We could make sbcon Germany and have like 4 sad people in black turtlenecks playing mtg
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I played the MTG Arena beta yesterday, it was the first time I played magic in about, uh, 12 years??
It’s fine. I get confused easily though
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I disagree really strongly that Commander/EDH is newbie friendly at all. The format really rewards people who have deep knowledge of Magic’s entire cardbase, has very non-intuitive deckbuilding strategies, and in order to build anything effective you’re probably going to need to buy a whole lot of extremely specific design. It tends to emphasize all of Magic’s worst design problems really fast.
Maybe if a local metagame is extremely casual, this won’t be an issue. But if your local meta is extremely casual you’ll probably be fine playing regular Magic anyway.
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Sometimes we play multiplayer and Carl gets out his heinous Myr Battlesphere deck and does his best supervillain impression and the rest of the table bands together to to try to defeat him as he puts us in one impossible situation after another.
Commander/EDH is like that except that every player is the supervillain. I don’t understand how people can play it with any serious frequency. It’s like cake made entirely out of feta cheese: it’s a fascinating novelty, and you might try a bite, but it’s entirely too much.
. .
.
(j/k I love feta and I will absolutely play edh, but… just… not to the exclusion of regular magic, ok)
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tbh most of the appeal of Commander is just that i like character classes in traditional games. same with netrunner. the actual rules of both are probably a bit much for me right now
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commander is a blast but its a ton of information for newer players
You’re approaching EDH / Commander from the wrong angle if the goal of your deck is to be “effective”. Focus on doing something interesting and you’ll find the format a lot more rewarding.
If you just want to put your foot into the pool, you can easily buy a Commander / EDH deck. The decks honestly aren’t bad if you aren’t playing in a super competitive group. I think this is the problem with a lot of playgroups generally. They don’t play to do something interesting, they play to win. This is the problem with Magic as a game in pretty much every other format (and because EDH seems to have become more competitive of late, a bigger problem in EDH as well). The enjoyment of the game dies real quickly when competition is all that matters. Magic as a game can offer so much more than that, but the only place you’ll ever have a chance to see it is in Commander / EDH, because every other format has basically nobody who will build decks to do something interesting with the game.
That said, I agree that it can be a lot of information, but the rules are no more complicated than any other format.
The simplest way to build an EDH deck on your own, is probably to head over to EDHRec and find a Commander you like, and then build on that Commander’s quirks (use Cockatrice or another program to help build the deck). There’s obviously way more you can do, but if someone’s new to it I tend to recommend starting there.
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More clarification for the newer players: You can make decks that do interesting stuff (but generally lose) in pretty much any format, but in EDH, the multiplayer nature will buy you time to actually execute on your plan most of the time. Other non-rotating formats like Modern have different deck building rules that can make your jank decks more consistent, but the likelihood of you staying alive more than a few turns is likely to make it completely unviable, especially since there are no other players to soak up some damage/resources while you aren’t an imminent threat.
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EDH is very casual if you play in a group of people who play it casually. You could play Standard casually. You could play truly casual and not worry about any cardpool limitations. EDH does not facilitate this any more than any other format on a rules level.
It’s not that the extra rules for EDH are a especially hard to figure out, it’s that the meta and cardpool are vastly larger and more convoluted than any other format. Building a 100 card deck, where each spell has to be different, is a much more challenging process than building a conventional deck if you want to be effective at all.
And yes, I do think being concerned about being effective should be at least something of a concern. Because in most situations, you’re going to have at least one person who’s playing to win. And if you don’t want to get trounced, it’s a thing you really do have to have some idea of how good your deck is going to be.
Take it from me, I tried to get into MTG a few years ago. I was constantly being tossed into EDH matches. Most of the time I ended up sitting there trying to get anything working while some dude who had more money than me showed off some cool trick to efficiently destroy me with his card deck.
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oh no don’t take me back
This mostly sounds like a problem with your playgroup, not with the format. I could easily make an EDH deck that wins extremely quickly and consistently, but no one wants to play with that person.
Also, while you could play a format like standard casually, I don’t know anybody who does. If you play standard, you’re almost assuredly playing competitively.
I don’t honestly think of EDH as a line between casual and competitive though (whereas pretty much every other format draws this line strongly), I think the line is people who want to win and people who want to explore the game. The latter are the people you want to play with (and yeah, finding those people can take some time).
I think the main factor at play here is whether or not you are playing with friends or strangers. Friends can try to convince each other to play a certain way for the sake of fun, but it is much harder to advocate for a change in play style if you are playing with whoever happens to be at your local game store. cEDH (competitive EDH) where everyone plays highly tuned decks is a thing, and if that’s what people are into near you and you have no other people to play with, there’s not much you can do.
I do. I have a <$100 Standard counterburn deck I keep at work in case I feel like playing Magic on my way home. Standard is the only non-EDH format that has regular events in my area, so if I want to get some 1v1 games after work, I just grab it and go. It’s not a super optimal list but it’s a play style I enjoy and it does decently enough to not be frustrating to play.
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I agree, but I’ve also found strangers open to playing a style that’s not just about how fast you can win at EDH. I think there are plenty of players who play EDH primarily as a game where they want to do weird or different things than the game really intends to explore in competitive formats. And while I’m aware of cEDH, I very much think it goes against the spirit of the format.
As for a casual Standard deck, that’s cool. Still, don’t really want a deck that won’t be playable every time a new block starts.
It wasn’t even a pretty swamp.
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just realized Ravnica Vol. 3 is gonna have new basics with architecture in them and I am fucking pumped
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I’m considering fucking around and splashing blue, or just making a B/R aggro deck because I just love Tetsuko. She’s won a few prerelease and draft games for me.
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What a fucking nerd
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You don’t understand until you drop a turn three Hazoret and piss off your friends
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I keep watching videos of a lecherous strange man opening magic boxes and being sexually attracted to the illustrations of women and I hate it and I can’t stop watching and I don’t even play the game. AMA.
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