Everything Is Commander Now 

My theory about commander decks is this: they all sell pretty well because they’re all fun and pretty strong, and it’s entirely because of the casual focus of the format. Modern/standard/regular precons aren’t competitive. Look up any of those precons, and you’ll find articles about how many cards need to be swapped before it stands a chance at your local shop. So no one buys them, because why buy a $40 deck that requires another $150 in changes before it’s worth shuffling. But with commander decks, the format is ‘let’s make decks with quirky gimmicks and interactions’, so the decks are built to be creative and fun. But they’re strong enough that you can go to the shop, buy any commander deck, and you’re gonna be on a generally level playing field against everyone else’s home builds. Commander decks are the solution to why precons suck. You aren’t buying the deck to win a tournament. You’re buying it to have fun.

Just very weird to have Modern Horizons being a made-for-modern set that is also introducing cards not made for modern and are in fact not legal in modern.

"We want to revitalize standard. Anyway, here's Commander"

19:00 I literally experienced this tonight. For clarity, I live in Dublin, the Irish capital city and my LGS is the biggest one in this city so probably also the biggest in the country. I was excited for sanctioned Standard tournaments returning and when I asked my LGS owner, he told me they are running on Tuesdays. So I showed up tonight all eager and pumped for Standard but I was the only person who signed up. There were a lot of people there for Modern and it felt oddly shameful that I was there for Standard but sitting among them, almost like it was wrong to want to play Standard. The LGS owner also told me that they may not even opt to run a Legacy European Tour event this year even though the store is in the WPN because they've been offering Standard events since the release of MKM and I was the first and only person to show interest.

As a worker at an LGS, the ending about being the change you want to see hurts even more. I've tried hard to get management to approve any sort of events that are anything but commander and fnm draft(still the best format), and it's a fool's errand. No matter what we try and fire, no one will show up. Any attempt at getting a constructed format event to be approved is met with 'I wish we could, but it's not worth taking out one of our MULTIPLE commander nights for it.' I wish I could be the change I want to see, but in this climate it just seems too unrealistic.

they could have done modern decks but we need more commander in the modern sets.

As someone who started magic 2 years ago with Neon Dynasty, I am already getting burned out on all the commander products they keep releasing every month. Yet here you are, turning a topic like this into a surprisingly earnest and optimistic message. I have to give major props to you Vince!

Remember when we would get supplemental sets like conspiracy? Those were good days

11:00 I remember reading verbatim at the start of a rules book (or at the back of a deck box) "You are a Planeswalker" on official Magic products, most likely those included in M11/M12/M13's Intro Decks or Odyssey's Expert Decks or Ravnica: City of Guilds' Golgari deck. I'm 90% sure that's an exact phrase used to start off the pitch for the game.

I love EDH. It's the only way I engage with paper Magic anymore aside from pre-releases since ~2017. However, I preferred it when Commander was not the sole focus of Hasbro, and standard sets were printed with standard in mind. It was much for fun when during previews looking for cards to slot into your current commander decks. I also looked forward to the annual Commander decks and would buy the set each year. Now I've basically tuned out all Magic releases. I still go to most pre-releases but now I still play Commander but just pick up a couple singles each release. Hasbro has over-staturated the market and people just don't have the energy to get hyped for a new set when another one will be coming out 6-8 weeks later. I realize I'm in the minority with these opinions, but I think my side is gaining people.

"I can't believe players will have missed a permanent type that's in the game and has rules." Meanwhile Battles be like.... o_O

When they say "Don't know what a planeswalker is", I think they mean what a planeswalker is in the sense of their lore. What can a planeswalker do? What are the different planes? How does it work? How do they become planeswalkers? At least, thats what makes sense to me. My dad is very much somebody like this.

It's weird how quickly wizards gave up on brawl which would have been the gateway to transforming all formats into a commander adjacent.

The funniest thing is...even most commander players i know wish the game was less about commander. Most of people around me got into it because it was a fun way to get out of standard/modern and use our pet cards. Now it slowly became a rotating format too.

I mainly play commander & pauper, but as much as I want to play Modern or Standard (which I really do), I'm priced out. I don't have 500 quid to drop on a Boros Burn deck only to get rinsed by everyone else there. Whereas I can have 5 playable commander decks for the same price from precons, and people are more chill about proxies in commander. It honestly feels like if you haven't been playing magic since like Tarkir to have the fetches, shocks and other staples ready to go, you're just SoL. The fact Rosewater even said recently they can't do a modern precon b/c "people wouldn't be able to make the price point" shows their complete unwillingness to make the hobby accessible for anyone new over money.

EDH power creep has turned it into standard where every few weeks you need to "upgrade" cards in decks lol

As a commander player i prefered it when decks were made from cards not necessarily made with commander in mind cause it was more interesting to build decks (tho that might just be nostalgia)

A local game store I stopped at a few weeks ago said they stopped doing singles in-person (only online orders) because Commander players would have them constantly look for singles of cards that didn't make them any money, like cheap commons such as Cultivate, and they said the system was too expensive to maintain. For reference, Magic wasn't the majority of their displayed inventory, most of it was general board game stuff, TTRPGs, and Warhammer as well as playmats and such.

"Be the format you want to be" That's why I started playing paper standard for the first time ever last week, where I've been a commander player for around 10 years.

I only play commander, but I really hate the commander focus. I feel like it's exacerbated and has also been negatively effected by power creep. If a legendary creature doesn't do 5 different things and have an entire game plan designed right into the card, why even use it? And when every usable commander is designed to be the center piece of a deck, it starts feeling like "ok, let's see who built the better, faster infinite value engine" or "who built their cookie cutter strategy best". Maybe people are just too competitive where I live, but any time I've commander outside my close friends, it's been the sweatiest type of players. On a side note, I really dislike how some people refer to all legendary creatures as 'commanders' and can only think of them in the context of being a deck's commander, even if they're from a non-commander set. It is very irksome. Plus, that attitude will just make things worse.

As someone who was a commander (and draft) only player before the pandemic, and is now in a post pandemic world a pioneer player primarily, I really really hate this push towards making 90% of things commander focused, it feels awful. And my lgs is at least on the lucky end, we still fire like 30 player pioneer events regularly, but we can't get people for literally anything else. Modern is like, 8 people max, and there's essentially no chance of us getting anything else.

They always do four commander precons because it is a 4 player format. They can use it in their marketing when youtubers get the decks early. Wizards shows off all four decks that way.

Commander Modern!

Bit of a fuzzy pullover you've got there Vince. That gem in a haystack metaphor is top notch

I'm aware that as someone who almost exclusively plays kitchen table commander I'm part of the problem, but standard (or type 2 if you're old enough to remember that) was Wizards answer to being able to make money without excessive power creep. Having the primary way people engage with the game being a rotating format means they can keep selling new cards without having to constantly escalate the power/complexity of those new cards. I wasn't playing at the time but I bet if you made graphs of complexity and power creep they would line up with graphs of the rise in popularity of modern and commander. The professor is right when he says that direct to modern sets are an attempt to force rotation into modern and that's because Wizards needs that "rotation" of cards in the meta to keep selling cards. And I don't really see a good solution here since a big part of the appeal of formats like commander is not having to spend as much on new cards.

As a Commander player primarily, I've been trying to get my local shop to fire anything other than Commander FNMs and random draft Tuesdays, and I'm convinced that, although I do live in a small town with a small Magic community, I'm probably the only Pioneer, Pauper, and aspiring Modern and CanLander player around. Which sucks. Because as much as I enjoy commander, I love playing other formats, especially with randos because the chances of a botched Rule 0 (or worse, not having one at all) are next to none. That being said I'd kill for Modern Challenger decks as a way to approach a format like Modern because as much as I'd love to play Living End, I don't have an extra $1500 just laying around, but I'd absolutely buy a $50-75 Challenger Deck that was Tron (minus One Rings, obvs) or similar

Just to add some commentary from the other aisle. I *do* think a refocus on commander is bad... For commander! The reason I liked the format so much in the first place was because the number of cards I had to care about each set release I could count on one hand, and buy singles which I'd only need one of even if they were pricey, so Commander along with its unique rules was also an excellent budget format. Now Wizards *designs with commander in mind* and every set I see a handful or more cards that seem precision designed to be meh in modern and limited but playable only in commander. Think Legendaries that clearly want you to play them asap and stick around or random theme support in a set that has nowhere near the cards to support that theme. This, combined with the new breakneck product release schedule, makes playing commander *expensive and exhausting* rather than cheap and relaxed!

My biggest issue as being primarilly a commander player is that the only other format I or other commander players i know engage with is Pre-release sealed, and that's not a "real" format.

Brazilian player, and must say that wotc cutting on Portuguese translation for the cards felt like a kick in the gut. It never felt like we got that much support to begin with, but now, well, we are out for ourselves.

I said this on another channel it's Commander Horizons 3. I do miss seeing stranded decks and Modern decks, all it is noting but commander decks. I miss seeing other kind of decks I just miss it.

Stumbled upon your video and just wanted to say I recently got into MTG (by buying a Warhammer Commander deck), and I don't know what a Planeswalker is. I'll go look it up now, I guess...

I played Commander for over half a decade, and I can safely say. Commander is just Legacy, but you need to draft a constitution before every game. I'm honestly disillusioned with it, because what was meant to be chaos incarnate has actually become 2 hour legacy games where everyone sits around malding. And if you don't want that? You have to have the rule 0 talk, but every time someone new joins in, or somebody's opinion changes, the whole thing happens over again. Whenever new broken cards come out, there needs to be a discussion, and that gets old quick considering the ramped up level of power creep in Magic as a whole the past few years. At this point I've started to play other games more, and when I do play magic I play party box, and cube draft. Magic has some of the best mechanics of any card game, but it's hard to enjoy them when they're smothered under 30 years of power creep, and complexity creep, and a card pool so big (27,000-ish) that it is now exceeding many people's ability to interact with it.

I remembered back around 2010-2011 I had a group of friends we would play 2HG and extended, and there would be a few of them playing commander while we played 2HG. At the time I never understood the format. The games would drag on forever, and the win conditions would take forever because in a 60-card format with multiple copies of cards you can get a win condition pretty quick. I did quit playing around 2016, and in December of 2022 I picked up commander, and I love the game.

As a brazilian, thank you for your support!

1 product I would love to see is like a yearly round up of the 4 decks that won protours, they could price it like crazy and it would still be good value, or just do it after each protour, have the deck that won be a sealed deck that you can just buy, or hell all of the top 4 or top 8 decks

I mostly play commander with my kids, 8, 10, and 12. I try to teach them about priority and the stack while we're playing. It's such a subtle but highly important aspect of the game that i find really enjoyable. I find most rules arguments can be answered by understanding priority and how the stack works. It's also a good logical thinking practice.

I remember during the Dominara Standard there was a competitive blue tempo deck with a playset of Tempest Djinn, and building it did cost less than 60€.

As an almost exclusively limited player I'm just burned out by commander. It's got the entirety of magic design caught in its gravitational field and that warps card design across the whole game. I recently saw some of the cards for a commander precon, I now know where the best card designers have been sent, they work on commander products now and limited sets get what's left. The push for every format to be this explosively powerful thing, where evey card does two or more things, generating loads of value. This has resulted in limited formats speeding up immensely because every card now needs an answer or runs away with the game, which makes land issues more pronounced and game ending more so then before. These cards are designed around commander mana bases and four player games, not a 2v2 draft games and it shows. When Khans of Tarkir came on to arena in January it was like a breath of fresh air, the contrast with Ixilan just before was huge. I think it's fine that Commander got popular but the straight jacket it has the rest of the game in is killing my interest in the game as a whole. Commander players had their format but now every format bows to Commander at the expense of its own identity.

Imagine how much easier commander would be if you could recognize your opponents' cards from across a table or webcam

I think the problem a lot of people have with commander is just that for a certain subset of people who might be interested in the magic space, commander just sticks out as a "bad" format. That isnt to say its wrong to enjoy it or that people cant enjoy it, but just to say that it has a lot of inherent flaws with the way its designed ad the social rules around itthat make it very "messy". You cant just build a commander deck that is "as powerful as possible" because you need a bunch of vintage staples so as a new person jumping into the format the financial barrier is too high (unless you want to proxy which sure, but for a CCG the answer of "just dont use real cards" is kind of unsatisfying). even if you did make a cEDH deck, most of them look very similar because in a singleton 100 card format there are a lot of combo's which make it in as auto include because they are a very low investment way to add another tutorable wincon. You dont need to add many cards to your deck to be able to win with thassa's oracle and every viable deck is in blue anyway. If you arent going to play cEDH then you have to make a decision about what "power level" you are playing at but the idea of building a deck that is intentionally just "not good" is quite antithetical to how a lot of people view magic. even people who build jankey decks like mill or who build within a constrained budget in 60 card are usually trying to build the best deck they can within those parameters. but for commander you are just going to drive yourself insane trying to do that, there will ALWAYS be upgrades that will make your deck better at the jank strategy, but the issue is that continuously including them will push your deck up in other peoples perceptions untill it is now outside of your intended power level. you never want to be looking at your deck like "i could include this flooded strand that I own, it will make my deck objectively better but the people I want to play with *might* think that it is too good", and the issue is this could happen with 10+ cards every time you want to build a new deck. its also a format where some magic archetypes that are core to the game are often unacceptable at a given table. in 60 card, its typically accepted that because you are trying to win, if you bring a draw go control deck that that is okay, but there will be many commander pods who dont appreciate you countering everything they want to play. People might also dislike you trying to win with combo, trying to win too fast, playing other disruptive or stax based strategies or any other number of things. This turns your prep for your game of magic into a negotiation. Finally, as much as people want to pretend this isnt the case, the rules of magic are just not well constructed to handle multiplayer. The best example is priority bullying. the rules just werent really built to accommodate more than two players, and there are a lot of unintended outcomes.even just at its basic level, the way that 4 40 life players pushes agro to the fringes of the meta (a core magic archetype) because "normal" ago cards havent been tuned to deal 120 ish damage fast enough. There are work arounds and builds which can put out a respectable amount of damage per turn but at its core, cards which arent high enough "card quality" for midrange decks can't make it in by being low to the ground because a red deck wins type of agro is non functional. Can a lot of this be fixed by only ever playing with a small number of people who share your conception of the game almost completely? sure. But that is a problem in and of itself. Commander almost reduces the number of people that you can play magic with because to have fun, all 4 people at the table need to be much more closely aligned than they would for a game of pioneer. Organsing a game of commander is not like organizing a game of magic. its like organizing a ttrpg oneshot.

I don't know what's gotten into me the past week or so but I can't (and honestly don't want to) stop myself from going around different MtG related videos' comment sections and sharing my thoughts on all of Magic being commander now. I never really got the appeal of commander and even though I've tried I never got into it. I've always been and probably always will be a kitchen table Magic player but I like to be up to date with anything in this game both in terms of news and in terms of.releases (of course I can't afford the latter but I buy singles and the occasional booster box and I generally like to keep my finger on the game's pulse). That said, even though I have nothing against commander as a variant of Magic and the fact that people like it (after all that's how things work when games exists for over 30 years-people improvise different ways of utilising the core rules and invent new ways of playing with them), I can't help but feel like its fast increase in popularity in recent years isn't natural and I'd go as far as to say it's parasitic to other waya of playing the game. I feel like the format was developing and growing naturally to the point where Wizards acknowledged it and started printing precons for it alongside the other precons they were printing. At that stage (roughly 10-12 years ago) people started refering to commander as 'THE casual format of magic'. The growth of this idea through word of mouth naturally led to many new players being introduced to Magic via commander and I'm willing to bet many of them either haven't played any other form of Magic because they think it's too competitive/intense or they've never actually been shown other forms of this game. Therefore, when for many new players the only way of looking at Magic is through the lens of 'commander first and everything else second' due to how they have been introduced to this otherwise incredibly open game with vast amounts of variability built in, they make purchases and most importantly, consume content based on the notion that the only thing truly worth paying attention to is commander. This creates the impression that the format is wildly popular due to the sheer amount of views and purchases but in the end what else could happen when you have a huge portion of the player base introduced to the game via commander and being convinced that everything other than commander isn't worth the effort. This is why many older players who also play commander play Magic in other ways as well. Anyway, the point of this explanation is that the feedback loop created from introducing new players via commander only leads to the MtG discourse being focused mainly on commander, which leads to much of the content both physical and online to be focuses on commander as well. Because after all that's what people want right? i don't think so. I think many people either don't know about the alternatives or have a really wrong idea of what they are due to someone not introducing them properly. This leads us to the current day where we have only commander precons being sold by Wizards and they're in every set, even fucking Modern Horizons III, a fucking set all about the fucking modern format. We have cards specifically designed for commander that don't work outside this format and can't be used anywhere else so you need to actively avoid them when building decks. We have people thinking and (and that's worse) saying that commander is the only way of playing magic casually or in multiplayer. Let's look at kitchen table magic. What does it mean? Well it can mean anything. Do you want to play a 100 card singleton deck? No problem-go ahead. However, you're not required to restrict yourself in such a way. Do you want to build a 60 card deck with up to 4 copies of each individual card? No problem as well. However, you're not limited to that as well.l you can do these things and everything in-between. You can have 1, 2, 3 or up to 4 copies of any card and that could be 4 Sol Rings which might sound OP but consider the fact that your opponents can also play anything they like and suddenly no wacky and incredibly powerful or creative build is off limits. Also. You want to play 4 people free for all multiplayer using those wacky decks? No problem. Oh, you want to play 3 vs. 3 teams or one against 3 or 4 people? No problem again. You can literally do whatever you want and you don't have to adhere to an awfully restrictive and honestly cumbersome deck building format, you don't necessarily have to deal with the personalities of multiple strangers in a pod at your LGS because you HAVE to play multiplayer and you only brought one friend. And most importantly, there is no ban list other than what you and your group agree to. After all every version of playing magic has originated from players experimenting with existing and universally available and accessible game pieces that were repurposed. Not by catering to a specific format/way of playing to the degree that it ends up occupying almost the entirety of the game. This just feels wrong.

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been playing since '94. Still never played commander.

Imagine if they sold modern challenger decks 😭

I just wanna play Vintage.

I like the new lighting PK

Seems pretty clear, especially when every set, not just the precons but the set itself, has a ton of legendry creatures that are clearly designed to be the engine piece to run a deck and have more game text than an entire law student's textbook.

Sometimes I genuinely feel like commander will outlive Magic at large in a way. Like I could almost see WotC ending the production of standard magic sets in the future in favour of producing sets of commander decks with collectors boosters. Hell, rename the whole game to commander and treat it like smash bros.. (I don't actually think they would do that, I am being a bit dramatic) We don't get standard playable precons yearly anymore, we don't get pioneer precons yearly anymore, and we've never really gotten modern accessible decks out of the box. Now we get commander decks in a set whose name is supposed to mean "the future of modern" and its just like.. I have enough commander decks, and I'd love to try modern for the cost of a precon. Too bad lol

I really don’t like commander. The thing that makes me really loathe it right now is how it has entirely consumed casual mtg. I cannot express how much this upsets me and reduces my ability to play the game as someone who’s getting back in after along time. I don’t know how common this was but when I used to play, with my group, kitchen table style magic was great and very natural to play. We could jump right into really fun matches with a deck we just built from a draft or a precon if they were new, then over time we’d upgrade it as you bought boosters or sometimes specific cards you heard about/saw, then eventually people would get to the point where they had enough cards and a good enough understanding of the game to build a deck from the cards they had collected. They weren’t competitive level or anything like that but they were really fun and interesting decks that were really solid and felt very powerful as non-tournament level veterans and downright unstoppable to our newer players lol. Theres this sentiment I see a lot now that that is what commander is for, as if you couldn’t do that before with regular mtg formats. It really rubs me the wrong way because not only is that absolutely possible to do with normal formats, but there also uses to be a space for it where there doesn’t seem to be anymore. There’s so many things like that, commander also has a reputation for being more noob friendly and the only format you can play more than 2 players. Commander is so much worse for new players it’s ridiculous, there are more systems at play and more moving pieces because of the command zone, it limits a lot of the depth of the game, and it teaches them to crutch on one card and build their whole deck around it. Not to mention the community’s weird “spirit of commander” thing discouraging oppressing the board which can mean literally anything at any given time, shackling a new player’s ability to experiment with powerful cards and interactions they want to try to whatever fits into whatever box the group they are playing with likes. And you can play multiplayer in regular mtg too, 2 headed giant is really awesome but even besides that you can absolutely free for all, it’s weird and crazy but that’s half of why you do it in the first place, that’s why people love commander so much too no? I don’t know where either of these ideas came from but how much they annoy me is exacerbated by how much commander is overshadowing casual mtg now. Also even just in a conceptual/gameplay level commander is overrated I feel I get the idea, when I was first starting magic I naturally almost came up with a very similar idea, “man wouldn’t it be cool if I could have this one card I really like as my main card that I can guarantee to have in my hand every match and then my whole deck could be built around synergies with that card”, and I imagine this is a common thought among new magic players which is why commander exists. But almost immediately I realized that this takes away a lot of the depth I love about mtg and really limits what is possible both in matches and when it comes to deck building, on top of the fact that if you want to play like that you basically can it just takes a tiny bit of extra work and isn’t exactly the same. To this day I build a lot of my decks like that, where it’s almost as if one of the cards is my commander.

Casual players not understanding the stack reminds me of this interaction "I pay 1 and sacrifice my goblin charbelcher to kill your creature" "I'll kill your charbelcher in response" "Hmm... aha, okay well in response I'll pay 1 and sacrifice my charbelcher to kill your creature" "Oh damn"

The problem is not that Commander is the focus. The problem is when they assign design teams into making Commander Decks for a direct-to-Modern set instead of making those design teams focus completely on the set so they can avoid previous mistakes like Hogaak or the Invocations. The problem is when, in every Standard set, they introduce quote-unquote "fun" new multicolored legendary cards with a wall of text that when you open one up on a Limited environment you waste time reading it fully to ultimatetly say "meh?" and pick the better uncommon or common card instead, if the time you wasted reading the card didn't manage to burn all your time for your pick, where you pick just something randomly instead. The problem is when they introduce explicitly designed multiplayer mechanics (e.g. Monarch, Initiative) that their whole focus is to solve for stallness, a problem Commander games normally have, but fail to anticipate how those mechanics may or may not affect 1-on-1 environments because "the focus is Commander", and then those mechanics start pushing those formats in ways not intended by the mechanic. The problem is that they lose focus of the design ethos of their other products when focusing on Commander on all of them.

This is just my personal anecdote but it speaks to MaRo's point about the 'kitchen table player'. I first got into Magic with a Journey into Nyx bundle my friend brought over and we'd see what sort of decks we could build from that. And for about 4 years, that was all the Magic I knew, anything that didn't come in that bundle I was completely oblivious to during that time, which included dual lands and planeswalkers.

I don't know, 25 years ago I used to play tabletop only and had a Skeleton / Delraich deck, sacing the skeletons to the delraich enter trigger, but then regening them :D

Pauper- nah Penny dreadful- perfection

I used to buy the full set of commander decks every year, when they were annual. When they started doing them every set, I stopped buying every one. I think the last full set I got was warhammer, before that, Ikoria. I almost never buy even a single deck now. Theres too many, too much to keep track of, too much money to spend. I buy singles of the cards that I want from the set (if I even know they exist, I don't follow spoilers as much, because theres too many cards and too many words on the too many cards). So yeah, I used to spend $120-140 a year on magic automatically in the commander decks, and now I don't even spend $40. Guess this is what they meant by "not every product is for everyone". I guess the precons weren't actually for me, and they fixed the issue for me.

I'm not against these being their entirely own thing released side by side with the set. What bugs me is these cards are sometimes included in the rare slot of normal play packs, and if you're not into commander, you're pulling something that has no value to you, and feels forced on you.

A big reason people would get into EDH is a non-rotating deck that is only as expensive as you let it be (kind of, but generally yes). Commander's Quarter has ton lists for cheap, or you can get a precon, or try your own $100 brew. Or if you really need to, spend $500+ on staples. And while there is the neverending debate about power level, reasonable people will adjust to each other at the table. Which can't be done in Modern without $1.000 budget.

I try to make others at my lgs play limited more, although they don't want to play sealed or draft for 2 reasons: 1. It takes quite a but of time(which is reasonable, although we could organise some small limited event) 2. They would have to spend even more money(which is also reasonable, but you're buying packs anyway, instead of buying packs just to open them, you could buy packs to play with them) My solution? Pack Wars. It takes less than 20 minutes and is affordable. For those who don't know: pack wars is a thing where each player gets 1 draft booster, shuffles it with 15 basic lands(3 of each) and plays a regular match with it. You can't look at the cards when you open them and you can't take muligans. It's really fun.

I think part of people only engaging with MTG via Commander/EDH has to be just the state of the world and cost of living in addition to the cost of the game. Lots of people don't have a lot of time showing up consistently to any hobbies or if they have time, it's for one at most to take seriously. EDH can be engaged with intermittently with low stakes. Whereas if you want to be good at Modern, you probably need to show up and play consistently and you need other people play with. You also need to actually spend the money to play competitive sanctioned formats like modern or legacy. Money is less required for casual EDH play on the other hand. A lot of people are just scraping by and don't have a lot of time so being able to drop in with minimal consistency or money investment for games of EDH is a lot easier than buying into a good modern deck and showing up consistently.

Commander is a singleton, 4-player free for all format with a guaranteed 'cool' card available to every player (and being open info to each other player) that inherently puts restrictions on deckbuilding options. That 'fixes' so many things about Magic that are irrelevant or even ideal for competitive play, but that are a net negative for casual play and particularly are a deterrent for new players. Finding ways to guide players from Commander to non-singleton formats, now that seems like a path forward... and maybe (or maybe not) that includes a Modern set coming with Commander decks.

As someone who plays mostly commander, I’d be really interested in a pre constructed standard, pioneer or modern deck 🤷

I primarily play commander in even I was upset that monitor Horizons 3 did not get Challenger decks

A quick comment about the "there are players out there that don't know what a planes walker is." When I learned magic, the game was between two powerful wizards. (not planes walkers. That term came later.) When I left the game for awhile as the first Ravnica sets were released, I still hadn't heard anything about the change to the meta story that changed it from wizards to Planes walkers. Also, no planes walkers had been released yet. (Although they had shown up enough in the novels that I was aware of what they were and that they existed.) When I came back to the game some time later, I was confused by the planes walker cards. I had a hard time learning the rules related to them and generally avoided playing with them as a result. I have since gotten more information about them and how they play. And yes, it would surprise me if there are many players today that actively play that don't know. But I am sure there are many that used to play and have no idea.

The problem with Modern is price. The after market price of a Modern precon at the same power level as the Veloci-ramp-tor precon would be $500USD minimum. The Commander precons typically have around a 2:1 to 3:1 ratio of after market price. Splitting the difference at 2.5:1 a Modern precon would start at $200 USD. That price differential exists to keep card prices inflated, because no one who put 4 $90 Sheoldreds in their deck wants to see a new deck with 4 of them in it selling for $200 dropping the price of the card to $30 or lower.

As a new player who joined with LotR, I really fucking wish they would do some modern, standard, and even other precinstructed sets to help new players learn those formats.

We've tried to engage with our local store, and they've tried multiple times to get Standard, Pioneer and Draft events onto their calendar. Heck, we even tried Modern. But to no avail. The only things that get any traction are the Tuesday Commander night, or pre-releases. They don't even run FNM any more because of being burnt too many times trying to get competitive formats going, and they're classed as a Premium Store by Wizards!

To expand upon your point: Commander brought scooze to old formats and it was fine. 1 new card from 4 precons doesnt ruin eternal stuff, modern rotations does.

Man this video slaps, your arguments are always so well-crafted. Incredibly insightful stuff, thanks Vince

Our LGS is commander only basically. We made pioneer decks and started playing. Only a few people would be there each week so the store "stopped" it. They never advertised except on the wizards site/app. We've asked for any other format but commander is supreme. I personally am just looking to change it up here and there but we have 3 days a week where commander is run now.

I know this old guy he was in magic back in the day, vintage but came back because of commander. He missed out on what a battle/invasion card is. Nice guy

I only knew what planeswalkers were when I started because I started with Ravnica Vraska precon deck. Wouldn't have known about sagas if I hadn't gotten one from some starter land box. And I only played for two expansions and never knew about the stack until I started watching Magic videos on youtube this year. And I still don't know what battles are.

I like his warhammer/magic story. I watched some guys I worked with play magic and they thought the could use there creatures to attack there opponents creatures directly. It was funny and when I tried to verify they said this was how they played for years😂

They should make a Commander variant where each player has a 6p card deck and you can have 4 of each card and its 1v1.

Commander also naturally enforces and encourages the collectible side of the game. If you're going to lean into the collectors market with all the special-full-extended-limited-crossover-foil-borderless-etc cards, it's only natural to heavily promote a singleton format that encourages people to chase a copy of cool versions of their favorite cards. From a business standpoint the model is a no brainer.

They could've made a Commander deck that's also legal in Modern.

Kitchen table player here. I vaguely know what the stack is. I definitely know what a plsneswalker is, and I love the pre con decks. Building a deck one card at a time is too much for me

I wouldn't say 4 commander decks per set is an arbitrary number, pods are typically 4 players. Making 4 decks lets the pod each play a different deck. This also works great for RU-vidrs and Streamers to promote the set of decks by just playing each one.

modern horizons 3 commander decks, I genuinely think I'm gonna hang myself

I was a competitive player years and years ago (not like professional, but I took it seriously). I gave that up because of the cost, stress, and time investment. I swore I was finished with Magic. Just this past year my friends finally talked me into giving Commander a shot and I've had an absolute blast with it.

Thank you for reporting on the end of the Portuguese print. I learned something.

The local gamestore I frequent has completely stopped buying and selling magic singles. They blame commander. Nobody is buying play sets of cards and they can't compete with the online market. However, they get a TON of commander players. It feels strange to me that, despite massive turnout, they can't move singles, just the occasional lose pack. This is common theme for many smaller LGS. Unfortunately, I can't justify ordering booster boxes from ANY LGS in my area when they often charge 20% to 60% more than the online market. I don't mind paying a little more for convenience and instant gratification and the good feeling from supporting the place I play at, but these mark ups are unsustainable. Mtg is sadly very unfriendly to LGS. At my favorite LGS, they converted all their shelf space for singles to pokemon, which has a MUCH stronger collector market.

I just hate that there is product with Modern in the name that I am not allowed to play the cards from in Modern. I already checked out of watching standard set releases for modern cards as a large proportion of the time that I saw something that seemed like it might be playable, it was actually from the adjacent commander product. But Modern Horizons was the refuge, the kind of set I could actually pay attention to and clearly know that it was cards for modern. Having to ask for every card thats spoiled "oh wait, am I actually allowed to get excited about this card for the format I care about?" is exhausting.

I think prize support given FREE to stores for non-commander tournaments is key. Get people excited to compete, get them in stores and have them feel happy with participating. Commander is fun but it’s going to not fit a lot of players so the game can’t funnel it’s formats to “make biggest number bigger” at the cost of others.

Please take a look into Sorcery: Contested Realm. Please. It is a return to form for the TCG market. It feels like vintage magic but also fresh and new as you play and learn the intricacies. The community is the best too. I promise you will love it.

I got into Magic just over a year ago, with Commander with a group of 8 friends. We meet weekly and play Commander and it's fun! That said, I want to try out different formats, specifically limited formats like Draft or even cubes, but none of my friends seem interested in it, at all. I've tried floating the idea around, even suggesting Pauper, but it's not really interesting to them. There's also no other community of Magic players in my area, not even an LGS, we all order our cards online. It's rough, but there's not a ton I can really do about it, I guess.

We made a playgroup with friends that we introduced to Magic. I confirm they don't know what a planeswalker is.

Finally, something that gives alittle focus to Commander! 😅

I swapped from competitive magic to competitive 40k (in fact have played you!). I still have a couple of edh decks but i spend about £20 on yearly total. Magic isnt really for me anymore but i have good memories of GP weekends.

My LGS's have started running standard events and they have been well recieved. Pioneer, modern and Pauper also have regular slots. They are also running other events like team trio and 2 headed giant events. These are all well received.

Im a rollercoaster of magic participation before I became enfranchised around 2013. Before that time I can appreciate Mark's claim about casual players. Some of the examples are extremes but there are definitely complete dissociations from the online community, casual me didnt know what a PW was until another casual in my playgroup sleeved one up, I didnt know any content creators or drama, I wasnt even on twitter at that time. I learned the rules proper in 2012 when a group of my friends were all getting into it, and even then some things just take time to master, we also did not comprehend the secondary market, what made cards good or why on earth some had certain price points... The friends I used to play with but didnt continue still have sketchy comprehension of the rules (I recently had a conversation where one explained to me that they hated the stack mechanic because it made no sense, then proceeded to explain a series of illegal game actions to me about it). This is a very real player who will spend $100 - 200 in their lifetime on magic product, then shelf it with the rest of their spontaneous game purchases. Casuals who just never engaged and appreciate the couple of game nights they have with friends playing it are valid and have an overall positive experience with the game, and often speak well of it and convince other people to try it. The enfranchised commander player is just this experience stretched out over time. If you want to engage with magic positively, I'm convinced this is the most sustainable way to do so for most people, and wotc is capitalizing on it.

My only gripe with Commander products is that it is accelerating power creep. Now everything needs 5 abilities, a full text box, has to be good early and late game. Apparently others love it. But I’m still a 1vs1 player where early active plays matter, and games are quick, bloody, and brutal. Not just hide behind a high life total and ramp ramp ramp until play bombs.

I like the lighting man!

I completely agree with your opinion ond dropping the additional languages. I'm from Brazil but live in Canada for a long time, I started playing magic im the early 2000s, and initially my first cards were translated to portuguese, it made it so much more acessible and easier to understand the game. Once me a my group had more experience and learned playing with the translated cards, we then started getting cards in English and that helped a lot in learning a new language. At least people will have the exinting printed cards, but it's a shame they will stop translating for the new players.

There is a giant body of kitchen table players. A silent majority. They play on lunchroom tables though too and they play 60ish card essentially vintage/legacy with no rules lol. They know what a planeswalker is and I assure you they dont need commander precons. Probably they need standard tbh.

I started playing six years ago. About five years ago I discovered one of my friends played as well and none of us have told the other. Of course we played a game and when I played a Planeswalker he asked me what it was. Even tho he's been playing for years with his friends at school and even had a Planeswalker he just thought it was some kind of a promotional card so some kitchen table players actually don't know what a Planeswalker is.

They are not even hiding it anymore

I almost feel bad for fitting the stereotype of a commander player, but I can't deny it. I played kitchen table magic as a teen with someone's old collection my parents bought me, and now as an adult, I've gotten back into the game specifically because of commander, because that seemed like a cool and interesting format. I only have commander decks, and I feel like I just couldn't keep up in other formats. I find commander to be a great experience, but I don't want WotC to sour people on the format by overfocusing on it. It's tough I will say for precons though, the commander ones are a lot better than precons for other formats. They usually have cool cards and do fun things, and upgrading them feels like a fun way to personalize them rather than a necessity to make them tournament viable

Our young adult group loves commander, but we have been doing limited drafts from older sets. Not only to change things up, but to get some cards in new players hands as they start deckbuilding.

Edh is the best for new players, budget players, and casual players. 60 card formats (minus pauper) require too much money, vast knowledge of the card pool for the format, deck building skill & ratios, and are extremely sweaty/competitive. Edh precons are $20-$50 on average, are pre built, is casual format where winning isn’t the focus, and you have 3 ppl to help you with game mechanics. No entry fees, no prizes, just buy a precon and enjoy mtg. That is why precons are essential and are the cheapest sealed product & entry for mtg in general.

Our LGS used to run Modern weekly. The local meta stagnated with the same players winning every week. Many of the regulars soured on it. We get reasonable numbers with Commander, but some of the modern players haven't come back.