How Commander Changes The Strategy Of Magic The Gathering 

You guys aren't negative on commander at all. You're consistently highly negative on four-player free-for-all games of magic.

This video makes me think about the chicken and the egg situation of "Does commander have fourty life because it's a casual game or is commander a casual game because it has fourty life." You briefly touched on it but one of the reason I think commander is so appealing as a casual format is because there isn't any rush so economy is king. If economy is king, and I have the worst deck at the table, I kinda just get to do my thing. Not in the sense that I'll win, I rarely if ever win, but I get to play my spiders or whatever subpar strategy I decided to brew around.

Video request: Balancing games across factions. How do you make some factions better than your balancing reference point without trivializing that mechanic in other factions, without overpowering one faction, and without making the game feel stale?

Another day of Gavin and Forest dunking on the commander mini game, another day they are richly rewarded with appealing to my own game design baises and now they get a like :)

Ego is the games biggest problem. Peoples ability to be transparent about what they're bringing to the table. Most people now can play the game at different levels. Just hard to keep everyone on the same page.

30 lands is how you miss land drops.

I think the biggest problem is that too many people view the two games as one and the same. There's a saying that all squares are rectangles but not all rectangles are square. As a player who has never who started with edh, I quickly learned when joining competitive events that one cannot put an edh shaped peg into an mtg shaped hole.

Tldr: Punch your friends, it will make your games more fun 😂

You guys should explore Oathbreaker. It has a lot of the strengths of commander with a smaller deck size/life total. I've had a lot of fun with my Oathbreaker decks whenever I can find someone to play with me lol

A lot of casual players ive played with and witnessed playing seem to believe that commander games need to be a 4 player economy match, and anyone bringing a strategy that is not a long term economy, non-interactive deck will receive complaints from others for various reasons such as: their deck wins too quickly or out of nowhere, it touches the opponents stuff at all/too much, or it doesnt "let their deck do its thing" as if everyones deck should always fulfill its intended strategy every game or something. Id try to simplify it to cEDHs term of "midrange hell" but the term midrange typically implies the inclusion of removal, which many casual players whine about.

So I've never really liked this approach to discussing commander as a format, as if cedh is the final goal and everyone playing "casual" is either less legitimate for discussion or somehow missing something. The way I've found to view it in a way that makes it make sense that it's so popular and enduring is you are not really playing magic by even the rules of commander at all most of the time. You are, in a similar way to dnd, working as a group of 4 game designers, each with an audience of 3. That's why most people play in pods with friends, the setup is so much more focused on designing a set of decks that make compelling decision trees happen, and that's why nobody really likes instant wins. Because it's not a game of using the cards available to make the best deck, it's creating a pool of decks where you can craft interesting challenges for the other people around you. I would say a pubstomper with a perfectly tuned deck played with perfect optimization of plays is bad at commander, if that makes sense.

7:00 That's actually one of the counter example, Nadu is a Rush commander 7:40 EDH and CEDH are basically not the same game. You can't talk about CEDH and say you're talking about EDH

It's funny because I recently watched a video on Commander deckbuilding and the host was essentially saying that everyone will hate you if you randomly add a 2-card combo wincon in a deck that is otherwise a 'normal' Commander deck. Basically the argument is that if your deck does janky casual stuff 90% of the time but can pull a crazy win 10% of the time, people are gonna be surprised the first time and then you become a lightning rod for interaction in every subsequent game.

This is why I feel like 30 life might be better for the format. You could maybe actually punish the ramp players with early aggro and at least get their life total low enough that it's easy to finish them off in the late game.

I think a lot of players want commander to be a place where their tier 2-3-4 strategies can have a home. fun deck concepts that are not viable in standard or Modern but they like to play. So when the people bring tier 1 decks/CEDH decks then the format just becomes wacky 4 player modern and not a game where their less powerful decks gets to try stuff.

The social expectation is stronger in MtG, but even in SC2 paratext (social media posts, commentary, etc) strategies that are textbook Rush like 12-pool, banebust or cannon rush are called Cheese. Edit : The concept of "honest gameplay" and refusing interaction is a bit opposite, though. What do you mean I don't want to measure my micro/macro skills against my opponent if I'm playing to win and I know they're better.

I'm a simple guy. I see someone talk shit about commander, I click.

Great point about high level decks having multiple archetypes but shifting between them depending on tactics and draws. I am starting to think "you need to kill 120 HP" is a little overblown though. I have a Purphuros deck and I have never, ever, needed to deal 120 damage to win. Your opponents will very reliably damage each other, at least at the LGS I play at. Even in cEDH combat damage is relevant in some games where people drew enough defense (or paid enough life to various things), part of the appeal of Tivit or Atraxa is their ability to just kill someone the old fashioned way. Look at it this way: in 2 player, if all players do a Lightning Bolt a turn, the game ends in 7 turns. In EDH, if all players do your hypothetical 'Big Lightning Bolt' a turn, the game ends in 5 turns (since everyone takes 3*3=9 a turn cycle). So it's really a meta thing, if aggressive decks are acceptable and played they help each other and become more viable vs the economy decks.

Great video! would you be able to do one on designing "powerlevel" for different audiences? Such as the difference between MH# sets and traditional standard sets and if this issue is unique to magic or if it shows up when designing other long lasting games.

I'd say the strategy circle still exists in cedh since the hyper combo decks beat the farm value decks which beat the stax decks which beat the hyper combo decks. In casual pods, stax and hyper combo are considered unfun so are basically banned which causes every deck to be economy

Love y’all’s videos, very interesting discussion. I wanted to say that thassas oracle // demonic consult is not the main wincon in CEDH, I see this complaint a lot from casual players and it shows a fundamental misunderstanding with the format. We mostly win with breach, and if there’s anything that needs a ban it’s bowmasters

My best buddy and I were just talking about this video and the way you guys approach commander, and I think he kinda hit the nail on the head. In his words, every square is a rectangle, but not every rectangle is a square. Commander is a game that uses Magic as a framework, but it simply isn't Magic. You can't really view it through the lens of the same deck archetypes and philosophies that you see in a format like Standard or modern. Aggro decks still exist, for instance, but they're not just low to the ground one drops and bolts for days, they're instead snowballs rolling downhill such as my beloved baby Anim Pakal. Control still exists, but it doesn't come in the form of one for one-ing your opponent into Oblivion, they are instead economy focused decks that are likely to build in a lot of wraths and self protection.

Would it be at all possible for y'all to make a video on Digimon? 👀I was looking back through the catalogue and ofc the second episode of the og podcast covered it as it re-released. It'd be cool to get your takes now that its been out for so long. A great vid btw, Commander always seems to cause issues and my local commander league has been a huge source of frustration for myself, other players, and organizers alike due to the competitive-casual balance.

Just today I was thinking about how multiplayer FFA is basically the same in every game and genre. This video nails that home even harder. In RTS games the cornerstone of casual games is "No Rush". Some games even have a built in timer setting to prohibit rush strategies. This effectively means economy booming and turtle strategies are king. However, the moment you get slightly higher level turtle strategy falls off leaving only econ. Turtle falls off because the econ player becomes more mobile and just has enough resources to overtakes the turtle player without fail every time, but the turtle player isn't fast enough (often times read as "good enough") to counter the rush player. So building econ then only attacking at max population cap is simply how low level players play. This is VERY similar to how commander is played. Players that don't have the experience of 60 card formats, and/or are just very casual in their play thought process lean very heavily into econ strategies. This causes the more reactive decks built to slow players down to be less effective because you often will just hold onto cards for long periods of time. For the less experienced player they might not know how to use removal and counterspells very effectively so it seems worse. A common trend I have seen is, not wanting to run removal because that takes away from the "main strategy". Essentially, I want to do more of the thing and running removal gets in the way of that. Afterall, why play removal when I can instead just run another big dumb spell? I recall introducing aggro into my playgroup and it kind of upended the group in a lot of ways. If my Rakdos Lord of Riots deck, or my Krenko deck, or my Breya combo deck, or my Henzie blitz deck, etc. pops off then the eco decks just crumble. I had never really made the association before watching this of the strategy triangle in something like MTG. It makes a lot of sense why I tend to be a very dominate player in my group, unless one of the guys we play with that runs lots of removal joins us, then I have to shift into more long game strategy and sandbag a lot in order to win. Also, it really makes me understand why I like the decks I enjoy because I am that RTS player that will rush every game until you figure out how to beat it, then we find out if you can win the long eco game (for my friends/family, the answer so far has been a resounding, no.)

Strategy circle, nuance shmuance, yeah yeah yeah you guys know what you’re talking about and we know it. Just say commander sucks more explicitly in the titles and thumbnails so I can send 20+ minute videos to people and say “see!”.

I didn't commit to the bit, but I was really tempted since all his Mana pips are hybrid to try and build my Obosh the Preypiercer EDH deck as Mono Red Burn.

Rush strategy is providing a short game experience,and Commander in it's roots is rather longplay, so i suppose it was designed for not supporting rush strategies. As I tried to do a mono-red deck with dubling..., tripling damage with Solphim, Meyhem Dominus and bunch of enchantments - it end up to have to play it as a control deck and stay alive, to the moment when you can blow everyone with one spell. So Commander as a format leads to different play style of decks we play as a two player experience.

I have a friend who plays to win with decks deliberately constructed to win fast. The rest of my pod uses precons that run pretty well. I'm playing with an adjusted precon and two somewhat decent original constructions since I had just the right cards to smooth out the fun I wanted from the decks. It's interesting to play because every game ends up being a gang up on the one "powerful" player before the rest of us have a more even playing field. It's certainly interesting, but I play Magic to see what could happen, so I like games with back and forth, with interesting decisions. I guess I prefer to be a performer rather than a victor, so I have a hard time with the idea of competitive formats. I have fun differently, and finding a balance has been important to my growth as a Magic player.

This is an interesting analysis. I had already decided on my own that "every deck needs to ramp and draw" is a problem for EDH, but I hadn't associated it with being a consequence of the lack of viable "rush" archetypes. I wonder what the solution is, or if one is even necessary?

Interestingly i'm working currently on decks reducing Ramp in casual Commander because i feel too slow. It might be of cause simply a problem of power level (that i run at casual at decks too powerful vs my decks), but i think it is not that simple, because low-cost strategies that hurt the Ramp crowd are possible. Try e.g. Board Wipe Tribal in your casual pods.

acceptable land density is a function of reliability and efficiency of card draw and expected game length. which is why cedh decks are all in the 20s.

Imodane, the pyrohammer does in fact make your lightening bolts hit all the other players.

The one who solves the "casual game" paradox, should get the game named after them. What is casual enough, while still being able to win games?

Everyone playing their own game of solitaire is exactly my problem with commander. Most people who play commander just want to take 20 minute turns making their deck "do the thing" and barely interact with other players. This is also why stax and land destruction is frowned on. This is why my favorite strategy is to play stax and chaos. Either we will truly make this a 1 player game or I will force people to interact.

I don't hear any hate in this I honestly think that more people think about stuff like this when it comes to commander games I know for me I had to learn a lot of hard lessons very early and very quickly if I wanted to even have a chance of playing let alone win

Fast mana, card advantage and mana fixing // thinning are so basic, but casuals just avoid it more so than removal. Removal they at least eventually pick up on because it happens to them. Fast mana, advantage and fixing//thinning all just increase the statistical likelihood of your decks consistency by SO FUCKING MUCH. It's been hard to straddle those concepts while staying casual and viable.

I love your videos. Keep up the excellent work. I think i find myself in some weird pods compared to the average commander player. 3 different local groups and all of them are in mid power and use all different strategies. 1 group is my family and my mom is a big proponent of a rush strategy. My brother in law loves control, my wife likes all the "mean strategies" and im a typical blue player. We never have any issues and dont find ourselves in "midrange hell" I think enough players in my groups come from 1v1 formats and have helped prevent the creation of the commander stereotypes from taking hold. Not sure if thats accurate or if im making that up 😂

"WHO THE F*** DO YOU THINK YOU ARE" is a CollegeHumor Troopers reference, isn't it?

I built a control jeskai planeswalker deck with many effects that block only attack (magus of the moat, etc). I love to see the horror in the eyes of my pod.😂

Reading the majority of comments here I see a lot of hatred for commander. I'll make sure to buy the next UB so I can keep wotc forget about other formats or even about mtg lore ❤️

I play 30-32 lands in most of my commander decks, yes I know it’s insane. My second deck had Sydri as the commander and is full of 2-3 drop mana rocks so it didn’t make sense playing heaps of lands. And now I just struggle to put more lands in a deck

new commander player, i like your videos a lot,

Ah yes, the thing that EDH players hate most: interaction and having real wincons.

I'm honestly curious about the 3 vanilla tribal cards. Can someone explain?

I think of commander as a game of munchkin, but we're using magic the gathering cards.

The math of the 120 damage to win the game is not entirely accurate if you take into account the damage your opponents will deal to each other. Also, there's a lot of powerful lifegain strategies like Soulsisters or Tokens. So, instead of 120 you would need to deal around 160 damage instead. That's why all my attack decks have either infect or a way to create multiple battle phases so I can actually kill people faster. I remember the original complaint about mass land destruction was that the game extended too much. Nowadays I feel board wipes have the same effect; so people are playing much less board wipes, which causes "Go wide" strategies to proliferate. You'll see these "army decks" ramp and go crazy unopposed. So now there's a mix of Army decks Vs Combo. And the same can be said about combo. It has flourished because people still don't play enough removal for the fear of the feel bads. So no one is doing anything 😂😂😂. I think I'm punishing both strategies and balancing my game plan with Tempo. I play Braids which speeds up the process and the way I play her is I always ramp and play "fact or fiction" type of cards so my opponents aren't scared of me. Then I'll "solve" a problem using a meteor golem against a threat and they're like: " So he just took care of a problem, that's help me develop. And then I wait for their army to grow big enough to use a Reins of power and kill them with their own cards. And the other players will say: "Oh, that's smart and they did it to themselves 😅". At that point they still don't think I'm in control, instead they'll "abuse" Braids to keep getting bombs and kill each other first. At that point I've already drawn my forces to defend myself in the ending stages, or I'll have a bounce wipe loop with archeomancer and Evacuation or something similar. The way you play is trying to use your opponents to beat eachother and then you act like the control player against the most dangerous person to gain the other players favour. Divide and conquer.

My friend group has 3 entrenched players and me. Im newer but understand the game well enough. One of the entrenched players plays ramp(dot)decks, and will usually attempt to outvalue the table before alpha striking anyone who attempted to stop them/interacted with them. They leverage small bean syndrome the entire game since "all im doing is ramping". The other plays combo, and the third is a timmy. All 3 of them are greedy and will often elect not to interact if it means they can further their own gameplan, and if they take any damage early on they complain. It's tiresome as the combat player, because no matter what im making enemies by putting creatures on the board early.

1v1 commander can be fun for the same reason that sometimes when playing Age of Empires II you want to start in the imperial age with all techs researched and tons of resources can be fun, as opposed to the standard dark age 3 villagers and a scout. But I personally am not a fan of the way four player free for all warps the game so hard.

I know you talked about Starcraft really briefly but one of the most popular casual game modes that almost rivaled 1v1 in popularity was Big Game Hunters where your resources nodes are as close as possible to your base and are effectively limitless, accelerating your economy by an insane degree and pushing everyone towards economy. Before Big Game Hunter there were lobbies where any sort of attack before 20 minutes was not allowed, or spoken agreements between friends to not attack early. It is interesting to see the same throughline in Magic, that in a self-governed casual format, players will trend towards allowing everyone to be able to "Do the thing", which seems to almost always be in the economy space.

0:12 here we go boys

I only play board wipes for my interaction. Single target removal just isnt efficient enough. If i spend my mana to remove a threat, the other players just take that as a sign to hit me because now my defenses are down. Commander rewards inaction and punishes action because going for the offensive in any capacity leaves you down for three entire turns

Video has almost nothing related to GREED though. Being greedy is not playing removal, non basic mana bases, not interacting, and relying on the multi-player aspect too much to where the deck wouldn't work in 1v1.

I haven’t watched the video yet, so I don’t know if you get into it here, but I’m curious based on other videos what you guys like about Commander deck building, because I’m exclusively a casual player, and it’s exactly the format’s deck building restrictions that kill my interest in it.

Playing economy decks is the only “fun” option in commander. Rush/combo is frowned down upon (unless cEDH) and defense Counter/Stax is also frowned down upon. Most causal pods want to have fun and to do that the expectation is that each individual will build economy states like synergistic tribes or themes and then overpower the table with value. The race then becomes value driven. If a player introduces a rush strategy to beat his friends, he starts the vicious cycle of now someone will make a counter spell deck to beat rush and soon the arms race ends with toxins turn 1-2 strategies that try to win before anyone else with free spell interaction.

Your thinking is wrong. Aggro (Rush (rock)) beats Control (Defence (scissors)) beats Economy (Combo (paper)). Problem is in commander you can't beat 3 players with a classic draw-go style control Deck.

On my view, Commander suffers from all of the usual pitfalls of asymmetric, multiplayer games (It has intractable balance issues, politicking, has elimination as well as last-one-standing, and requires meta knowledge) but is not like other games that try and, I dunno, try to do anything to at least address these problems. (And not that you necessarily need to. Sometimes you want to play an unbalanced, eliminative, meta-based game, which I frequently do, it's called Magic: The Gathering). When I don't necessarily want to do that is when more than one other competitor is involved and our interests are zero-sum (If I win, they lose and vice versa). Politics then arise where perhaps it is more beneficial to ally with one or against one player, especially in a game with an odd number of players. And it's not like politics in multiplayer games are bad either, just when they are present, usually there is some social contract codified in the rules where Commander is a purely vibes-based.

The multiplayer rules for MTG are trash.

Ermmmm it’s not turbo it’s “rush”

why do you call it rush, economy, and defense when the terms aggro, midrange, and control already exist? kept confusing me the entire video

Me: I find Commander anti-fun so I don't play it. Distraction Makers: You can't learn to properly despise Commander until you play it a lot.

As the resident sith lord bringing balance to the force (nobody ever thinks that balance means more evil), play more stax decks. The games are way different, way more interactive, sometimes more political and variant. Stax is a neglected archetype that needs more love.

Yes, you haven't done anything all game, because you build greedy decks, run 20- lands, your ramp combo commander got countered because everyone knows what it does and all your creatures are high cmc five-colors Goodstuff. No, i will not have mercy and wait for you to combo off.

The immediate surface level thought is maybe the issue is with commander's objective. Expecting players to plow through 120 life is not what most cards are desinged to do. Maybe a system where players earn points equal to the amount of damage they deal to a player, and the first to 20 or 40 points wins? Kinda lorcana system. It would certainly change everyone's strategy.

Edh is a strange montage. Typically, if you just want to win, play combo/economy. This is Cedh, more or less. The real dilemma for me comes in how average players define "casual" For example, I don't want to see cyclonic rifts, excessive low cost tutoring, fast mana rocks (mana crypt, mana vault etc), rhystic study, mystic remora......basically no Cedh Staple. If I see players do that, I will simply play my Cedh deck, and I think that is perfectly fair. SO many players I have played with jam Cedh staples in their half-assed, or pre-con decks just because they want power to dominate games. That, to me is cheesy because they can't or aren't willing to play the game on a level playing field, they have to have the advantage at all costs because they aren't good at magic. But, alas, so many players will play whatever they have, with no regard for their play mates time or effort, and because of that Edh becomes and arms race.

I own 3 cedh decks and 5 edh decks, it's hard to build a deck to play with strangers outside of cedh because honestly most decks are "power level 5" rather than the magic "7" everyone talks about. If cedh decks are 9-10 most people can't build a 6. It's plain to see that hitting land drops and drawing cards wins commander games so the format tends towards economy strategies and rush/defence (combo and stax) are frowned upon as "unfun". Personally i include at least one 3+ card infinite combo in all my decks just to end games, i don't always execute the combo if i draw it on turn 3 but i judge my power based on the consistancy of the deck getting to it's win via tutors and card draw. In this world of printed for commamder sets and hurt feelings everyone should pack some removal and stax so people can get used to playing magic, then we can start printing 1 mana enchantments with "cumulitive upkeep - each opponent loses 3 life" so true rush strategies outside of combo can be viable. The multiplayer nature of the format can be seen having an impact even on CEDH decks, you cannot police the entire table and often the 2nd win attempt is the successful one.

A lot of Commander's problems would be mitigated or outright solved with a lower starting life total, perhaps 30 or so. The RC will never do it because they lack the cajones, but if you list the stuff people typically complain about the connection is pretty clear: 1. Boros colors too weak because they (mostly) suck at doing anything but aggression? Not an issue with a lower starting life total. 2. Simic/Sultai too strong? Ramping and drawing all the cards can't be 90% of your gameplan with 10 less life. 3. Ridiculous cards like Sway of the Stars and Coalition Victory are on the banlist when they shouldn't be? When you start with 30 life 8+ mana sorceries with extra setup required aren't as viable and would definitely come off the banlist. 4. A salty player whines about an overloaded Cyclonic Rift? Getting to 7 mana with less life isn't as easy and feels like more of an accomplishment, rather than a given. 5. Some commanders just keep coming back no matter how many times you kill them? A 30 life version of Commander would have less second and third casts of Commanders because it would be less ramp-heavy and the 2 mana tax would hit harder. 6. Combos make the endgame feel anticlimactic? Give players a more realistic option to kill with regular damage and you'll see less combos... The real draw of Commander to me is multiplayer + singleton with a given build-around card (your Commander). I think that's its core strength. The fact that "economy" is the dominant strategy at casual tables isn't inherent to Commander. It's mainly a consequence of 4x40 life. If somebody created a singleton 4x40 life version of Pioneer or Modern you'd find the same gravitation towards "economy" with combo win conditions at higher power tables.

I think what I'm learning here is that you two either need new friends or you are the problem in playgroups that you're a part of lol

I'm sorry but any format that requires an application for segregation i.e Commander just to play the game is fundamentally flawed. I shouldn't need a 3/4ths vote just to be able to engage with people.

Tainted pact

I put 33 lands and at most 3 mana rocks in my commanders...

commenting super early so maybe youll say smth like this after, but the problems with burn become very apparent when "every card should be the equivalent of 3 damage" suddenly becomes "every card should be the equivalent of 18 damage" in commander. Suddenly lightning bolt feels a little underwhelming.

I usually appreciate this channel, but this criticism of commander is flat out wrong. You can play aggro decks very successfully in commander, they're just typically different from your 1v1 MRA decks. For example, Raffine is a commander that can be built very aggro. It's actually mostly rushing the board with small creatures, then pumping them up with the ability, thus achieving both a go wide and a go tall effect. And there's other decks, as well. Aggro decks can very easily kick someone out by turn 4-5 if not interacted with, even outside of cEDH. Now, that's usually not the best strategy with that kind of deck, both because it's kind of a dick move to rush one player first and because it's going to turn the other two against you quickly, and because you'll want to be more resilient against board wipes etc., but it's a valid thing you can do. I think this is actually approaching the issue from the wrong side. You're trying to adapt an aggro deck as it is in 1v1 to commander, rather than looking at commander and trying to develop an aggro deck from those circumstances. The strategy circle still exists, but commander has to basically be seen as its own game, not as a sub-game of magic where the same strategies work the same way.

17:99 That is more than enough mana if you have a reasonable amount of ramp and a reasonably coated deck.

cEDH solves every commander problem. Bring your best deck. Play to win. Easy.

Commander needs to adjust life totals to 20 or 30. 40 life is unnecessary padding and drags the game out

Frankly I just don't find 1v1 magic fun

Oh I just started the video but I don't want to miss this opportunity to once again express just how.much I've grown to hate commander in the last year or so. It used to be just one of the ways of playing the game and as such I had nothing against it but not any more. People (mostly under the influence of content creators) have overhyped it to the point that many new players and apparently Wizards themselves think of it as the entirety of Magic. The fact that there are not only cards printed specifically for commander but they're growing in number with each new set is sickening. It's absolutely ridiculous that you can open a regular play booster and in the rare or.mythic slot there might be a card ONLY usable in commander. I hate how the paradigm is shifting and it's normalised to see magic as divided between 'competitive' and commander. As if commander IS all that casual Magic could ever be. Commander offers literally 0 things that were not previously available in casual Magic. This is subjective but I find commander's deck building restrictive and cumbersome. People seem to forget that while in regular kitchen table Magic (and honestly, most competitive formats) the 60 card deck minimum is often the optimal deck size, it's not forced and it's not the only option. Being able to have multiples of most cards, while not necessary, is also an option that people might choose whether or not to utilise. And finally, while multiplayer is absolutely possible, it's not forced and people may play with however many other people they choose. Commander throws that freedom out of the window by forcing singleton deck building, having a mandatory deck size of exactly 100 cards and forcing multiplayer on players. Oh, and it has a ban list (yeah I know that many people utilise rule 0 but in actual casual Magic rule 0 is the default and the only cards to avoid would be the ones the people you currently play with wouldn't wanna play against). I don't see how any of that is casual. Edit: having now watched the video, the points you're raising are completely separate from my qualms with this cursed format but still absolutely valid, giving me all the more reason to hate it with a passion.