i usually just lurk here now and then but given the recen situation i felt like it might be worth to add some food for thought. Disclaimer: I'm not trying to convince - or even worse try to force - anyone. All i'm saying is: "Here's an idea. Why not check it out? You might like it."
A little context first though: I'm a long time EDH player (started during the second half of the 00s and played until i took a short break at the end of the 2010s) and to me EDH is - or rather was as i sadly have to admit - the most entertaining format of all time. I'll get to the reason that's no longer true (or at least not as true as it used to be) shortly.
During the second half of the 00s EDH saw a massive influx around where i was playing (a rather busy location) and it didn't take long to get to the point where even if people wanted to play any of Wizard's formats they wouldn't find opponents as basically all regulars had more or less switched to EDH exclusively (exclusions obviously prove the rule - it simply took a lot of luck to find a non EDH game). Admittedly a lot could be said about the differences in mind set in comparison to today but that's besides the point. The point being EDH was doing extremely well before Wizards even recognized that this wacky singleton thing had potential, which made them hop on the bandwagon trying to get a piece of the (nonexistent) pie. I don't want to offend anyone but if there's people out there who think EDH got popular because of Wizards they are bat***** crazy. EDH got popular *despite* Wizards involvement later on, not because of it.
To put it bluntly: The characteristics of EDH (the ones that within months drove the availability of games in official formats to basically zero) and Wizards simply don't match, since the only way for Wizards to make money on EDH without massively interfering with the format would be reprinting cards, which, as we know, on it's own just doesn't cut it for them. EDH in it's youth used to be an *extremely* slow moving format. I remember a time when set after set went by (that means months or even a whole year not 2 weeks where you'd lose track of what's even actually available) with me picking up 1-2 or sometimes simply no cards at all. That's not in Wizards interest. As much as playing with your old/leftover/pet cards is not in Wizards interest. Wizards basically *had to* **** up the format to make it financially viable.
Fast forward a bit to the first Commander products. Sure, it felt a bit exciting. Something we had been playing and preaching for years had suddenly become the official agenda. It was kinda crazy and the reprints were much apprechiated even if the shape of things to come was already clearly visible. Just not to the point where it would have been a real problem. It was just a handful of "funny" legendaries Wizards had chosen to become the first non reused and therefore directly monetizeable parts of EDH. Yeah, the amount of player taking the bait (or simply having been washed into the format by wizards PR machine therefore not knowing any better) made games a little more repetitive and boring but it was far from overwhelming, even if cards like Command Tower had brainless autoinclude spelled out in big neon letters (seriously, outside of Ruination and friends or tutorability, why would you not run it if you have a somewhat diverse manabase?). It's City of Brass sans the drawback after all but before anyone gets offended: I played it too. Wizard wanted to print a 150% obvious universal good-card and they succeeded. It doesn't get much more boring than this but a good card is a good card after all, i guess.
In my opinion this sums up Wizard's relation to EDH pretty well and i'm sure, especially now, almost 15-20 years later, there's not only a bunch of people who are fine with this but rather downright demand their obvious autoincludes and overengineered legendaries, which also make coffee during your oponents turn. It's pretty much contrary to what you were signing up for when you started playing EDH during it's rise to popularity and a lot of people i know are very tired with all of this. They just limp along because they love the general idea and don't want to lose it entirely, which for the most part has somewhat worked. Eyes get rolled here or there. Oh, well, it's not ideal but life goes on.
Which brings me to the present, where 4 cards suddenly getting banned pushes almost everyone into fight or flight mode. It's not that important what's my own opinion on the situation. Let's put aside the bird, the lotus and monkey pirate for a second (it'll become obvious why shortly) and just focus on Mana Crypt. It's a card that's been legal since the formats inception (read 20+ years) without causing much turmoil, so what happened here? First of EDH (or rather "Commander") has been getting a lot faster and more powerful with Wizards putting whole decks on "exciting" Commander cards (admittedly to practice has also started to drip into "normal" sets but "made for commander" is still where to bulk comes from) or even straight up legendaries costing not even tree fitty in mana, thereby making sure even the randomness of the draw can no longer "balance" these cards. Trying to "fix" that makes going after fast mana into a somewhat obvious approach, even if in my opinion it's a fight against windmills in a format like EDH and also basically spells "desperation". Secondly there's the vast uptake in popularity due to Wizards making Mana Crypt their cash cow. I know people, which, while having actively played Magic for a double digit number of years, not to long ago, would have answered with a blank stare when asked about their opinion on Mana Crypt. Sure, obscurity doesn't fix what *is* (i hope noone is going deny that) an inherently broken card like Mana Crypt but that's besides the point anyways. The point being that all the problems that led to the gigantic drama that went down over the last week can be easily traced back to Wizard's attempts of getting at people's piggy banks (i don't blame them for that - they are a company after all but that doesn't make it any less true).
OK, this has been quite a "bit of context". Way more than i initially thought i'd write. So, what i'm getting at is: Why not address the actual root cause of the problems instead of agonazing over bans, death threats, etc and just remove Wizards from the equation. Admittedly that's easier said then done, they make the whole game after but what we will probably be trying locally is (more or less) keep the old EDH/Commander ban list and blanket ban each and every Commander exclusive card ever printed. Basically, if it's exclusively designed for Commander it's out. Sure, that's still not some kind of silver bullet. Cards like Nadu exist after all and probably don't need a ton of discussion, not to mention Wizard currently is basically printing problematic cards to various degrees everywhere, but i feel it's a kind of a start at getting back to what EDH used to be and not stumble from format wrap to format wrap.
Anyways, like i've said initially, this is not meant to push anyone towards anything. I'm not here to tell you what to do but if you are lucky enough to be playing with a group of people, which would be open to a bit of experimentation, you could obviously run it past them and see if it leads anywhere. Besides that all that's left for me to do is wish you a wonderful day!
Cheers
(and thanks for reading!)
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i usually just lurk here now and then but given the recen situation i felt like it might be worth to add some food for thought. Disclaimer: I'm not trying to convince - or even worse try to force - anyone. All i'm saying is: "Here's an idea. Why not check it out? You might like it."
A little context first though: I'm a long time EDH player (started during the second half of the 00s and played until i took a short break at the end of the 2010s) and to me EDH is - or rather was as i sadly have to admit - the most entertaining format of all time. I'll get to the reason that's no longer true (or at least not as true as it used to be) shortly.
During the second half of the 00s EDH saw a massive influx around where i was playing (a rather busy location) and it didn't take long to get to the point where even if people wanted to play any of Wizard's formats they wouldn't find opponents as basically all regulars had more or less switched to EDH exclusively (exclusions obviously prove the rule - it simply took a lot of luck to find a non EDH game). Admittedly a lot could be said about the differences in mind set in comparison to today but that's besides the point. The point being EDH was doing extremely well before Wizards even recognized that this wacky singleton thing had potential, which made them hop on the bandwagon trying to get a piece of the (nonexistent) pie. I don't want to offend anyone but if there's people out there who think EDH got popular because of Wizards they are bat***** crazy. EDH got popular *despite* Wizards involvement later on, not because of it.
To put it bluntly: The characteristics of EDH (the ones that within months drove the availability of games in official formats to basically zero) and Wizards simply don't match, since the only way for Wizards to make money on EDH without massively interfering with the format would be reprinting cards, which, as we know, on it's own just doesn't cut it for them. EDH in it's youth used to be an *extremely* slow moving format. I remember a time when set after set went by (that means months or even a whole year not 2 weeks where you'd lose track of what's even actually available) with me picking up 1-2 or sometimes simply no cards at all. That's not in Wizards interest. As much as playing with your old/leftover/pet cards is not in Wizards interest. Wizards basically *had to* **** up the format to make it financially viable.
Fast forward a bit to the first Commander products. Sure, it felt a bit exciting. Something we had been playing and preaching for years had suddenly become the official agenda. It was kinda crazy and the reprints were much apprechiated even if the shape of things to come was already clearly visible. Just not to the point where it would have been a real problem. It was just a handful of "funny" legendaries Wizards had chosen to become the first non reused and therefore directly monetizeable parts of EDH. Yeah, the amount of player taking the bait (or simply having been washed into the format by wizards PR machine therefore not knowing any better) made games a little more repetitive and boring but it was far from overwhelming, even if cards like Command Tower had brainless autoinclude spelled out in big neon letters (seriously, outside of Ruination and friends or tutorability, why would you not run it if you have a somewhat diverse manabase?). It's City of Brass sans the drawback after all but before anyone gets offended: I played it too. Wizard wanted to print a 150% obvious universal good-card and they succeeded. It doesn't get much more boring than this but a good card is a good card after all, i guess.
In my opinion this sums up Wizard's relation to EDH pretty well and i'm sure, especially now, almost 15-20 years later, there's not only a bunch of people who are fine with this but rather downright demand their obvious autoincludes and overengineered legendaries, which also make coffee during your oponents turn. It's pretty much contrary to what you were signing up for when you started playing EDH during it's rise to popularity and a lot of people i know are very tired with all of this. They just limp along because they love the general idea and don't want to lose it entirely, which for the most part has somewhat worked. Eyes get rolled here or there. Oh, well, it's not ideal but life goes on.
Which brings me to the present, where 4 cards suddenly getting banned pushes almost everyone into fight or flight mode. It's not that important what's my own opinion on the situation. Let's put aside the bird, the lotus and monkey pirate for a second (it'll become obvious why shortly) and just focus on Mana Crypt. It's a card that's been legal since the formats inception (read 20+ years) without causing much turmoil, so what happened here? First of EDH (or rather "Commander") has been getting a lot faster and more powerful with Wizards putting whole decks on "exciting" Commander cards (admittedly to practice has also started to drip into "normal" sets but "made for commander" is still where to bulk comes from) or even straight up legendaries costing not even tree fitty in mana, thereby making sure even the randomness of the draw can no longer "balance" these cards. Trying to "fix" that makes going after fast mana into a somewhat obvious approach, even if in my opinion it's a fight against windmills in a format like EDH and also basically spells "desperation". Secondly there's the vast uptake in popularity due to Wizards making Mana Crypt their cash cow. I know people, which, while having actively played Magic for a double digit number of years, not to long ago, would have answered with a blank stare when asked about their opinion on Mana Crypt. Sure, obscurity doesn't fix what *is* (i hope noone is going deny that) an inherently broken card like Mana Crypt but that's besides the point anyways. The point being that all the problems that led to the gigantic drama that went down over the last week can be easily traced back to Wizard's attempts of getting at people's piggy banks (i don't blame them for that - they are a company after all but that doesn't make it any less true).
OK, this has been quite a "bit of context". Way more than i initially thought i'd write. So, what i'm getting at is: Why not address the actual root cause of the problems instead of agonazing over bans, death threats, etc and just remove Wizards from the equation. Admittedly that's easier said then done, they make the whole game after but what we will probably be trying locally is (more or less) keep the old EDH/Commander ban list and blanket ban each and every Commander exclusive card ever printed. Basically, if it's exclusively designed for Commander it's out. Sure, that's still not some kind of silver bullet. Cards like Nadu exist after all and probably don't need a ton of discussion, not to mention Wizard currently is basically printing problematic cards to various degrees everywhere, but i feel it's a kind of a start at getting back to what EDH used to be and not stumble from format wrap to format wrap.
Anyways, like i've said initially, this is not meant to push anyone towards anything. I'm not here to tell you what to do but if you are lucky enough to be playing with a group of people, which would be open to a bit of experimentation, you could obviously run it past them and see if it leads anywhere. Besides that all that's left for me to do is wish you a wonderful day!
Cheers
(and thanks for reading!)