Honestly I'd love a format that was 60 or 100-card singleton with a more accessible card pool. It's just that 30 health + commander rules = broken magic.
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It's just that 30 health + commander rules = broken magic.
See, I'm not convinced of this. Maybe I'm just mincing words here, but I feel as though the real issue here isn't that Magic's ruleset can't create a great Brawl experience per se, just that perhaps the same cards designed for Standard do not necessarily lead to great Brawl environments. The two formats have different needs.
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I don't think we'll really know if that's the case until Kaladesh and Amonkhet rotate out. It'd actually be kind of nice if Dominaria was a base set for brawl. I feel like when Dominaria rotates, we'll have a problem with legendary and walker diversity. I guess it would be a good excuse for them to go back to an updated Kamigawa, but I guess we'll see.
I still hold that brawl is a multiplayer format. I've been seeing people playing against counterspell-ridden Baral decks in 1v1, which sounds like a waste of time honestly.
We're on the same page with 1v1 Brawl for sure. I actually get the appeal (highlander formats are fun in 1v1), but I think they should just sanction Standard, Modern, Legacy highlander (sans a commander) and leave Brawl as a multiplayer format. I'm going to be real bummed if they ban Baral.
For commander diversity, I'm a little less worried. There were 14 available commanders in Amonkhet and 12 in Ixalan. I'd expect the trend of double digit legends to continue as well as they now have their eyes on that count more regularly to keep Brawl viable. It won't be as diverse as commander, but it already isn't. I don't think we'll need a Dominaria type set to keep things interesting.
It's just that 30 health + commander rules = broken magic.
See, I'm not convinced of this. Maybe I'm just mincing words here, but I feel as though the real issue here isn't that Magic's ruleset can't create a great Brawl experience per se, just that perhaps the same cards designed for Standard do not necessarily lead to great Brawl environments. The two formats have different needs.
I mean, that's true - you could come up with a card pool that was ideal for any kind of variant ruleset Magic, it's just that the card pool as it exists... isn't, and you can't really do that without making an environment that's very broken for other formats. For example, you can't really print 1/2 mana threats that are powerful enough to really punish the Baral "oops all counterspells" strategy when players start at 30 life.
Even if it works well in multiplayer, to me it's a shame that WotC is supporting this as a 1v1 format with leagues when it's just such a poor format in that setting, instead of supporting something a similar accessible singleton format without Commander rules.
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I mean, that's true - you could come up with a card pool that was ideal for any kind of variant ruleset Magic, it's just that the card pool as it exists... isn't, and you can't really do that without making an environment that's very broken for other formats. For example, you can't really print 1/2 mana threats that are powerful enough to really punish the Baral "oops all counterspells" strategy when players start at 30 life.
Even if it works well in multiplayer, to me it's a shame that WotC is supporting this as a 1v1 format with leagues when it's just such a poor format in that setting, instead of supporting something a similar accessible singleton format without Commander rules.
I think Wizards supporting Brawl as a 1v1 format on MTGO is more of a byproduct of MTGO more than anything else.
Although Wizards hasn't really cemented their intentions with the Brawl format as well as the Rules Committee has with Commander, by borrowing similar elements from Commander, it's clear to me that Wizards is really hoping to piggyback off of a lot of Commander's intentions, namely that it be played as a casual format instead of as a competitive one. That's in direct contention with what MTGO stands for though since MTGO is just about the antithesis of casual play. The Brawl format's health, like Commander, very much relies upon players not breaking it since the environment itself, as mentioned in my previous post, can't really be trusted to create the kinds of games it ought to due to the fact that Brawl's cardpool isn't crafted exclusively for it. Therefore, I don't think it should really come as a surprise that players on MTGO aren't reproducing the same kind of environment that Brawl players are seeing on paper. When players can hide behind digital anonymity, there can't be any serious repercussions for disrupting the format. The social element is totally gone there.
Wizards understands there's a demand for Brawl, and that's why they've monetized it on MTGO, but just because they've made the format playable doesn't mean the medium is well suited to it. To make an analogy, playing Brawl (or Commander) on MTGO very much strikes me as playing Dark Souls on a DDR dance pad. Sure, you can do it, but the game was never intended to be played like that, and doesn't translate well as a result. It's just another way for Wizards to cash in on something without having to make any kind of serious effort.
You can't disrupt a format that doesn't exist. Brawl pretty much begun online. It has had people playing both 1v1 and multiplayer since it was implemented last wednesday meanwhile to this day most of what you read in reddit, twitter, facebook and here regarding the format is "lol who plays Brawl?".
It feels to me that some people expected Brawl to be a weak, durdly and cheap format reminiscent of the mythological "75% Commander". But instead found 5C Jodahsaurs, Jhoira Storm, Zacama and Bolas making cEDH decks look fair not because they're overpowered, but because everything else in the format is weak, has little support or outright sucks.
Brawl was born broken, both 1v1 and multiplayer. Nobody stole the format's innocence, it was never innocent.
I don't know what to make of this statement. I agree with you that Brawl's playerbase is tiny, but just because that's true doesn't mean the format still can't be played in ways it isn't intended to.
Did it? My understanding comes from this article where Gavin Verhey explains how Gerritt Turner built a Commander microformat for his group of friends and later brought it to R&D.
It has had people playing both 1v1 and multiplayer since it was implemented last wednesday meanwhile to this day most of what you read in reddit, twitter, facebook and here regarding the format is "lol who plays Brawl?".
Yeah, that does seem to be the general response, doesn't it? I can't say I'm surprised though. Aside from how jaded the Magic community tends to come off anyway, I believe that Brawl, at its core, isn't trying to appeal to the same kinds of people that permeate those websites. Instead, Brawl is trying to be a launchboard for newer players. Wizards understands that the barrier to entry for non-Standard formats is enormous, and that includes Commander, which is a problem considering Commander monopolizes the casual scene.
Brawl is Wizard's attempt to bridge the gap for new players. Wizards understands that limiting the cardpool to Standard only cards ensures that card availability remains high and therefore increases the accessibility of the format. That's something most enfranchised players don't care about because many of them have already been playing the games for years. Instead what we see is an attitude of indifference. Enfranchised players are seeing it more as a Commander derivative and therefore not really deserving of much attention.
Ironically, anyone claiming Wizards should take the reins from the Rules Committee has finally gotten their wish, though not in the way most had imagined.
It feels to me that some people expected Brawl to be a weak, durdly and cheap format reminiscent of the mythological "75% Commander". But instead found 5C Jodahsaurs, Jhoira Storm, Zacama and Bolas making cEDH decks look fair not because they're overpowered, but because everything else in the format is weak, has little support or outright sucks.
So, a few things. First off, I don't think "mythological" is an accurate descriptor for 75% Commander. Like you, I've had doubts as to whether or not Commander was still being played in the way it was originally intended. That's why I decided to ask Toby this question in a recent AMA a few weeks ago. According to him, Commander is very much on track.
arrogantAxolotl asks, "Do you believe Commander is still being played by the general Magic community in the way it was originally intended to be?"
Yes, but with a couple of caveats.
The format has grown considerably. By definition, that means that there are more people altering Commander to suit their own philosophy. I'm all in favor of that (see my comment about microformats above), but there's now a bell curve, rather than a blob.
The other change has been the rise in creature power over the past ten years, especially big creatures. We used to have to scrape to find worthy monsters, and I think we've lost a little of the forced-improvisation spirit that infused the early format. It always makes me sad to hear "Wizards needs to give us a Commander for X," because part of the joy of Commander was being forced to work with what we had, even if it wasn't optimal. Optimal usually isn't that interesting.
Second, I think there's a misconception here. The secret to any casual format, be it Commander or otherwise, has always been in not breaking it. If people are looking for a compelling environment in Brawl, they can find it, just not in the competitive scene because the format isn't designed for competitive play. That's what other formats are for. Brawl was designed for casual play, so bereaving the fact that Brawl doesn't live up to its predecessors in terms of competitive viability strikes me as missing the point.
Now, granted, do I think cards like Zacama should have seen print given the fact that Brawl now exists? No, I don't. A casual format is going to have different needs than a competitive one, and sharing the same pool of cards is really asking for trouble since some of the cards printed for the betterment of the Standard format are going to negatively impact the health of the Brawl format. Sorcerous Spyglass strikes me as a perfect example. While the Spyglass's availability in Standard is important for keeping potential metagames balanced, it hurts Brawl by being a two mana card that anyone can put in their deck to shut out opposing planeswalker commanders. Not exactly a great design choice.
Brawl was born broken, both 1v1 and multiplayer. Nobody stole the format's innocence, it was never innocent.
Again, I think you're missing the point of the format. Brawl was never intended to be played competitively. The format was never balanced to create compelling competitive environments because having a compelling competitive environment isn't a goal of the format. The goal of Brawl is to provide a way for casual players to make use of recent product. The format is very much innocent in that regard. Players can certainly play the format competitively if they wish to, but that doesn't mean they should.
You're completelly missing the point of what I'm saying and what I mean. Sure WotC can say whatever they want about their fun cute Brawl playtesting at WotC HQ and how much fun they had, but the cards don't go in that direction.
The first people to test Brawl were the MTGO community and no, the MTGO community isn't 100% Spike grinders, there's always been a large and very creative Commander community. Subformats like Pauper Commander, 3DH and Penny Dreadfull Highlander were not born in paper and you very often find people willing to try weird stuff like deckbuilding challenges, Vanguards and obscure commanders because you can play as many games as you want with as many people as you can find from the comfort of your own house.
We tried to have fun with the format but the cards wouldn't have it. Before Dominaria you could pretty much only build around five commanders: Depala, Hapatra, Scorpion God, Beckett and Kumena. No other commander notoriously interacted with game mechanics that weren't natural gameplay (Locust God and drawing, Ghalta and playing creatures). Unsurprisingly every Depala, Hapatra, Scorpion God, Beckett Brass and Kumena deck looked the same. Even more unsurprisingly every other deck was just the best cards in it's commander's colors and it became very obvious very fast that not all legends and planeswalkers are made equal.
You say the real goal of the format is to get new players with weaker budgets to play. Will you tell those players not to play the Zacama they opened in their pre-release kit, or let them get crushed by the guy who opened Zacama in their pre-release kit? Either way someone will always end up feeling bad. Baral effortlessly hitting 1v1 Tier 0 dominance on the format's second week of existance by just droping every counter, draw and bounce card avalaible into a pile is not a symptom of evil Spikes breaking a poor innocent casual format's intended purpose. It's a symptom of WotC's ham handed bomb-or-bust limited design, Standard is designed for decks with 4x Fatal Push, not one Push vs infinite Barals.
In the end I believe they lied about testing the format at all. I don't want to believe the people making the game are so bad they genuinelly thought people would be able to turn their draft remains into a Brawl deck. The power disparity between what is and isn't playable in the Standard card pool is ridiculous and it's only exacerbated even further by being singleton. I don't want Brawl to be a Spikey format, but I don't believe it can not be.
You're completelly missing the point of what I'm saying and what I mean. Sure WotC can say whatever they want about their fun cute Brawl playtesting at WotC HQ and how much fun they had, but the cards don't go in that direction.
Would you care to elaborate on this any further? To a degree, I agree with this. Cards like The Immortal Sun seem pretty heinous to print immediately prior to releasing Brawl. Not that there shouldn't exist answers to problematic planeswalkers mind you, but when one of the key features of a new format is to be able to use planeswalkers as commanders, not being able to do so because the The Immortal Sun is a popular and relatively ubiquitous card feels like an accident at best and negligence/poor design at worst.
The first people to test Brawl were the MTGO community
Were they? I had assumed everyone got hold of the news at the same time. With that said, I do think more games of Brawl are being played online than they are on paper simply because it's much easier to find games that way.
and no, the MTGO community isn't 100% Spike grinders, there's always been a large and very creative Commander community. Subformats like Pauper Commander, 3DH and Penny Dreadfull Highlander were not born in paper and you very often find people willing to try weird stuff like deckbuilding challenges, Vanguards and obscure commanders because you can play as many games as you want with as many people as you can find from the comfort of your own house.
Point taken. Maybe I gave off the wrong impression by painting every Magic Online player as some sort of tournament grinder. What I guess I should have done was express a different notion, that the intersection on the Venn diagram of "players who Wizards seems to be marketing Brawl towards" and "players who play MTGO" seems virtually non-existent.
We tried to have fun with the format but the cards wouldn't have it. Before Dominaria you could pretty much only build around five commanders: Depala, Hapatra, Scorpion God, Beckett and Kumena. No other commander notoriously interacted with game mechanics that weren't natural gameplay (Locust God and drawing, Ghalta and playing creatures).
I don't know what to say to this. Some friends and I played Brawl pre-Dominaria, and everything was just fine for us.
Unsurprisingly every Depala, Hapatra, Scorpion God, Beckett Brass and Kumena deck looked the same. Even more unsurprisingly every other deck was just the best cards in it's commander's colors and it became very obvious very fast that not all legends and planeswalkers are made equal.
This is something I've noticed as well, and I believe this phenomenon is largely the fault of the cardpool. It's just too small.
While I think having a limited cardpool is philosophically important for Brawl, most of the cards in Brawl suffer from the fact that they're not explicitly designed for Brawl. In fact, most Standard legal cards aren't even designed for Standard. They're designed for limited. Now, that's never really been of much consequence for Standard, but for a singleton format like Brawl, building anything more than a goodstuff style of deck is quite difficult given that the greater part of the commons and uncommons are literally just unplayable. They just tend to not be able to compete with what the rares and mythics are doing because the commons and uncommons tend to be made for limited. Rares and mythics aren't off the hook either. Many of those cards also play poorly in Brawl because they're designed for other formats, be they limited, eternal, standard... Taking this into account, Brawl's actual cardpool shrinks wildly, and that's a problem.
You say the real goal of the format is to get new players with weaker budgets to play.
That's my impression of what Wizards is attempting to do with Brawl, yes. They want to create a casual format that features their new cards. Commander doesn't do this because the cards they're printing today (understandably) can't compete with everything they've printed 25 years prior. As a result, Commander, while a vibrant and fun format, is less accessible to new players since they can't purchase product on the shelf (beyond Commander pre-cons) to realistically enter the format. Wizards has realized this, and is marketing Brawl towards casual players that purchase their sealed products and are looking for a non-competitive way for them to play with them.
Will you tell those players not to play the Zacama they opened in their pre-release kit, or let them get crushed by the guy who opened Zacama in their pre-release kit? Either way someone will always end up feeling bad.
This is a real problem, right? Everyone, especially new players and players that aren't as enfranchised into the game as we are, want to believe that whatever they open up is fair game. That's problematic though since the reality is that Wizards (to me) doesn't seem particularly concerned about the consequences their Standard legal sets have on Brawl. Many of the cards in those sets work very much against Brawl's best interests, but seemingly see print regardless because Wizards wants to sell product and that product needs to attract players of all kinds of backgrounds.
So what do we, as players, do about it? Do we soft ban cards like Zacama? Personally, that's the approach I'm in favor of.
Baral effortlessly hitting 1v1 Tier 0 dominance on the format's second week of existance by just droping every counter, draw and bounce card avalaible into a pile is not a symptom of evil Spikes breaking a poor innocent casual format's intended purpose. It's a symptom of WotC's ham handed bomb-or-bust limited design, Standard is designed for decks with 4x Fatal Push, not one Push vs infinite Barals.
I don't know what to make of this. Like, is Baral just accidentally crazy? Is Baral just so ridiculously good that it takes over every single game it's played in regardless of the player's level of experience or choice of surrounding cards? If so, then yeah, that definitely seems like a problem. Players want to believe that whatever commander they're interested in playing will give them a fighting chance (even if they know it's not the best), and if a card like Baral is so far gone that nothing else can even remotely compete with it, then players are naturally going to be upset.
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Well yes I mean Baral is extremely good in cEDH so its not a really surprise that he is a God when he is the only high tier Commander around in the latest blocks.
Again, I believe WotC is being disingenuous. The Standard card pool doesn't have casual cards. It has constructed playables and limited fodder. And in the very announcement Gavin mentions Ghalta, Rashimi and Nicol Bolas as exiting commanders to build around. What makes casual cards like Roon, Mayael or Rakdos some of the most popular commanders in their colors is the large card pool. Without a large and complex card pool picking Ajani, Valiant Protector instead of Huatli, Radiant Champion is not a strategic choice or a show of originality, it's handicapping yourself on purpose.
Either their definition of casual is way different from ours (mostly yours, I can live with building competitively but playing casually), or they don't know what they're doing. Because the only way Nicol Bolas won't dominate a table of people who made decks out of draft remains is if the deck is pretty much all basic lands.
Hell one of my first multiplayer games was Zacama vs Kambal (me), Beckett and Vona. Zacama's deck was all ramp and lands and it still won.
The Standard card pool doesn't have casual cards. It has constructed playables and limited fodder.
It's hard for me to say this, because it seems at least partly opinion, but this is flat incorrect. The sets legal in Brawl contain plenty of "casual" build-arounds. A large percentage of rares and mythics from all of these sets fit in to this space. If you're telling me that Sunbird's Invocation or Etatali, Primal Storm or Helm of the Host or Sandworm Convergence don't read like casual staples, you're out of touch. I know they are, because they're all appearing in Commander at disproportionately high rates.
Without a large and complex card pool picking Ajani, Valiant Protector instead of Huatli, Radiant Champion is not a strategic choice or a show of originality, it's handicapping yourself on purpose.
Even with a large, complex card pool it would, basically, always be "wrong" to pick Ajani over Hautli in a tokens build. Ajani is perfectly fine choice in more mid-range-y W/G decks though, so I don't really understand your point here. Both are plenty fine as a commanders. Hautli is probably a little better overall, but you can say that's true one of any two commanders in the same colors in Commander.
The Standard card pool doesn't have casual cards. It has constructed playables and limited fodder.
It's hard for me to say this, because it seems at least partly opinion, but this is flat incorrect. The sets legal in Brawl contain plenty of "casual" build-arounds. A large percentage of rares and mythics from all of these sets fit in to this space. If you're telling me that Sunbird's Invocation or Etatali, Primal Storm or Helm of the Host or Sandworm Convergence don't read like casual staples, you're out of touch. I know they are, because they're all appearing in Commander at disproportionately high rates.
Without a large and complex card pool picking Ajani, Valiant Protector instead of Huatli, Radiant Champion is not a strategic choice or a show of originality, it's handicapping yourself on purpose.
Even with a large, complex card pool it would, basically, always be "wrong" to pick Ajani over Hautli in a tokens build. Ajani is perfectly fine choice in more mid-range-y W/G decks though, so I don't really understand your point here. Both are plenty fine as a commanders. Hautli is probably a little better overall, but you can say that's true one of any two commanders in the same colors in Commander.
Ajani Unyielding is a perfectly fine choice in a more midrange WG deck that isn't heavy in tokens, IF there were such a deck. Ajani, Valiant Protector can`t even be used for the only interaction he's good at in Standard because it's off color.
And where could all those cool casual cards (Sandwurm Convergence isn't casual btw, it's a staple in Abzan Approach and GB Aquisition decks) that don't have any support find a home? In Commander, that's where. Sunbird's Invocation isn't doing anything in a format where people are trying to get turn 4 Zacama out of Jodah.
Ajani Unyielding is a perfectly fine choice in a more midrange WG deck that isn't heavy in tokens, IF there were such a deck. Ajani, Valiant Protector can`t even be used for the only interaction he's good at in Standard because it's off color.
Cainsson, I'm getting the impression that you fundamentally misunderstand what Brawl is about. The very idea that there is no Ajani Unyielding deck doesn't make any sense. There very much is an Ajani Unyielding deck. Whether or not it's competitively viable is irrelevant since Brawl isn't a competitive format and was never intended to be one.
And where could all those cool casual cards (Sandwurm Convergence isn't casual btw, it's a staple in Abzan Approach and GB Aquisition decks) that don't have any support find a home? In Commander, that's where. Sunbird's Invocation isn't doing anything in a format where people are trying to get turn 4 Zacama out of Jodah.
I don't mean to sound condescending here, but cards can be played in multiple formats, you know? Just because a card sees Standard or Commander play doesn't mean it wasn't designed to be a casual card. And I side with alfindeol regarding your statement on casual cards. If you genuinely believe that Standard doesn't have any casual cards, you're dead wrong.
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Whether or not it's competitively viable is irrelevant since Brawl isn't a competitive format and was never intended to be one.
And how are you gonna enforce that?
Outside of your own playgroup you have no power over what people play, and all I've seen people play so far are decks that try to abuse Bolas, Zacama, Paradox Engine, etc. Do we start banning pretty much every good card already because some people think Gavin meant "cheap bad cards nobody plays" when he called the format "casual" despite recommending Bolas, Rashimi and Ghalta in his own article? Or do we accept that this isn't the format where people thought Planeswalker Deck walkers could shine after all?
Ultimatedly casual and competitive are down to intentions and the ease with which you can apply those intentions. When what you want to do with Sandwurm Convergence is make it a 15 mana super Moat with Form of the Dragon, it is a casual card. When you want to snipe whatever you opponents play with Zacama while your wurms kill them and this is actually a viable wincon in the format it becomes a competitive and pretty cutthroat card.
Again, I don't want the format to be always cutthroat all the time. But after close to a hundred games online and a couple dozen at the LGS, people aren't playing the crappy 5cmc removal they're playing Fatal Push and Vraska's Contempt so if you haven't played the format much and you will be playing it in public with strangers, don't expect their decks to be cheap of underpowered just because you'd like it that way.
If you're only gonna be playing in a closed playgroup with nobody but your friends and you all agree on the power level you want to see at the table then ignore everything I said.
Every discussion of what "casual" vs "competitive" means in Magic gets mired in that there's no clear defined lines. Some people will say that playing a tier 2 or 3 deck that you like instead of sleeving up an established "best deck" is casual, some people will insist that "casual magic" ends at trying to optimize in any way over just throwing together a pile of 100 pet cards. I think we can all agree that pure Johnny "I wanna win with One With Nothing" Magic is casual, and that tournament grinder "I'm playing Hollow One at this event because I don't know Modern all that well so a proactive tier 1 deck with a lot of free win potential is the thing to go for" Magic is competitive, but everything in the middle is a gray area that people would do well to remember you're not going to square into one camp or another. The other day I went into a Pauper league with 5C Tron, which I don't think is a top deck or even necessarily a T1 deck in the format (and, because it runs such long matches and is under such pressure from the clock, is a really poor choice to maximize your leagues), but I enjoyed playing it and I had a good time (I went 3-2, though I lost a match and filed for comp thanks to a newly introduced bug in MTGO...).
I think of this as a somewhat casual attitude to playing in a competitive setting, and a TON of people playing on MTGO are doing this; watch any (say) Jeff Hoogland video and you'll see that the Modern leagues are full of weird brews and decks that aren't complete jokes but which are plainly not good in the format, like WG value piles. Sit down to any draft in MTGO and you'll definitely get a sense that some pods are just not behaving optimally; I've seen more than one Shivan Fire go sixth or seventh in like four Dominaria drafts, and sometimes you get paired up against 5x Ruin Raider 2x Tetsuko instead of a normal midrangey Limited deck.
I think a lot of self-described casual players, and particularly paper players in very social multiplayer scenes like EDH, have this image of MTGO as all "modo grinders" smashing tier one lists into one another but in the day-to-day, it's not that any more than everyone at a GP is coming there with a tuned and researched tier one deck. It's more optimized than a typical FNM, sure, but it's not perfectly optimized and people are not making "pure spike" choices without room for preference or "fun" in them. There's more of a nuance between casual and competitive than that.
And I think that's kind of the shame with Brawl on MTGO - I think there's a lot of desire for formats that feel relatively "flat" and "open" and are friendly to experimenting, and in a lot of ways Modern looks like that right now, but Modern is very inaccessible both in terms of card availability and the complexity of the format. Standard has been miserable for a long time and it tends towards a sharper incline of power level between the top decks and the bad ones anyway, even when Standard is good. I was kind of hoping Brawl would capture that feeling while being more accessible, but the results from the first Brawl challenge (87% of lists had Commit / Memory in them!) really make it look like a badly broken format, not just one where there's 3-4 "top decks."
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On average, Magic players are worse at new card evaluation than almost every other skill, except perhaps sideboarding.
Well as far as Magic Online, it's been an abortion too be honest. The level of play has been horri-bad. Lot's of new players who have no idea about threat assessment or what cards do, etc. On-top of that lots of salty players and plays. It's hard to explain to new players that it's just a game. They act like you've killed their mother or something, lol.
So it's been disappointing, just the quality of games is way below average of equivalent commander games online. Most games don't finish, people quit, etc. Commander has just more experienced player online, so there is a bit more know-how about whats going on. I guess Brawl is turning out for a lot of players who don't know what they are doing, so don't expect quality games that's for sure.
I just wouldn't recommend multiplayer at this stage, unless you're prepared for below average games.
I think the most annoying thing I've run into so far is all the people that want to play brawl, but don't want to build a deck unless other people are playing. It's sort of a failed circular logic at the moment. We have a small group of people that play and people always come up and say they are interested, but aren't sure if they should build a deck or not. We always tell them to just do it and that we'll be playing brawl. I feel like if those people just committed to building a deck, we would have a pretty big play group to fire multiple pods with. I feel like this is where MTGO is doing paper a disservice as the brawl environment there is toxic trash because 1v1 brawl is a terrible format that really shouldn't exist and it's making people that look into brawl online suddenly lose interest.
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Trap your friends in an endless game with this 23-card combo!
I still hold that brawl is a multiplayer format. I've been seeing people playing against counterspell-ridden Baral decks in 1v1, which sounds like a waste of time honestly.
For commander diversity, I'm a little less worried. There were 14 available commanders in Amonkhet and 12 in Ixalan. I'd expect the trend of double digit legends to continue as well as they now have their eyes on that count more regularly to keep Brawl viable. It won't be as diverse as commander, but it already isn't. I don't think we'll need a Dominaria type set to keep things interesting.
R Norin the Wary: I've Got a Bad Feeling About This
UG Thrasios & Kydele: Knowledge is Power
RG Borborygmos Enraged: The Breaking of the World
BG The Gitrog Monster: All Glory to the Hypnotoad
WUR Zedruu the Greathearted: Endless Possibilities, One Outcome
WBG Karador, Ghost Chieftain: What's Dead May Never Die
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I mean, that's true - you could come up with a card pool that was ideal for any kind of variant ruleset Magic, it's just that the card pool as it exists... isn't, and you can't really do that without making an environment that's very broken for other formats. For example, you can't really print 1/2 mana threats that are powerful enough to really punish the Baral "oops all counterspells" strategy when players start at 30 life.
Even if it works well in multiplayer, to me it's a shame that WotC is supporting this as a 1v1 format with leagues when it's just such a poor format in that setting, instead of supporting something a similar accessible singleton format without Commander rules.
I think Wizards supporting Brawl as a 1v1 format on MTGO is more of a byproduct of MTGO more than anything else.
Although Wizards hasn't really cemented their intentions with the Brawl format as well as the Rules Committee has with Commander, by borrowing similar elements from Commander, it's clear to me that Wizards is really hoping to piggyback off of a lot of Commander's intentions, namely that it be played as a casual format instead of as a competitive one. That's in direct contention with what MTGO stands for though since MTGO is just about the antithesis of casual play. The Brawl format's health, like Commander, very much relies upon players not breaking it since the environment itself, as mentioned in my previous post, can't really be trusted to create the kinds of games it ought to due to the fact that Brawl's cardpool isn't crafted exclusively for it. Therefore, I don't think it should really come as a surprise that players on MTGO aren't reproducing the same kind of environment that Brawl players are seeing on paper. When players can hide behind digital anonymity, there can't be any serious repercussions for disrupting the format. The social element is totally gone there.
Wizards understands there's a demand for Brawl, and that's why they've monetized it on MTGO, but just because they've made the format playable doesn't mean the medium is well suited to it. To make an analogy, playing Brawl (or Commander) on MTGO very much strikes me as playing Dark Souls on a DDR dance pad. Sure, you can do it, but the game was never intended to be played like that, and doesn't translate well as a result. It's just another way for Wizards to cash in on something without having to make any kind of serious effort.
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It feels to me that some people expected Brawl to be a weak, durdly and cheap format reminiscent of the mythological "75% Commander". But instead found 5C Jodahsaurs, Jhoira Storm, Zacama and Bolas making cEDH decks look fair not because they're overpowered, but because everything else in the format is weak, has little support or outright sucks.
Brawl was born broken, both 1v1 and multiplayer. Nobody stole the format's innocence, it was never innocent.
I don't know what to make of this statement. I agree with you that Brawl's playerbase is tiny, but just because that's true doesn't mean the format still can't be played in ways it isn't intended to.
Did it? My understanding comes from this article where Gavin Verhey explains how Gerritt Turner built a Commander microformat for his group of friends and later brought it to R&D.
Yeah, that does seem to be the general response, doesn't it? I can't say I'm surprised though. Aside from how jaded the Magic community tends to come off anyway, I believe that Brawl, at its core, isn't trying to appeal to the same kinds of people that permeate those websites. Instead, Brawl is trying to be a launchboard for newer players. Wizards understands that the barrier to entry for non-Standard formats is enormous, and that includes Commander, which is a problem considering Commander monopolizes the casual scene.
Brawl is Wizard's attempt to bridge the gap for new players. Wizards understands that limiting the cardpool to Standard only cards ensures that card availability remains high and therefore increases the accessibility of the format. That's something most enfranchised players don't care about because many of them have already been playing the games for years. Instead what we see is an attitude of indifference. Enfranchised players are seeing it more as a Commander derivative and therefore not really deserving of much attention.
Ironically, anyone claiming Wizards should take the reins from the Rules Committee has finally gotten their wish, though not in the way most had imagined.
So, a few things. First off, I don't think "mythological" is an accurate descriptor for 75% Commander. Like you, I've had doubts as to whether or not Commander was still being played in the way it was originally intended. That's why I decided to ask Toby this question in a recent AMA a few weeks ago. According to him, Commander is very much on track.
Yes, but with a couple of caveats.
The format has grown considerably. By definition, that means that there are more people altering Commander to suit their own philosophy. I'm all in favor of that (see my comment about microformats above), but there's now a bell curve, rather than a blob.
The other change has been the rise in creature power over the past ten years, especially big creatures. We used to have to scrape to find worthy monsters, and I think we've lost a little of the forced-improvisation spirit that infused the early format. It always makes me sad to hear "Wizards needs to give us a Commander for X," because part of the joy of Commander was being forced to work with what we had, even if it wasn't optimal. Optimal usually isn't that interesting.
Second, I think there's a misconception here. The secret to any casual format, be it Commander or otherwise, has always been in not breaking it. If people are looking for a compelling environment in Brawl, they can find it, just not in the competitive scene because the format isn't designed for competitive play. That's what other formats are for. Brawl was designed for casual play, so bereaving the fact that Brawl doesn't live up to its predecessors in terms of competitive viability strikes me as missing the point.
Now, granted, do I think cards like Zacama should have seen print given the fact that Brawl now exists? No, I don't. A casual format is going to have different needs than a competitive one, and sharing the same pool of cards is really asking for trouble since some of the cards printed for the betterment of the Standard format are going to negatively impact the health of the Brawl format. Sorcerous Spyglass strikes me as a perfect example. While the Spyglass's availability in Standard is important for keeping potential metagames balanced, it hurts Brawl by being a two mana card that anyone can put in their deck to shut out opposing planeswalker commanders. Not exactly a great design choice.
Again, I think you're missing the point of the format. Brawl was never intended to be played competitively. The format was never balanced to create compelling competitive environments because having a compelling competitive environment isn't a goal of the format. The goal of Brawl is to provide a way for casual players to make use of recent product. The format is very much innocent in that regard. Players can certainly play the format competitively if they wish to, but that doesn't mean they should.
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The first people to test Brawl were the MTGO community and no, the MTGO community isn't 100% Spike grinders, there's always been a large and very creative Commander community. Subformats like Pauper Commander, 3DH and Penny Dreadfull Highlander were not born in paper and you very often find people willing to try weird stuff like deckbuilding challenges, Vanguards and obscure commanders because you can play as many games as you want with as many people as you can find from the comfort of your own house.
We tried to have fun with the format but the cards wouldn't have it. Before Dominaria you could pretty much only build around five commanders: Depala, Hapatra, Scorpion God, Beckett and Kumena. No other commander notoriously interacted with game mechanics that weren't natural gameplay (Locust God and drawing, Ghalta and playing creatures). Unsurprisingly every Depala, Hapatra, Scorpion God, Beckett Brass and Kumena deck looked the same. Even more unsurprisingly every other deck was just the best cards in it's commander's colors and it became very obvious very fast that not all legends and planeswalkers are made equal.
You say the real goal of the format is to get new players with weaker budgets to play. Will you tell those players not to play the Zacama they opened in their pre-release kit, or let them get crushed by the guy who opened Zacama in their pre-release kit? Either way someone will always end up feeling bad. Baral effortlessly hitting 1v1 Tier 0 dominance on the format's second week of existance by just droping every counter, draw and bounce card avalaible into a pile is not a symptom of evil Spikes breaking a poor innocent casual format's intended purpose. It's a symptom of WotC's ham handed bomb-or-bust limited design, Standard is designed for decks with 4x Fatal Push, not one Push vs infinite Barals.
In the end I believe they lied about testing the format at all. I don't want to believe the people making the game are so bad they genuinelly thought people would be able to turn their draft remains into a Brawl deck. The power disparity between what is and isn't playable in the Standard card pool is ridiculous and it's only exacerbated even further by being singleton. I don't want Brawl to be a Spikey format, but I don't believe it can not be.
Would you care to elaborate on this any further? To a degree, I agree with this. Cards like The Immortal Sun seem pretty heinous to print immediately prior to releasing Brawl. Not that there shouldn't exist answers to problematic planeswalkers mind you, but when one of the key features of a new format is to be able to use planeswalkers as commanders, not being able to do so because the The Immortal Sun is a popular and relatively ubiquitous card feels like an accident at best and negligence/poor design at worst.
Were they? I had assumed everyone got hold of the news at the same time. With that said, I do think more games of Brawl are being played online than they are on paper simply because it's much easier to find games that way.
Point taken. Maybe I gave off the wrong impression by painting every Magic Online player as some sort of tournament grinder. What I guess I should have done was express a different notion, that the intersection on the Venn diagram of "players who Wizards seems to be marketing Brawl towards" and "players who play MTGO" seems virtually non-existent.
I don't know what to say to this. Some friends and I played Brawl pre-Dominaria, and everything was just fine for us.
This is something I've noticed as well, and I believe this phenomenon is largely the fault of the cardpool. It's just too small.
While I think having a limited cardpool is philosophically important for Brawl, most of the cards in Brawl suffer from the fact that they're not explicitly designed for Brawl. In fact, most Standard legal cards aren't even designed for Standard. They're designed for limited. Now, that's never really been of much consequence for Standard, but for a singleton format like Brawl, building anything more than a goodstuff style of deck is quite difficult given that the greater part of the commons and uncommons are literally just unplayable. They just tend to not be able to compete with what the rares and mythics are doing because the commons and uncommons tend to be made for limited. Rares and mythics aren't off the hook either. Many of those cards also play poorly in Brawl because they're designed for other formats, be they limited, eternal, standard... Taking this into account, Brawl's actual cardpool shrinks wildly, and that's a problem.
That's my impression of what Wizards is attempting to do with Brawl, yes. They want to create a casual format that features their new cards. Commander doesn't do this because the cards they're printing today (understandably) can't compete with everything they've printed 25 years prior. As a result, Commander, while a vibrant and fun format, is less accessible to new players since they can't purchase product on the shelf (beyond Commander pre-cons) to realistically enter the format. Wizards has realized this, and is marketing Brawl towards casual players that purchase their sealed products and are looking for a non-competitive way for them to play with them.
This is a real problem, right? Everyone, especially new players and players that aren't as enfranchised into the game as we are, want to believe that whatever they open up is fair game. That's problematic though since the reality is that Wizards (to me) doesn't seem particularly concerned about the consequences their Standard legal sets have on Brawl. Many of the cards in those sets work very much against Brawl's best interests, but seemingly see print regardless because Wizards wants to sell product and that product needs to attract players of all kinds of backgrounds.
So what do we, as players, do about it? Do we soft ban cards like Zacama? Personally, that's the approach I'm in favor of.
I don't know what to make of this. Like, is Baral just accidentally crazy? Is Baral just so ridiculously good that it takes over every single game it's played in regardless of the player's level of experience or choice of surrounding cards? If so, then yeah, that definitely seems like a problem. Players want to believe that whatever commander they're interested in playing will give them a fighting chance (even if they know it's not the best), and if a card like Baral is so far gone that nothing else can even remotely compete with it, then players are naturally going to be upset.
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Either their definition of casual is way different from ours (mostly yours, I can live with building competitively but playing casually), or they don't know what they're doing. Because the only way Nicol Bolas won't dominate a table of people who made decks out of draft remains is if the deck is pretty much all basic lands.
Hell one of my first multiplayer games was Zacama vs Kambal (me), Beckett and Vona. Zacama's deck was all ramp and lands and it still won.
It's hard for me to say this, because it seems at least partly opinion, but this is flat incorrect. The sets legal in Brawl contain plenty of "casual" build-arounds. A large percentage of rares and mythics from all of these sets fit in to this space. If you're telling me that Sunbird's Invocation or Etatali, Primal Storm or Helm of the Host or Sandworm Convergence don't read like casual staples, you're out of touch. I know they are, because they're all appearing in Commander at disproportionately high rates.
Even with a large, complex card pool it would, basically, always be "wrong" to pick Ajani over Hautli in a tokens build. Ajani is perfectly fine choice in more mid-range-y W/G decks though, so I don't really understand your point here. Both are plenty fine as a commanders. Hautli is probably a little better overall, but you can say that's true one of any two commanders in the same colors in Commander.
R Norin the Wary: I've Got a Bad Feeling About This
UG Thrasios & Kydele: Knowledge is Power
RG Borborygmos Enraged: The Breaking of the World
BG The Gitrog Monster: All Glory to the Hypnotoad
WUR Zedruu the Greathearted: Endless Possibilities, One Outcome
WBG Karador, Ghost Chieftain: What's Dead May Never Die
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And where could all those cool casual cards (Sandwurm Convergence isn't casual btw, it's a staple in Abzan Approach and GB Aquisition decks) that don't have any support find a home? In Commander, that's where. Sunbird's Invocation isn't doing anything in a format where people are trying to get turn 4 Zacama out of Jodah.
I don't mean to sound condescending here, but cards can be played in multiple formats, you know? Just because a card sees Standard or Commander play doesn't mean it wasn't designed to be a casual card. And I side with alfindeol regarding your statement on casual cards. If you genuinely believe that Standard doesn't have any casual cards, you're dead wrong.
Trap your friends in an endless game with this 23-card combo!
Outside of your own playgroup you have no power over what people play, and all I've seen people play so far are decks that try to abuse Bolas, Zacama, Paradox Engine, etc. Do we start banning pretty much every good card already because some people think Gavin meant "cheap bad cards nobody plays" when he called the format "casual" despite recommending Bolas, Rashimi and Ghalta in his own article? Or do we accept that this isn't the format where people thought Planeswalker Deck walkers could shine after all?
Ultimatedly casual and competitive are down to intentions and the ease with which you can apply those intentions. When what you want to do with Sandwurm Convergence is make it a 15 mana super Moat with Form of the Dragon, it is a casual card. When you want to snipe whatever you opponents play with Zacama while your wurms kill them and this is actually a viable wincon in the format it becomes a competitive and pretty cutthroat card.
Again, I don't want the format to be always cutthroat all the time. But after close to a hundred games online and a couple dozen at the LGS, people aren't playing the crappy 5cmc removal they're playing Fatal Push and Vraska's Contempt so if you haven't played the format much and you will be playing it in public with strangers, don't expect their decks to be cheap of underpowered just because you'd like it that way.
If you're only gonna be playing in a closed playgroup with nobody but your friends and you all agree on the power level you want to see at the table then ignore everything I said.
I think of this as a somewhat casual attitude to playing in a competitive setting, and a TON of people playing on MTGO are doing this; watch any (say) Jeff Hoogland video and you'll see that the Modern leagues are full of weird brews and decks that aren't complete jokes but which are plainly not good in the format, like WG value piles. Sit down to any draft in MTGO and you'll definitely get a sense that some pods are just not behaving optimally; I've seen more than one Shivan Fire go sixth or seventh in like four Dominaria drafts, and sometimes you get paired up against 5x Ruin Raider 2x Tetsuko instead of a normal midrangey Limited deck.
I think a lot of self-described casual players, and particularly paper players in very social multiplayer scenes like EDH, have this image of MTGO as all "modo grinders" smashing tier one lists into one another but in the day-to-day, it's not that any more than everyone at a GP is coming there with a tuned and researched tier one deck. It's more optimized than a typical FNM, sure, but it's not perfectly optimized and people are not making "pure spike" choices without room for preference or "fun" in them. There's more of a nuance between casual and competitive than that.
And I think that's kind of the shame with Brawl on MTGO - I think there's a lot of desire for formats that feel relatively "flat" and "open" and are friendly to experimenting, and in a lot of ways Modern looks like that right now, but Modern is very inaccessible both in terms of card availability and the complexity of the format. Standard has been miserable for a long time and it tends towards a sharper incline of power level between the top decks and the bad ones anyway, even when Standard is good. I was kind of hoping Brawl would capture that feeling while being more accessible, but the results from the first Brawl challenge (87% of lists had Commit / Memory in them!) really make it look like a badly broken format, not just one where there's 3-4 "top decks."
So it's been disappointing, just the quality of games is way below average of equivalent commander games online. Most games don't finish, people quit, etc. Commander has just more experienced player online, so there is a bit more know-how about whats going on. I guess Brawl is turning out for a lot of players who don't know what they are doing, so don't expect quality games that's for sure.
I just wouldn't recommend multiplayer at this stage, unless you're prepared for below average games.
I hope local games stores have been going better?
Niv-Mizzet Reborn
Feather, the Redeemed
Estrid, the Masked
Teshar
Tymna/Ravos
Najeela, Blade-Blossom
Firesong & Sunspeaker
Zur the Enchanter
Lazav, the Multifarious
Ishai+Reyhan
Click images for decks->
-Prime Speaker Vannifar
---------------------Will & Rowan Kenrith