cards that are guaranteed to work.
I don't understand the complaint that commander is suddenly too tryhard... like, you're the one who made your deck. That's not an indictment of Commander, it's an indictment of your approach to the game.
43:45 I really hate Richards argument. No one actually just gets every good card and jams it in a deck. Also I honestly doubt If you did that it's gonna be fun to play or even have a chanve of winning. Even the highest power Kenrith or Najeela cedh deck doesn't just jam every staple and win games.
Elesh norn doesn't invalidate your white deck. Clever concealment doesn't make your Flawless Maneuver or Teferis protection unplayable. They're different, not better.
People who go from Commander to 60-card format is usually Pauper from what I can tell. My friends and I only play commander but now we also play Pauper due to how much bulk we have.
It is a great to see Phil on the cast again! Did Crim Sleep in again haha! I listened to his on Spotify already and it was great. If you are all are trying Cast rotations, can you let us know. Like..."Hey all we got the crew and Crim is off this week". Just something to keep us in the loop. Love the podcast and crew!
For brawl; a possible better idea is having the cardpool that is legal be specific rotations OR have a larger than standard card pool. This can revive the format bc the staples of old are no longer expensive bc they have rotated already.
Pioneer/Modern brawl? Crew did an episode with pioneer commander decks and that was pretty sweet. In my area, we are slowly adapting Pauper Edh as an alternative to regular Edh. We also have some actual Brawl Store championships (as people really like cmdr and that is one of the formats that Wizards accepts for Store championships). But it would be a larger success if we had a bigger card pool like you suggest
The idea of story on arena is crazy good. They need to go back and make story content for all the previous sets that people can hop into and rewards people with cards from those old sets. Helps new players get cards and attract new players
So my biggest problem so far watching this is the assumption that everyone is going to play with all the cards. Most everyone I play with limits the cards in one way or another. If it’s irl it’s what cards you have on hand. If it’s online it’s more fun to just pick a block or whatever and only play cards from that block. If you have access to every card in existence yeah it’s going to be pretty overwhelming.
I think it's much better and easier for them to use broad sweeping statements like that because all they can go off is the data they have, which is largely going to be coming from EDHrec and is gathered from enfranchised players. In my local store for example, practically everyone is looking at the data and largely using the staples and there's demonstrable proof that new players coming to the store and playing EDH are getting
Bombarded by hundreds of cards that are in the decks.
It'd be a much less consumable debate in my opinion if they were mentioning every niche case where some groups are playing block themes and some don't buy singles and only upgrade their decks using cards they get from cracking their three ONE boosters. I'm sure they know those people exist, but they also probably aren't the ones adding to the data.
at 14:30 Richard is trying to explain casual, but he's describing passionate. By definition it's supposed to to be relaxed, which is how he described Commander coming off a day of grinding a PT a few minutes earlier. I think one of the keys to keeping Commander healthy is keeping it casual; i.e. relaxed!
HOLY SHIT Tomer! Ive been playing standard since OG Kamigawa and my terrible shrine deck. Heartless Havengul Myr-chine gun was my all time favorite deck and I developed quite the reputation at my LHS for destroying all the Kessig ramp lists. Since then Heartless and Wurmcoil are easily in my top 5 favorite cards. Was amusing to hear you had a similar experience
49:25 prEDH (before commander products, like around 2011)
Well WotC has effectively killed standard. Nobody I know in my area game stored plays it anymore or pioneer. My options are pretty much modern or commander.
It may be way late but I hear the comments about commander being multiplayer and that maybe being the best thing about it. I know that when I was starting magic I played multiplayer formats all the time utilizing 60 card decks; two-headed giant or some form of grand melee. Added players does change the game a bit but you could always change the 60 card deck requirements (standard, pioneer, modern, or more) so you can rotate things a bit that way.
When it comes to Brawl a major failing there is probably the very limited card pool for your singleton decks.
In terms of supporting the player base this was put out before we knew that WotC wouldn't be putting out more Challenger Decks which I believe many enjoyed as a way to get into a 60 card format. Far easier to get the taste for thing when you buy that somewhat competitive deck than it is to try building it all by yourself but where can you get them now? The last 60 card "pre-con" was basically a year ago as I post this but how many new commander pre-cons have they put out?
Jumpstart should be more focused on as the on ramp for people. It removes the stress of deckbuilding, it's easy to pick up, can be really fun for veterans, and can can steer people towards both 1v1 formats and commander (especially with the inclusion of cool legends.)
I love the low queue on spell table. Decks run minimal staples and no infinite combos. There’s plenty of new cards to play and breathing room for jankier strategies. Apart from that I loved Phil’s ideas to improve single player support on Arena. I would love an Arcane style show but I have no confidence that could happen.
Commander clash episode idea: only cards that were ever legal in standard can be played.
(edit):
Commander clash ep idea 2: Ravnica EDH! only cards from the 3 ravnica blocks can be used.
I mean that is still most of magic sure it gets rid of some card but I wouldn't expect major changes
I think this would also end up more impactful in paper then it is on MODO- there’s a fair amount of those cards that they already don’t have access to
@Gabriel lecureux Well, then they make even narrower card pool restrictions. The guys at Loading Ready Run did an EDH episode where they could only use cards that were from sets set in Ravnica (so the 3 ravnica blocks, essentially).
It was a super fun episode. Nice and grindy. Very back and forth. Everyone had their moments. Nobody snowballing and taking 20-minute game-ending solitaire turns.
Just to clarify for Tomer: technically, DotA's predecessor did come from a StarCraft 1 map where the heroes (Kerrigan, Jim Raynor, etc.) were put into lanes to defend their towers. It wasn't popular because Starcraft 1 wasn't hero-focused (for multiplayer anyway). Warcraft 3, on the other hand, was, and so it was much easier to use existing character models and just port them to different heroes.
WotC's role in Commander is analogous to if, back in the 2010s, Blizzard had actually seized on DotA 1 and made into a sort of standalone game or gave it more support.
I think Prof’s talking about RnD, and specifically Standard
I've been considering this concept but not just for MTG: there's a few different axes of how a game is fun. One is the concept of participation vs. spectacle. I feel like in older days of WOTC, they weren't building for commander and it required a level of brewing and participation that isn't there when they print stuff specifically for commander and it feels more like a spectacle. This is getting at what Phil and Seth were getting at.
I think one answer is that there's room for more commander formats. I've seen a ton of interest in Uncommons Only commanders as well as "Pauper Dragon Highlander" which uses any uncommon as the commander with commons in the 99. Most Rule 0 commander sessions solve this but there's a lot of energy here.
Commander cubes are also growing a lot with the CMR and CLB sets.
Late Stage Commander is the new Late Stage Capitalism
I love brewing and love people having the Options with the number of legendary creatures they print every set (although I still don't think that's exactly healthy to do every single set). I personally have 36 sleeved decks, around 8 of which are constantly being switched out and rotated, cuz I love playing all the different archetypes and having a different experience every game throughout the night. However the Only reason all of this is doable for me is because my group simply wants to play the game, and even though all of us each work 2 jobs we don't want to go broke on cardboard. So we proxy all the new stuff and if we really like a card or want a special version we'll eventually buy it for our personal collection cuz we like it but we feel Zero need to buy the precons as soon as they come out anymore. We literally proxy them, play them as is, upgrade them, slowly buy what we love from the deck then move on and either scrap the deck for the next round, or we love it and slowly finish making it real as the year goes on.
Commander card designs are bad for 60 card formats. Not every card needs to produce two for one and be a source of constant card adventage. Every color and almost every deck in standard is basically a midrange deck because of it.
I've been saying this for a couple of years now.
This is a very good discussion. I pulled a lot of good points out of here. Great work!
I just think the core of magic shouldn't be a poorly design format with an abandoned ban list held together by good will, scarcity of staples, and gamers needing to talk to one another.
I agree, and perfectly worded.
Standard went for 5 years from 2012-2017 with 0 bannings. Was that an "abandoned banlist", or the golden age of Standard?
Now since 2017 on they have to ban multiple cards each year in Standard. And people wonder why everyone fled Standard to play eternal formats instead.
@@Tvboy777 You make the mistake of thinking that I believe Commander has an abandoned ban list because it has no bannings. It has had bannings relatively recently. I believe Commander has an abandoned ban list because there have been problem cards since the format's inception that the RC has admitted to not banning because they expect your playgroup to work it out. That is not an inviting format to new, casual, or sporadic players.
I started with commander but have switched to explorer predominantly. I really like how smoothly and quickly 60 card decks play, and don't really have a local playgroup of actual friends. Much easier to set up a 1v1 online with friends or family.
I think Seth’s point on people starting off in commander and moving to 60 card is definitely a real thing, but rather than move to traditional competitive 1v1 I’ve seen beginner players at both at my lgs and within my friend group move to both limited draft events and “multiplayer” 60 card formats with archenemy, two-headed giant, planechase, etc. with draft decks, duel decks, challenger decks and other “casual” 60 card decks that are played more as traditional “board games” rather than competitive duels.
1:00:00 Yes Phil, exactly this. That could bring interest back into the story of the game. And honestly playing HearthStone adventures single player was one of the most fun I've ever had there, blizzard did such a good job on those and Arena is really losing a lot for not having that.
Really seems like Arena is just Wizards wanting to gain the max they can while spending the least they can
Commander was much more enjoyable back when they made 1 set of decks a year. Too many commander specific cards now. Don't want to see things designed for commander anymore.
this was a great episode! very interesting to get all of your opinions! thanks!
Phil literally itching to come at tomer for his Fortnite disrespect had me in shreds! 🤣🤣🤣 As for "powercreep" I'd be staring directly at cards like Ancestral Recall, Coffers Combo, Cradle, Craterhoof, Protean Hulk n SOOOO many other cards that still have no equal.
EDIT: Also, my conclusion to this whole mess would be having all the Standard brokies who swapped over to Commander go back to their lil GP scene if that's how they wanna play, but they don't cuz it's just gonna cost em 4x as much per card. 🤣 Welcome to reality. 😊
I started out with dirddling around in 60 card formats to getting heavily into commander. But I've recently been playing Pauper to get my 1v1 fix with decks that aren't two grand. I'd highly recommed pauper to commander players looking for a 1v1 format
Commander also self regulates, unlike other formats. Playgroups set their own power level and house bans, just like you guys.
Standard as a format is inherently unhealthy. You pay money for cards that lose value after a year or so, where commander or modern staples tend to hold values. Nobody wants to pay $200+ on standard decks just to have them devalue like driving a new car off the lot
I wish I could say the same at this LGS I frequently visit. We have slight precons playing vs budget cEDH decks. I miss old events with points before everyone started to play Thoracle and the like. The Goldfish crew should appreciate how good they have it.
@@faerie7dragon yep. My playgroup has no self regulation either and I've tried to introduce it just to be ignored
@@greyderpanite3344 Alas. I have been mocked and made fun over it. I am at odds to build a hatebear deck with tons of removal or not, because for them it would be "winconless", as it would win through combat.
If that's the case, the players you sit down with don't respect you as a player. Every store I visit in San Diego has groups that always have rule 0 questions. We always ask how competitive we want to be. Maybe my regular 10-12 opponents are abnormal examples, but we self regulate because we want to encourage repeat players, and we want them to introduce their friends.
Richard B Peterson: “what do you mean, precisely, by casual?”
I have actually shifted my focus more to Pioneer, because every set is for commander and it's too much to keep track of. Pioneer is the new commander for me because sure there is an established meta but it also pretty open to the jank you want to run.
Phil's idea of a campaign would be amazing. Also would be a neat way to push Brawl, because you could run 1v1 Brawl games (or multiplayer) where you play a deck based on a character and fight the big baddies. That would help Brawl for casual new players too.