It's fair to not like commander and its also fair to say that WOTC is pandering to commander to a massive degree. But to just shift blame to an entire format and away from the company thats making the decisions that are ruining the game. So what would your solution be?
I feel like every time he says the format is ruining the game he methodically brings it back to the company just trying to pander and charge max dollars. The blame is squarely put on wotc in this video by making the game less dynamic. While the title is kind of click baity (what else are you going to do as a content creator?) we can tell he's far more mad at the company than the actual players
@@disconsolator Based on the content of the video I would say it came across as he's half upset at the company and half upset at the FORMAT. I'm not under the illusion he's actually angry at any individual player for playing commander. Just that the format of commander itself creates an environment for WOTC to exploit.
Honestly, commander is more interesting because of what you take from standard to commander. By pandering to commander WoTC is over saturating commander as a format.
It's not commander killing Magic, it's WOTC killing Magic by overdoing commander and increasing the prices substantially. A booster box in 2015 when I started was $80-90 locally, it's about $150-160 now and that's what's killing Magic today. Thanks for listening to my TedTalk.
I absolutely agree and with the new sets being at a all time high even then its ridiculous i think the LOTR set will sell well but i think commander masters is a fail at that price point and bad too alot of stores are going to hard on CM and i think they may get burnt hard
Every single person I talk to has stopped buying sealed. Stopped months ago.. but I keep hearing the sales figures on sealed are good. Something isn't adding up. SOMEONE is sending WOTC the wrong message. Someone is happy pissing their money away. Those people are to blame as well.
Commander was never really geared to financially supporting WOTC, it was a community driven format that wizards wanted to profit from, which turned more people to commander and away from other formats, it's cannibalising the format and there are a lot of commander players that seem to share the sentiment that it won't matter as there are enough cards for them to keep playing commander, not only that they don't want to pay to play commander scoffing at $5 to sit at an LGS table for a day, it's a feedback loop. More commander products will come out to force rotation in commander, and the price and power level will continue to rise, it's just the nature of catering to a non rotating format.
Commander has ruined the true essence of the game. Thanks to you garbage commander players that can't handle 60 card decks with combos and quick mechanics in a 1v1. Commander is NOT MTG its a completely different game using MTG cards!
Those were the days. This problem really didn't start till they started "the year of commander" when they put commander products with every single set drop. I hated that decision
I totally agree, i started playing commander at the end of 2013 and yes, that time frame was the best for me. And as for now i cant say im against with an anual commander focus set, but only once a year specially for the reprints, so commander staples get under price control. And standart set back to focus on the formar, and yeah you can put "each opponent" or "your opponents" in standart/modern cars without problem because will not change non of those formats, so you can pasively support commander. But always making the focus on 1v1.
What made Commander charming and interesting was the deckbuilding challenge -- finding novel ways to use cards that weren't originally designed for a multiplayer environment where games went long enough for your strategy to really develop. That could never happen in competitive 1v1, and that bred creativity. Now that WOTC has gone overboard with designs clearly intended for commander, the decks basically build themselves, and that aspect is no longer interesting.
I’m strictly an edh player. And even I’m getting tired of all the crap they’re throwing at us. Way too many new legendary creatures. Way too many new mechanics. (Does anyone actually like Battles?) So I definitely agree with you
I actually like battles a lot. Technically, we've only seen sieges, but. They are quite fun in limited, and I think you miss out on a lot of the gun of magic by only playing one format. Play what you enjoy, but other formats allow you to explore themes and cards you don't get to play in edh.
5:05 that’s what is great about commander. I play with as many cards from pre-1997 as I can, because those are the cards I love. I played a Khabal Ghoul and a Black Vise last night and both times someone asked, “what’s that card. I’ve never seen it before!” I’m sharing my love of old school MTG.
And that is the point. Creativity and discovery is soooo important for commander. What happens when all this goes away because WOTC just prints obvious commander cards like they are doing now.
I feel like a perfect balance could be struck by slowing down commander-centric designs/sets and boosting prize support and coverage of 1on1 formats. Wizards needs to delve into their success with stamping prize cards with local store names to give average players an incentive to return to 1on1 and they just can’t do it for free anymore.
I am saying exactly this for years. Hide the formats you play from WoTc or they print master series boxes for your format and kill it! The natural and organic evolution of a format like commander is not realistic in this corporate greed environment.
I think Complexity creep has also made Commander less fun for me. Back in like 2016 2017 and before if you paid attention you could keep track of everything that was going on and all the cards on the table. But now that every card has a full text box and lots now have a backside, it's too complicated to keep good track of everything going on. This takes away alot of the strategy.
@@ryanfrieden4450 Yes but how is that the fault of a format for existing? You're negating a lot of nuance with this comment. Who's at fault then? The company making the decision or the format for existing in the first place to be focused on?
This take is extrmely accurate. You should not have been canceled for it. What you said is coming true (modern horizons 3 commander? LOL). Commander remaining as the focus of design will ultimately kill the MtG.
Exactly. I think commander is great and is a format that should exist in magic. But when this format takes over everything else and becomes THE only format to play magic. I think this is a problem.
Damn i fucking hate commander. So sick of playing games where my opponent's deck is just shit I've never seen before. I cant strategize anything in advance and every game feels like a random rng coinflip win.
I agree that WotC single minded focus on Commander is killing MtG. No doubt. However all TCGs need a multi-player format to play thier games, or they are going to fail. Commander/group play has sustained MtG through lots of lows.
94' player here. MtG is one of my favorite games. That said, I believe WotC/Hasbro jettisoned half the fun of collecting the cards in favor of higher profit margins. You cant just find cards in draft packs anymore. You need to go to Precons, Collectors packs, Secret Lairs, etched foils, serial cards, retro frames, curly foils, seasoned curly foils...The print variations are so numerous its confusing even to sellers. Thats a problem. Its a big enough problem its pushing players and collectors like myself to other games.
I like Commander as a format. It’s fun, it can be affordable (emphasis on “can be”), and I actually like how long the games can be. However, I do wish WoTC would bring back things like planeswalker decks to being back interest in Standard. 60-card-deck formats aren’t as fun because of the neglect, when all Wizards has to do is do what they were doing before and utilize all formats equally.
Yes! Balance is the key. You know what the creators of Grand Archive said? "We believe that the healthiest of TCG projects have a community consisting of 50% players, and 50% collectors" I think balance is important in every aspect. WOTC has lost a lot of this.
Ill never go back to 60 card format too pricy to buy cards at a 3x or 4x of especially mana bases. Would much rather pay a high price once than 4x. Card prices coming down on the secondary would be the only thing to bring me back to 60 card format
In every other format of Magic there is a consensus that you are trying to win and will play the most powerful individual cards/things possible. Commander is a contradiction in this sense with both the unattainability of said power and how we measure power. Lava spike instead of being 1/7 of your way to a win is now a mere 1/40 of the way there and deck building has to follow suit. Magic is also fundamentally ungathered already. When you find someone else who plays the game there is another stage of having the same format ready and commander really has many internal formats, which is the last thing we needed. But in a positive light when all of this is accounted for with a balanced pod it is one of the best experiences one could possibly have with Magic. Between the staple printing overload and proxy incentives there is room for shenanigans and skill expression, but it leaves too much up to the players in my opinion.
There's no doubt that Commander has organically risen to great heights, but there is also a huge amount of weight being added to the scale. To illustate what I mean, I'll share my experience. I've always been about Modern, Standard, and Draft, going back to Scars of Mirrodin. I took a break around Eldraine and when I came back around VOW and I was pissed when I opened Zendikar set boosters and found Comamnder-only mythics. I didn't play commander, never had. No one I knew did, either. I didn't want unplayable cards showing up in my standard boxes and packs - seemed kind of stupid to me. But now here I am all this time later, and I'm finally giving in and building commander decks. Why? Because everything is geared towards it and I can't find people playing it at LGS around me. Commander sounds cool, no doubt, but I just never preferred it. Point is I'm definitely a prime example of someone who is moving to Commander, but not because that was my first pick, but because it's quickly becomming the only show in town. But I don't think "Commander" did this itself. I think it's WotC just draining everything they can. I've heard plenty of commander players say that they don't like hwo everything is geared towards it either, and how they feel like the format is oversaturated with new cards.
I only play Modern. Why was Kamigawa Neon Dynasty such a banger set? Because it had cards for ALL formats - Standard, Pioneer, Modern, Legacy, and yes, Commander. The draft was also fun from what I've heard from drafters. Banger set. I don't understand why Wizards does not understand that having a few Modern playable cards in sets is a great thing and helps their sales. I just want to say Mark that we really don't know enough about the Lord of the Rings set yet. I'm waiting for spoilers to see if there are actually any playable cards for Modern. Right now, we don't know.
I've been feeling this for years, The only thing worse then the creep that's in the format but they are creating an artificial rotation. I dusted off my cards when i was introduced to edh when it was in its infancy and i was so excited to use all the garbage cards i had that didn't have a home. Cards get pushed out constantly and it becomes a "rat race" for the latest and greatest. Maybe the format will eventually split to "vintage edh" and "wizards commander" and there being a cut off set to be legal in vintage edh and can ignore the focus of newer cards entering the format.
Being playing only commander for more than 9 years, in the last 4 years i had bought less sealed boosters boxes/boosters (boxes only one a year just for the nostalgia and feeling). But yeah i agree absolutely, making commander as the focus on new cards, was the biggest mistake in desing way. I miss the times where the best card for commander was that crappy red mythic of every set.
Our group spread across few years ago and now we gather to play few times a year. There's six of us and the commander games we play last way too long as it's impossible to build any sort of boards. I've basically moved on from magic and playing only at those gatherings, but even then I rarely have fun and the new cards aren't helping. I'd much rather play 10+ matches of other games in the time it takes for us to finish 1 commander match.
There has certainly been a shift towards making cards tuned for commander. I don't think that changing how they make cards was a good idea, I don't think changing how they produced or sell them was a good idea either. It's in a bad and worsening spot. Whereas I've off loaded a lot of MTG for FaB, it's just doing things better!
And one of the most amazing parts of the current state of TCG world is that MTG has real competition. This can only be healthy for MTG, as they realize they are not the top dog anymore. If you want to see a company make rapid good changes, give them healthy competition.
I'm going to leave here my 2 cents. Magic is experiencing a change like no other it has gone through. People is used to 60 card decks and 1 vs 1 games with decks finely crafted to perform consistently. Commander has shattered that and people is having a blast with it, it's cheaper, it allows groups of more people to play together, it has room for weird and gimmicky decks to be played while snatching some wins with cards that haven't seen any play before. Commander is at the moment the most played format and, just like lenguage, Magic isn't something written in stone but changing with the use people give it. Commander isn't killing magic, Commander has become Magic and people gravitating to it is what is making all the other formats obsolete.
While I agree with this sentiment, I think what is missing from here is a balance. I don't think it is healthy for magic to be a one format game. I don't think magic should be 100% competitive, but that doesn't mean it should be 100% casual either. One of the reasons that Magic is superior to other cards games is that it has many formats, and I fear if that disappears, it will actually be the end for magic.
@@SolarGamesllc thats something i do agree on. Its healthy for the game to diversify to appeal to a wider audience, but i still dont think that would cause magic to die. If edh completely takes over the game, competitive edh will become the competitive way to play the game, and probably even be divided between legacy, modern and standard edh or similar. Mtg is too big to die, it will simply change, and if it dies it wont be because of edh, but because wizzards keeps making terrible choices like rising prices constantly, refusing to reprint staples (Which creates a big disparity on power level between those who are able to afford dual lands, fetches, shocks and those who dont), fatiguing people with constant releases...
@@SolarGamesllc Magic having more formats than other card games doesn't necessarily make it more superior when it only makes it more expensive due to how these cards individually influence these formats in such a way that it bleeds over to other formats. Now imagine If Modern was officially discontinued as a format by Wizards of the Coast / Hasbro and all the sudden the Secondary Market value completely tanks thus making Commander MUCH MUCH cheaper as a format. Same with Legacy and Vintage. If Wizards of the Coast / Hasbro decided to officially discontinue these formats like they did with Extended a long time ago then a lot of these old cards would be slightly cheaper to get a hold of but unfortunately won't be low enough due to the power the Reserve List has on these cards. That and you HAVE to factor in how supply and demand affects the cost of purchasing these cards especially with how much resellers have hoarded up so much sealed product over the years.
Commander really isn’t capable of a balanced sanctioned tournament scene. It’s too broken and would need a ban wave unlike any we’ve seen before to get the format even remotely close to cash support, tournament ready. Who’s gonna pay several grand for a tournament capable commander deck? That’s why legacy and vintage is a shell of its former self. No one can afford to play it. Competitive Commander has the same problem. It will never BE magic. It will either be a supplementary format focused on casual play or the death blow to the game. All the points made in the video are extremely relevant. Who’s gonna open boxes to make singles available when people inevitably walk away from commander? It Isn’t the modern players. It isn’t the standard players. Draft and sealed is on its last legs as well. Because the focus in on making commander cards. Which on a base level just messes with how literally every other format functions. It’s nearly impossible to grind out an opponent in standard anymore. Because every card does 14 things because it’s made for a 4 player format and needs to be able to perform in that environment. Commander IS killing magic. It’s just not like taking the game out back and shooting it in the head. It’s a slow death by 1000 cuts.
its true that, even formats like PEDH and Oathbreaker, (all 4 player's formats, singletones, with a commander building around) can't get any light because new commander players have zero deckbuilding interests and can't go further than a preco or a fixed-preco... And In EDH turns kinda shity when people start to do infinite mulligans and start to re-do actions that they forgot.
I agree with you in that commander is the golden child of WOTC. They really don’t care about standard or modern. 16:06 is the truth. They will always try to make more money!
You make a good point about there being dilution in the market. However , this is a trend that has continued in a cycle since the game started. Standard, Modern, the old extended , type 1 , type 2, type 1.5 and various other formats have had their own cycles or moments to shine. Right now, is commander’s turn. And when they run it in to the ground with marketing and they will; people like me will still play while we grumble about something akin to standard or Modern formats getting all the press again. I have played this game for over 23 years. I have seen the cycles go up and go down. No matter how skewed WOTC has been in their scope about what was popular, nothing has come close to killing the game of magic. And at this point, it would take a lot more than I’ve seen for me to even consider that a possibility. I respect your opinion and I appreciate your video. This was merely my opinion and what I have witnessed over a quarter of a century playing this game.
Getting back into MTG after 20 years, at the time as a teenager I didn't know anything about standard or EDH, we would just play with my friends throwing cards we liked in our decks, now I'm discovering all the overwhelming different formats, very confusing. At first I was like WTF is commander, and didn't like the idea of it, same for standard, I just wanted to play as I used to but now I've come to realize that there's no "freeform" format except if we agree on that with friends/playgroup, all formats have their restrictions but there are way too many formats to me. Then now after a few months I've started to enjoy the idea of commander, and definitely still don't like the idea of a rotating format like standard : - way too limited in terms of strategy, as having only cards from the past 2 years doesn't open up much creativity - which leads to seeing the same decks everywhere, boring - when you spend money on cards and can't use them anymore after 2 years I find it pointless and frustrating - having/needing a playset of cards you wanna play can become very costly, and boring as well if a playset is "needed" - pulling cards you wanna play that get banned is as well frustrating and boring (which is why though I belong to the ones happy that standard extends from 2 to 3 years) That led me to enjoying commander because no need of a playset, it's actually fun to build around synergies or tribes (which are both limited in a rotating format), and as you said but in a positive way : there are cards you won't draw in a game, meaning your games won't all look the same and use the same strategy and combos, so for me it allows more creativity because you're not stuck to playing the same way and getting bored with your deck. The non singleton format that seems more appropriate to me seems to be Modern, but there are things that bore me though in formats allowing playsets : people will just try to have playsets, I think it becomes boring and lots of decks end up being similar, to me I think it's cool to have a playset of a card or a couple playsets but building a deck based on playsets only doesn't sound fun to me and in the few months I've been getting back into the game I find people's creativity is often limited, when you know how big the card pool is. The best format to me would be a format that's an hybrid version of commander and freeform : being allowed to have playsets but not relying on this strategy and more building around synergies, but without bans or restrictions. Unpopular opinion but to me the Reserved List is BS, I do think some cards should hold value for collectors due to their edition but I hate the idea of "you're not rich nor born early enough to have been able to get those cards, then you don't deserve to play them". It's just cards, litterally ink on a cardboard, everyone should have the right to be happy to play any of the power nine or pull them, I'm not talking about yearly reprints but every now and then so that new players could enjoy the game as it was intended to. To me it's like if playing card editors all decided at once "we won't print jokers and aces anymore ever again". When I see people complain about Magic 30 but support the Reserved list I'm like "wtf dude ? you're saying magic 30 is for whales yet support the concept of not reprinting cards and granting new players access to them unless they're... whales ?", I find it hypocrite... Anyway, as for your analogy with punk music, as a full-time and professional musician I kinda disagree : I've always enjoyed music not because it's "cool" but because I love the music, so if something "obscure" or underground that I like becomes mainstream I'm actually happy that more people will come to enjoy it and that I can have conversations about these artists with more people rather than a niche group. I wish more people would know about artists/bands like Tigran Hamasyan, Hiatus Kaiyote, Snarky Puppy, etc... but anyway, long live music and MTG, although I do hope MTG/wotc will be lead by better people than the current greedy & cynical ones in the future...
Yeah I hate it when that happens. I'm glad my play group is cool to do some limited first before Commander, but they always want to rush the drafting to go to commander.
Wow, I got home and took time to read through a lot of the comments. I guess this what getting cancelled feels like huh (JK). I will be making a response video to this. Thanks for everyone's thoughtful replies.
I like commander better than all other formats because it's extremely unlikely to be fast, which, while playing casually, means you can play absolutely awful yet hilarious decks and at least survive long enough to sometimes get the punchline out. Magic, for me, is about playing good games with good friends. Casual Magic is about having fun with the people, not the cards. We get some pizza and some beer and go ham for the day. To one of your points, it's not rude to scoop and go to the next game at all. Scoop and go get a drink. "Can't no one compel another man to recreation, certainly not someone as ill-humored as yourself." -Buster Scruggs.
I agree that EDH is killing Magic. Commander can't be the primary focus of wizards if they want to survive long term. Standard, Pioneer, and Modern need to carry. I love commander and play it frequently. That said, i am heavy on arena play due to the lack of standard support at my LGS. Its kind of sad...they really only do commander. I really hope they change it.
Yup they did this about 13 years ago when they introduced commander/highlander/two headed giant and changed the reserved list. Why would they introduce a format and then permanently change the reserved list to what it is today? Pretty obvious why.
i stopped playing magic at 11-14 years old thats was after mirrodin besieged. 10 years l8r. Up until my return to magic, edh ( tbh i prefer over "commander"). Seemed like a really cool niche magic format id liek to get into. And when i saw all the specific commander products. I was ohhh noooooo.. lmao idk i cant explain. EDH seemed enticing being its own thing .
I used to play standard and modern, but now I only play limited and commander. What made me turn away from the traditional competitive formats is that I felt that the metagame was too narrow and doesnt have place to play wacky and suboptimal decks that play with a gimmicky idea. Having to pay a lot of money for playsets of the same cards, meanwhile in commander I only need a single copy and I can even play using proxies. And lastly I dont even need to pay to the lgs to play commander, or get on time to the lgs on a commander night, just get to the store at any point, greet everyone, find an empty table and start playin, and gettin a promo card at the end of the evening. Here on the third world countries commander is THE WAY to play magic. Greetings from a place with 110% yearly inflation.
i love building commander decks and playing commander. there are so many cards that have only seen 1 printing that we need a commander reprint set, hell even some card havent seen a good reprint like rhystic study. I love cracking collectors booster, just wish theyd get rid of foils and the standard border. i prefer extended are and showcase after that and with the price of a collectors they should have everything extended art/showcase.
This is why we need to make all supplemental sets illegal in commander. Check out the Heritage format. The heritage format does this and basically makes version of the Legacy format, minus supplemental products. Commander was meant as an alternative way to play magic. With wotc literally taking that aspect of commander away, it makes commander some other format altogether, imo. We take the format back by all agreeing not to use supplemental sets (E. G. Commander sets like precons and commander specific sets, battlebond, modern horizons etc). Every card HAS to have been in the standard format to be playable in commander, imo.
o me, the main issue comes from WotC to design almost every set with mostly Commander in mind, which affects not only other formats but Commander itself, which has become less about being creative at finding niche cards and more about getting the must-have staples designed to be optimized for the format and the wall-of-text legendary creature that autopilots the deck. Also, there is such constant release of new cards (but that's more of a wider WotC issue) that I find increasingly hard for someone who is not extremely engaged with the game to keep up. I started playing casually in the late 90s and I really enjoyed discovering Commander in the mid 2010s, but I have barely played it since the pandemic: normally, by the time one builds a deck and plays it a couple of times, it is already time to upgrade it (or essentially replace it), something for which personally I just do not have time/energy. But it WotC could simply "leave the format alone", I think it is still a quite enjoyable format, despite a couple of gameplay aspects I'm personally not to fond of (luck playing a much bigger role in the opening hand being a singleton 100 cards format, 1-2 people at the table often merely watching others playing).
I miss paper draft. Arena cross pod drafts are garbage. Draft boosters have no value now and paper drafts don't fire near me. Haven't bought any MtG this year, and I doubt that will change any time soon.
Hello, my friend! Stay a while and listen. Ah the "good old days" 🙂 There are many things hurting the game, FIRE design to me is the main culprit. I enjoyed the annual Commander boxes that we had between 2011 and 2019, some of them has solid cards, that was good to keep the game from getting stale with "we only play with cards printed at least 5 years ago". The pain came when every set had accompanying Commander products, and the focus on card design was no longer on Standard as the main thing to play but Commander - would Commander players want that card? If so, give it some more power to drive up sales even more. FIRE also got us the insanity of often now 3-6 different versions of each card in a set, Aftermath being a prime example for that crap. Perhaps I'm getting too old as well, but there were times when I could recognize Magic cards as MtG cards from a few ft away on a table when someone was playing. Now? No clue. They lack a consistent look and feel, everything is supposed to be some form of special so it's just dumb. To summarize, to me Commander to me is an okay format if you like to drag out matches for 30-90 minutes. Else, there are better formats. FIRE design should be trashed, it only gets worse. Too many reprints also kill the game. When nothing can hold value unless it is RL or some super exclusive promo version (e.g. the Japanese WAR alt arts, D&D ampersand promos to name recent) -> also bad, it just loses value to quickly. Without EV, why keep boxes. All that kills (the fun of) Magic, Commander is just a symptom.
I care about special version if they are cheaper than original, foil is garbage even for free otherwise, all those cosmetic are garbage. Commander can be cheaper than standard / normal 4 cards deck because just imagine here at canada, a sheoldred the apocalypse worth more than 100,00 $ Commander deck diversity are more fun too. It's not hard to build a deck, you just need money.
I haven't played a lot of MTG lately, but I always viewed standard as the 'gateway' into MTG, and then you'd get into other formats in time. Things like EDH/Commander were the 'other thing to do' with the cards designed for standard, and thus it feels really weird to have cards literally being made specifically for commander, which in turn feels like it's sucking the fun out of commander.
I quit commander because it wasn’t fun anymore. No One interacts. It’s all battle cruiser crap. And god help you if you decide to interact with others plans. You’ll just be painting a target on your head. Then you add in all the commanders that are made obsolete with new ones every set, needing new cards to keep each deck current and it became a nuisance to keep up with.
Been saying that for a couple years now, everything is commander focused and it’s destroying the rest of the formats, and it forces you to buy new cards every set just to keep your commander decks upgraded. Essentially creating a rotation for commander. I checked out of mtg several months ago and haven’t had a single regret. Not playing this cash grab nonsense anymore. Tired of watching my collection lose value every set because they won’t stop reprinting everything with any value.
You should check out Star wars unlimited if you haven't already. I've been on and of MTG since the early 2000s and totally agree that Hasbro is losing this in the long term. SWU felt to me like the early MTG but much modernized but yet very recognizable.
Let's say they reverse this stance and produce less Commander pre-cons and less cards aimed at Commander. That's a huge chunk of the market that will have less interest in their newer products, translating into less profit. I have my doubts the Standard or Modern players would make up the difference. The only way they will change course is if multiple Commander-centered products crash and burn!
especially with most commander players willing to just buy or print proxies. 8 competitive players spend more in a games store than 30 Commander players.
I agree with many of these points. Didn’t March of machines have a card that they didn’t let us put into our decks for the pre-release because it was for commander only? That’s a pretty bad feeling when you can’t play with the cards you open
I feel what you're saying. I'm a relative newcomer to the commander format, but even I've been witness to product saturation, power creep, and milking the teets of the cash cow. I don't think it's the format that's doing it, but rather the decisions in meeting rooms between WotC and Hasbro executives: They're exploiting this developing market. I would add, too, that the commander format also suffers from this exploitation. My commander group has halved in size the past year or so, and I promise you, there's nothing fun about the format. Playing powerful, best-in-slot cards isn't you being smart, it's you spending money on an efficient card to try and stay relevant in the game. Playing janky old cards with a unique theme doesn't make you a fun player, it makes you irrelevant at the table. So my point is that while I agree with you on the game dying, I don't truly believe it's the commander format doing it - that's dying too!
5K for a compétitive deck and they say hoo standard is too expensive. Sorry to say that but the death of magic will come by the "old" Community and some who never stop play. I was a , i think, descent player during 4 -5 years"(french championshio qualified 2 times during mirrodin and kamigawa era), i stop because all my friend stop mtg to go to online poker and i was focus on my study. Now some years later, i have stable life, stable income and i was looking to play mtg again. So i go back to a club near my town, i know some guy of this club, and.... they ALL , i say ALL, play Dual Commander, and some play modern or legacy, in all tournament of this club u have 2/3 of Dual Commander, the rest is modern, legacy and some draft. No Standard, no pionner. I just ask one question for them... how new player, budget player, or guys who have no play mtg during the last 15 year can enter to this game....Impossible, i don't know in your club but in my club, no one is a new player (maybe the kids of the old one). So now i play on Arena :)
As every set comes out... Wizards is making me less and less interested in commander which is so sad. It's my favorite but the power creep and pushed cards make it so easy to do anything and it's not a challenge or fun anymore. Just as I get a deck put together they create a new legendary that makes mine obsolete. Also the cost of commander masters is f-ing gross...
Commanders existence is technically the motivation for focusing solely on releasing certain products, but which to blame ends up a more philosophical question
I see your argument but I would say its not commander as a format causing this but more so WOTC sees how they can monetize commander rather than be true to the format.
Wizards understands that there needs to be a new shiny thing in every format to make the constant flow of keeping people hooked. Your complaints sounds like a metta issue. Play jank with your play group. Or build a deck for someone else and have them do the same or just build on a budget. They are all fun and since there is such a deep pool of cards you can build any kind of deck. Personally I have 4 vorthos decks and they all are white black. And all very different and unique and fun in their own ways. That is just my preference but I find them fun and my metta finds them a breath of fresh air than the most popular ones.
I think edh is for more experienced players, I would never introduce someone to magic without showing him a simple mono colored 1on1 game first. I think edh and standard complement each other well. 1on1 is for competitive style, draft rounds, tournaments and release events. While edh is for easy play with your group of friends mainly for fun to test out different cards and play styles. But I agree that magic is putting out too much content all over the place atm.
The single thing i hate the most about 60 card formats are people needing 4 same cards of each for their deck and its plain boring. Playing a deck like this 3 or 4 times its already super boring while a commander deck gives a lot more playing experience before you know the deck.
I think of it differently. I understand that you want more RNG and of course having singleton 100 cards gives you more of that. But a constructed or even sealed or drafted deck plays in a different way. It is like play rock paper scissors. While there are only 3 options. The combinations of the game, meta game and meta meta game, makes it infinitely interesting even in a very limited space. So much of your decision is based on knowledge of what your opponent has and guessing and playing around those threats or having counters to those threats. If this wasn’t true StarCraft as a video game would have never been so popular.
@@SolarGamesllc I can understand your reasoning but it does not resonate with me. I did not like Starcraft and i dont like rock paper scissors as deciding factors if you know what i mean :)
I agree magic is getting killed by commander format. I have not played commander. But it seem like it's easier to win with commander. Not Much competition. The regular format u are allowed 4 of the same card. Commander u are only allowed 1 of each card.
If they just focused on standard, mtg would be in a much better position and commander could just exist. The fire philosophy is probably the biggest issue. They're shoving out so many cards without proper balancing.
@11:43 Not Becoming, already IS. Commander's power level is absolutely fucking BONKERS now. It's completely unrecognizable compared to what it use to be back when I played 10 or so years ago. Even the fact that CEDH is a thing is kind of crazy to me, it's contradictory to the entire POINT of EDH lmao. No offense to those that enjoy CEDH or anything, I don't have any beef with the format or those that play it, my point is just that the format isn't the same and hasn't been for a while now and CEDHs mere existence kind of proves that - the entire reasoning behind having to use all singletons was to force the format into a lower power level to slow the game down - when it was created, you weren't supposed to have access to all the redundancy the format has now and will likely continue to get thanks to them tailor making support for it. The emphasis on having to sort of scale your EDH decks to each other in order to have fun games has gone up massively because the power ceiling for these decks just keeps going higher and higher. I almost feel like EDH is going to end up splitting off into sub formats that try and keep the original balance / spirit of EDH. Imagine, Rotation EDH or REDH, if you will. 🤣
Its actually WotC pandering to a format they dont need to pander to. Not the format it's self. Commander would still be perfectly fine without commander specific products.
I’d say commander would be better if there are no specific print to commander products. How organic it would feel to make a deck. Instead of having all the pieces done for you.
If everything is special then nothing is special. WOTC doesn’t respect this simple rule because they want to ring every ounce of profit out of anything that sells and that is there ONLY driving motivator. I think they are not concerned about this because every time they overdue and kill something then they just pivot to a new idea and I think they believe they can continue this cycle forever. Honestly, they could be right and maybe they can, but I don’t think so. I think each iteration of this hurts the product overall just a little bit more and eventually they won’t be able to come back. Death by 1000 cuts.
I’m brand new to Magic. Just played in my first CEDH tournament and it was terrible. Thassa’s Oracle and cards like it, need to be banned. I’m brand new and I can already tell that commander is a toxic format. I most likely will not be playing commander much longer because of my first experience but we will see.
@@SolarGamesllc I don’t think you can recommend it even as a 25 year veteran… a game with 100 card decks should not be ending by turn 3-5. That’s not even playing the game IMO
If standard players weren't so price sensitive and bought enough to float all of hasbro, im sure they wouldn't be focused on commander. At least until the day standard does 1b per year in sales....
After 15 yrs of standard It took me out...I hate arena and commander...iam a standard only player...commander has never been fun to me...Ikoria was the last packs I opened and nobody wanted to play with me. Commander is so boring imo...just dropped 800 bucks on lorcana pre orders hoping they bring a standard environment back. They ruined my favorite thing to do in life. It hurts actually. If it wasn't just a game I would literally cry.
We always sat down with 4 to 8 people playing the same game with 60 card decks. Commander is a much better format for that and you can keep using your cards after cards get rotated out. And you don't have to play blue to be successful. You're way off on saying commander is killing magic. Commander is what sucked me back in. Now all my decks are commander decks.
I will agree that commander and all of the little things that commander players want and cry about is killing magic. Everyone is pushing for more and more reprints and cheaper cards and they in most cases refuse to play any other format of magic.
It's fair to not like commander and its also fair to say that WOTC is pandering to commander to a massive degree. But to just shift blame to an entire format and away from the company thats making the decisions that are ruining the game. So what would your solution be?
I will make a follow up to address this. Good points and good questions.
I feel like every time he says the format is ruining the game he methodically brings it back to the company just trying to pander and charge max dollars. The blame is squarely put on wotc in this video by making the game less dynamic. While the title is kind of click baity (what else are you going to do as a content creator?) we can tell he's far more mad at the company than the actual players
@@disconsolator Based on the content of the video I would say it came across as he's half upset at the company and half upset at the FORMAT. I'm not under the illusion he's actually angry at any individual player for playing commander. Just that the format of commander itself creates an environment for WOTC to exploit.
Honestly, commander is more interesting because of what you take from standard to commander. By pandering to commander WoTC is over saturating commander as a format.
Naw, its the players. Come on, this is the people that say “but Standard is so expensive”. They are the ones choosing to spend this much money.
It's not commander killing Magic, it's WOTC killing Magic by overdoing commander and increasing the prices substantially. A booster box in 2015 when I started was $80-90 locally, it's about $150-160 now and that's what's killing Magic today. Thanks for listening to my TedTalk.
I absolutely agree and with the new sets being at a all time high even then its ridiculous i think the LOTR set will sell well but i think commander masters is a fail at that price point and bad too alot of stores are going to hard on CM and i think they may get burnt hard
Every single person I talk to has stopped buying sealed. Stopped months ago.. but I keep hearing the sales figures on sealed are good. Something isn't adding up. SOMEONE is sending WOTC the wrong message. Someone is happy pissing their money away. Those people are to blame as well.
@@Syne111 I think there are more people buying sealed. It is just more concentrated to a smaller crowd.
Commander was never really geared to financially supporting WOTC, it was a community driven format that wizards wanted to profit from, which turned more people to commander and away from other formats, it's cannibalising the format and there are a lot of commander players that seem to share the sentiment that it won't matter as there are enough cards for them to keep playing commander, not only that they don't want to pay to play commander scoffing at $5 to sit at an LGS table for a day, it's a feedback loop. More commander products will come out to force rotation in commander, and the price and power level will continue to rise, it's just the nature of catering to a non rotating format.
Commander has ruined the true essence of the game. Thanks to you garbage commander players that can't handle 60 card decks with combos and quick mechanics in a 1v1. Commander is NOT MTG its a completely different game using MTG cards!
I miss the 2014-2017 era of commander. When we only had 1 commander product every year, but still a big enough card pool of commanders to choose from.
Those were the days. This problem really didn't start till they started "the year of commander" when they put commander products with every single set drop. I hated that decision
I totally agree, i started playing commander at the end of 2013 and yes, that time frame was the best for me. And as for now i cant say im against with an anual commander focus set, but only once a year specially for the reprints, so commander staples get under price control.
And standart set back to focus on the formar, and yeah you can put "each opponent" or "your opponents" in standart/modern cars without problem because will not change non of those formats, so you can pasively support commander. But always making the focus on 1v1.
What made Commander charming and interesting was the deckbuilding challenge -- finding novel ways to use cards that weren't originally designed for a multiplayer environment where games went long enough for your strategy to really develop. That could never happen in competitive 1v1, and that bred creativity.
Now that WOTC has gone overboard with designs clearly intended for commander, the decks basically build themselves, and that aspect is no longer interesting.
Exactly
I’m strictly an edh player. And even I’m getting tired of all the crap they’re throwing at us. Way too many new legendary creatures. Way too many new mechanics. (Does anyone actually like Battles?) So I definitely agree with you
I actually like battles a lot. Technically, we've only seen sieges, but. They are quite fun in limited, and I think you miss out on a lot of the gun of magic by only playing one format. Play what you enjoy, but other formats allow you to explore themes and cards you don't get to play in edh.
I like the battles. Some of them are really good. Some I haven’t used yet.
Battles so bad. "Here defend my planeswalker for me and if you don't I get to alt it" how about no.
Weird to complain about new mechanics when every set always have something new in it.
Well you got your Cake, now eat it.
edh saved wotc by generating demand for bulk trash. wotc couldn't manage a hot dog stand outside of a weight loss clinic
So commander is not killing mtg the over printing and lack of care for the game overall from Hasbro and WATC
5:05 that’s what is great about commander. I play with as many cards from pre-1997 as I can, because those are the cards I love. I played a Khabal Ghoul and a Black Vise last night and both times someone asked, “what’s that card. I’ve never seen it before!”
I’m sharing my love of old school MTG.
And that is the point. Creativity and discovery is soooo important for commander. What happens when all this goes away because WOTC just prints obvious commander cards like they are doing now.
This was damaged when wotc started making commander specific cards that power creep all the random stuff we have in our binders.
I feel like a perfect balance could be struck by slowing down commander-centric designs/sets and boosting prize support and coverage of 1on1 formats. Wizards needs to delve into their success with stamping prize cards with local store names to give average players an incentive to return to 1on1 and they just can’t do it for free anymore.
I am saying exactly this for years. Hide the formats you play from WoTc or they print master series boxes for your format and kill it! The natural and organic evolution of a format like commander is not realistic in this corporate greed environment.
I think Complexity creep has also made Commander less fun for me. Back in like 2016 2017 and before if you paid attention you could keep track of everything that was going on and all the cards on the table. But now that every card has a full text box and lots now have a backside, it's too complicated to keep good track of everything going on. This takes away alot of the strategy.
Yes Dude!
Don't agree that commander is killing the game. We can't lose sight of the fact that WOTC's decision making is killing the game.
The decision to focus on….commander.
@@ryanfrieden4450 Yes but how is that the fault of a format for existing? You're negating a lot of nuance with this comment. Who's at fault then? The company making the decision or the format for existing in the first place to be focused on?
This take is extrmely accurate. You should not have been canceled for it. What you said is coming true (modern horizons 3 commander? LOL). Commander remaining as the focus of design will ultimately kill the MtG.
Exactly. I think commander is great and is a format that should exist in magic. But when this format takes over everything else and becomes THE only format to play magic. I think this is a problem.
Damn i fucking hate commander. So sick of playing games where my opponent's deck is just shit I've never seen before. I cant strategize anything in advance and every game feels like a random rng coinflip win.
I agree that WotC single minded focus on Commander is killing MtG. No doubt. However all TCGs need a multi-player format to play thier games, or they are going to fail. Commander/group play has sustained MtG through lots of lows.
Multiplayer is rare in TCGs. And the only one designed for multiplayer (vampires of the eternal struggle) is basically dead
Commander is the club that WotC is using to beat MTG to death. It isn't the club that is at fault.
94' player here. MtG is one of my favorite games. That said, I believe WotC/Hasbro jettisoned half the fun of collecting the cards in favor of higher profit margins.
You cant just find cards in draft packs anymore. You need to go to Precons, Collectors packs, Secret Lairs, etched foils, serial cards, retro frames, curly foils, seasoned curly foils...The print variations are so numerous its confusing even to sellers.
Thats a problem. Its a big enough problem its pushing players and collectors like myself to other games.
i said for a long time that legay and modern are now edh. and thats bad. it deluted the kasual spirit of edh to a nasty kombo fest
That’s a problem with the player pool, not necessarily the format.
I only play commander but yeah, it feels like every product is cater to commander first and foremost
I like Commander as a format. It’s fun, it can be affordable (emphasis on “can be”), and I actually like how long the games can be. However, I do wish WoTC would bring back things like planeswalker decks to being back interest in Standard. 60-card-deck formats aren’t as fun because of the neglect, when all Wizards has to do is do what they were doing before and utilize all formats equally.
Yes! Balance is the key. You know what the creators of Grand Archive said? "We believe that the healthiest of TCG projects have a community consisting of 50% players, and 50% collectors" I think balance is important in every aspect. WOTC has lost a lot of this.
Ill never go back to 60 card format too pricy to buy cards at a 3x or 4x of especially mana bases. Would much rather pay a high price once than 4x. Card prices coming down on the secondary would be the only thing to bring me back to 60 card format
In every other format of Magic there is a consensus that you are trying to win and will play the most powerful individual cards/things possible.
Commander is a contradiction in this sense with both the unattainability of said power and how we measure power. Lava spike instead of being 1/7 of your way to a win is now a mere 1/40 of the way there and deck building has to follow suit.
Magic is also fundamentally ungathered already. When you find someone else who plays the game there is another stage of having the same format ready and commander really has many internal formats, which is the last thing we needed.
But in a positive light when all of this is accounted for with a balanced pod it is one of the best experiences one could possibly have with Magic. Between the staple printing overload and proxy incentives there is room for shenanigans and skill expression, but it leaves too much up to the players in my opinion.
There's no doubt that Commander has organically risen to great heights, but there is also a huge amount of weight being added to the scale. To illustate what I mean, I'll share my experience. I've always been about Modern, Standard, and Draft, going back to Scars of Mirrodin. I took a break around Eldraine and when I came back around VOW and I was pissed when I opened Zendikar set boosters and found Comamnder-only mythics. I didn't play commander, never had. No one I knew did, either. I didn't want unplayable cards showing up in my standard boxes and packs - seemed kind of stupid to me.
But now here I am all this time later, and I'm finally giving in and building commander decks. Why? Because everything is geared towards it and I can't find people playing it at LGS around me. Commander sounds cool, no doubt, but I just never preferred it. Point is I'm definitely a prime example of someone who is moving to Commander, but not because that was my first pick, but because it's quickly becomming the only show in town.
But I don't think "Commander" did this itself. I think it's WotC just draining everything they can. I've heard plenty of commander players say that they don't like hwo everything is geared towards it either, and how they feel like the format is oversaturated with new cards.
You’re not alone. Wotc’s laser focus on has been hurting the game for years now
I only play Modern. Why was Kamigawa Neon Dynasty such a banger set? Because it had cards for ALL formats - Standard, Pioneer, Modern, Legacy, and yes, Commander. The draft was also fun from what I've heard from drafters. Banger set. I don't understand why Wizards does not understand that having a few Modern playable cards in sets is a great thing and helps their sales. I just want to say Mark that we really don't know enough about the Lord of the Rings set yet. I'm waiting for spoilers to see if there are actually any playable cards for Modern. Right now, we don't know.
I've been feeling this for years, The only thing worse then the creep that's in the format but they are creating an artificial rotation. I dusted off my cards when i was introduced to edh when it was in its infancy and i was so excited to use all the garbage cards i had that didn't have a home. Cards get pushed out constantly and it becomes a "rat race" for the latest and greatest. Maybe the format will eventually split to "vintage edh" and "wizards commander" and there being a cut off set to be legal in vintage edh and can ignore the focus of newer cards entering the format.
Being playing only commander for more than 9 years, in the last 4 years i had bought less sealed boosters boxes/boosters (boxes only one a year just for the nostalgia and feeling).
But yeah i agree absolutely, making commander as the focus on new cards, was the biggest mistake in desing way. I miss the times where the best card for commander was that crappy red mythic of every set.
Our group spread across few years ago and now we gather to play few times a year. There's six of us and the commander games we play last way too long as it's impossible to build any sort of boards. I've basically moved on from magic and playing only at those gatherings, but even then I rarely have fun and the new cards aren't helping.
I'd much rather play 10+ matches of other games in the time it takes for us to finish 1 commander match.
There has certainly been a shift towards making cards tuned for commander. I don't think that changing how they make cards was a good idea, I don't think changing how they produced or sell them was a good idea either. It's in a bad and worsening spot. Whereas I've off loaded a lot of MTG for FaB, it's just doing things better!
And one of the most amazing parts of the current state of TCG world is that MTG has real competition. This can only be healthy for MTG, as they realize they are not the top dog anymore. If you want to see a company make rapid good changes, give them healthy competition.
I'm going to leave here my 2 cents. Magic is experiencing a change like no other it has gone through. People is used to 60 card decks and 1 vs 1 games with decks finely crafted to perform consistently. Commander has shattered that and people is having a blast with it, it's cheaper, it allows groups of more people to play together, it has room for weird and gimmicky decks to be played while snatching some wins with cards that haven't seen any play before. Commander is at the moment the most played format and, just like lenguage, Magic isn't something written in stone but changing with the use people give it. Commander isn't killing magic, Commander has become Magic and people gravitating to it is what is making all the other formats obsolete.
While I agree with this sentiment, I think what is missing from here is a balance. I don't think it is healthy for magic to be a one format game. I don't think magic should be 100% competitive, but that doesn't mean it should be 100% casual either. One of the reasons that Magic is superior to other cards games is that it has many formats, and I fear if that disappears, it will actually be the end for magic.
@@SolarGamesllc thats something i do agree on. Its healthy for the game to diversify to appeal to a wider audience, but i still dont think that would cause magic to die. If edh completely takes over the game, competitive edh will become the competitive way to play the game, and probably even be divided between legacy, modern and standard edh or similar. Mtg is too big to die, it will simply change, and if it dies it wont be because of edh, but because wizzards keeps making terrible choices like rising prices constantly, refusing to reprint staples (Which creates a big disparity on power level between those who are able to afford dual lands, fetches, shocks and those who dont), fatiguing people with constant releases...
@@SolarGamesllc Magic having more formats than other card games doesn't necessarily make it more superior when it only makes it more expensive due to how these cards individually influence these formats in such a way that it bleeds over to other formats. Now imagine If Modern was officially discontinued as a format by Wizards of the Coast / Hasbro and all the sudden the Secondary Market value completely tanks thus making Commander MUCH MUCH cheaper as a format.
Same with Legacy and Vintage. If Wizards of the Coast / Hasbro decided to officially discontinue these formats like they did with Extended a long time ago then a lot of these old cards would be slightly cheaper to get a hold of but unfortunately won't be low enough due to the power the Reserve List has on these cards. That and you HAVE to factor in how supply and demand affects the cost of purchasing these cards especially with how much resellers have hoarded up so much sealed product over the years.
Commander really isn’t capable of a balanced sanctioned tournament scene. It’s too broken and would need a ban wave unlike any we’ve seen before to get the format even remotely close to cash support, tournament ready. Who’s gonna pay several grand for a tournament capable commander deck? That’s why legacy and vintage is a shell of its former self. No one can afford to play it. Competitive Commander has the same problem. It will never BE magic. It will either be a supplementary format focused on casual play or the death blow to the game. All the points made in the video are extremely relevant. Who’s gonna open boxes to make singles available when people inevitably walk away from commander? It Isn’t the modern players. It isn’t the standard players. Draft and sealed is on its last legs as well. Because the focus in on making commander cards. Which on a base level just messes with how literally every other format functions. It’s nearly impossible to grind out an opponent in standard anymore. Because every card does 14 things because it’s made for a 4 player format and needs to be able to perform in that environment. Commander IS killing magic. It’s just not like taking the game out back and shooting it in the head. It’s a slow death by 1000 cuts.
its true that, even formats like PEDH and Oathbreaker, (all 4 player's formats, singletones, with a commander building around) can't get any light because new commander players have zero deckbuilding interests and can't go further than a preco or a fixed-preco... And In EDH turns kinda shity when people start to do infinite mulligans and start to re-do actions that they forgot.
I agree with you in that commander is the golden child of WOTC. They really don’t care about standard or modern. 16:06 is the truth. They will always try to make more money!
10:46 smothering tithe, and Rhystic Study is an argument for updating a banned list, not killing a format.
You make a good point about there being dilution in the market. However , this is a trend that has continued in a cycle since the game started. Standard, Modern, the old extended , type 1 , type 2, type 1.5 and various other formats have had their own cycles or moments to shine. Right now, is commander’s turn. And when they run it in to the ground with marketing and they will; people like me will still play while we grumble about something akin to standard or Modern formats getting all the press again. I have played this game for over 23 years. I have seen the cycles go up and go down. No matter how skewed WOTC has been in their scope about what was popular, nothing has come close to killing the game of magic. And at this point, it would take a lot more than I’ve seen for me to even consider that a possibility. I respect your opinion and I appreciate your video. This was merely my opinion and what I have witnessed over a quarter of a century playing this game.
Getting back into MTG after 20 years, at the time as a teenager I didn't know anything about standard or EDH, we would just play with my friends throwing cards we liked in our decks, now I'm discovering all the overwhelming different formats, very confusing.
At first I was like WTF is commander, and didn't like the idea of it, same for standard, I just wanted to play as I used to but now I've come to realize that there's no "freeform" format except if we agree on that with friends/playgroup, all formats have their restrictions but there are way too many formats to me.
Then now after a few months I've started to enjoy the idea of commander, and definitely still don't like the idea of a rotating format like standard :
- way too limited in terms of strategy, as having only cards from the past 2 years doesn't open up much creativity
- which leads to seeing the same decks everywhere, boring
- when you spend money on cards and can't use them anymore after 2 years I find it pointless and frustrating
- having/needing a playset of cards you wanna play can become very costly, and boring as well if a playset is "needed"
- pulling cards you wanna play that get banned is as well frustrating and boring
(which is why though I belong to the ones happy that standard extends from 2 to 3 years)
That led me to enjoying commander because no need of a playset, it's actually fun to build around synergies or tribes (which are both limited in a rotating format), and as you said but in a positive way : there are cards you won't draw in a game, meaning your games won't all look the same and use the same strategy and combos, so for me it allows more creativity because you're not stuck to playing the same way and getting bored with your deck.
The non singleton format that seems more appropriate to me seems to be Modern, but there are things that bore me though in formats allowing playsets : people will just try to have playsets, I think it becomes boring and lots of decks end up being similar, to me I think it's cool to have a playset of a card or a couple playsets but building a deck based on playsets only doesn't sound fun to me and in the few months I've been getting back into the game I find people's creativity is often limited, when you know how big the card pool is.
The best format to me would be a format that's an hybrid version of commander and freeform : being allowed to have playsets but not relying on this strategy and more building around synergies, but without bans or restrictions.
Unpopular opinion but to me the Reserved List is BS, I do think some cards should hold value for collectors due to their edition but I hate the idea of "you're not rich nor born early enough to have been able to get those cards, then you don't deserve to play them".
It's just cards, litterally ink on a cardboard, everyone should have the right to be happy to play any of the power nine or pull them, I'm not talking about yearly reprints but every now and then so that new players could enjoy the game as it was intended to.
To me it's like if playing card editors all decided at once "we won't print jokers and aces anymore ever again".
When I see people complain about Magic 30 but support the Reserved list I'm like "wtf dude ? you're saying magic 30 is for whales yet support the concept of not reprinting cards and granting new players access to them unless they're... whales ?", I find it hypocrite...
Anyway, as for your analogy with punk music, as a full-time and professional musician I kinda disagree : I've always enjoyed music not because it's "cool" but because I love the music, so if something "obscure" or underground that I like becomes mainstream I'm actually happy that more people will come to enjoy it and that I can have conversations about these artists with more people rather than a niche group.
I wish more people would know about artists/bands like Tigran Hamasyan, Hiatus Kaiyote, Snarky Puppy, etc... but anyway, long live music and MTG, although I do hope MTG/wotc will be lead by better people than the current greedy & cynical ones in the future...
Me: Let's play Magic!
The majority of players: Cool!
Me: Here's my deck.
The majority of players: Where's your Commander?
Me: 🫤
Yeah I hate it when that happens. I'm glad my play group is cool to do some limited first before Commander, but they always want to rush the drafting to go to commander.
I've now build decks that are either Pauper, or float between Modern and Pioneer.
I agree......................... Its so bad i have to rule zero out certain cards or types of cards
Not a bad idea
I can feel it to a degree! I have 32 decks and don't know what to play im burnt out.
All my problems with commander in one video
Wow, I got home and took time to read through a lot of the comments. I guess this what getting cancelled feels like huh (JK). I will be making a response video to this. Thanks for everyone's thoughtful replies.
I like commander better than all other formats because it's extremely unlikely to be fast, which, while playing casually, means you can play absolutely awful yet hilarious decks and at least survive long enough to sometimes get the punchline out. Magic, for me, is about playing good games with good friends. Casual Magic is about having fun with the people, not the cards. We get some pizza and some beer and go ham for the day. To one of your points, it's not rude to scoop and go to the next game at all. Scoop and go get a drink.
"Can't no one compel another man to recreation, certainly not someone as ill-humored as yourself."
-Buster Scruggs.
I agree that EDH is killing Magic. Commander can't be the primary focus of wizards if they want to survive long term. Standard, Pioneer, and Modern need to carry. I love commander and play it frequently. That said, i am heavy on arena play due to the lack of standard support at my LGS. Its kind of sad...they really only do commander. I really hope they change it.
Commander was better when everything wasn't commander
you made alot of great points man. thank you.
Yup they did this about 13 years ago when they introduced commander/highlander/two headed giant and changed the reserved list. Why would they introduce a format and then permanently change the reserved list to what it is today? Pretty obvious why.
12:28 you can fix that legendary problem with Arena of the Ancients.
i stopped playing magic at 11-14 years old thats was after mirrodin besieged. 10 years l8r. Up until my return to magic, edh ( tbh i prefer over "commander"). Seemed like a really cool niche magic format id liek to get into. And when i saw all the specific commander products. I was ohhh noooooo.. lmao idk i cant explain. EDH seemed enticing being its own thing .
This MH3 set right now there's so many 4 drop multi colored legendary creature rares that's tanking the value for opening packs, it's so bad...
I used to play standard and modern, but now I only play limited and commander. What made me turn away from the traditional competitive formats is that I felt that the metagame was too narrow and doesnt have place to play wacky and suboptimal decks that play with a gimmicky idea. Having to pay a lot of money for playsets of the same cards, meanwhile in commander I only need a single copy and I can even play using proxies. And lastly I dont even need to pay to the lgs to play commander, or get on time to the lgs on a commander night, just get to the store at any point, greet everyone, find an empty table and start playin, and gettin a promo card at the end of the evening. Here on the third world countries commander is THE WAY to play magic. Greetings from a place with 110% yearly inflation.
Wait. What makes you think commander masters is for commander?
i love building commander decks and playing commander. there are so many cards that have only seen 1 printing that we need a commander reprint set, hell even some card havent seen a good reprint like rhystic study. I love cracking collectors booster, just wish theyd get rid of foils and the standard border. i prefer extended are and showcase after that and with the price of a collectors they should have everything extended art/showcase.
This is why we need to make all supplemental sets illegal in commander. Check out the Heritage format. The heritage format does this and basically makes version of the Legacy format, minus supplemental products. Commander was meant as an alternative way to play magic. With wotc literally taking that aspect of commander away, it makes commander some other format altogether, imo. We take the format back by all agreeing not to use supplemental sets (E. G. Commander sets like precons and commander specific sets, battlebond, modern horizons etc). Every card HAS to have been in the standard format to be playable in commander, imo.
o me, the main issue comes from WotC to design almost every set with mostly Commander in mind, which affects not only other formats but Commander itself, which has become less about being creative at finding niche cards and more about getting the must-have staples designed to be optimized for the format and the wall-of-text legendary creature that autopilots the deck. Also, there is such constant release of new cards (but that's more of a wider WotC issue) that I find increasingly hard for someone who is not extremely engaged with the game to keep up.
I started playing casually in the late 90s and I really enjoyed discovering Commander in the mid 2010s, but I have barely played it since the pandemic: normally, by the time one builds a deck and plays it a couple of times, it is already time to upgrade it (or essentially replace it), something for which personally I just do not have time/energy.
But it WotC could simply "leave the format alone", I think it is still a quite enjoyable format, despite a couple of gameplay aspects I'm personally not to fond of (luck playing a much bigger role in the opening hand being a singleton 100 cards format, 1-2 people at the table often merely watching others playing).
I miss paper draft. Arena cross pod drafts are garbage. Draft boosters have no value now and paper drafts don't fire near me. Haven't bought any MtG this year, and I doubt that will change any time soon.
Commander being an official format was worse for the game and worse for commander.
Hello, my friend! Stay a while and listen. Ah the "good old days" 🙂
There are many things hurting the game, FIRE design to me is the main culprit. I enjoyed the annual Commander boxes that we had between 2011 and 2019, some of them has solid cards, that was good to keep the game from getting stale with "we only play with cards printed at least 5 years ago".
The pain came when every set had accompanying Commander products, and the focus on card design was no longer on Standard as the main thing to play but Commander - would Commander players want that card? If so, give it some more power to drive up sales even more. FIRE also got us the insanity of often now 3-6 different versions of each card in a set, Aftermath being a prime example for that crap.
Perhaps I'm getting too old as well, but there were times when I could recognize Magic cards as MtG cards from a few ft away on a table when someone was playing. Now? No clue. They lack a consistent look and feel, everything is supposed to be some form of special so it's just dumb.
To summarize, to me Commander to me is an okay format if you like to drag out matches for 30-90 minutes. Else, there are better formats. FIRE design should be trashed, it only gets worse. Too many reprints also kill the game. When nothing can hold value unless it is RL or some super exclusive promo version (e.g. the Japanese WAR alt arts, D&D ampersand promos to name recent) -> also bad, it just loses value to quickly. Without EV, why keep boxes. All that kills (the fun of) Magic, Commander is just a symptom.
I care about special version if they are cheaper than original, foil is garbage even for free otherwise, all those cosmetic are garbage. Commander can be cheaper than standard / normal 4 cards deck because just imagine here at canada, a sheoldred the apocalypse worth more than 100,00 $ Commander deck diversity are more fun too. It's not hard to build a deck, you just need money.
I haven't played a lot of MTG lately, but I always viewed standard as the 'gateway' into MTG, and then you'd get into other formats in time. Things like EDH/Commander were the 'other thing to do' with the cards designed for standard, and thus it feels really weird to have cards literally being made specifically for commander, which in turn feels like it's sucking the fun out of commander.
I quit commander because it wasn’t fun anymore. No One interacts. It’s all battle cruiser crap. And god help you if you decide to interact with others plans. You’ll just be painting a target on your head. Then you add in all the commanders that are made obsolete with new ones every set, needing new cards to keep each deck current and it became a nuisance to keep up with.
@@ryanfrieden4450 I prefer chess over checkers as well! Legacy, Standard, Modern are the best formats!
Been saying that for a couple years now, everything is commander focused and it’s destroying the rest of the formats, and it forces you to buy new cards every set just to keep your commander decks upgraded. Essentially creating a rotation for commander. I checked out of mtg several months ago and haven’t had a single regret. Not playing this cash grab nonsense anymore. Tired of watching my collection lose value every set because they won’t stop reprinting everything with any value.
You should check out Star wars unlimited if you haven't already.
I've been on and of MTG since the early 2000s and totally agree that Hasbro is losing this in the long term.
SWU felt to me like the early MTG but much modernized but yet very recognizable.
I remember playing 8 player free for alls that were with 60+ card decks. Those games were always crazy long and went like dominoes normally.
Let's say they reverse this stance and produce less Commander pre-cons and less cards aimed at Commander. That's a huge chunk of the market that will have less interest in their newer products, translating into less profit. I have my doubts the Standard or Modern players would make up the difference. The only way they will change course is if multiple Commander-centered products crash and burn!
especially with most commander players willing to just buy or print proxies. 8 competitive players spend more in a games store than 30 Commander players.
"Until it's not fun anymore." Precisely.
I know this is an old video, but I agree with you, homie. Fuck commander. Bring back constructed competitive formats and drafting, please!
I agree with many of these points. Didn’t March of machines have a card that they didn’t let us put into our decks for the pre-release because it was for commander only? That’s a pretty bad feeling when you can’t play with the cards you open
I feel what you're saying. I'm a relative newcomer to the commander format, but even I've been witness to product saturation, power creep, and milking the teets of the cash cow. I don't think it's the format that's doing it, but rather the decisions in meeting rooms between WotC and Hasbro executives: They're exploiting this developing market. I would add, too, that the commander format also suffers from this exploitation. My commander group has halved in size the past year or so, and I promise you, there's nothing fun about the format. Playing powerful, best-in-slot cards isn't you being smart, it's you spending money on an efficient card to try and stay relevant in the game. Playing janky old cards with a unique theme doesn't make you a fun player, it makes you irrelevant at the table. So my point is that while I agree with you on the game dying, I don't truly believe it's the commander format doing it - that's dying too!
Valid points on the commander players taking too long or running with the game. The decks are so optimized there’s often less interaction
This is why the invented fab and sorcery so all my money can go to them instead of wizards
Same
It's more so the blatant negligence for the other formats. If wotc did a better push for brawl then it could possibly replace standard.
Hasbro is killing the golden goose... Excited for Sorcery: Contested Realm....
5K for a compétitive deck and they say hoo standard is too expensive. Sorry to say that but the death of magic will come by the "old" Community and some who never stop play. I was a , i think, descent player during 4 -5 years"(french championshio qualified 2 times during mirrodin and kamigawa era), i stop because all my friend stop mtg to go to online poker and i was focus on my study. Now some years later, i have stable life, stable income and i was looking to play mtg again. So i go back to a club near my town, i know some guy of this club, and.... they ALL , i say ALL, play Dual Commander, and some play modern or legacy, in all tournament of this club u have 2/3 of Dual Commander, the rest is modern, legacy and some draft. No Standard, no pionner. I just ask one question for them... how new player, budget player, or guys who have no play mtg during the last 15 year can enter to this game....Impossible, i don't know in your club but in my club, no one is a new player (maybe the kids of the old one). So now i play on Arena :)
I agree with most of your videos but I do disagree with this one overall. I'm going to leave a like still because the video is good.
This is why I’m getting into premodern.
As every set comes out... Wizards is making me less and less interested in commander which is so sad. It's my favorite but the power creep and pushed cards make it so easy to do anything and it's not a challenge or fun anymore. Just as I get a deck put together they create a new legendary that makes mine obsolete. Also the cost of commander masters is f-ing gross...
Commanders existence is technically the motivation for focusing solely on releasing certain products, but which to blame ends up a more philosophical question
I see your argument but I would say its not commander as a format causing this but more so WOTC sees how they can monetize commander rather than be true to the format.
Wizards understands that there needs to be a new shiny thing in every format to make the constant flow of keeping people hooked. Your complaints sounds like a metta issue. Play jank with your play group. Or build a deck for someone else and have them do the same or just build on a budget. They are all fun and since there is such a deep pool of cards you can build any kind of deck. Personally I have 4 vorthos decks and they all are white black. And all very different and unique and fun in their own ways. That is just my preference but I find them fun and my metta finds them a breath of fresh air than the most popular ones.
A long game of commander is a fun game of a commander. That's how commander was supposed to be
Flesh and Blood is where the 1 vs 1 is at. I still love magic but mainly for commander.
Agreed 100%
I think edh is for more experienced players, I would never introduce someone to magic without showing him a simple mono colored 1on1 game first. I think edh and standard complement each other well. 1on1 is for competitive style, draft rounds, tournaments and release events. While edh is for easy play with your group of friends mainly for fun to test out different cards and play styles. But I agree that magic is putting out too much content all over the place atm.
I've been playing magic ever since it came out and I totally and honestly agree with you. Magic is definitely being killed by,nder say it brother
The single thing i hate the most about 60 card formats are people needing 4 same cards of each for their deck and its plain boring. Playing a deck like this 3 or 4 times its already super boring while a commander deck gives a lot more playing experience before you know the deck.
I think of it differently. I understand that you want more RNG and of course having singleton 100 cards gives you more of that. But a constructed or even sealed or drafted deck plays in a different way.
It is like play rock paper scissors. While there are only 3 options. The combinations of the game, meta game and meta meta game, makes it infinitely interesting even in a very limited space. So much of your decision is based on knowledge of what your opponent has and guessing and playing around those threats or having counters to those threats.
If this wasn’t true StarCraft as a video game would have never been so popular.
@@SolarGamesllc I can understand your reasoning but it does not resonate with me. I did not like Starcraft and i dont like rock paper scissors as deciding factors if you know what i mean :)
I agree magic is getting killed by commander format. I have not played commander. But it seem like it's easier to win with commander. Not Much competition. The regular format u are allowed 4 of the same card. Commander u are only allowed 1 of each card.
EDH is all I play.
You nailed it bro. Commander is ruining magic.
I saw the thumbnail and thought geez I hate Marjorie Taylor Green too but you can't just kill her!
If they just focused on standard, mtg would be in a much better position and commander could just exist. The fire philosophy is probably the biggest issue. They're shoving out so many cards without proper balancing.
@11:43 Not Becoming, already IS. Commander's power level is absolutely fucking BONKERS now. It's completely unrecognizable compared to what it use to be back when I played 10 or so years ago. Even the fact that CEDH is a thing is kind of crazy to me, it's contradictory to the entire POINT of EDH lmao. No offense to those that enjoy CEDH or anything, I don't have any beef with the format or those that play it, my point is just that the format isn't the same and hasn't been for a while now and CEDHs mere existence kind of proves that - the entire reasoning behind having to use all singletons was to force the format into a lower power level to slow the game down - when it was created, you weren't supposed to have access to all the redundancy the format has now and will likely continue to get thanks to them tailor making support for it. The emphasis on having to sort of scale your EDH decks to each other in order to have fun games has gone up massively because the power ceiling for these decks just keeps going higher and higher. I almost feel like EDH is going to end up splitting off into sub formats that try and keep the original balance / spirit of EDH. Imagine, Rotation EDH or REDH, if you will. 🤣
Come back to us 60 card formats
Its actually WotC pandering to a format they dont need to pander to. Not the format it's self. Commander would still be perfectly fine without commander specific products.
I’d say commander would be better if there are no specific print to commander products. How organic it would feel to make a deck. Instead of having all the pieces done for you.
Commander UB is what got me into this game. I’m mostly a yugioh player. Other formats are Boring lol
You gotta try limited. You haven’t lived until you try it. IMO drafting is the best format.
If everything is special then nothing is special. WOTC doesn’t respect this simple rule because they want to ring every ounce of profit out of anything that sells and that is there ONLY driving motivator. I think they are not concerned about this because every time they overdue and kill something then they just pivot to a new idea and I think they believe they can continue this cycle forever. Honestly, they could be right and maybe they can, but I don’t think so. I think each iteration of this hurts the product overall just a little bit more and eventually they won’t be able to come back. Death by 1000 cuts.
I’m brand new to Magic. Just played in my first CEDH tournament and it was terrible. Thassa’s Oracle and cards like it, need to be banned. I’m brand new and I can already tell that commander is a toxic format. I most likely will not be playing commander much longer because of my first experience but we will see.
Yeah I wouldn’t recommend CEDH as a beginner. It is very competitive.
@@SolarGamesllc I don’t think you can recommend it even as a 25 year veteran… a game with 100 card decks should not be ending by turn 3-5. That’s not even playing the game IMO
I feel too many sets/packs releases for the money grab is ruining Magic, not a format or just a format.
If standard players weren't so price sensitive and bought enough to float all of hasbro, im sure they wouldn't be focused on commander. At least until the day standard does 1b per year in sales....
After 15 yrs of standard It took me out...I hate arena and commander...iam a standard only player...commander has never been fun to me...Ikoria was the last packs I opened and nobody wanted to play with me. Commander is so boring imo...just dropped 800 bucks on lorcana pre orders hoping they bring a standard environment back. They ruined my favorite thing to do in life. It hurts actually. If it wasn't just a game I would literally cry.
We always sat down with 4 to 8 people playing the same game with 60 card decks. Commander is a much better format for that and you can keep using your cards after cards get rotated out. And you don't have to play blue to be successful. You're way off on saying commander is killing magic. Commander is what sucked me back in. Now all my decks are commander decks.
We all need to skip a set or two.
We have!
case in point: went on spelltable, people only playing commander.
I will agree that commander and all of the little things that commander players want and cry about is killing magic. Everyone is pushing for more and more reprints and cheaper cards and they in most cases refuse to play any other format of magic.