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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • Right, so this is fucking wild and it turns out a shocking number of Magic players are fucking awful.

    Back in the late 90s, judges needed a way to pass the time for hours while they waited on calls so they came up with a multiplayer format called Elder Dragon Highlander(EDH). The idea was that you would have a “Commander” which had to be one of the 5 Elder Dragons, and all the cards in your deck had to match the colors of your commander.

    The format stayed that way for about a decade, slowly collecting new players before it was decided that you could run any legendary creature as your commander. During that period they needed a way to control cards that were too powerful and formed a body to manage a banlist. This body was the Rules Committee(RC), which was a group of volunteers that kept tabs on the format.

    Then the format started to gain some traction and around 2011 Wizards got involved and released the first batch of product made explicitly for the format, it was a big success and sold well enough to have Wizards make a followup product in 2013.

    Somewhere around this period, the Rules Committee started to get into closer talks with Wizards about future products and getting the format onto Magic Online which led to them changing the banlist for the first time entirely removing a batch of cards that were Banned as your commander, but legal in the other 99, to just outright banned. This made a lot of people mad, but ultimately it was a good decision.

    Wizards went on to print a new commander product every year after this and it went on to surpass both standard and limited as the most popular format. Wizards then started to cater to the format specifically in sets, printing more and more cards that were really powerful in a multiplayer format, but middling power in 1v1.

    With the huge influx of players, the Rules Committee created a new body called the Commander Advisory Group, which consisted of some extra people that could offer their opinions on any changes the RC was going to make

    This came to a head with the release of Commander Legends and a card called “Jeweled Lotus”. Jeweled Lotus was a card that was essentially a direct copy of Black Lotus(The rarest, most powerful, most expensive magic card) but it only works in Commander(outside of some specific corner cases). This card was the rarest in the set, but fit into literally every deck in the format. unsurprisingly, the card retailed for ~$100 USD and if you had one your deck was just more optimal than any of the players that didn’t.

    The format stayed pretty static at this point for a few years, but last month they issued a new batch of bans, the 2 most contentious were Jeweled Lotus and Mana Crypt(another very powerful, very expensive card that has been legal since the start of the format). This caused an alarming number of people to send real actual death threats to the Rules Committee and the Commander Advisory Group. The people that managed the commander format were all volunteers and they didn’t have the resources or the desire to deal with that, so they quite understandably relinquished control of the format to Wizards.

    The problem with this change is that the RC did not have a profit-motive to ensure that the most recent product stayed legal so that it can sell packs. This is not true of Wizards, and has been shown to be a known problem with The One Ring in Modern(a whole separate debacle that I won’t get into here).

    Wizards has also announced a new “power-level” system to help players figure out if the deck they’re playing is a good fit for the rest of the table (which, to be fair, has always been a problem with the format) but they system they have hinted towards has a lot of problems and could lead to some angle shooting from assholes to take advantage of newer players.

    Right now, Commander is in some rough waters, and a lot of people don’t have faith in Wizards to properly police it with the goals of making it fun rather than just profitable.







  • Godort@lemm.eetoXbox@lemmy.worldGo play Inscryption!
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    11 days ago

    Inscryption was my absolute favorite game of 2021. Highly recommend playing it if you’re even remotely a fan of deck builder games.

    If you’ve already played it, but didnt know the creator made other things I also highly recommend playing anything else Daniel Mullens has released. Namely Pony Island and The Hex. Completely different from Inscryption in gameplay, but similar in tone.