Commander Can’t Be Magic: the Gathering’s Premier Format | Commander Clash Podcast 84 

Tomer dropping the F-bomb is definitely the highlight of this video.

I can’t believe how much i want Phil’s idea about a set story campaign on arena. Wizards please!

Commander not rotating is part of the reason of success of the format... myself I don't play standard because of rotation, get to use a deck once and its done. Commander is what you put into it... I think being able to pick up a preconstructed deck for 25 is prefect way to get them into the format. To be honest if your just getting into the game get a couple Jump/Start packs, they will teach you how to play magic generally. I think that commander can be focus but there does have to be another format to support the game. As for edhrec killing the format, no it up to person building the deck. It was always problem with net decking, does it make it easier to build decks yes. But that is benefit from today, all the infromation is at your finger tips. Standard was in a bad place, but I think not having pros playing (like gps) put it mostly in the grave and covid pushed it the rest of the way by not having tournements. Commander shined because you could take the cards that you have laying around and play via webcam. standard cant have that effect due to rotating out.

Idk how long Richard is gonna be back on the pod but I can't get enough of it

MTGA single player mode that exposes a story is such a good idea! Mind blown! I recently read the storyline for Tezzeret on a Wiki, which was over multiple blocks, but was very cool. Even the story of Dominaria United, the Brothers War, and All Will Be One are interesting, but I have to care to dig around to know more. It's such a missed opportunity that would get myself more invested in the cards and characters of a point in Magic's history. Seriously, such a good idea lol

I’ve just started listening. It’s funny to hear Richard talk about needing to play commander staples. He’s the guy who plays skeletons, birds, etc… when I play at my LGS many decks lack commander staples.

Richard described me perfectly. I woke up one day and just couldn't give myself a good reason for having spent a few grand on cardboard. I've spent the last few months selling everything worth more than £1. Pretty much done now, and I'll be making a pretty huge order to MPC this month to replace my 8 EDH decks.

i just started playing magic maybe 2 months ago and if it wasn't for commander I probably would have never played at all. what ive learnt for it so far is that its extremally diverse, i can play at a table where everyone has crazy strong decks and feel competitive or ill go over to a friends grab some drinks and we can play all night long with all different decks and someone new wins every time. the second part i love is precons i love buying a new precons playing it and getting a feel for it, then weeks later budget upgrade it and it feels brand new. also the fact you can play 3 games of the same deck and have those games feel completely different is amazing. commander might be the most fun card game ive ever played and i hope it continues to thrive. to the point standard is easier than commander maybe but the experince of standard feels so much worse when you see the same cards being played over and over getting slaped by the same combos is not fun for a new player.

The thing that drew me to commander originally was the singleton aspect and the diversity of the format. I only had to buy a single copy of a card instead of a 4x staple. I do feel like over the last couple years I see many more staples than I used to. It has made some games feel same-y as the same staples appear over and over while I feel like I used to see more variance among playing with random pods.

I wish draft was the premier multiplayer format again, much better way to onboard players and still a way to do stuff with a lot of friends

Great video, loved the discussion. I felt represented and satisfied as a strictly spike pauper player.

commander is an enthusiast format, so you can't learn the game with it. 60 card formats at least revolve around a small enough card pool (either from rotation or metagame), that new players can at least get a hold of how to play around the game pieces you're expected to see. Commander has so many moving pieces with different mechanics that nobody but studied magic enthusiasts can really understand what's going on, what to look out for while playing, and how to play around it.

EDH is on rails now. I think that the best versions of the format are budget builds with each deck having the same monetary value.

I was largely onboarded to Magic via Commander, and even though I had kitchen table YuGiOh experience, I treat Magic is my first real trading card game. I remember playing my first couple commander game and being completely overwhelmed by the board state, not to mention even knowing the different cards. Just having to keep track of THREE other board states made my head spin. I jumped into Arena after being frustrated by tabletop and that's where I really learned to play Magic and where started following different creators. After all that I can now really appreciate commander and I don't really touch arena anymore since it's so expensive.. All that to say, no everyone is gonna stick with it like I did. I refuse to bring people into the game with commander a more people should play jumpstart.

Phil nails it 6:37. couldn't have said it better myself.

As someone who is in the middle of year 2 of playing mtg I started off learning the game via commander ( really hard to learn via commander but I learned ) and i played just commander for about 6 to 7 months And then I tried a pauper match and then I essentially just stopped playing commander all together because I can't go back to the 3 hour games and politics. I love pauper, modern and legacy now I love the speed, straight forward gameplay and not waiting 10 hours for my turn and just how intense it is

So first off, props to Seth for rememebering his conversation with my GF (we were the group you smashed with Infect first thing Sat Morning at Philly) I agree with Tomers point (rare thing that is) that casuals dictate the health of a game, if a game is inaccessible to the regular "weekend warrior", it's not gonna go far. We talk about this a lot in the CoD Fandom, the average player is just some 30+ person with a job and kids and only a few hrs to play this game and doesn't have the time and money to invest in being "sweaty" to use CoD vernacular. Commander is also appealing because for another friend of ours who was new to it, buying one card of each is easier than trying to get playsets often. But Richard does bring up that Arena is a great starting point to this and while my GF is rather new and plays only EDH in paper, I set her up on Arena first to learn the basics of the game rules. So it's a little of both While Standard where you learn to play, but Commander as a non-rotating (huge price point thing) overly casual format, is the premier format for the game

I think the future predictions entirely missed the ascendency of cube (and other kitchen table curated formats like battle box, wizard's tower, or even custom cards). Basically, I think the future of Magic is going to be, "Hey, I have a box of Magic cards. Come over and play them." And I think it will be glorious.

I feel like Seth and Richard are having a hard time understanding that Commander is vastly different than any other 1v1 format. I'm a huge introvert but I find myself smacktalking people I've never met an hour into a commander game and I'm fully comfortable with these new people. Meanwhile in 60 cards formats I'm tense and stressed and so I almost never open up and engage in banter with my enemy. Also that "must play" staple list idea is whatever you make of it. I'm brewing new weird stuff frequently and I value unique synergy cards over 95% of the just good stuff staples.

Thank you for correcting the DOTA history Phil.

This is probably my favorite episode of the podcast so far, this kind of discussion was really nice to listen to.

Limited is by far the best onboarding format with commander as your endgame. You learn one sets mechanics and then You get some cool cards that you can use to upgrade a precon.

This entire episode has resonated with me so much. - I’ve sold the majority of my collection, keeping 2 decks. - the group at my LGS is _okay_ but not great - def a few really try-hard players who ruin the experience for newer players.

I think the people who describe Commander as a board game are correct. I think that's why it's popular: people love board games and to work together with their friends. Going head to head with your friends can be a giant pain especially if one of you takes it way more seriously than the other. Also, I think the jank element still exists but not for enfranchised players. If you think commander looks cool but aren't completely bought into magic, you can just use what you have and still have that "throw the things that kind of work together" feel that is more consistent because you can always access at least one pretty good card. If you like that, you can stay there. If you don't, you can power up. Wizards can't really ruin commander because commander is already ruined: look at cedh.

the main issue i had with brawl is that the cost of cards being so high due to it being standard means that its not affordable to survive rotation also maybe rather than a yearly rotation is could be 2-3 years so that you can have a build up of cards in the pool or at least treat it like pioneer

Doesn't help that older edh decks didn't have to jam the same 10+ pushed staples for each color. And now just oopsing into a win is beyond easy to do.

When I was new at the end of 2022 to commander, I had no friends that played magic. A co worker told me about card shops and the commander format and I built 3 decks and just showed up. The first day was fantastic. The community was so welcoming. When my decks didn't function, because I was new to the format and didn't build the decks "properly", they all quickly offered me thiers to play. I didn't have sleeves, I didn't have a play mat. They didn't tease me or side eye me. They offered me to use their mats and one player about a month into me showing up weekly just bought me sleeves for my deck. Now I'm a player that has bought other new players sleeves for their first decks. The store itself gave me a playmat from there extras. They told me about other shops in the area, and a year and a half later some of my greatest friends are from these card shops. We get together for commander and other games quite often. And this happened when I was 34, so it's never too late to go make friends with people who like the same hobbies as you do.

Phil’s idea at the end sounds like so much fun!!

I can’t wait for a commander clash League game some day. With how much you all reference it ha. Really fun conversation to have over the “hot take”

I feel like a lot of the separation is because of arena. Think about it, if you want to talk to people, have a good time, etc you’ll play paper commander because that’s where the human interaction is. On arena, you can be as spiky as you want with 0 drawback. You don’t have to worry about cheating, salty/annoying opponents, or nearly as much about the price point (even for as bad as arena’s economy is).

Commander cannot be the focus of magic as long as the LGS experience remains the way it is. A lot of people need luck of the draw on being in a good area with an accessible LGS that plays the type of commander that player wants to play. There is a less unified vision of what makes a good commander game compared to any other format, largely because the goals are so different between commander and any 1 v 1 format

Phil's idea for Arena (a single player campaign mode that tells the current set's story) is amazing. I've been playing since 2003 and I don't follow the story at ALL. I mainly log into Arena for my daily/weekly wins, but getting gold or cards or packs for grinding out games against Corrupted Tamiyo sounds so fun!

The other issue is my fav formats are 1v1 formats but nobody plays them anymore so my only option to play mtg in paper is typically edh and edh isn't even my top 5 favorite formats.

I would argue sometimes it is easier to pick up commander than standard. While on paper the card pool is massive, you don't actually need to know all the cards in the format. You don't even really need to know what is in your deck, unless you are tutoring. You draw a card, read the card, and pick a couple in your hand to play, whichever is best for your current board state. In standard you need to properly metagame to win. You need to know based on the open mana what possibly threats could be fielded, and make decision what responses to hold for example.

The big problem is that all products are Commander products. So while all the products aren’t for Standard so if you primarily play Standard and they make a Modern set, you can take a break. Commander never gets a break.

This is a very good discussion. I pulled a lot of good points out of here. Great work!

I agree with Seth and Phil's early statements. I've been coming to terms with being a magic boomer playing for ~21 years and commander for ~8. It originally felt like we were making the decks out of cards not made for us, piecing together a cohesive strategy out of mismatched bits and pieces from magic's history. Ones that were either nostalgic or never had a home. But the sheer quantity of products are overwhelming, and with so many dedicated to commander the power creep is inevitable and disenfranchising. The same is true with limited to a degree, drafting sets that were made without limited in mind was fun and felt like you were getting away with something. But now every card in a pack is playable in a draft or sealed pool.

An importance of Commander is that it's the only format primarily played as semi-competitive. We've heard that the vast majority of MtG play is so-called kitchen table Magic, where power level isn't always topped out at Tier 1 or Tier 2 decks.

It is a great to see Phil on the cast again! Did Crim Sleep in again haha! I listened to his on Spotify already and it was great. If you are all are trying Cast rotations, can you let us know. Like..."Hey all we got the crew and Crim is off this week". Just something to keep us in the loop. Love the podcast and crew!

As someone who started playing Magic with Commander, in my opinion it was a lot easier to learn the game without having so many restrictions to worry about such as set rotations. Learning how mana works and how to cast spells in a 4 player format was, in my case, easier. Sure sometimes it would be overwhelming when an opponent popped off and I didn't know why or what was going on, but in those cases I almost always stopped to ask what was happening. I also wasn't worried or focused on learning every single card available because there were almost no cards not available to play(I don't count the cards outside of my budget as playable but that's another topic). My mentality was to focus on optimizing my own gameplay by playing as many games as I could with as many people as possible which would also introduce me slowly to new or cool cards that I'd never seen before. After getting my footing in Magic I started playing arena 1v1 formats and wasn't getting any satisfaction out of it(I'm not good at 1v1) so I stuck to Commander. TL;DR - I think Commander is perfectly reasonable for an entry format as long as you don't go in with the wrong mentality.

Does anyone else remember that guy who was making a Commander deck for every legendary in the game? That was like 5 years ago. I wonder where he's at with that now, after hundreds of new commanders a year?

The idea of story on arena is crazy good. They need to go back and make story content for all the previous sets that people can hop into and rewards people with cards from those old sets. Helps new players get cards and attract new players

Commander wins because of two fairly obvious reasons: 1. People want a Representative character. Not only to build around but also because it has their preferred art or ideal. It is that person at a base level. 2. Expense. It is easier to optimize and build around a representative character or theme in a singleton format. This is not possible in other formats- they dont represent you as the main character at all. Either you have the fairly expensive meta cards or you dont. If you can bear the expense you will do moderately well but- if you cant- you are screwed. There is another valid point that tomer made: wotc can make alot of mistakes with printing and powercreep in a format like commander, the magic library is quite vast and absorbent to this. The other formats are wrecked far to easily by even singular mistakes. For example- venerated rotpriest killing on turn 3 with storm effects. Trying to pull off the same trick in a pod of 4 with alot more avenues of response is much harder and more realistic. "Casual" meta doesnt seek the instant win or turn 1-5 win. This is the definition of a casual meta- I simply dont want to see you kill me right away because what is the fun in that. There is no rank to obtain, no money to be won, just friends gathering to throw down the hopefully more splashy and hilarious side of this wonderful game. I think one thing could ultimately ruin commander and it is this: Wotc making a rank system for it. Monetizing its actual power and influence. Nobody cares that they do this to products, nobody cares if a card or two gets pricey- but your average, new and older players absolutely need, want and desire a format that isnt restricted or easily broken by the profit engine that governs and is totally willing to kill happiness when it comes to a silly game. Its bad enough wotc wants data, forces and threatens it out of our lgs's on who or how many are showing up to casual play events. I do see them eyeballing this potential. And when they do try to step into it fully- they will kill it. The destroyer of dreams is greed. Greed is killing the other formats. Predictability kills the other formats. They are solvable. Cedh is solvable, out of the 40-50 players i know- only 3 of them even build for cedh. My collection has many components for cedh building but i will not build for it. I am fine with my 25% win possibility as long as i get to play, that i can be represented by my favorite game characters and that i can play unrestricted with some of the coolest, silliest, scariest, stupidest and funnest cards in the game. And im sorry- 60 card formats just dont cut it. Commander is what magic shouldve been from the start however- it wouldnt be as expansive, random, exclusive, personalized, social nor worthy had it actually been started that way which is the crux of its complexity and yet absolute desirability and playability.

this was a great episode! very interesting to get all of your opinions! thanks!

I run Baneslayer Angel in the sideboard of my Pioneer UW Control deck. I brought it out in game two of a match at my store championship a few weeks ago and my opponent freaked out. He’d never seen the card and he couldn’t believe it was real. He kept saying how busted it was and asking other players if they’d seen the card before even after the championship was over. It made me really happy to know that card could still blow someone’s mind.

Phil + Seth + Tomer - Make a video talking about Phil's idea for onboarding players on Arena, and ask for engagement! This is the best idea I have heard about Arena. Single player campaign, earned cards, and story focus would be huge! I hate that Arena is all about grind and dailies. They need to hear this!

I absolutely love Phil’s idea of making magic more accessible through online campaign via MTGA. I LOVED the Magic 2012,2013 ect games that they had for Xbox back in the day. I’ve known how to play since I was a kid. But, those games helped me get my friends into Magic who knew nothing. I think, if they had those kinds of games with the campaigns where you learn the game organically with rewards to help build deck when you get to the point of being comfortable for online play. It would help bring more people into the game as well as be a healthy way to introduce people without overwhelming them. I’d even play it, and you could do the lore for the sets through the campaign story and bring a whole new aspect to players new and old.

My group's reason for hopping into commander was the price. It's soooo much lighter on the wallet to buy one good card and proxy or swap it into all our other decks as opposed to buying a full play set of urza's sagas or another expensive card. What sucks now is Wizard's pushing insanely powerful commander cards that are going upwards of $50. It was nice being able to just go to a pre-release, crack the kit, and try to build a deck or two out of the cards I pulled. With the influx of cards printed specifically for the format, the power of a random person's deck has really started to increase. That changes the whole feeling of the game when playing at a local LGS

Tomer, I also ran heartless, havengul, perilous. You lost a lot to delver, but man when it was on, it was unbeatable. I added green for thragtusk, which made for a pretty good 3 drop and bounce punish. Good times, thanks for the reminder

I love the low queue on spell table. Decks run minimal staples and no infinite combos. There’s plenty of new cards to play and breathing room for jankier strategies. Apart from that I loved Phil’s ideas to improve single player support on Arena. I would love an Arcane style show but I have no confidence that could happen.

i think one thing you guys missed is that Jumpstart is perhaps the easiest newbie way to play magic because it removes deckbuilding skill from the equation even more so than sealed/prereleases, and can thus be even more balanced and simple. So I would make Jumpstart a yearly release. Themes would be tied to specific planes and be a way to check in on everywhere story-wise. I also do not like the current distribution of the jumpstart packs in boxes with some packs being far more common than others. I would design boxes so you are guaranteed not to get any repeat packs in a box. I would also jazz up prereleases as they seem to be one of the most beloved formats. I think the kits could use some cooler swag than just a die. I think the latest sets of Ravnica with their guild packs with special set symbol cards were really cool and should be the new sort of standard level of quality for those. I would justify the increased costs of product with increased print quality. Get everyone to shut up about curled foils and the like. Also every serialized card would go through an in-person inspection/grading before being packaged. If magic has the most expensive cards then they should also be the best cards. I would decrease card varieties but probably not as much as some people want. I think they're a good idea. But they should fit the cards to some level. They should also be meaningfully different. The foil and textured foil DMU stained glass cards were hard to sort out from each other. We want people who buy craploads of product to be happy with it. When designing for commander to avoid power creep I would try to focus on cards that open up less supported strategies like the tier C tribes that don't quite have enough support for a real deck, and other janky strategies like equipment that people like disproportionately to how strong they are. I would also try to add some cards that can bring down the level of the stronger new strategies and cards like treasures, without just also being power creep. things like putting "players can't create more than one token each turn" on a modal removal spell or something. has to be on a card people will actually use, which is where the balancing comes in. I wouldn't stop secret lairs, I would just want to make them thematically stronger. Base rule of thumb would be they could reasonably fit into the same deck. They've gotten a bit better with this lately. I would make sure the commander precons are great out of the box. Some are okay ut some are seriously yikes. If these are one of the main onboarding products for MTG, it can't be something people regret buying and get told 'oh that's a precon. it sucks real bad.' I know they do leave room for improvement in those as a way to encourage people to start buying more cards but I think the initial power level can be higher especially with the lands. good luck finding a brand new player excited to work on their mana base. they'll be happy to spend money on a crazy dragon or whatever but feeling hamstrung by not having spent hundreds of dollars on lands is not an exciting thing to feel. when new sets are being spoiled i would control the process so that the cards are revealed in story order. like that prof's video where he talks about, imagine if the last few cards we saw for Neon Dynasty were the run of cards that included Jin-Gitaxias, Tamiyo's Compleation, and Tamiyo, Compleated Sage. People can't get interested in the story of Magic if they can play the set and read every card and still not even know what the story is. Revealing the set in order with context would help a lot especially with a quick video released on the last day of spoiler season. I also like Phil's idea of a single player arena campaign for each set. Speaking of what Riot did with Arcane, they didn't just hire a studio and say hey make a good show thanks. My understanding is they worked to help build that studio over time starting with things like music videos for the releases of new characters and game cinematics. This helped them not just give the studio experience to make quality animation in a distinctive art style but also help Riot refine the idea of what a good League of Legends show would even be. Magic should do the same thing. They shouldn't make an MTG movie if they can't yet even make an impressive MTG short film. Some of the set trailers are cool, but they're trailers, not complete and emotionally compelling stories. I think it says a lot that there is little hype among the community for any upcoming movie if it even ends up getting made. Make an awesome short and people will change their minds. And if you can't tell people hey make us an awesome short using this story and these characters, and have it work, then it's not going to work spending twenty times as much money on a feature film or series either. But at least the risk is minimized and you get something out of it. Short fan films helped bolster the Warhammer 40k games. Moving on I would also focus more on mid-level competitive play. If the value of 'real' magic cards is that they're tournament playable, then make it so players want to play in tournaments and actually can and do. I would try to do a lot to boost the LGS scene. I agree with what Richard said about Commander, despite being a 'casual format', it's actually kinda the worst to play with strangers. So other formats being stronger helps the LGS scene. There is probably a lot more that could be done and I am sure WOTC has their reasons for not doing these things yet but that would be the main stuff I would be looking to implement.

A big thing that makes Commander great is that a lot of the time you identify or connect with your commander in a weird way. You connect more closely with the colors and you think about how everything centers around how your Commander works with your deck. It’s more like a video game than other 60 card formats

I started with commander but have switched to explorer predominantly. I really like how smoothly and quickly 60 card decks play, and don't really have a local playgroup of actual friends. Much easier to set up a 1v1 online with friends or family.

Great to hear Phils prospective since he started around the same time in commander as I did from 60 card format. I really enjoy this foursome for this podcast.

I love brewing and love people having the Options with the number of legendary creatures they print every set (although I still don't think that's exactly healthy to do every single set). I personally have 36 sleeved decks, around 8 of which are constantly being switched out and rotated, cuz I love playing all the different archetypes and having a different experience every game throughout the night. However the Only reason all of this is doable for me is because my group simply wants to play the game, and even though all of us each work 2 jobs we don't want to go broke on cardboard. So we proxy all the new stuff and if we really like a card or want a special version we'll eventually buy it for our personal collection cuz we like it but we feel Zero need to buy the precons as soon as they come out anymore. We literally proxy them, play them as is, upgrade them, slowly buy what we love from the deck then move on and either scrap the deck for the next round, or we love it and slowly finish making it real as the year goes on.

I love playing commander over 60 card formats … primarily becuz it’s a singleton format … I don’t like the fact that you can have 4 of each card it seems repetitive and limited … I could care less about staples … if I can win with cards no one uses it’s a win win for me

I've been considering this concept but not just for MTG: there's a few different axes of how a game is fun. One is the concept of participation vs. spectacle. I feel like in older days of WOTC, they weren't building for commander and it required a level of brewing and participation that isn't there when they print stuff specifically for commander and it feels more like a spectacle. This is getting at what Phil and Seth were getting at. I think one answer is that there's room for more commander formats. I've seen a ton of interest in Uncommons Only commanders as well as "Pauper Dragon Highlander" which uses any uncommon as the commander with commons in the 99. Most Rule 0 commander sessions solve this but there's a lot of energy here. Commander cubes are also growing a lot with the CMR and CLB sets.

When is Prof going to be on Commander Clash?

Great discussion, guys. Personally, I feel the primary issue that covers all of your concerns is printing too many cards too quickly. That is the process that accelerates power creep. If card printing was reduced by 30%, that will reduce power creep by 30%. It will also reduce burnout, and complexity creep. I am not advocating for going back to 4 standard sets per year, because I don't think that was enough to provide new and interesting commanders that people don't have to fight over. But multiple commander precons, 5 standard sets, modern horizons... it's impossible to keep up and it must be expensive for wizards. I want some time to enjoy my cards. This is enough of a problem that I never buy sealed anymore, because I get too many cards at once, and more will be coming in two weeks.

As a fairly new magic player (I started playing in Dominaria United) I was first playing the Pokémon TCG (in a 1v1 format), so I have a decent understanding of how tcg and card rules play out. I found Magic because it looked cool and saw people playing at my LGS, so I looked into it and saw there was Standard, that was very similar to the Pokémon format I used to play, and there was Commander, which was very unique and removed some of my biggest gripes with the 1v1 format from Pokémon, which we the games playing out the same with multiple copies of cards, tutors to fetch those cards, where the goal was to win first and that can take some of the fun out game from stress to win, and my biggest gripe was the rotating card pool. I really didn't like having to buy the newest sets to keep up with the rotations and you talked about commander feeling like that with power creep, but the main difference for me is that I have the option to play my older cards. Another thing that got me into playing commander was the Pre-cons, it was super easy to get into the format, pick up a deck already made that can get me started and I can swap cards or make new decks when I used to the format. Standard does have those pre-made decks, but once the format rotates, they are useless to me and then they go in storage or be traded for next to nothing. This is just my perspective on the issue that the Professor was talking about but I do agree that if Wizards want to have Commander be their "main format" then changes need to be made for the long term health of the game.

Richard, Seth, Tomer, Phil - the best crew. Can't wait until they are the active Commander game rotation again.

I don't think anyone is necessarily expecting wizards to make better and better cards for commander. I believe more so expecting new designs or better supporting cards for less than great archetypes. See the rat commander Phil mentioned. Baldurs Gate and All Will Be One for example are sets that have been fantastic for commander and haven't pushed another hullbreaher into the format. That same design also helps the old school players feel like their draft cards can make a decent commander deck.

Great discussion this episode

Very sobering points from Richard towards the end there, I gotta agree with him about the inevitability of the card value bubble bursting, its how these sort of purely speculative assets work out in the long term

Been building a shared deck cube (sdc). True random Timmy magic. One deck all players share, Singleton, no non utility lands. Play any card face down as a nonbasic land that has all types and produces any type of mana, colored, colorless, or snow. Choose what to keep and cast and what to turn into mana. Never get mana screwed, never get flooded. Scy to mess with your opponents draws, bounce lands to recover spells. My SDC is going somewhat for simplicity, to cater to the needs of friends of mine who stopped playing. No search cards, no dungeons, no flip cards. I'm at around 500 cards in my SDC right now and still adding a lot, real variance.

My hot take: I don't have the money to buy a standard deck each year (that will rotate), but I have enough money to buy a card here and there to build and keep improving a quite interesting Commander cube, from which I can build quite funny decks that do not stomped by the new hotness of the month.

I think the big reason people flocked to commander is it feels bad to invest into standard, then your deck rotate out, and now all the cards you invested in become (generally) worthless. I was big into War of the Spark standard, then when it rotated I swapped to commander because I had tons of cool cards that weren't good enough for Modern, but were fine in commander. It also felt better to buy cards, knowing that those cards will at least always have a home. They might get power crept, but the difference between a bad card in commander and 4 bad cards in modern is massive.

Something we have done within our group that has been super successful is we do to keep it balancd and not an arms race... We play standard but mostly we play 2 headed giant, this been the best experience because building a deck with partners in mind is different, certain cards spike in power, also when one team loses the whole table is done and you don't the "commander guilt" problem where you kill someone and they sit around for 1 - 2 hours. I would love to see more people play 2 headed, even did this during the ONE release, a 2 headed sealed again best MTG experience in a long long time.

I started out with dirddling around in 60 card formats to getting heavily into commander. But I've recently been playing Pauper to get my 1v1 fix with decks that aren't two grand. I'd highly recommed pauper to commander players looking for a 1v1 format

@49:05 Seth, I started playing 60 card, got tired of rotation then moved to Commander but now they’re doing the same with power creep so I returned to 60 card limited. I just enjoy sets as they are meant to be played and I’m ok with that.

People who go from Commander to 60-card format is usually Pauper from what I can tell. My friends and I only play commander but now we also play Pauper due to how much bulk we have.

Magic 30 was personally my breaking point for continuing to purchase cards. I'm currently only playing EDH, so I've already sold 10g of my 40g+ collection and will proxy from this point forward. It's just not a lucrative investment at the small scale.

Honestly they shouldn't design standard sets with commander in mind. Create your standard sets for standard. Commander players found cards that worked. Make two or three commander precon sets a year and thats where you focus on the commander design space.

I think Commander is a good beginner format because you can lose and have fun. I started playing at Standard FNMs and had no fun playing because I lost. I stuck around because of the community

Commander clash episode idea: only cards that were ever legal in standard can be played. (edit): Commander clash ep idea 2: Ravnica EDH! only cards from the 3 ravnica blocks can be used.

Just to clarify for Tomer: technically, DotA's predecessor did come from a StarCraft 1 map where the heroes (Kerrigan, Jim Raynor, etc.) were put into lanes to defend their towers. It wasn't popular because Starcraft 1 wasn't hero-focused (for multiplayer anyway). Warcraft 3, on the other hand, was, and so it was much easier to use existing character models and just port them to different heroes. WotC's role in Commander is analogous to if, back in the 2010s, Blizzard had actually seized on DotA 1 and made into a sort of standalone game or gave it more support.

For Phil I started as a commander player in magic origins, and the past two years I started playing standard and explorer on arena. So I’m someone who went from commander to also playing 60 card formats

It may be way late but I hear the comments about commander being multiplayer and that maybe being the best thing about it. I know that when I was starting magic I played multiplayer formats all the time utilizing 60 card decks; two-headed giant or some form of grand melee. Added players does change the game a bit but you could always change the 60 card deck requirements (standard, pioneer, modern, or more) so you can rotate things a bit that way. When it comes to Brawl a major failing there is probably the very limited card pool for your singleton decks. In terms of supporting the player base this was put out before we knew that WotC wouldn't be putting out more Challenger Decks which I believe many enjoyed as a way to get into a 60 card format. Far easier to get the taste for thing when you buy that somewhat competitive deck than it is to try building it all by yourself but where can you get them now? The last 60 card "pre-con" was basically a year ago as I post this but how many new commander pre-cons have they put out?

The social anxiety is such a good argument, even the rule zero sometimes feel like, what do they call, ableism? sometimes. And playing on mtgo is most of the time a fuking nightmare

Hot take: a combination of high frequency of set release, combined with mythic rarity making strong cards very chased and therefore expensive, mean that standard just isn't worth playing when you can play Arena for free

Hi longtime commander player. I started on commander and have been trying out multiple 60 card formats. Pioneer, pauper, and standard and have had a lot of fun with it because I am one of those people that want to have a competitive experience and commander just wasn't scratching that itch so I am in full agreement with prof. However I think the most interesting format I've tried is competitive pauper commander. The decks are like $50-$60 and you can get as competitive as you want and with the increasing power of commons you have a lot of things to work with and wizards is not printing for the format at all. I built a tatyova deck that I've been having a lot of fun with and best of all it is a brewers paradise. There are decks online if you want to pick them up but just about any commander can be viable to some degree and you can use a bunch of old limited cards and they will put in a lot of work. Something to consider and I recommend giving it a try

I started playing Magic with 60-card decks back in the day when I was a kid, but when I started going to my local LGS I discovered Elder Dragon Highlander and thought it was a fresh and interesting way to play the game and it gave me a way to use my cards that would otherwise be considered jank, or cards that perhaps were good in standard but due to rotation I no longer had a use for. As I grew into Magic as a hobby EDH became my preferred way to play the game to wind down from an FNM (our locals at the time was a very competitive environment). Flashforward through the years EDH grew in popularity and WotC decided to make it an official format and renamed it Commander as they powered out the first round of Commander precons. That was really cool to me. Further on into what is now the present I still have that competitive drive but the game as a whole has almost entirely pushed me out of competitive play. I do not enjoy playing Standard due to rotation making very expensive decks worthless after the fact. Modern is so expensive to get into its ridiculous, but I did try it. Every time I did try to build a deck however the deck I was building at the time ended up either having a card in it banned, went into obscurity due to power creep killing the deck before I could even finish building it, or went through so many different changes it's now a completely different deck after I spent so much money building the previous version. Perhaps my experience with Modern isn't the common experience for most people but it left a bad taste in my mouth. I tried playing Pioneer as well but I just didn't enjoy the environment I was playing in when I'm getting Greasefang Combo'd by turn three half the time. I WANT to be the one to go from Commander to 60-card, but it's just not the right time. The competitive formats are just too abrasive to get into for my taste. I really miss Alara block Standard. That was probably the most fun I ever had playing Magic competitively.

Ive been thinking for a mintue now that there will be an obvious deviation in the power creep that will mark an era change, and there will essentially be a form of commander that cuts off at that deviation or set that created the most egregious power creep. Whether that point has occured or not will be determined in the future.

Wc3 custom maps and games was truly peak fun i had in gaming. Didnt even play dota but the amount of variety was really neat.

Phil's idea of a campaign would be amazing. Also would be a neat way to push Brawl, because you could run 1v1 Brawl games (or multiplayer) where you play a deck based on a character and fight the big baddies. That would help Brawl for casual new players too.

great discussion but I would like to know exacly what you guys define as "staple". There are so many popular cards that are in almost every deck that can play them like counterspell or swords to plowshare but people usually don't consider them as a staple as they are cheap and accecible. Also Seth you would be suprise how many commander decks people usually have. I know several people that want to/have deck in every color combination or 10+ decks

So my biggest problem so far watching this is the assumption that everyone is going to play with all the cards. Most everyone I play with limits the cards in one way or another. If it’s irl it’s what cards you have on hand. If it’s online it’s more fun to just pick a block or whatever and only play cards from that block. If you have access to every card in existence yeah it’s going to be pretty overwhelming.

1:00:00 Yes Phil, exactly this. That could bring interest back into the story of the game. And honestly playing HearthStone adventures single player was one of the most fun I've ever had there, blizzard did such a good job on those and Arena is really losing a lot for not having that. Really seems like Arena is just Wizards wanting to gain the max they can while spending the least they can

My absolute least favorite thing about Commander is the Rules Committee huge and overwhelming focus on established groups of friends playing the format. The framing and ruleset should be designed around pickup and random groups because it is so much easier to self regulate a friend group.

I think if a singleton 1v1 format were promoted alongside commander, then players who want a more competitive environment would have an easier way to get into it and vice-versa. I've wanted to try 1v1 60 cards again for a while now and the buy-in for a decent deck has been prohibitive. I have however built a cEDH deck over the years which has quite a few cards in common with Canadian Highlander.

I play spelltable often and I struggled with the questions of casual and every deck being PL 6-8. Casual to me is playing with the intent to have fun not necessarily to win. The decline of 1v1 formats led spikes to edh and resources from command zone and edhrec streamline the process to make decks “ good” instead of fun.

They used to have something like that to teach new players. When I was brand new they had a CD that I think they gave away for free. It was seventh edition, and it basically taught you how to play and as you won games you got to add more cards to your deck . It was great and definitely what got me into magic to begin with.

Phil is killing it through out this vidwot

Commander now versus Commander then is summarized by one word: astroturfing. The original joy of commander was taking random cards and making them work, not just making decks with cards that are guaranteed to work.

To make "rotating" commander they could make a format for each major plane in magic. The card pools are everything from the sets on those planes + core sets + whatever is legal in standard. This gives them huge design space and creates multiple places where they can build out archetypes. It also wouldn't pigeon hole people into one format because people could still casually play their "kamigawa commander" deck against someone's "Dominaria commander" deck. If original commander gets out of hand people could switch over to these plane-based versions to still have their fun without so much broken stuff going on. Wizards could also put some necessary staples into standard / a "core set" to make each plane-based format have enough removal, etc.

I think Prof’s talking about RnD, and specifically Standard

I think pilander (pioneer edh) and preedh are both viable options as different versions of the commander format. One of my locals runs a pilander league and it seems to be pretty successful. I think wizards should embrace canlander as a competitive format.

Commander is a great way to bring in new players. The other players are helpful in explaining the nuances of all the ways cards interact. That said, when bringing in a new player there should be a period of easing back on all the complicated card interactions. (Including counters, tokens, emblems etc.) Start with the basics and then up the complexity later. I'm currently doing this with my playgroup. We have a new player and their partner. I built them two commander decks to play against each other, so the Nooby can learn easily. The decks use no counters. tokens or complex rules that need looking up how they work. After they've played enough for the new player to have a grasp on the basics, we'll gradually introduce the more complex abilities.

My LGS has a dedicated pioneer edh(called Pi-lander) that has a very dedicated following. They runs leagues regularly and have around 300 active discord members. Super microscopic size of players compared to what we see with commander, but people here like the restricted card pool and longer grindy games that said card pool facilitates. There’s still powerful two card combos in the format like inverter or truth plus oracle or walking ballista plus heliod. Planeswalkers are allowed as commanders with certain cards like Oko being banned. All the brawl cards are allowed as well. It’s a neat way to try something new and flex those creative deck building muscles since there’s no EDHrec data base for it to easily find the “average” build.

at 14:30 Richard is trying to explain casual, but he's describing passionate. By definition it's supposed to to be relaxed, which is how he described Commander coming off a day of grinding a PT a few minutes earlier. I think one of the keys to keeping Commander healthy is keeping it casual; i.e. relaxed!