I dont know who to quote here but there are absolutely times where you vant curate your pods. Where you have no choice in who you play and refusing to means no game.
For instance one shop here gets about 8 players. Thats two pods. If you refuse to play against someone, well youre ***** out of luck that round.
Another place gets about 40 people. They only do 2 or 3 rounds. Again, if you refuse to play against someone... well maybe you can swap but chances are your ass is skipping that round
Point is that for some places edh night is organized and structured. Social contract and communication on power level just does not work in that environment because you cant predict what youre going to be up against, and everyone is playing for different reasons. Discussing it doesnt always do anything because some people only bring one deck, some people have different perceptions of power levels, sometimes youre the 8th man at an 8 person event where the 7 others are friends and go full bore where you cant.
Edh experiences vary.
And yet the only person responsible for your fun, is still you...
I am not sure why this is such a hard concept for some of you all to grasp, but you can skip structured commander nights at your LGS and instead call or text friends to schedule time to sit down and play, any other night of the week...
This arguments here for how that is impossible, are absolutely comical.
and i don't understand why this is so hard for you to grasp, while you can do that, and a lot of people do, its not always an option.
this has zero to do with dictating your own fun. hell if anything, toning down your play, or bumping it up, would have more to do with dictating someone elses fun. we're going to show up to an event and play what we feel is fun and it sucks to have that experience mitigated and diminished because johnny-no-cards wants to play wurm tribal, or the guy who hates counterspells throws a fit the minute a blue card hits play but this also works the other way by being thrown into a pod with the one dude in town who owns a timetwister.
if i build something new, i want to play it. i don't want to carry around 12 different decks ranging from garbage beeble tribal tier to tier 0 just to try to match the other people in the pod i'm forced to play in that night, and then hope that the other players also did that, and that we can all discuss it.
regarding setting up your own groups/times: a lot of us might be free on thursday for edh, and not on any other night of the week. so the shop has an event. we want to support the shop and its the easiest place to meet/utilize the space because its central to everyone. now if someone else shows up, wtf are they expected to do? sit and watch? make their own group with the no one else that's there? sometimes you also want to interact with new people, see fresh takes on edh, try something different. attendance to these events would logically show that there are more than a few other people of a like mind when it comes to their edh environment because if they felt they could get that select group of people together outside of the structured event... well they would be doing that.
this doesn't even get into maybe the guys you regularly play cards with aren't the type of friends you want to invite into your home for... reasons. we can all relate to that, dudes we enjoy gaming with at a store but really don't want to hang out with beyond that.
sometimes everyone is only free for just a few hours too.
unrelated to that, i do enjoy being able to explore the vast array of cards and archetypes in edh currently. it makes for some dynamic games. that said, i do feel the committee is slow to act sometimes, and ignores some problematic cards as they don't fit their style of play at all so they don't see them often. its a balance. a difficult one. right now its in a reasonable spot. but the idea that you can always discuss power level with the people in your pod and meet accordingly, or that all problems are solved with house bans is patently ridiculous once you move to an organized, structured, event. that's a concept you're just going to have to accept as that is a reality for a lot of people.
again, who dictates power level? i can sit down locally with my feldon build and be absolutely crushed by the guys i regularly play with... and still have a good time. at the same time i can go an hour north and play at a different store, and absolutely destroy them with the exact same deck. to me the power level of that build is very low, to another group its very high. discuss it all you'd like but perspective matters. why should someone be expected to go brew up something that's just god awful to meet someone elses expectations? this also works both ways, but at the same time the nature of the game dictates that people should be striving to make their decks more powerful anyway because of how varied the environment is.
I dont know who to quote here but there are absolutely times where you vant curate your pods. Where you have no choice in who you play and refusing to means no game.
For instance one shop here gets about 8 players. Thats two pods. If you refuse to play against someone, well youre ***** out of luck that round.
Another place gets about 40 people. They only do 2 or 3 rounds. Again, if you refuse to play against someone... well maybe you can swap but chances are your ass is skipping that round
Point is that for some places edh night is organized and structured. Social contract and communication on power level just does not work in that environment because you cant predict what youre going to be up against, and everyone is playing for different reasons. Discussing it doesnt always do anything because some people only bring one deck, some people have different perceptions of power levels, sometimes youre the 8th man at an 8 person event where the 7 others are friends and go full bore where you cant.
People don't want narrative in games, they just want power.
I agree cEDH ruins everything.
To the surprise of no one one new guy who turned up for a week or two who had the cEDH mindset ended up getting himself banned after arguing with the store manager. Not a related matter but it's reflective of the overall personality.
I know what the c really stands for and it's not something pleasant I can say on the forums.
That just blows my mind, I've had the exact opposite experience. I've yet to have one issue with anyone who plays cEDH, but I've got a thousand lifetimes worth of horror stories about being aggressively mistreated by casual players. In particular the more casual they claim to be, the nastier they seem to get. There's a super-budget EDH variant in this area and they're absolutely the meanest players I've ever met. You ever get yelled at by a guy who played 4 mana doublers on his last turn for countering his full-tap Stroke of Genius, because you're somehow supposed to know that he has no win-condition?
Just chiming in to say this has been my experience too.
The more casual a player claims to be, or their build claims to be, the nastier theyve been.
Ive seen no less than three people throw their decks physically and rage sell their entire collection after a loss. One guy threatened a beating after he used slaughter pact and his only swamp was vindicated. Its okay when they counterspell your cultivate but its rage time if you spell pierce their genesis wave.
i do sometimes wonder if that's what's really wrong with the format right now.
Congratulations, you got it.
RC's "style gameplay" is what made the format popular. A lot of people wanted to play that kind of magic and couldn't everywhere else.
Then wotc came and printed a lot of bull*****. They were clearly clueless about what the format was about (and it's not hard to see. Maro still is. They tought that tucking was a feature and not a bug. 2013 commanders were a broken mess. And so on).
So nowadays the format evolved and became way more broken. It's natural of course, after all more cards = more broken combinations, it's inevitable. But with commander it happened too fast. "2010 gameplay" is what many people still want to play, so i can't blame the RC for clinging to it.
yeah. i find my old lists sometimes, back from 2010. they're vastly different. way more laid back, slower, but way more complex, synergistic, and more fun to play. games were wildly unpredictable because you were trying to make a perfect machine using imperfect parts.
i look at my lists in 2020 and a lot of them are similar to each other now with the majority of the deck not even having existed 10 years ago. everything has kinda become jam these newly printed format aimed cards that are ridiculously strong, and bolster them with some reserve list power. if you're in blue you need XYZ, if you're in green you must run this. its not even about synergizing with your commander either most of the time. its about keeping up with the other people who also run xyz because if you don't you just get steamrolled because of how quickly card design out paced the format. if you don't run those you end up at this severe disadvantage.
its wildly different, not necessarily bad, just different. if anything i wouldn't mind the committee being more aggressive in banning some of those cards. the ones specifically designed for edh with big splashy effects that break games, designed by people who don't necessarily play the format or understand its nuances.
its also made deck building somewhat harder as you go man i need this this and that, but for each one of those that became a defining card, thats one less fun card you can jam, and if you dont' run them you end up with a deck operating on a much lower tier than your store regulars so now everyone is involved in this arms race. who can power out expropriate fastest, who can copy it the most, how many cyclonic rifts can we see go off in the next hour. the format as a whole moves away from being about a commander and more about a subset of cards.
while i don't agree with the style of gameplay the rules committee advocates, and i too feel they're stagnantly stuck in 2010, i think they do an okay enough job for now.
the ever rising prices of some reserved list cards may call a lot of that into judgement very soon. the difference between owning a gaea's cradle, and an earthcraft, and not owning them is pretty huge with the disparity growing larger all the time. some of these reserve list cards are just going to make an entire class of player unable to compete against the other - which causes interest to wane on a longer timeline. the point here being that they may have to revise their stances on expensive cards being banned to prevent ubiquity, or start adding things over an identifiable value to the ban list. the social contract and talk it out with your group doesn't hold water any more because of the surge in popularity. you walk into a store you want the same banned list as the other store you walked into.
while wizards has continued support for the format, and run with it, and yes that has caused a huge surge in popularity, i do sometimes wonder if that's what's really wrong with the format right now. so many of these newer cards, or edh designed cards, just break the format in half. they do out of control absurd things, or combo in ways no one saw right away. its changed the nature of deckbuilding, especially since 2010. its less about finding obscure stuff or cute interactions and way more easy these days to go OOPS THAT'S EXPROPRIATE MANA AND I CAN COPY IT TOO! one approach is definitely more in line with deckbuilding in 2010, than deckbuilding in 2020. there is a little bit of a disconnect there sometimes it seems.
i think those are where the rules committee is weakest right now, and are definitely slow to act.
for now they stay largely hands off, and that's... honestly i can appreciate that. what i enjoy in edh, and the cards i enjoy using, are much different from sheldon's favored ones - most of them showing up on his do not play these cards list - but because they're hands off... well i can still play those cards and strategies for now. it means we all get a more diversified environment rather than some kind of iron will being executed that makes playing entire archetypes impossible. it means that we're free to explore different archetypes, different cards, and basically do whatever we personally want with the format instead of just lining up craw wurms the way he seems to favor.
now if we really want to discuss something problematic let's talk about sheldon's renown and platform, and how his insistence to avoid certain cards/strategies translates to the community largely trying to deligitimize those cards/strategies resulting in less experienced players being unable to handle those cards/strategies and how that may eventually lead to a banning due to unpopular opinion of them... yeah i think that has some merit too and that social contract against things like the cards on his list needs to be dropped from all edh terminology.
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and i don't understand why this is so hard for you to grasp, while you can do that, and a lot of people do, its not always an option.
this has zero to do with dictating your own fun. hell if anything, toning down your play, or bumping it up, would have more to do with dictating someone elses fun. we're going to show up to an event and play what we feel is fun and it sucks to have that experience mitigated and diminished because johnny-no-cards wants to play wurm tribal, or the guy who hates counterspells throws a fit the minute a blue card hits play but this also works the other way by being thrown into a pod with the one dude in town who owns a timetwister.
if i build something new, i want to play it. i don't want to carry around 12 different decks ranging from garbage beeble tribal tier to tier 0 just to try to match the other people in the pod i'm forced to play in that night, and then hope that the other players also did that, and that we can all discuss it.
regarding setting up your own groups/times: a lot of us might be free on thursday for edh, and not on any other night of the week. so the shop has an event. we want to support the shop and its the easiest place to meet/utilize the space because its central to everyone. now if someone else shows up, wtf are they expected to do? sit and watch? make their own group with the no one else that's there? sometimes you also want to interact with new people, see fresh takes on edh, try something different. attendance to these events would logically show that there are more than a few other people of a like mind when it comes to their edh environment because if they felt they could get that select group of people together outside of the structured event... well they would be doing that.
this doesn't even get into maybe the guys you regularly play cards with aren't the type of friends you want to invite into your home for... reasons. we can all relate to that, dudes we enjoy gaming with at a store but really don't want to hang out with beyond that.
sometimes everyone is only free for just a few hours too.
unrelated to that, i do enjoy being able to explore the vast array of cards and archetypes in edh currently. it makes for some dynamic games. that said, i do feel the committee is slow to act sometimes, and ignores some problematic cards as they don't fit their style of play at all so they don't see them often. its a balance. a difficult one. right now its in a reasonable spot. but the idea that you can always discuss power level with the people in your pod and meet accordingly, or that all problems are solved with house bans is patently ridiculous once you move to an organized, structured, event. that's a concept you're just going to have to accept as that is a reality for a lot of people.
again, who dictates power level? i can sit down locally with my feldon build and be absolutely crushed by the guys i regularly play with... and still have a good time. at the same time i can go an hour north and play at a different store, and absolutely destroy them with the exact same deck. to me the power level of that build is very low, to another group its very high. discuss it all you'd like but perspective matters. why should someone be expected to go brew up something that's just god awful to meet someone elses expectations? this also works both ways, but at the same time the nature of the game dictates that people should be striving to make their decks more powerful anyway because of how varied the environment is.
be a little real here.
For instance one shop here gets about 8 players. Thats two pods. If you refuse to play against someone, well youre ***** out of luck that round.
Another place gets about 40 people. They only do 2 or 3 rounds. Again, if you refuse to play against someone... well maybe you can swap but chances are your ass is skipping that round
Point is that for some places edh night is organized and structured. Social contract and communication on power level just does not work in that environment because you cant predict what youre going to be up against, and everyone is playing for different reasons. Discussing it doesnt always do anything because some people only bring one deck, some people have different perceptions of power levels, sometimes youre the 8th man at an 8 person event where the 7 others are friends and go full bore where you cant.
Edh experiences vary.
Just chiming in to say this has been my experience too.
The more casual a player claims to be, or their build claims to be, the nastier theyve been.
Ive seen no less than three people throw their decks physically and rage sell their entire collection after a loss. One guy threatened a beating after he used slaughter pact and his only swamp was vindicated. Its okay when they counterspell your cultivate but its rage time if you spell pierce their genesis wave.
yeah. i find my old lists sometimes, back from 2010. they're vastly different. way more laid back, slower, but way more complex, synergistic, and more fun to play. games were wildly unpredictable because you were trying to make a perfect machine using imperfect parts.
i look at my lists in 2020 and a lot of them are similar to each other now with the majority of the deck not even having existed 10 years ago. everything has kinda become jam these newly printed format aimed cards that are ridiculously strong, and bolster them with some reserve list power. if you're in blue you need XYZ, if you're in green you must run this. its not even about synergizing with your commander either most of the time. its about keeping up with the other people who also run xyz because if you don't you just get steamrolled because of how quickly card design out paced the format. if you don't run those you end up at this severe disadvantage.
its wildly different, not necessarily bad, just different. if anything i wouldn't mind the committee being more aggressive in banning some of those cards. the ones specifically designed for edh with big splashy effects that break games, designed by people who don't necessarily play the format or understand its nuances.
its also made deck building somewhat harder as you go man i need this this and that, but for each one of those that became a defining card, thats one less fun card you can jam, and if you dont' run them you end up with a deck operating on a much lower tier than your store regulars so now everyone is involved in this arms race. who can power out expropriate fastest, who can copy it the most, how many cyclonic rifts can we see go off in the next hour. the format as a whole moves away from being about a commander and more about a subset of cards.
the ever rising prices of some reserved list cards may call a lot of that into judgement very soon. the difference between owning a gaea's cradle, and an earthcraft, and not owning them is pretty huge with the disparity growing larger all the time. some of these reserve list cards are just going to make an entire class of player unable to compete against the other - which causes interest to wane on a longer timeline. the point here being that they may have to revise their stances on expensive cards being banned to prevent ubiquity, or start adding things over an identifiable value to the ban list. the social contract and talk it out with your group doesn't hold water any more because of the surge in popularity. you walk into a store you want the same banned list as the other store you walked into.
while wizards has continued support for the format, and run with it, and yes that has caused a huge surge in popularity, i do sometimes wonder if that's what's really wrong with the format right now. so many of these newer cards, or edh designed cards, just break the format in half. they do out of control absurd things, or combo in ways no one saw right away. its changed the nature of deckbuilding, especially since 2010. its less about finding obscure stuff or cute interactions and way more easy these days to go OOPS THAT'S EXPROPRIATE MANA AND I CAN COPY IT TOO! one approach is definitely more in line with deckbuilding in 2010, than deckbuilding in 2020. there is a little bit of a disconnect there sometimes it seems.
i think those are where the rules committee is weakest right now, and are definitely slow to act.
for now they stay largely hands off, and that's... honestly i can appreciate that. what i enjoy in edh, and the cards i enjoy using, are much different from sheldon's favored ones - most of them showing up on his do not play these cards list - but because they're hands off... well i can still play those cards and strategies for now. it means we all get a more diversified environment rather than some kind of iron will being executed that makes playing entire archetypes impossible. it means that we're free to explore different archetypes, different cards, and basically do whatever we personally want with the format instead of just lining up craw wurms the way he seems to favor.
now if we really want to discuss something problematic let's talk about sheldon's renown and platform, and how his insistence to avoid certain cards/strategies translates to the community largely trying to deligitimize those cards/strategies resulting in less experienced players being unable to handle those cards/strategies and how that may eventually lead to a banning due to unpopular opinion of them... yeah i think that has some merit too and that social contract against things like the cards on his list needs to be dropped from all edh terminology.