Yeah I miss when you would scour the visual spoilers for neat but niche cards that might make an archetype more fun. It's much less fun when it's forcefed to you.
I miss the days when cards from standard set booster packs that were bad in other formats were the good cards for Commander. Nowadays card designs for Commander wreck both Commander and most other formats.
@@joeferreti9442this is the most important part. If you could pin a reply comment it should be this one. The beauty of the format was playing “bad” in-set cards that would only see play in limited and sometimes not at all but being able to add them to a commander deck. Now everything is pushing towards cEDH like I predicted years ago.
and usually a phrase used by people who never played commander and just say "high cmc means commander" haha but yeah, same. I miss when commander was built around making cards not designed for the format work
So players feeding the machine didn't directly tell wizards to keep going? Stop coping. Your format is trash. Half the players are peds. Go to your local commander night and check names against the red dot list. Pretty gross honestly. I've done this in 25 states and found alteast 3 per store. The best part. Not one standard or modern player came up at all. Weirdos.
I love commander, but I wish they would stop designing specific cards for it. Commander was more fun when you found the hidden gems from the new sets. Now the format is becoming more and more stale with these overpowered monstrosities.
The only thing is that it's a shit design for commander, too. I don't think they were designing Nadu for any format, regardless of what the lead designer says.
As a person who started playing highlander and then switched to EDH before it became commander, i think that catering for commander players is stifling creativity and is very damaging in the long run. I miss the old days where you had to actually do your best to find the perfect card. These days the only thing holding you back is the card prices and thats Just sad. It makes it a case of coloring instead of drawing.
This. My first ever commander game, someone played deflecting swat and I'm sitting here like "wtf is this, at least Force of Will makes you pay something"
As someone who is squarely in Commander/Brawl's target audience (relative to other MtG formats), and who played it when it was EDH, it started to turn incredibly dumb for me once they got it into their heads that they needed to design legends (let alone other cards) "for" Commander, rather than just doing design the way they'd always done and letting Commander shake out. IT WAS WORKING.
your not wrong about stifiling creativity. but you're asking WoTC to leave money on the table by not designing for commander, and they will never leave money on the table.
the problem isn't commander its wotc. replace commander with whatever format and we'd have the exact same problems. this whole 'its commander's fault' nonsense misses the point and gives wotc a pass while players blame one another instead of them.
I think Commander is an easy thing to blame when "eleventh hour untested design changes" has been a problem for ages and gave us, among other cards, Skullclamp. The issue is they're not learning from their mistakes.
Plus Nadu wasnt really "designed" for commander, they just didnt want to break a format that they support, which is something they should do, i dont want commander masters to break modern or legacy, nor do i want a standard set breaking competitive eternal formats. The real issue is such a pushed powerful card being designed so late. And the most ironic thing is that i think this nadu is probably stronger on commander anyways, so it was bad design and analysis all the way.
@@joaobispo2602 I 100% agree with your analysis as well. There is a difference between "designing not to break other formats than the one the set was intended for" and "designing to be competitive or powerful in a format other than the one the set was intended for".
I mean, Commander just has different fundamentals. I think the blame is valid enough. I think Commander needs to be spun off from Magic entirely to be treated as its own game system, not that that is reasonably achievable now. Wizards has proven it can't support 60-card formats and Commander, and in part that's just due to the differences. 40 life, social contracts, free mulligans, effective eighth card in hand every game, kingmaking. How do you address that? Rule zero conversations are just mediating how your group will put up with a fundamentally flawed implementation of a bunch of cool ideas. This also explains, to me, why Commander players feel the need to define so many ways to rank their decks and explain power level. Those should be differing formats in a totally separate game, not different subformats of a format.
I watched one video where someone had said "it's not that they're not learning from their mistakes, the teams that made those mistakes did learn from their mistakes but they aren't the ones making these. This is a whole new team of people repeating some of the same mistakes of previous people. They havent had a chance to make a mistake large enough where they can learn from." To some point I think it's valid.
@@fastpuppy2000 why is this Commander's fault, though? It was doing fine on its own for years without much nonsense past making weird prices on the secondary market.
I dont think they said it was to strong. I suspect it was more that they were concerned that commander players would be unhappy with other people playing during their turn
Flash isn't necessarily too strong, but giving all of your permanent spells flash from turn 1 or 2 guaranteed is just ridiculous. Flash is very powerful for control, but it would have been better than what they ended up coming up with. That and the triggered ability only working when your opponents target your stuff would've kept it from being too broken
Saw someone make a comment the other day that said something along the lines of "it used to be that you played commander with magic cards, but now it feels like we are stuck playing magic with commander cards" and boy did i feel that
I mean, you said it yourself. From the article, "We didn't playtest with Nadu's final iteration, as we were too far along in the process, and it shipped as-is." "I missed the interaction with zero-mana abilities that are so problematic. The last round of folks who were shown the card in the building missed it too." Nevermind the fact that they somehow missed the abundance of 0-cost abilities. That they didn't even bother TESTING just shows how much of a joke of a company it is. Commander is an easy thing to blame, but the overemphasis on EDH is a smaller thing compared to the complete lack of actual testing with the FIRE-based bullshit they vomit out.
This is their excuse every damn time. "We changed it last minute, whoops." Either some people need to find new jobs or other pressures need to be removed. It's obvious the current methods are not working.
Yeah, this is the least surprising admission in a while between a) it being obvious to anyone with eyes and b) having been used before to explain their incompetence, i.e. Oko. But it makes money unfortunately as pointed out by the person above me said, so WotC and Hasbro will keep doing it while continuing to cut corner with playtesting and burying what few playtesters they have under an avalanche of product.
Interesting thought experiment, PRE-FIRE would this be a 3/3 for 2UG pr 3UG and no one actually plays it in Moderrn, so it's only a Commander problem? I mean, entering untapped is still incompetent design. but still.
During yesterday's daily MTG stream, Carmen brought up the point that we, as players, don't see the successful last minute changes. However, the example she brought up were things like how originally the MDFC lands only cost 2 life and they changed it to three at the last second and that was probably a good thing. But the difference here is that that was basically a know that they adjusted and I am pretty confident that the game designers can intuit tweaking values like that without testing, the problem we get is when they basically change how a card functions at the last minute without testing. IDK, it seems like once they are past the point of play testing, the abilities of cards should be locked and the only freedom they have is to tweak numbers here and there. In software development, there is this thing called a "feature freeze" where developers on the team are not allowed to make and major additions to the code base and focus on refinement and bug fixing for the target version release. its crazy that they don't have something like that during development of sets
Ultimately, the issue with Nadu is that nobody who reviewed the change knew or thought about Cephalid Breakfast: combining a thing like Shuko that can target infinitely for free with an unbounded (or virtually unbounded) "trigger-on-target" effect. When it was spoiled, everyone who was aware of the Legacy deck (which I assume includes some of the MH3 contactors who did NOT get to review the change) immediately thought of Shuko. If they had thought about Nadu as a "Shuko combo" engine, they would have realized it was probably too good for both Commander and Modern. So while it's annoying and extremely ironic that somebody in a Commander meeting said "Flash for permanent spells is too good" and tipped the first domino that brought us Nadu, the utter failure is that nobody at WotC knew or thought about the zero-mana interaction, and they decided to make such a significant change without letting outside eyes proofread their work.
@@majordude83 Exactly, people were Shuko has never done anything....I was like other than be a linchpin combo piece lol Ban the bird fine but eventually this will happen again and we will be banning a creature for being abused with Shuko just like this.
Also, terrible example, because changing MDFCs from 2 life to 3, is a nerf. Nerfing a card last minute is going to be fine 99% of the time. If a card comes out in a set, and it's too weak because of a last minute change, that sucks, but no harm is done, there's just one extra bad card out of 250. If a card is changed last minute, and is broken now, it leads to situations like this. So yeah, last minute changes can be fine, but the difference between missing on a buff, a nerf, or an overhaul, is absolutely massive.
WOTC can design with commander in mind; they can make sure effects work in multiplayer as well as in two-player formats. They shouldn't design with commander being the target.
As a former CCG designer, the way they fumbled Nadu so badly at several stages is such an amateurish clown show of terrible design practice. Skipping the playtest part by making a last second change before sending something to print is the biggest dumb mistake, compounded with two separate concepts that always causes problems: allowing for disproportionate amount of trigger targets, and balancing free things (usability/consistency). Everything about it screams "massive fuckup" (saying "mistake" is underselling it) and what REALLY pisses me off was the designer mentioning how playtest didn't catch it when later on he admits IT DIDN'T SEE TESTING at the revamped text. That group of testers should be rightfully pissed off.
i miss the EDH of ten years ago.... i guess i kinda miss the whole of Magic from ten years ago? we didn't have this constant barrage of stuff you need to buy or you miss out on everything that's good and card prices were reasonable (i remember buying doubling season for 8€ and an Italian All Hallows' Eve for like, 12€ or something) and like, you had to look for the good stuff? try and find what could work in your decks and what might be an interesting new thing, and if they had any cool cards that could work as your commander etc. i remember fondly when we talked about Alesha Who Smiles At Death with a friend and how you could utilize it and what sort of stuff you could put in a deck. Fate Reforged had what, ten legendary creatures? and not all of them super viable commanders, and that was fine! it was very much fine, and fun to brew and think and see if you actually COULD make them work somehow. now it feels every legendary has a strategy built in and there is really only one way to properly build the deck, and that makes me a bit sad honestly
When commander is designed for: Commander is terrible and 60 card constructed falls apart. When 60 card constructed is designed for: Commander is great and 60 card constructed is healthy. Commander should never have been the commercial focus. It is like turning the dessert dish into the main course.
@@TheEvolver311While the OP's post is perhaps oversimplified since it's not like mistakes never happened before the change design philosophy, post-"we design for Commander" design has basically power crept everything, led to far more broken cards, and generally contradicted what Commander was supposed to be in the first place as place for more niche and underused cards. Not like the last one was ever perfect either, though tellingly a lot of the problems were WotC's earliest instances at designing directly for Commader like with Derevi, Edgar Markov, Kaalia, and such.
@MusicoftheDamned they have been designing products directly for Commander since 2011 and it's been screwing up constructed since 2011 with cards like True-Name Nemesis. It isn't new at all
@@TheEvolver311 No one said it was new though? At least not wholesale. Just that it tends to screw things up when that's the design philosophy. Whenever the once-a-year Commander products happened to make any overly pushed or accidentally busted 1v1 screw-ups, those generally only screwed over Legacy, maybe also Vintage and/or Commander itself too depending on the cards. The important and actually new things now, however, is that basically *every* card is designed with Commander in mind even though that's a bit of paradox even before the power creep issue that it's greatly exacerbated. At least before back in 2011 and so, the damage from a Commander-focused "oopsie" was both a once a year thing and maybe affect two or three formats at once. Nowadays pretty much every format tends to feel the mistake that flawed design philosophy brings, with Modern generally getting the brunt of it now due to Modern Horizons too.
Commander is not to blame. Incompetence is. I appreciate that Magic, with all the different formats and metas is a complex system to put cards into. But Nadu's text is so obviously broken that they should have realized it just just looking at it. They should have realized it while typing it out.
EDH as a format is not to blame. DESIGNING for EDH and trying to print "oooh this'll be a cool EDH card" is. Also, the abundance of "rule 0" bitching that removes two of the three "rock paper scissors" options turns it into a giant "who can get their value engine out sooner" contest, where every new card needs to be a better engine than what came before.
@@DJKokaKola designing for any format in the same way would result in the same thing, it has nothing to do with the format and everything to do with how wotc is choosing to design their products. and what does 'the abundance of "rule 0" bitching that removes two of the three "rock paper scissors" options' even mean? commander is not rock-paper-scissors lol have you ever played it?
@@themoops4006 All card games, including magic, can roughly be broken down into aggro/mid/control. Obviously there's more nuance, tempo vs mid, control vs combo, etc., but speaking in general terms that's how you split up the deck archetypes. Aggro generally wins against control as it overwhelms early before control can stabilize. Mid/tempo can contest aggro and outvalues it in the midgame. Control isn't pressured enough by midrange early on and can outvalue late game. Aggro overwhelms control before it can contest. Rule 0 eliminates two of those three options. People complain about pillowfort, hatebears, stax, hyper aggro, etc., so those get struck in the deckbuilding stage. That leaves you with midrange-y tempo decks as the vast majority of game strategies in EDH. Most of the combo-y or lockout strategies have either been formally banned because one guy in the EDH rules group lost to it one time, or informally banned in casual settings because people don't want to play against it. You very clearly do not understand how card games are designed if you haven't even heard of the rps design philosophy of card games.
@@DJKokaKola i think you're projecting your own personal anecdotal experiences onto the format and playerbase as a whole. rule zero dictates you can only play midrange decks? what are you on about lol
I'm still confused how anyone thought that original version of Nadu would have broken commander... I mean flash is a nice ability and the targeting protection is nice but hardly broken.
I play a Yeva commander deck, your permanents having flash is VERY powerful. Yeva was a Cedh deck for years FYI and she only lets you cast green creatures as though they had flash.
I mean, yes, it was. Problem was that no playtesting was done with the card, and the people who made it didn't realize you could "infinite" combo it with 0-Cost activated abilities. So the tedious combo wasn't discovered.
I have an interesting redesign to the initial form of Nadu. Delete the flash all the time and give it "landfall- you may cast creatures as though they have flash till end of turn"
Honestly that seems underpowered. The initial form needs a seedborn muse type effect to be broken, and honestly if you can get a seedborn muse into play and keep it there, cEDH decks have done decently with that with both Thrasios and Kinnan
@RagingRugbyst how often would you be able to trigger landfall during someone else's turn, and how often would you actually care about creatures having flash during your turn?
In response to the "we never asked for this", I never asked for Birds murdering formats, I asked for Anime girls being in all 100 slots of my commander deck.
Being designed for EDH is so annoying. It seemed neat at first. "Oh hey! This card says CoMmAnDeR on it!!!" You find out pretty quickly that all it does is lead to power creep and limiting deck creativity if you don't want to build jank. I've been a solely commander player for over a decade, and I desperately miss the days of playing something that was designed specifically for standard like everything else was and having to figure out how to make it work rather than being force fed ideal strategies. EDIT: Also, enough with the Horizons. Bring back Masters.
Yeah as a mainly 60 and 40-card player, the appeal of commander has always seemed to be to find a home for cards that just weren't good enough for standard. Cards that are too slow, too demanding, or just didn't fit the format at the time, could be built around in commander to still be interesting. Also gave you a place to play with your old favourites from standard. Nowadays all new legendary creatures just read ''When you cast an artifact, draw a card. Whenever you cast your 5th artifact, Goblins you control get +5/+5 until end of turn'' It's just so boring. Wow, wonder how I should build this interesting new design!
It's baffling that they completely missed how this would interact with 0-cost abilities, considering, you know, one of the most played commander cards, one that goes in pretty much every single deck, is an artifact with a 0 cost equip ability.
Every commander player I talk to (and myself) all say the same thing: commander was more fun BEFORE they started designing stuff "for commander." Wizards, please STOP. We don't need you to design for it, and we don't WANT you to design for it
Designed for Commander? But it is super miserable in Commander, like, what do you mean? Why it needed to be so pushed? I mean, EDH is the most casual and jankiest format, you could have made Nadu a 6 mana with only one per turn clause, and people would still love it and played it. Like... How can be the designers so disconnected from the format and the game? Its play pattern even mirrors the same issues of Paradox Engine, a banned card. You can tell it just by reading it, no playtesting needed, regardless of the 0-mana equip combos.
Commander is the most powerful format in Magic. It has access to the most cards, with the least-restrictive banlist when looking from a "power" lens. The only thing that keeps Commander "casual" is if ALL 4 people who sit down agree to it. CEDH and EDH *are* the same format, one is just played with a handshake agreement that isn't even always followed. EDH is just as powerful, if not more-so, than Vintage is. WotC *IS* designing for Commander whenever they make cards this strong. How else are you going to compete in a format where Demonic Consultation AND Thassa's Oracle are legal at the same time? Just because people choose not to use the good cards, doesn't mean they magically go away. WotC can't just pretend that Commander is casual like players can.
@@petrri323the most powerful format is still vintage. Commander has access to the most powerful cards in the history of the format that aren't the power nine, but the singleton nature of it can't be underestimated. The deck that comes to mind that's capable of achieving table kills that are as fast is rogsi, and that relies on having a 0 cost creature to sacrifice for mana or cards.
My biggest issue upon reading the article was: Ignoring all other context, the post is a "lessons learned" post-incident report, something that all companies do after something goes wrong. And in no company, under ANY circumstances, should "We made sweeping changes after testing AND THEN DID NOT TEST THE NEW CHANGES" ever, ever, EVER end up on a Lessons Learned whiteboard.
Commander isn’t to blame, the way wotc handled the shift in focus to commander is why shit sucks now. No one forced them to make cards the way they decide to print them.
Commander is supposed to be a format that is run by non with people and just happens to exist outside of what magic really is. Commander is completely parasitic and ruining every other format.
@@winkelfilms you cant blame a company for meeting the demands of the customers. Commander players want more commander cards and show that to WOTC by buying lots of commander product -> WOTC is being rewarded for producing more commander cards. What is WOTC supposed to do?
@@astarte768 love the implication it's the consumers fault when they are not the stewards the game. Wotc has done tons of shit the players hate. Are casual players at fault for that to?
Edh is fun because it uses cards not made for it, it forced us to get creative. Making cards specific for edh just feels like it's begging for power creep
I think it becomes clear that you're most likely right when the Nadu article starts by saying Nadu's original home was Bant Midrange in Modern. I wonder how the article would have been interpreted if it didn't have that once sentence mentioning commander.
@@Hitzel Well that would be a lie. Lying to people sometimes works, but that still doesn't make it true. Nadu was broken BECAUSE OF WOTC's obsession with Commander.
A last-minute change due _entirely_ to the need to avoid breaking Commander. And the solution is that Wizards is going to be _give the Commander team more control earlier in the process._
@@jyrinx They do try and prevent breaks in all formats, the bird we got is stronger in commander then the original one. Its not because of a focus in commander, its because of the deadline, both nadus were designed for modern.
Ideal: "Everyone will self regulate." Reality: My buddy buys 6 $30-50 cards every couple months. I have Counterspells. He runs Mana Drains. He has 5 tutors. I have maybe a Demonic, but usually not even that. He only plays with me and his son, neither of us can drop anything like the money he does to the point where we stopped trying completely.
have u tried talking to him? "hey jeff i don't got $100/month to spend on mtg, can i borrow some cards or proxy some cards? because as it stands it isn't fun getting crushed by you, and i know we'd both have more fun if it was more balanced" or whatever
Since the fire design philosophy is catering towards commander, then it's only right if the commander complacency committee needs to be more proactive. The ones in charge of the duel commander ban list are more proactive than the edh rules committee and the "advisory group".
Ah yes, nadu, a notorious card in commander, beloved by all. A perfectly made card for commander… that everyone but the menaces to society hates always and just leads to extremely boring games wether it’s the nadu player playing the entire game as if it’s solitaire or “I attempt to cast nadu. Any responses?” “Yes I cast pyroblast, counterspell, force of will, and red elemental blast!” Having fun yet?!?! **** Nadu
No, it is 0% commander's fault commander. Just happens to be the most popular format.Whatever format was the most popular was going to get intense focus by the giant company.
@@cablefeed3738 The problem with blaming Commander or saying it should never be a consideration for cards is that it makes sets into monolithic blocks for very specific people. No set is going to put 300 cards into Modern decks--and if it did, players would hate it. If there's 50 cards that make it, what of the other 250? Limited only? There just to take up space in packs and be thrown out? It's not unreasonable to use the remaining parts of the sets for other formats. For years, Modern players complained they never got any cards in Standard sets....because they were designed for Standard. Now they're getting sets designed for their format yet going "No, we want everything focused on our format. No others." It's like reversing the oppression they felt for years.
They are lying. Nadu is not even balanced in commander, everyone in my LGS hates him (except the guy that plays him). They only increased the power level to sell more packs.
@@JD-gk7eh But there are plenty of examples of good commander cards printed in MH3 that aren't pushed to hell. Quest for the Necropolis, Argent Dais, and the 3 color landscape cards are all examples of low power cards that are good for commander without breaking other formats. Yet no one is talking about these cards because Wizards released so many bloated cards that these less flashy cards are getting eclipsed.
I play with 2 playgroups, and in one of them I made the motion to collectively say we will not play Nadu as a group for a couple of reasons. 1) we play on cockatrice and with how clunky cockatrice can be it just leads to hour long turns 2) The playgroup we do play in with Nadu banned doesn’t really have any restrictions in terms of strength in general, but we do typically end up just not playing decks that don’t mesh well with that group. Like my Tivit deck is really strong, I love playing it, but it’s full of bullshit that playgroup doesn’t enjoy playing into and overall I think that deck lost focus from my initial thought of making a funny vote deck to let’s make this deck PUSHED, which is fun for high power, but not for casual commander. 3) The first group is newer to Magic and doesn’t know what the “best cards” are yet. Sure they know about some of the big ones like doubling season, Rhystic study, and it feels like everyone found smothering tithe really fast, but they don’t know beyond the staples. The other group is a group of power gamers who aren’t quite CeDH level but pretty close. Tivit is my only deck that can compete there because the other decks were not PUSHED like Tivit was. There’s fun to be had when everyone’s deck is just super pushed and threats are showing up all the time, but the guy sitting in the corner drawing cards is the biggest threat because he’s playing combo Tameshi and will just play Solitaire on his turn until we’re dead.
Is it just me or did that article say they "didn't want Nadu to be a card no one thought was interesting enough to build around" rather than they "didn't want it to be too strong for Commander?"
I hate how the rules committee uses rule 0 to do nothing. The rules committee should set the standards for playing at commander events and in stores. That is how we get stuff like dockside and Armageddon hellscape
All the "casual commander" players pretending that they don't play a turn-2 format will always be wild to me. Like, ok. YOU don't play the two-card-infinite-win-immediately cards, but you could if you wanted to. The ACTUAL commander format, what's legal, what's not legal, is the most powerful format. WotC's choice to consider the most powerful format when making ALL of their new cards is the reason we are seeing the monumental spike in how power crept cards have become. Imagine turning up to a Vintage event, and pulling out cat tribal. That's Commander. Everyone could play Jewel Shops if they wanted, they choose not to. Problem is WotC needs to still consider the fact that Jewel Shops exists. So all new cards need to be balanced for a turn-2 format. More playtesting would probably have helped the Nadu situation. But I believe there is a fundamental flaw in designing your entire game around it's most powerful iteration.
So if the main issue is that commander designed cards are dangerous when in the same product as modern and standard cards, maybe the answer is that we need less tent pole sets and more stuff like the DND sets and commander masters that is intended to be drafted for commander? That would allow for less commander cards in each set while retaining a commander focus
I think you are overemphasizing the "made for commander" aspect here, the real problem with Nadu isn't that they changed the design due to commander concerns, its the lack of playtesting. I mean, thats how we got skullclamp and the mind sculptor as well (as you mention in the video) Basically i think the real problem isn't designing for commander, its changing things when its too late to playtest
I kinda agree with your point, because if the card was well tested they could have seen how broken the card was in no time, but most people take issue with the fact that the set was called MODERN Horizons 3, and the main focus on both card design and play testing for that set should have been the Modern format, not commander. Theres also the issue that the set had commander precons, why not put the card into them and leave it out of Modern?
@@GabAssbreakerEvery set takes into account how some cards can affect some formats that those cards are going into. They do that all the time to make sure cards don't go into standard that break modern, and they have talked about that in the past as well.This is only about power creep and trying to make money off eternal formats.
@@GabAssbreaker and the problem is still with wotc for choosing to designing the products that way, not the format itself or the people who play it. blaming the format just gives wotc an out and pits players against one another. we'd have the exact same set of problems if it were modern or any other format everything were being designed for. wotc is going to chase the carrot it doesn't matter what format that carrot is.
@@cablefeed3738we all know its all about money, power creep sells packs, i was just pointing out why most people are focusing so much in the "designed for commander" angle.
@@themoops4006 A set is 300 cards. Not every card is going to make waves in its target format. Even Standard sets don't see 300 cards from them played. The number is probably like 30. So what of the other 250+ cards? Are they just supposed to all be for limited and never seen again? Sets are 85% chaff that no one wants? I don't think that would end up popular with players either. There's multiple ways to play Magic and WotC is trying to release sets that give at least a little of something to everyone. That's hard. They mess up. They mess up badly sometimes and it sucks for us all. But I'd rather see them slot some cards for different formats into every set rather than going "Modern Horizons will be cards good enough for Modern. We tested all the Standard set cards and 0 of them will see play in Modern for sure. We did that to be safe. Commander products will only be good enough for Commander and unplayable in all other formats that allow those cards too."
Commander broke Modern, which broke itself trying to turn back into Standard with the Horizons sets because Modern players were bored with cards having to filter through Standard in order to make it to the format and now we are here. Support Standard and this happens less.
no, wotc broke modern, stop blaming players and formats for wotc's bad decisions. commander players didn't make wotc design nadu and we'd see the exact same set of problems we're seeing right now if wotc did with any other format what they're doing with commander right now.
The last Minute change plus no testing was the problem. Thats the same problem that made scullklamp brocken as fuck. And scullklamp comes from a time where t2 (or standart now) was the hottest and most played format. So i do not See why supporting standart should save us from wotc making the same mistake over and over again.
Yes of course "commander is to blame". But all this really means is Wizards is incentivized to make as much money as possible and commander has the most players. So of course they make commander cards in every set The real problem is making them legal in other formats, please just make them straight to commander and put them in special guest or list slots
God. As a 10 year EDH player, I’m pissed they are messing up constructed formats the way they have been for the past 4 years. It’s aggravating that they cannot separate design and then leads to problematic designs warping commander, but more importantly, competitive magic at large. Without competitive magic, the casual crowd would stagnate and die.
Weird perspective, but I often wonder how the artists of banned cards feel. Like if they feel disappointed, or they find it funny, or they find it exciting kinda thing.
My frustration with the article was that they modified it for commander appeal and sent it off without playtest. They ended up with a card in a modern set that is banned in a modern format
Not to assign blame in any way, but maybe if the people responsible for commander had a firmer grasp on the health of the format, these types of cards would've been turned down a long time ago.
@@cablefeed3738 That's a reasonable way of thinking as well. Honestly its possible everyone involved holds a slice of the blame, but I don't buy this argument of "The problem never had a solution to begin with".
As I'm primarily a Commander player nowadays, I can say that I liked it better when they weren't designing things specifically for Commander. If they just stuck to designing things for Standard, we wouldn't have the ridiculous power creep that we see nowadays. Granted, you can do some very specific things to help the commander experience (such as having certain effects affect "all opponents" versus just "target opponent" and making sure that legendary commanders exist for various color combinations and/or mechanics), but loading creature after creature with 3+ abilities that go infinite at the drop of a hat isn't healthy for any format. This applies to designing directly for Modern as well. The silliest thing about Nadu is that even if it was supposed to be designed specifically for Commander, the card is broken in that format as well. Their supposed fixes to the "original" card (which was also stupidly broken in Commander) just made it worse.
I'd rather they kept the original printing of Nadu. Sure, there wouldn't be a cap to the Thrasios ability and you could flash in perms, but at least it relied on the OTHER players.
@@TheEvolver311 they literally thought it would be too strong in commander in its initial iteration. modern horizons is full of insanely pushed cards intended to turn modern into mh block constructed. Complain about it. Immediately start whining about how modern is killing magic.
If Nadu's ability only worked off of other birds you control it would have been nowhere near as much of a problem, but it wouldn't have been the MH3 moneybomb WotC were hoping it would be
Its like they try to catch the commander design mistakes in developement because they know the RC won't do jack all about it. The ultimate irony being that Nadu turned out to be a problem in commander anyways
I’ve listened a lot of discussions on the BnR, and hadn’t heard anyone compare Modern to a drowning baby until today. This is why I watch your content! 💀
Putting on the cowboy boots and pushing a card without testing seems like a wild thing to admit to. The vibe I got from the article was that the lessons learned from all this weren't "don't ever release a card that hasn't been play tested", they were "make the untested changes less good" and "change the ban dates and carry on" which only guarantees that this will happen over and over again.
Yeah. I get that they want to give people from throughout the company a chance to weigh in so they get a broader amount of feedback, but they should probably have that happen at some point before the play testers leave, though part of that seems like it might be due to the fact that play testing for this set is different than for standard sets since they use a group of temporary contractors rather than the future future league.
Highly relevant video. At my last EDH game day with friends, we were all talking about making at least one deck only with cards made prior to the first commander product released in 2011. Just to get that original feel of the format back.
The one small cavoite about them designing for commander is that I remember the days in which a new set would come out and you would only see like 1-3 legends in the whole set. While there was a lot more attention on them because we got less legends I think getting an increased number of legends is good but I think the push for power in command zone and the format as a whole is bad.
Stop designing for commander in non commander product... make neat legendary creatures and we will figure it how to use it. Don't shoehorn that into everything... and don't make commander specific products a premium.
Honestly, i don't believe this story. they didn't "accidentally" push this card, they did it in full knowledge to push it beyond any reason so they could sell packs. People already pointed that out when it was spoiled how dumb that design is, so i have a hard time that a company of the size and experience like WotC wouldn't know better, so they did that deliberately
I buy high end proxies now (flat $3 a card and you cant tell the difference), its too expensive to keep up with Magic since they made all formats rotate
The charm of commander was that most legends used to just have sort of vaguely synergistic effects and the challenge was to try and find a way to somehow build a deck around something that never intended to be the focal point of a deck. Only a handful of top tier commanders from the 2010s just so happened to be S tier commanders because they coincidentally had effects conducive to focusing a deck around. Now days almost every other legend is printed with an effect that blatantly screams "HEY YOU, BUILD AROUND ME!" As if every legend now has to be what an S tier commander would've been 10 years ago. The charm of the jankyness of trying to force a deck to work around a clunky effect is almost entirely gone now. Short of coming to a mutual understanding within a play group that you all agree to avoid these blatant build around me commanders.
I really appreciate the tone of this video. I’ve seen a couple other videos, talking about the bands as well, and almost all of them seem like they’re more interested in taking the piss out of the developers rather than talking about the circumstances around the game. It just started to get me down after a while.
Designed to break Commander instead, got it. :D 2:00 Hah, so it was just "Opponents Control" to start.... It WAS a perfectly fine power card to begin with which still gave permanents flash making it still bonkers but not insane bonkers. :D 5:36 Agreed.
It was originally a triggered ability on Nadu, as well, not a static ability that grants a triggered ability to all your creatures. As a triggered ability, you can deal with it. It triggers, you flash in a Tidebinder, and it no longer triggers while Tidebinder is on the field. Removing the triggered ability actually removes the ability!
I came back to Magic in 2020. I found about Commander and it really peaked my interest. It let me play my old cards and build interesting decks. However, I soon realized that part of what made it so good was WotC stayed out of it and that it was not a competitive thing. However, you could immediately tell that WOTC made money on sets that created Commander cards and since then they have been hellbent on making sure they got the money instead of the secondary market. Now WotC is creating singleton cards in formats where you can have play sets without having a restricted list for those formats, because they need you to burn wild cards so you open more packs on Arena.
Commander is the single most popular format in magic, and it is not even close. Almost all new players are entering through commander, and I would not be surprised if most newer magic players do not know that 60 card formats exist. Expecting Wizards not to target that audience is frankly ridiculous.
What's ridiculous is that Wizards (Hasbro) is so fucking greedy that they put commander designed cards in everything. We have commander products. They are the assholes trying to squeeze it into sets that sell themselves as being for other formats.
When I first saw Prossh and Derevi I knew it was down hill from there for commander products and feared the competitive evolution of the format away from casual play and then printing staples for this competitive format. Wizards greed and cEDH got us here and people really don’t want to accept the latter part.
cedh IS edh. They have the same ban list. I can go to a Vintage event with a standard deck if I wanted to, but it's still a Vintage event. Just because most people don't play the strongest commander legal cards, doesn't mean that edh and cedh are different. On paper, and more importantly to WotC, they *ARE* the exact same thing.
@@petrri323 if they were the same thing we wouldn’t be referring to it as cEDH lets be serious here. Additionally, WotC 100% acknowledges the existence of cEDH given the fact they are partnering and planning sanctioned events and backing the format with prize support next year. So yes. The development team is VERY cognizant of that format separate of commander. It’s probably why Nadu got changed to begin with.
The card designers are to blame because they feel the need to design commander cards outside of the precon decks to get more product to be sold by targeting a larger audience. That's bad for commander and every other format that sets are printed for.
When i first started commander 2.5 years ago my LGS JUST OPENED and the meta was amazing. It was ... Commander. It was very battlecruiser and "lets all just do our own thing." Now the meta is insanely powerful... Gone are the days of casual play
The most fun commander game i had was when we decided to make $75 decks, i was running a 5 colour devoid eldrazi deck, and another guy had a kamigawa spirits deck.
All they needed to do was add "This card cannot be put into your Command Zone" to the original and it now is harder to get going. The lije "This card cannot be put in your Command Zone" should always be an option for any Legendary card to counter potential Commander issues.
commander only worked as a side format that depended on cards being vetted through the standard game, making cards for commander specifically completely defeats the entire purpose of commander as the casual multiplayer format. Im predicting that as commander gets increasingly plagued with power creep and meta gaming people are going to switch back to playing normal decks at 40 life, or some other format over commander.
I think firing a boatload of employees at the end of last year while having the suits demand the line go up is a major issue, as it means that small staff is even smaller, and like you said, the release schedule is putting a toll on development.
What about “commander, except cards that were both released after year X AND which sell for more than Y, are banned” (where “sell for more than Y” means that the cheapest version of the card, at decent quality rating, sells for more than Y”. If there’s an equivalent cheap version, someone isn’t prevented from using a more expensive alt-art version if they want to.) ? (Tune the variables X and Y as desired)
All i have to say is that commander makes so much money that this "made for commander" idealology wont change. HOWEVER. we get 16-24 precons a year. SAVE THOSE CARDS FOR THE FKN PRECONS. MAKE CARDS FOR COMMANDER IN COMMANDER PRECONS ONLY
Best video Vince! Long time watcher first post maybe. Your are 💯 correct about how mtg players play commander. The online community who make content, for the most part, are overly idealistic.
As a person that rarely upgrades their decks and builds with what they have, I definitely feel the power creep. It's rare that I play with another player and think "wow, this feels evenly matched". Usually they use the newer cards that are simply objectively better than what I own. Maybe at one point I will get around to buying a bunch of singles to help my decks, but that time isn't now.
I wouldn't say Commander is to blame even as someone who never really cared for the topic, if only because nothing forced WotC (and Hasbro) to focus on it. Same with pooping out nonstop product. It's more the fault of greed and an intentional lack of playtesting--but I repeat myself--than the intentional if always paradoxical focus on making things explicitly for Commander. Greedy people have never cared about the long-term health of anything they ring money out of even if they destroy it in the process. There's true here too.
I am still really curious how the "only twice per turn" clause, which is unique across all of Magic, got onto this card if they didn't test it at all. It seems very odd, because the only reasonable explanation is that clause made it on after testing in an attempt to limit the self-target interaction. If they didn't see the problematic interaction, why is that line there? Isn't it more likely that they saw it, tagged the 2x bit on, and thought everything would be fine?
You are touching the correct topic there, the game should be bought out by some rich private investor who loves magic and the person in question should strictly keep the game as a private entity and just keep focus on delivering a great game experience. Using a game as a cash cow will just end up in a desctruction of the game. At some point, players will have to decide as a community that we have had enough and just stop buying product all together to show the stock owners that this has gone on for too long now.
Our group does drafts but mostly play Commander. It seems that there are so many products that have 4 Commander Pre-cons now. I order them from my LGS. Commander Players are not to blame. It's Wizards fault. They know what they are doing. Thank you for the video Pleasant Kenobi.
I don't like the idea of splitting commander up between Casual and CEDH from a broad perspective because it literally just feels like "Playing Commander and "What if we played commander but we made up a random collection of rules that changed from play group to play group based on pre existing biases". Very great points across the point about the systemic issues that the format, and game as a whole faces. Brava.
9:55 - okay, do Modern players ask for more cards like The One Ring when they gobble up the copies and skyrocket the prices of it into stratosphere? Just cause we buy commander designed stuff, cause it's the only place to get must have cards akin to Sol Rings, doesn't mean we like it that much.
I miss the days when "it's probably good in Commander" was a polite way of saying "this card is ass."
Yeah I miss when you would scour the visual spoilers for neat but niche cards that might make an archetype more fun. It's much less fun when it's forcefed to you.
I miss the days when cards from standard set booster packs that were bad in other formats were the good cards for Commander.
Nowadays card designs for Commander wreck both Commander and most other formats.
@@joeferreti9442this is the most important part. If you could pin a reply comment it should be this one. The beauty of the format was playing “bad” in-set cards that would only see play in limited and sometimes not at all but being able to add them to a commander deck. Now everything is pushing towards cEDH like I predicted years ago.
and usually a phrase used by people who never played commander and just say "high cmc means commander" haha
but yeah, same. I miss when commander was built around making cards not designed for the format work
That's still true for niche cards. Nadu is simply not a niche card at all.
Commander isn't to blame. Wizards of the coast trying to milk comander dry is to blame.
It's a problem when you start marketing an eternal format as your *primary* format. That's how you get Yugioh-levels of powercreep.
@@Kylora2112 well, you aren't wrong.
So players feeding the machine didn't directly tell wizards to keep going? Stop coping. Your format is trash. Half the players are peds. Go to your local commander night and check names against the red dot list. Pretty gross honestly. I've done this in 25 states and found alteast 3 per store.
The best part. Not one standard or modern player came up at all.
Weirdos.
@@Kylora2112 Yeah, that's definitely a problem with non-rotating formats like Modern
I think one of the biggest issue is that they're ruining standard in the process.
I love commander, but I wish they would stop designing specific cards for it. Commander was more fun when you found the hidden gems from the new sets. Now the format is becoming more and more stale with these overpowered monstrosities.
Yep. I have passed on every single commander specific card. Even arcane signet barely makes it to my decklist
I don't love commander and I wish they would stop.
The only thing is that it's a shit design for commander, too. I don't think they were designing Nadu for any format, regardless of what the lead designer says.
Commander is the only format worth ayomg. Stop being stupid
@@RollingCalfthats because your dumb
As a person who started playing highlander and then switched to EDH before it became commander, i think that catering for commander players is stifling creativity and is very damaging in the long run. I miss the old days where you had to actually do your best to find the perfect card.
These days the only thing holding you back is the card prices and thats Just sad. It makes it a case of coloring instead of drawing.
This. My first ever commander game, someone played deflecting swat and I'm sitting here like "wtf is this, at least Force of Will makes you pay something"
I've only been plating commander for ~8 years, but yeah, that really describes my feelings as well.
As someone who is squarely in Commander/Brawl's target audience (relative to other MtG formats), and who played it when it was EDH, it started to turn incredibly dumb for me once they got it into their heads that they needed to design legends (let alone other cards) "for" Commander, rather than just doing design the way they'd always done and letting Commander shake out. IT WAS WORKING.
your not wrong about stifiling creativity. but you're asking WoTC to leave money on the table by not designing for commander, and they will never leave money on the table.
the problem isn't commander its wotc. replace commander with whatever format and we'd have the exact same problems. this whole 'its commander's fault'
nonsense misses the point and gives wotc a pass while players blame one another instead of them.
I think Commander is an easy thing to blame when "eleventh hour untested design changes" has been a problem for ages and gave us, among other cards, Skullclamp. The issue is they're not learning from their mistakes.
Plus Nadu wasnt really "designed" for commander, they just didnt want to break a format that they support, which is something they should do, i dont want commander masters to break modern or legacy, nor do i want a standard set breaking competitive eternal formats. The real issue is such a pushed powerful card being designed so late.
And the most ironic thing is that i think this nadu is probably stronger on commander anyways, so it was bad design and analysis all the way.
@@joaobispo2602 I 100% agree with your analysis as well. There is a difference between "designing not to break other formats than the one the set was intended for" and "designing to be competitive or powerful in a format other than the one the set was intended for".
I mean, Commander just has different fundamentals. I think the blame is valid enough. I think Commander needs to be spun off from Magic entirely to be treated as its own game system, not that that is reasonably achievable now. Wizards has proven it can't support 60-card formats and Commander, and in part that's just due to the differences. 40 life, social contracts, free mulligans, effective eighth card in hand every game, kingmaking. How do you address that? Rule zero conversations are just mediating how your group will put up with a fundamentally flawed implementation of a bunch of cool ideas. This also explains, to me, why Commander players feel the need to define so many ways to rank their decks and explain power level. Those should be differing formats in a totally separate game, not different subformats of a format.
I watched one video where someone had said "it's not that they're not learning from their mistakes, the teams that made those mistakes did learn from their mistakes but they aren't the ones making these. This is a whole new team of people repeating some of the same mistakes of previous people. They havent had a chance to make a mistake large enough where they can learn from." To some point I think it's valid.
@@fastpuppy2000 why is this Commander's fault, though? It was doing fine on its own for years without much nonsense past making weird prices on the secondary market.
They thought the flash ability was too strong, so not only are they designing for commander, they're not very good at it.
I dont think they said it was to strong. I suspect it was more that they were concerned that commander players would be unhappy with other people playing during their turn
Flash isn't necessarily too strong, but giving all of your permanent spells flash from turn 1 or 2 guaranteed is just ridiculous. Flash is very powerful for control, but it would have been better than what they ended up coming up with. That and the triggered ability only working when your opponents target your stuff would've kept it from being too broken
@@mark1A100 That is something that would bother commander players wouldn't it.
Olivia from CAH said it best “design magic cards, we’ll figure it out in commander”
I 100% agree with the statement but when does the rules committee ever figure it out
Saw someone make a comment the other day that said something along the lines of "it used to be that you played commander with magic cards, but now it feels like we are stuck playing magic with commander cards" and boy did i feel that
I mean, you said it yourself. From the article, "We didn't playtest with Nadu's final iteration, as we were too far along in the process, and it shipped as-is."
"I missed the interaction with zero-mana abilities that are so problematic. The last round of folks who were shown the card in the building missed it too."
Nevermind the fact that they somehow missed the abundance of 0-cost abilities. That they didn't even bother TESTING just shows how much of a joke of a company it is. Commander is an easy thing to blame, but the overemphasis on EDH is a smaller thing compared to the complete lack of actual testing with the FIRE-based bullshit they vomit out.
This is their excuse every damn time. "We changed it last minute, whoops." Either some people need to find new jobs or other pressures need to be removed. It's obvious the current methods are not working.
@@lordfaustmessiahas long as people keep buying then the current methods are working
What a dramatic statement. They are in business to make money, and business is booming. It's no joke.
Yeah, this is the least surprising admission in a while between a) it being obvious to anyone with eyes and b) having been used before to explain their incompetence, i.e. Oko.
But it makes money unfortunately as pointed out by the person above me said, so WotC and Hasbro will keep doing it while continuing to cut corner with playtesting and burying what few playtesters they have under an avalanche of product.
Interesting thought experiment, PRE-FIRE would this be a 3/3 for 2UG pr 3UG and no one actually plays it in Moderrn, so it's only a Commander problem? I mean, entering untapped is still incompetent design. but still.
During yesterday's daily MTG stream, Carmen brought up the point that we, as players, don't see the successful last minute changes. However, the example she brought up were things like how originally the MDFC lands only cost 2 life and they changed it to three at the last second and that was probably a good thing. But the difference here is that that was basically a know that they adjusted and I am pretty confident that the game designers can intuit tweaking values like that without testing, the problem we get is when they basically change how a card functions at the last minute without testing.
IDK, it seems like once they are past the point of play testing, the abilities of cards should be locked and the only freedom they have is to tweak numbers here and there. In software development, there is this thing called a "feature freeze" where developers on the team are not allowed to make and major additions to the code base and focus on refinement and bug fixing for the target version release. its crazy that they don't have something like that during development of sets
As long as the "Feature Freeze" prevents switching a - with a + or vice-versa. Oko and Skullclamp come to mind.
Just like a good facility manager, as long you do your job well, nobody will notice your existence. But make one mistake, everyone starts screaming.
Ultimately, the issue with Nadu is that nobody who reviewed the change knew or thought about Cephalid Breakfast: combining a thing like Shuko that can target infinitely for free with an unbounded (or virtually unbounded) "trigger-on-target" effect.
When it was spoiled, everyone who was aware of the Legacy deck (which I assume includes some of the MH3 contactors who did NOT get to review the change) immediately thought of Shuko.
If they had thought about Nadu as a "Shuko combo" engine, they would have realized it was probably too good for both Commander and Modern.
So while it's annoying and extremely ironic that somebody in a Commander meeting said "Flash for permanent spells is too good" and tipped the first domino that brought us Nadu, the utter failure is that nobody at WotC knew or thought about the zero-mana interaction, and they decided to make such a significant change without letting outside eyes proofread their work.
@@majordude83
Exactly, people were Shuko has never done anything....I was like other than be a linchpin combo piece lol
Ban the bird fine but eventually this will happen again and we will be banning a creature for being abused with Shuko just like this.
Also, terrible example, because changing MDFCs from 2 life to 3, is a nerf. Nerfing a card last minute is going to be fine 99% of the time. If a card comes out in a set, and it's too weak because of a last minute change, that sucks, but no harm is done, there's just one extra bad card out of 250. If a card is changed last minute, and is broken now, it leads to situations like this. So yeah, last minute changes can be fine, but the difference between missing on a buff, a nerf, or an overhaul, is absolutely massive.
WOTC can design with commander in mind; they can make sure effects work in multiplayer as well as in two-player formats. They shouldn't design with commander being the target.
As a former CCG designer, the way they fumbled Nadu so badly at several stages is such an amateurish clown show of terrible design practice. Skipping the playtest part by making a last second change before sending something to print is the biggest dumb mistake, compounded with two separate concepts that always causes problems: allowing for disproportionate amount of trigger targets, and balancing free things (usability/consistency).
Everything about it screams "massive fuckup" (saying "mistake" is underselling it) and what REALLY pisses me off was the designer mentioning how playtest didn't catch it when later on he admits IT DIDN'T SEE TESTING at the revamped text. That group of testers should be rightfully pissed off.
You'd think they would have learned all this from Skullclamp, but no. Its a repeat of the same "we didnt really test it"
@@mbarker_lng Don't forget Oko
i miss the EDH of ten years ago.... i guess i kinda miss the whole of Magic from ten years ago? we didn't have this constant barrage of stuff you need to buy or you miss out on everything that's good and card prices were reasonable (i remember buying doubling season for 8€ and an Italian All Hallows' Eve for like, 12€ or something)
and like, you had to look for the good stuff? try and find what could work in your decks and what might be an interesting new thing, and if they had any cool cards that could work as your commander etc. i remember fondly when we talked about Alesha Who Smiles At Death with a friend and how you could utilize it and what sort of stuff you could put in a deck. Fate Reforged had what, ten legendary creatures? and not all of them super viable commanders, and that was fine! it was very much fine, and fun to brew and think and see if you actually COULD make them work somehow.
now it feels every legendary has a strategy built in and there is really only one way to properly build the deck, and that makes me a bit sad honestly
ever since Arena came out, you're the tester!
When commander is designed for: Commander is terrible and 60 card constructed falls apart. When 60 card constructed is designed for: Commander is great and 60 card constructed is healthy.
Commander should never have been the commercial focus. It is like turning the dessert dish into the main course.
Not to mention that, thanks to commander, it's very difficult to find 60+ or 80+ card deck boxes now 😑
Not really
We've had plenty of just bad constructed designs in constructed sets that sink constructed lol Treasure Cruise in Modern or Legacy lol
@@TheEvolver311While the OP's post is perhaps oversimplified since it's not like mistakes never happened before the change design philosophy, post-"we design for Commander" design has basically power crept everything, led to far more broken cards, and generally contradicted what Commander was supposed to be in the first place as place for more niche and underused cards. Not like the last one was ever perfect either, though tellingly a lot of the problems were WotC's earliest instances at designing directly for Commader like with Derevi, Edgar Markov, Kaalia, and such.
@MusicoftheDamned they have been designing products directly for Commander since 2011 and it's been screwing up constructed since 2011 with cards like True-Name Nemesis.
It isn't new at all
@@TheEvolver311 No one said it was new though? At least not wholesale. Just that it tends to screw things up when that's the design philosophy.
Whenever the once-a-year Commander products happened to make any overly pushed or accidentally busted 1v1 screw-ups, those generally only screwed over Legacy, maybe also Vintage and/or Commander itself too depending on the cards. The important and actually new things now, however, is that basically *every* card is designed with Commander in mind even though that's a bit of paradox even before the power creep issue that it's greatly exacerbated. At least before back in 2011 and so, the damage from a Commander-focused "oopsie" was both a once a year thing and maybe affect two or three formats at once. Nowadays pretty much every format tends to feel the mistake that flawed design philosophy brings, with Modern generally getting the brunt of it now due to Modern Horizons too.
Commander is not to blame. Incompetence is. I appreciate that Magic, with all the different formats and metas is a complex system to put cards into. But Nadu's text is so obviously broken that they should have realized it just just looking at it. They should have realized it while typing it out.
EDH as a format is not to blame. DESIGNING for EDH and trying to print "oooh this'll be a cool EDH card" is.
Also, the abundance of "rule 0" bitching that removes two of the three "rock paper scissors" options turns it into a giant "who can get their value engine out sooner" contest, where every new card needs to be a better engine than what came before.
@@DJKokaKola designing for any format in the same way would result in the same thing, it has nothing to do with the format and everything to do with how wotc is choosing to design their products. and what does 'the abundance of "rule 0" bitching that removes two of the three "rock paper scissors" options' even mean? commander is not rock-paper-scissors lol have you ever played it?
@@themoops4006 All card games, including magic, can roughly be broken down into aggro/mid/control. Obviously there's more nuance, tempo vs mid, control vs combo, etc., but speaking in general terms that's how you split up the deck archetypes. Aggro generally wins against control as it overwhelms early before control can stabilize. Mid/tempo can contest aggro and outvalues it in the midgame. Control isn't pressured enough by midrange early on and can outvalue late game. Aggro overwhelms control before it can contest.
Rule 0 eliminates two of those three options. People complain about pillowfort, hatebears, stax, hyper aggro, etc., so those get struck in the deckbuilding stage. That leaves you with midrange-y tempo decks as the vast majority of game strategies in EDH. Most of the combo-y or lockout strategies have either been formally banned because one guy in the EDH rules group lost to it one time, or informally banned in casual settings because people don't want to play against it.
You very clearly do not understand how card games are designed if you haven't even heard of the rps design philosophy of card games.
@@DJKokaKolait’s the release schedule. They literally put out too much product.
@@DJKokaKola i think you're projecting your own personal anecdotal experiences onto the format and playerbase as a whole. rule zero dictates you can only play midrange decks? what are you on about lol
I'm still confused how anyone thought that original version of Nadu would have broken commander... I mean flash is a nice ability and the targeting protection is nice but hardly broken.
I play a Yeva commander deck, your permanents having flash is VERY powerful. Yeva was a Cedh deck for years FYI and she only lets you cast green creatures as though they had flash.
From what I've read and heard, it wasn't that the original would've broken commander, it would've been annoying as all get out to deal with.
The original design was unfun for commander. Uhhhh, and the version we got was supposed to be fun? Their excuse is BS.
I mean, yes, it was. Problem was that no playtesting was done with the card, and the people who made it didn't realize you could "infinite" combo it with 0-Cost activated abilities. So the tedious combo wasn't discovered.
I find Nadu fun, drawing cards is the best part of the game
Card designed for commander put into main set when they were releasing a Simic landfall commander deck
wow.... a Simic commander deck that rewards you for playing lands... groundbreaking /s
I have an interesting redesign to the initial form of Nadu.
Delete the flash all the time and give it "landfall- you may cast creatures as though they have flash till end of turn"
Honestly that seems underpowered. The initial form needs a seedborn muse type effect to be broken, and honestly if you can get a seedborn muse into play and keep it there, cEDH decks have done decently with that with both Thrasios and Kinnan
@@aeronhoare7706cards don’t need to be overpowered.
@RagingRugbyst okay, but that sounds pretty bad.
@@alexquinn9627 care to explain why?
@RagingRugbyst how often would you be able to trigger landfall during someone else's turn, and how often would you actually care about creatures having flash during your turn?
In response to the "we never asked for this", I never asked for Birds murdering formats, I asked for Anime girls being in all 100 slots of my commander deck.
Best comment I have seen all day.
Every product: "If you aren't a commander player, this product isn't for you"
Self regulated casual commander is dead, it's well past the time of an official Canadian Highlander type point system.
Being designed for EDH is so annoying. It seemed neat at first. "Oh hey! This card says CoMmAnDeR on it!!!" You find out pretty quickly that all it does is lead to power creep and limiting deck creativity if you don't want to build jank. I've been a solely commander player for over a decade, and I desperately miss the days of playing something that was designed specifically for standard like everything else was and having to figure out how to make it work rather than being force fed ideal strategies.
EDIT: Also, enough with the Horizons. Bring back Masters.
It's not designing for commander that creates power creep, designing for any eternal format dose that.
Yeah as a mainly 60 and 40-card player, the appeal of commander has always seemed to be to find a home for cards that just weren't good enough for standard. Cards that are too slow, too demanding, or just didn't fit the format at the time, could be built around in commander to still be interesting. Also gave you a place to play with your old favourites from standard. Nowadays all new legendary creatures just read
''When you cast an artifact, draw a card. Whenever you cast your 5th artifact, Goblins you control get +5/+5 until end of turn''
It's just so boring. Wow, wonder how I should build this interesting new design!
If they want to design SPECIFICALLY for commander inside a set than put the commander set symbol on in.
It's baffling that they completely missed how this would interact with 0-cost abilities, considering, you know, one of the most played commander cards, one that goes in pretty much every single deck, is an artifact with a 0 cost equip ability.
Every commander player I talk to (and myself) all say the same thing: commander was more fun BEFORE they started designing stuff "for commander." Wizards, please STOP. We don't need you to design for it, and we don't WANT you to design for it
whos we?
Designed for Commander? But it is super miserable in Commander, like, what do you mean? Why it needed to be so pushed? I mean, EDH is the most casual and jankiest format, you could have made Nadu a 6 mana with only one per turn clause, and people would still love it and played it. Like... How can be the designers so disconnected from the format and the game? Its play pattern even mirrors the same issues of Paradox Engine, a banned card. You can tell it just by reading it, no playtesting needed, regardless of the 0-mana equip combos.
Commander is the most powerful format in Magic. It has access to the most cards, with the least-restrictive banlist when looking from a "power" lens. The only thing that keeps Commander "casual" is if ALL 4 people who sit down agree to it. CEDH and EDH *are* the same format, one is just played with a handshake agreement that isn't even always followed. EDH is just as powerful, if not more-so, than Vintage is. WotC *IS* designing for Commander whenever they make cards this strong. How else are you going to compete in a format where Demonic Consultation AND Thassa's Oracle are legal at the same time? Just because people choose not to use the good cards, doesn't mean they magically go away. WotC can't just pretend that Commander is casual like players can.
@@petrri323the most powerful format is still vintage. Commander has access to the most powerful cards in the history of the format that aren't the power nine, but the singleton nature of it can't be underestimated. The deck that comes to mind that's capable of achieving table kills that are as fast is rogsi, and that relies on having a 0 cost creature to sacrifice for mana or cards.
My biggest issue upon reading the article was:
Ignoring all other context, the post is a "lessons learned" post-incident report, something that all companies do after something goes wrong. And in no company, under ANY circumstances, should "We made sweeping changes after testing AND THEN DID NOT TEST THE NEW CHANGES" ever, ever, EVER end up on a Lessons Learned whiteboard.
Commander isn’t to blame, the way wotc handled the shift in focus to commander is why shit sucks now. No one forced them to make cards the way they decide to print them.
Commander is supposed to be a format that is run by non with people and just happens to exist outside of what magic really is. Commander is completely parasitic and ruining every other format.
@@astarte768eh, blame WotC, not the format
@@winkelfilms the existence of the format and the player base that plays it told wizards they wanted this with their wallets it’s the formats fault
@@winkelfilms you cant blame a company for meeting the demands of the customers. Commander players want more commander cards and show that to WOTC by buying lots of commander product -> WOTC is being rewarded for producing more commander cards. What is WOTC supposed to do?
@@astarte768 love the implication it's the consumers fault when they are not the stewards the game. Wotc has done tons of shit the players hate. Are casual players at fault for that to?
Edh is fun because it uses cards not made for it, it forced us to get creative. Making cards specific for edh just feels like it's begging for power creep
Commander isn't to blame, a last second change that wasn't tested is to blame.
I think it becomes clear that you're most likely right when the Nadu article starts by saying Nadu's original home was Bant Midrange in Modern. I wonder how the article would have been interpreted if it didn't have that once sentence mentioning commander.
@@Hitzel It was changed at the last minute just because of commander.
@@Hitzel
Well that would be a lie. Lying to people sometimes works, but that still doesn't make it true. Nadu was broken BECAUSE OF WOTC's obsession with Commander.
A last-minute change due _entirely_ to the need to avoid breaking Commander.
And the solution is that Wizards is going to be _give the Commander team more control earlier in the process._
@@jyrinx They do try and prevent breaks in all formats, the bird we got is stronger in commander then the original one. Its not because of a focus in commander, its because of the deadline, both nadus were designed for modern.
Ideal: "Everyone will self regulate."
Reality: My buddy buys 6 $30-50 cards every couple months. I have Counterspells. He runs Mana Drains. He has 5 tutors. I have maybe a Demonic, but usually not even that.
He only plays with me and his son, neither of us can drop anything like the money he does to the point where we stopped trying completely.
have u tried talking to him? "hey jeff i don't got $100/month to spend on mtg, can i borrow some cards or proxy some cards? because as it stands it isn't fun getting crushed by you, and i know we'd both have more fun if it was more balanced" or whatever
Since the fire design philosophy is catering towards commander, then it's only right if the commander complacency committee needs to be more proactive. The ones in charge of the duel commander ban list are more proactive than the edh rules committee and the "advisory group".
Ah yes, nadu, a notorious card in commander, beloved by all. A perfectly made card for commander… that everyone but the menaces to society hates always and just leads to extremely boring games wether it’s the nadu player playing the entire game as if it’s solitaire or “I attempt to cast nadu. Any responses?” “Yes I cast pyroblast, counterspell, force of will, and red elemental blast!” Having fun yet?!?! **** Nadu
The answer is yes, asterisk. The asterisk is the intense focus on Commander by WotC is to blame.
No, it is 0% commander's fault commander. Just happens to be the most popular format.Whatever format was the most popular was going to get intense focus by the giant company.
FIRE design is to blame. If this cost 4 or 5 mana, it'd only be a problem in commander.
@@cablefeed3738 The problem with blaming Commander or saying it should never be a consideration for cards is that it makes sets into monolithic blocks for very specific people. No set is going to put 300 cards into Modern decks--and if it did, players would hate it. If there's 50 cards that make it, what of the other 250? Limited only? There just to take up space in packs and be thrown out? It's not unreasonable to use the remaining parts of the sets for other formats.
For years, Modern players complained they never got any cards in Standard sets....because they were designed for Standard. Now they're getting sets designed for their format yet going "No, we want everything focused on our format. No others." It's like reversing the oppression they felt for years.
They are lying. Nadu is not even balanced in commander, everyone in my LGS hates him (except the guy that plays him). They only increased the power level to sell more packs.
@@JD-gk7eh But there are plenty of examples of good commander cards printed in MH3 that aren't pushed to hell. Quest for the Necropolis, Argent Dais, and the 3 color landscape cards are all examples of low power cards that are good for commander without breaking other formats. Yet no one is talking about these cards because Wizards released so many bloated cards that these less flashy cards are getting eclipsed.
I play with 2 playgroups, and in one of them I made the motion to collectively say we will not play Nadu as a group for a couple of reasons.
1) we play on cockatrice and with how clunky cockatrice can be it just leads to hour long turns
2) The playgroup we do play in with Nadu banned doesn’t really have any restrictions in terms of strength in general, but we do typically end up just not playing decks that don’t mesh well with that group. Like my Tivit deck is really strong, I love playing it, but it’s full of bullshit that playgroup doesn’t enjoy playing into and overall I think that deck lost focus from my initial thought of making a funny vote deck to let’s make this deck PUSHED, which is fun for high power, but not for casual commander.
3) The first group is newer to Magic and doesn’t know what the “best cards” are yet. Sure they know about some of the big ones like doubling season, Rhystic study, and it feels like everyone found smothering tithe really fast, but they don’t know beyond the staples. The other group is a group of power gamers who aren’t quite CeDH level but pretty close. Tivit is my only deck that can compete there because the other decks were not PUSHED like Tivit was. There’s fun to be had when everyone’s deck is just super pushed and threats are showing up all the time, but the guy sitting in the corner drawing cards is the biggest threat because he’s playing combo Tameshi and will just play Solitaire on his turn until we’re dead.
lol they laid off ppl off then experienced low quality. not a shock
fuck corporate greed and fuck capitalism
Why would you play Magic then? It's always been a elitist hobby
I think the problem is that they tried to create a powerful card without testing - who they were designing for is much less important.
Is it just me or did that article say they "didn't want Nadu to be a card no one thought was interesting enough to build around" rather than they "didn't want it to be too strong for Commander?"
I hate how the rules committee uses rule 0 to do nothing. The rules committee should set the standards for playing at commander events and in stores. That is how we get stuff like dockside and Armageddon hellscape
All the "casual commander" players pretending that they don't play a turn-2 format will always be wild to me. Like, ok. YOU don't play the two-card-infinite-win-immediately cards, but you could if you wanted to. The ACTUAL commander format, what's legal, what's not legal, is the most powerful format. WotC's choice to consider the most powerful format when making ALL of their new cards is the reason we are seeing the monumental spike in how power crept cards have become. Imagine turning up to a Vintage event, and pulling out cat tribal. That's Commander. Everyone could play Jewel Shops if they wanted, they choose not to. Problem is WotC needs to still consider the fact that Jewel Shops exists. So all new cards need to be balanced for a turn-2 format. More playtesting would probably have helped the Nadu situation. But I believe there is a fundamental flaw in designing your entire game around it's most powerful iteration.
So if the main issue is that commander designed cards are dangerous when in the same product as modern and standard cards, maybe the answer is that we need less tent pole sets and more stuff like the DND sets and commander masters that is intended to be drafted for commander? That would allow for less commander cards in each set while retaining a commander focus
I think you are overemphasizing the "made for commander" aspect here, the real problem with Nadu isn't that they changed the design due to commander concerns, its the lack of playtesting.
I mean, thats how we got skullclamp and the mind sculptor as well (as you mention in the video)
Basically i think the real problem isn't designing for commander, its changing things when its too late to playtest
I kinda agree with your point, because if the card was well tested they could have seen how broken the card was in no time, but most people take issue with the fact that the set was called MODERN Horizons 3, and the main focus on both card design and play testing for that set should have been the Modern format, not commander. Theres also the issue that the set had commander precons, why not put the card into them and leave it out of Modern?
@@GabAssbreakerEvery set takes into account how some cards can affect some formats that those cards are going into. They do that all the time to make sure cards don't go into standard that break modern, and they have talked about that in the past as well.This is only about power creep and trying to make money off eternal formats.
@@GabAssbreaker and the problem is still with wotc for choosing to designing the products that way, not the format itself or the people who play it. blaming the format just gives wotc an out and pits players against one another. we'd have the exact same set of problems if it were modern or any other format everything were being designed for. wotc is going to chase the carrot it doesn't matter what format that carrot is.
@@cablefeed3738we all know its all about money, power creep sells packs, i was just pointing out why most people are focusing so much in the "designed for commander" angle.
@@themoops4006 A set is 300 cards. Not every card is going to make waves in its target format. Even Standard sets don't see 300 cards from them played. The number is probably like 30. So what of the other 250+ cards? Are they just supposed to all be for limited and never seen again? Sets are 85% chaff that no one wants? I don't think that would end up popular with players either. There's multiple ways to play Magic and WotC is trying to release sets that give at least a little of something to everyone. That's hard. They mess up. They mess up badly sometimes and it sucks for us all. But I'd rather see them slot some cards for different formats into every set rather than going "Modern Horizons will be cards good enough for Modern. We tested all the Standard set cards and 0 of them will see play in Modern for sure. We did that to be safe. Commander products will only be good enough for Commander and unplayable in all other formats that allow those cards too."
Commander broke Modern, which broke itself trying to turn back into Standard with the Horizons sets because Modern players were bored with cards having to filter through Standard in order to make it to the format and now we are here.
Support Standard and this happens less.
no, wotc broke modern, stop blaming players and formats for wotc's bad decisions. commander players didn't make wotc design nadu and we'd see the exact same set of problems we're seeing right now if wotc did with any other format what they're doing with commander right now.
The last Minute change plus no testing was the problem. Thats the same problem that made scullklamp brocken as fuck. And scullklamp comes from a time where t2 (or standart now) was the hottest and most played format. So i do not See why supporting standart should save us from wotc making the same mistake over and over again.
And then they made standard a 3 year rotation.
Yes of course "commander is to blame". But all this really means is Wizards is incentivized to make as much money as possible and commander has the most players. So of course they make commander cards in every set
The real problem is making them legal in other formats, please just make them straight to commander and put them in special guest or list slots
God. As a 10 year EDH player, I’m pissed they are messing up constructed formats the way they have been for the past 4 years. It’s aggravating that they cannot separate design and then leads to problematic designs warping commander, but more importantly, competitive magic at large. Without competitive magic, the casual crowd would stagnate and die.
Of course it was designed for Commander. The 3000 legendary creatures per set are always designed for Commander.
Weird perspective, but I often wonder how the artists of banned cards feel. Like if they feel disappointed, or they find it funny, or they find it exciting kinda thing.
My frustration with the article was that they modified it for commander appeal and sent it off without playtest. They ended up with a card in a modern set that is banned in a modern format
Not to assign blame in any way, but maybe if the people responsible for commander had a firmer grasp on the health of the format, these types of cards would've been turned down a long time ago.
I wish they would just stop designing for commander, it’s caused nearly every issue in the last 10+ years
@@TheUniversalEclipse problem is that EDH is their most popular and profitable format. So they will continue to do this.
The fault is wizard to the coast.If you put any fault on my favorite format just because it's popular, you're the problem
@@cablefeed3738 That's a reasonable way of thinking as well. Honestly its possible everyone involved holds a slice of the blame, but I don't buy this argument of
"The problem never had a solution to begin with".
@@electric_dream_machine The solution is clearly Premodern Commander /s
As I'm primarily a Commander player nowadays, I can say that I liked it better when they weren't designing things specifically for Commander. If they just stuck to designing things for Standard, we wouldn't have the ridiculous power creep that we see nowadays. Granted, you can do some very specific things to help the commander experience (such as having certain effects affect "all opponents" versus just "target opponent" and making sure that legendary commanders exist for various color combinations and/or mechanics), but loading creature after creature with 3+ abilities that go infinite at the drop of a hat isn't healthy for any format. This applies to designing directly for Modern as well.
The silliest thing about Nadu is that even if it was supposed to be designed specifically for Commander, the card is broken in that format as well. Their supposed fixes to the "original" card (which was also stupidly broken in Commander) just made it worse.
I'd rather they kept the original printing of Nadu. Sure, there wouldn't be a cap to the Thrasios ability and you could flash in perms, but at least it relied on the OTHER players.
PK: Is Commander to Blame for Nadu's 'Design Mistake'?
Me, observing the Nadu report(AKA: The Smoking Gun): Every single Yes Ever.
except the problem is they literally didn't test the card.
@@franslair2199
All of the desire to push it was rooted in a desire for it to be Commander playable
@@TheEvolver311 they literally thought it would be too strong in commander in its initial iteration. modern horizons is full of insanely pushed cards intended to turn modern into mh block constructed. Complain about it. Immediately start whining about how modern is killing magic.
If Nadu's ability only worked off of other birds you control it would have been nowhere near as much of a problem, but it wouldn't have been the MH3 moneybomb WotC were hoping it would be
Its like they try to catch the commander design mistakes in developement because they know the RC won't do jack all about it. The ultimate irony being that Nadu turned out to be a problem in commander anyways
Wait, why did I hear the Mesa Falcon noise at the start if CGB didn't say it
I am doing my part by voting with my wallet. I haven't bought cards since MH2. I miss what magic was, but don't miss what it is.
What a surprise that Wizard don't market towards you
I’ve listened a lot of discussions on the BnR, and hadn’t heard anyone compare Modern to a drowning baby until today.
This is why I watch your content! 💀
Putting on the cowboy boots and pushing a card without testing seems like a wild thing to admit to. The vibe I got from the article was that the lessons learned from all this weren't "don't ever release a card that hasn't been play tested", they were "make the untested changes less good" and "change the ban dates and carry on" which only guarantees that this will happen over and over again.
Yeah. I get that they want to give people from throughout the company a chance to weigh in so they get a broader amount of feedback, but they should probably have that happen at some point before the play testers leave, though part of that seems like it might be due to the fact that play testing for this set is different than for standard sets since they use a group of temporary contractors rather than the future future league.
I think content creators have a big part in everything that goes wrong.
They never call out wizards
I'm interested in hearing your feelings/take on PreDH. It was one of Sheldon's favorite variations for a lot of the reasons you talk about here
Yes.
Highly relevant video. At my last EDH game day with friends, we were all talking about making at least one deck only with cards made prior to the first commander product released in 2011. Just to get that original feel of the format back.
The one small cavoite about them designing for commander is that I remember the days in which a new set would come out and you would only see like 1-3 legends in the whole set. While there was a lot more attention on them because we got less legends I think getting an increased number of legends is good but I think the push for power in command zone and the format as a whole is bad.
Do you mean "caveat"?
I only play commander, and I don't think cards should be specifically designed for commander.
Stop designing for commander in non commander product... make neat legendary creatures and we will figure it how to use it.
Don't shoehorn that into everything... and don't make commander specific products a premium.
Honestly, i don't believe this story. they didn't "accidentally" push this card, they did it in full knowledge to push it beyond any reason so they could sell packs. People already pointed that out when it was spoiled how dumb that design is, so i have a hard time that a company of the size and experience like WotC wouldn't know better, so they did that deliberately
I buy high end proxies now (flat $3 a card and you cant tell the difference), its too expensive to keep up with Magic since they made all formats rotate
The charm of commander was that most legends used to just have sort of vaguely synergistic effects and the challenge was to try and find a way to somehow build a deck around something that never intended to be the focal point of a deck. Only a handful of top tier commanders from the 2010s just so happened to be S tier commanders because they coincidentally had effects conducive to focusing a deck around. Now days almost every other legend is printed with an effect that blatantly screams "HEY YOU, BUILD AROUND ME!" As if every legend now has to be what an S tier commander would've been 10 years ago. The charm of the jankyness of trying to force a deck to work around a clunky effect is almost entirely gone now. Short of coming to a mutual understanding within a play group that you all agree to avoid these blatant build around me commanders.
I really appreciate the tone of this video. I’ve seen a couple other videos, talking about the bands as well, and almost all of them seem like they’re more interested in taking the piss out of the developers rather than talking about the circumstances around the game. It just started to get me down after a while.
Designed to break Commander instead, got it. :D
2:00 Hah, so it was just "Opponents Control" to start.... It WAS a perfectly fine power card to begin with which still gave permanents flash making it still bonkers but not insane bonkers. :D
5:36 Agreed.
It was originally a triggered ability on Nadu, as well, not a static ability that grants a triggered ability to all your creatures. As a triggered ability, you can deal with it. It triggers, you flash in a Tidebinder, and it no longer triggers while Tidebinder is on the field. Removing the triggered ability actually removes the ability!
I came back to Magic in 2020. I found about Commander and it really peaked my interest. It let me play my old cards and build interesting decks. However, I soon realized that part of what made it so good was WotC stayed out of it and that it was not a competitive thing. However, you could immediately tell that WOTC made money on sets that created Commander cards and since then they have been hellbent on making sure they got the money instead of the secondary market. Now WotC is creating singleton cards in formats where you can have play sets without having a restricted list for those formats, because they need you to burn wild cards so you open more packs on Arena.
Bitter ordeal is one of my wincons in my glarb deck
Commander is the single most popular format in magic, and it is not even close. Almost all new players are entering through commander, and I would not be surprised if most newer magic players do not know that 60 card formats exist. Expecting Wizards not to target that audience is frankly ridiculous.
What's ridiculous is that Wizards (Hasbro) is so fucking greedy that they put commander designed cards in everything. We have commander products. They are the assholes trying to squeeze it into sets that sell themselves as being for other formats.
there is a cardmarket video where they were at an event. and a dude didnt know what "Modern legal" meant
When I first saw Prossh and Derevi I knew it was down hill from there for commander products and feared the competitive evolution of the format away from casual play and then printing staples for this competitive format. Wizards greed and cEDH got us here and people really don’t want to accept the latter part.
cedh IS edh. They have the same ban list. I can go to a Vintage event with a standard deck if I wanted to, but it's still a Vintage event. Just because most people don't play the strongest commander legal cards, doesn't mean that edh and cedh are different. On paper, and more importantly to WotC, they *ARE* the exact same thing.
@@petrri323 if they were the same thing we wouldn’t be referring to it as cEDH lets be serious here. Additionally, WotC 100% acknowledges the existence of cEDH given the fact they are partnering and planning sanctioned events and backing the format with prize support next year. So yes. The development team is VERY cognizant of that format separate of commander. It’s probably why Nadu got changed to begin with.
It's apparently important for them to design cards in a way that every one of those will find a home.
Wood Elemental says hello.
The card designers are to blame because they feel the need to design commander cards outside of the precon decks to get more product to be sold by targeting a larger audience. That's bad for commander and every other format that sets are printed for.
Just wanted to say, I gave Standard on Arena a try after your video on it the other day. And I had fun. Fun playing a 60 card format. Hot damn.
bird was the word
When i first started commander 2.5 years ago my LGS JUST OPENED and the meta was amazing. It was ... Commander. It was very battlecruiser and "lets all just do our own thing." Now the meta is insanely powerful... Gone are the days of casual play
The most fun commander game i had was when we decided to make $75 decks, i was running a 5 colour devoid eldrazi deck, and another guy had a kamigawa spirits deck.
Skullclamp 2: simic bird boogaloo
Maybe its just on my side but the elgato link doesn't work for me. Figured if it is an issue that was over looked you should know because money lol.
What if the extra sheets that they tend to do could have the cards designed for commander rather than having them in the main set?
All they needed to do was add "This card cannot be put into your Command Zone" to the original and it now is harder to get going.
The lije "This card cannot be put in your Command Zone" should always be an option for any Legendary card to counter potential Commander issues.
commander only worked as a side format that depended on cards being vetted through the standard game, making cards for commander specifically completely defeats the entire purpose of commander as the casual multiplayer format. Im predicting that as commander gets increasingly plagued with power creep and meta gaming people are going to switch back to playing normal decks at 40 life, or some other format over commander.
I think firing a boatload of employees at the end of last year while having the suits demand the line go up is a major issue, as it means that small staff is even smaller, and like you said, the release schedule is putting a toll on development.
What about “commander, except cards that were both released after year X AND which sell for more than Y, are banned” (where “sell for more than Y” means that the cheapest version of the card, at decent quality rating, sells for more than Y”. If there’s an equivalent cheap version, someone isn’t prevented from using a more expensive alt-art version if they want to.) ?
(Tune the variables X and Y as desired)
All i have to say is that commander makes so much money that this "made for commander" idealology wont change. HOWEVER. we get 16-24 precons a year. SAVE THOSE CARDS FOR THE FKN PRECONS. MAKE CARDS FOR COMMANDER IN COMMANDER PRECONS ONLY
Best video Vince! Long time watcher first post maybe. Your are 💯 correct about how mtg players play commander. The online community who make content, for the most part, are overly idealistic.
As a person that rarely upgrades their decks and builds with what they have, I definitely feel the power creep. It's rare that I play with another player and think "wow, this feels evenly matched". Usually they use the newer cards that are simply objectively better than what I own. Maybe at one point I will get around to buying a bunch of singles to help my decks, but that time isn't now.
I wouldn't say Commander is to blame even as someone who never really cared for the topic, if only because nothing forced WotC (and Hasbro) to focus on it. Same with pooping out nonstop product. It's more the fault of greed and an intentional lack of playtesting--but I repeat myself--than the intentional if always paradoxical focus on making things explicitly for Commander.
Greedy people have never cared about the long-term health of anything they ring money out of even if they destroy it in the process. There's true here too.
I am still really curious how the "only twice per turn" clause, which is unique across all of Magic, got onto this card if they didn't test it at all. It seems very odd, because the only reasonable explanation is that clause made it on after testing in an attempt to limit the self-target interaction. If they didn't see the problematic interaction, why is that line there? Isn't it more likely that they saw it, tagged the 2x bit on, and thought everything would be fine?
You are touching the correct topic there, the game should be bought out by some rich private investor who loves magic and the person in question should strictly keep the game as a private entity and just keep focus on delivering a great game experience. Using a game as a cash cow will just end up in a desctruction of the game. At some point, players will have to decide as a community that we have had enough and just stop buying product all together to show the stock owners that this has gone on for too long now.
Our group does drafts but mostly play Commander. It seems that there are so many products that have 4 Commander Pre-cons now. I order them from my LGS. Commander Players are not to blame. It's Wizards fault. They know what they are doing. Thank you for the video Pleasant Kenobi.
I don't like the idea of splitting commander up between Casual and CEDH from a broad perspective because it literally just feels like "Playing Commander and "What if we played commander but we made up a random collection of rules that changed from play group to play group based on pre existing biases".
Very great points across the point about the systemic issues that the format, and game as a whole faces. Brava.
9:55 - okay, do Modern players ask for more cards like The One Ring when they gobble up the copies and skyrocket the prices of it into stratosphere? Just cause we buy commander designed stuff, cause it's the only place to get must have cards akin to Sol Rings, doesn't mean we like it that much.
I really wish they’d stop printing commander cards (either dedicated commander cards or cards designed for commander) in normal sets