Decline MTG: Commander Format is Awful

[Mr. Magniloquent]

I moved a bit over a year ago. I finally got around to going to a game shop in my area for some Friday night MTG. This place has a good crowd, like 20ish players. Turns out that they only play commander format there. Worse yet, they only play 4 player group games. What a fucking waste.

I played that format a couple if times over a decade ago, and it sucks. It kills all the elegance of deck building and turns the game into a random walk of whatever rares people got in booster packs. MTG already has some imbalances for the colors when playing 3+ player games, but having 40 life only exacerbates those problems. Commander format is hardly even the same game. It's a completely shit one. Total waste of my Friday night.

 

[anvi]

It sucks but so does all of MTG. They had one of the best games but went shitty over the years. I think all their modes are stupid except for 2 Headed Giant which no longer exists. I can't have nice things.

 

[Dadd]

retarded format for overgrown children

 

[Sarathiour]

Commander Format being the most popular one despite being that bad should really tell you about the absolute state of MTG.

 

[ind33d]

I moved a bit over a year ago. I finally got around to going to a game shop in my area for some Friday night MTG. This place has a good crowd, like 20ish players. Turns out that they only play commander format there. Worse yet, they only play 4 player group games. What a fucking waste.

I played that format a couple if times over a decade ago, and it sucks. It kills all the elegance of deck building and turns the game into a random walk of whatever rares people got in booster packs. MTG already has some imbalances for the colors when playing 3+ player games, but having 40 life only exacerbates those problems. Commander format is hardly even the same game. It's a completely shit one. Total waste of my Friday night.

i used to hang with pro players and back in like 2017 EDH was about doing sick shit like dralnu self mill for infinite turns or spell piercing someone's t1 sol ring just to be a dick. magic is now a safe space for globohomo like everything else. it didn't used to be like this

 

[Pocgels]

It's bad. Not just kinda bad. Really bad.

 

[deuxhero]

Show them it sucks: Play a Child of Alara with 99 lands deck. Thing is cheap to make, really annoying to play against due to operations, and only way to stop it is Indestructible which can easily be countered by the effects of your hands or commander's body itself and aren't popular anyways.

 

[Doktor Best]

Its fun with the right kind of players and its absolute agony to play with people who construct their decks with the mindset to stomp others.

Its more like a design your own boardgame type of format and goes against the principle of "competitive" mtg. Most people fail to understand that when they build competitively in edh, they start an arms race that inevitably leads to unfun games.

 

[anvi]

jk lol

 

[gatorized]

Why do you play if you don't want to win? Do you guys just like looking at the art or something? You can do that with gatherer and it's a hell of a lot cheaper

 

[anvi]

jk lol

 

[gatorized]

You can just answer without acting like a child.

 

[Circuitbreaker313]

The MTG Commander format was originally conceived as a CASUAL format.

It was intended for the wacky, expensive (mana-cost) cards, leftovers or just make some fun deck for instance tribal decks (Goblins, Elves, Pirates). Of course this creates potentially large differences in power level of decks, but the fact that you normally play with 4 people should allow for some balancing. If a player is getting ahead, the rest of the table will usually target that player. It's a bit like a board game with this layer of politics.

Unfortunately the format has been marred by the generic problems of MTG. Power creep is really causing issues with balance. Your pile of mostly leftover cards will be utterly useless in competing with a "net deck". Also despite having a larger card pool then ever before, it feels like decks are getting more and more stale due to "staples" that you have to include in your deck to remain competitive.

I'm looking to maybe start playing again in earnest - had to stop during the Covid tyranny (I refused to play with a face diaper, and definitely wasn't getting the jab to be allowed to play in my LGS) - but so far have only played two pre-releases the last few months. It takes some serious investment (money and time) to update 3+ year old decks. On the other hand the recent Lost Caverns of Ixalan pre-release was fun and I had a great time there.

 

[illuknisaa]

Commander is really the only way I play mtg so I might be a bit biased. I think edh is at it's best when you play with like minded people. Lot of the issue with power level and other nonsense. I think this is why cedh kinda works better as a format because it naturally seeks like minded people.

These days I mostly just play turbo fog. I found out that killing with creatures is the most common way people lose so being immune to combat damage is pretty good.

 

[Grunker]

Commander is the worst thing ever. It highlights every worst case scenario possible when casuals want to formalize casual formats and end up creating the worst in practice gameplay ever designed within the frame of whatever game we're talking about.

Commander:
- Is horrible to actually play
- Takes for-fucking-ever
- Is often more cutthroat than quote-unquote "spiky" formats
- Drives up prices of every card in every format whether already expensive legacy stuff or random cards that would be 1 dollar if not for Commander

I hate Commander with a passion and so should you

 

[Squidhead]

I've never played commander but if I did, it wouldn't be with randoms.

 

[MerchantKing]

Commander is cheaper to play than normal since you technically don't have spend lots of money on booster packs to get 4x of the rares you need for your deck or enough rares to trade for them. You can play with a lot more of what you have and get away with it. Plus if you play blue, you have a lot of cards that let you remove cards from your deck making the game smoother. I haven't played it for a long time since I've lost interest in MTG. I regret playing it in the first place. Maybe it's decent if you can get cards and such for free. But it's ultimately not worth playing. It's a terrible game regardless of format. None of those card games are any good and especially the trading card games are nothing but lootbox games (long before they made their way into video games). that being said, the best way to play MTG was cockatrice since it was free and I didn't have to buy any more booster packs.

- Is often more cutthroat than quote-unquote "spiky" formats

The cutthroat part is merely coming from the usual players at the card shop. These types of games tend to bring the worst out of people, goyim and jew alike.

- Drives up prices of every card in every format whether already expensive legacy stuff or random cards that would be 1 dollar if not for Commander

Legacy cards are expensive just because many of them are old and legacy players are stupid. That's a good thing for WotC. Would you be able to tell the difference between an alpha black lotus and a hypothetical perfect replica some made for maybe 15 cents in their personal printing shop? The only thing that drove up prices for non-legacy cards in response to EDH was entirely WotC deciding to make it an official format instead of leaving alone. However, many card prices were going up prior to EDH becoming official thanks to them introducing another format which the retarded players would then respond to by paying more for cardboard and ink called modern. Ultimately, the problem is the players, not the format.

 

[Dadd]

The good thing is when you play with friends who aren't gay they don't care about proxies

 

[Mr. Magniloquent]

I have since setup my own legacy group, and its much better. Usually the same 4 other regulars, but sometimes we get 8-10 people at an event.

We don't really have rules, but we all frown on cards purchased of a certain cost. We try to keep decks in the $30-50 range. It is legacy though, so whatever. I have decks I built for $25 when Lorwyn and Shadowmoor came out that are now hundreds of dollars. Some of it can't be helped.

The games are so much better. Balancing your mana curve. Improving the odds and predictability of your strategy. Making potent strategy, but robust enough to play against most any deck. Infinite nuances to wrestle with to make not just The Ultimate Deck, but to win with style.

All of that is lost in Commander. Get some OP commander. Crutch on it. Random walk 99 cards. Wait for the end.

 

[luj1]

MTG used to be really great, the last expansions I played were Shards of Alara and Ravnica. After that it became trash to me

 

[Halfling Rodeo]

Why do you play if you don't want to win? Do you guys just like looking at the art or something? You can do that with gatherer and it's a hell of a lot cheaper

Winning isn't always the point. I used to have an EDH deck where it's only win condition was giving raging Goblin infect and +9/+9 to get 1 lethal swing on someone. It lost to any form of removal and couldn't do much but tutor up it's "combo" and ramp into enough mana to use it. It was never designed to win a game, it was designed to play a janky 4 card combo and kill someone with a 1/1 haste goblin. When it happened everyone laughed at how dumb it was. When it failed everyone laughed at how dumb it was. I wasn't playing to win, I was playing to do something novel/interesting.

MTG used to be really great, the last expansions I played were Shards of Alara and Ravnica. After that it became trash to me

We were probably playing around the same time. EDH died when Wizard started to support it directly. The commander decks were broken as fuck and giving everyone access to mana rocks like Sol ring made the format degenerate as hell. Fast mana was always a problem but generally was kept in check by lack of availability. No one was putting the power 9 in their deck. Once official support happened and cards were designed for EDH rather than discovered it all went to shit.

 

[Dadd]

The gay passive-aggressive "I wanna win but not really and I don't wanna win too much" attitude espoused by EDH players is the main reason to stay away from this absolutely embarrassing format. If you want to enable janky combos, then you should try to design the format's rules in a way that those combos are competitive or at least formidable, rather than encourage players to try to win less.

 

[anvi]

Playing to win is fine the problem is it ruins this game. The cards are too overpowered, the HP pool is too low, designed when a big card was a 4/4 angel with no abilities, not this retarded age of Eldrazi and stuff. And the best part of the game by far, is just playing it and noticing interesting cards and then thinking up your own deck ideas. It's the main skill in the game and takes a long time to get good at. Learning how to play the cards is important too but far less interesting, far more railroaded by rng. If you play with casual players trying stuff out, you get interesting games. People who play netdecks, the problem isn't that they want to win, the problem is that they skip the best part of the game completely, and then screw everyone who plays against them. It wouldn't matter as much if people picked decks that they thought might be fun to play, but they just pick tournament winning decks. When everyone is only playing to win in 2 turns without their opponent even doing anything, then you may as well just play dice. Anyone who knows the game but doesn't understand this is fucking braindead.

 

[Halfling Rodeo]

Playing to win is fine the problem is it ruins this game. The cards are too overpowered, the HP pool is too low, designed when a big card was a 4/4 angel with no abilities, not this retarded age of Eldrazi and stuff. And the best part of the game by far, is just playing it and noticing interesting cards and then thinking up your own deck ideas. It's the main skill in the game and takes a long time to get good at. Learning how to play the cards is important too but far less interesting, far more railroaded by rng. If you play with casual players trying stuff out, you get interesting games. People who play netdecks, the problem isn't that they want to win, the problem is that they skip the best part of the game completely, and then screw everyone who plays against them. It wouldn't matter as much if people picked decks that they thought might be fun to play, but they just pick tournament winning decks. When everyone is only playing to win in 2 turns without their opponent even doing anything, then you may as well just play dice. Anyone who knows the game but doesn't understand this is fucking braindead.

I blame weebs for this. Japanese TCGs are played Best of 1 and they love power crept insta win combo decks because of it. The influence has leaked into a lot of other card games and now we have the shit show of "exciting" card design which just speeds the game up into wombo combos.

 

[Dadd]

Wombo combos in MTG have been popular since 20+ years ago. Tinker + artifact, Time Vault + Voltaic Key, Illusions of Grandeur + Donate, etc. The worst change to MTG card design recently is WotC trying to turn MTG into a quasi-board game by giving permanents excessively powerful effects while lowering their costs, and printing creature-supporting cards that are too powerful for their costs. Recent printings like Urza's Saga are idiotic and exacerbate the problem with combo decks, but I don't see why weebs are to blame for this continuation of an old card design approach.