EDH was a community-developed format before wizards adopted and renamed it.
It’s a fun, casual format. There is a lot about modern MTG releases that suck but blaming a casual, community-driven format is a wack take.
this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2025
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Unpopular Opinion
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You are right that I shouldn't blame the format. I will blame Wizards for pushing it so hard it's pretty much the only way to play the game right now.
Come play Flesh and Blood! It's like if Magic the Gathering was thematically representing Mortal Kombat gameplay.
And Genesis: Battle of Champions! It's like if Magic the Gathering was crossed with Final Fantasy Tactics.
And Magi Nation! It's like if the entire Pokémon franchise aged up with its demographic, was more well-written and designed, and was just overall better than Pokémon at everything except for competing with the actual Pokémon franchise. They're back after a successful Kickstarter!
WotC has been royally fucking up Standard for the past few years, but I don't think that Commander is the problem.
The problem is that WotC wants to push more product, which is messing with how Standard works. They should just accept that there are four standard sets a year, choose the most thematic Universes Beyond set to be a part of Standard magic, and accept that some Universes Beyond product shouldn't be in Standard Magic.
I think some of the lore is cool, but actually all games based on collectables are trash.
Netrunner is where it's at. Community run and maintained with the sole purpose of keeping the game good instead of making a profit.
It's also the sheer amount... They are getting new sets every two months... On top of things like secret lairs and everything... It's just to much....
Never been a fan of CCGs as their business models are exploitative and inevitably lead to power creep.
Netrunner and Compile have me sorted for card games for a while.
The original pay to win game. Even back in the early 2000s a competitive deck ran about $400 in standard.
I'm 50. I was playing M:tG back in high school. Revised was the unlimited set out at the time. I thought they were overdoing the expansions back then.
Now it all seems remarkably silly to me with all the licensed stuff, and I'm glad I gave it up 30 years ago.
It was fun at the time but now it's too exhausting to keep up with.
Limited has gotten pretty great as more complexity has been forced into common and uncommon slots.
I do not enjoy the tracking mechanics like Ring Tempts, Dungeons, Speed, and fucking holy shit day/night.
Commander is by far the most popular format for many good reasons.
I however am not a fan of some recent sets design wise. Bloomburrow was peak though, and felt like a return to a more classic mtg experience.
Personally I'm a fan of budget commander, where it's still commander with these 3 deck building rules:
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Your total deck price l, if you price it online, cannot exceed $70 USD
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You cannot play any cards that have ever been banned in any mainstream constructive format (discluding rarity based formats like pauper)
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Proxies are not allowed, as it goes against the spirit of this format
The core spirit is "stop feeling compelled to proxy shit, support your LGS!"
I feel like you're implying that proxying and supporting your LGS is mutually exclusive, which I would argue is categorically untrue.
The entire point of the format is to actively make it so you are no longer pressured to proxy cuz you need thousands of dollars in cards to function at the table.
This is with the intent to make players want to actually go to their lgs and buy actual real cards, instead of ordering proxies from random companies in China.
Trying to pretend that players feeling compelled to proxy their deck isn't inherently unhealthy for the local game ecosystem is silly.
The #1 thing LGSs want is bodies in the door. So if players are getting back into stores to buy a bunch of 50 cent cards, they probably are also supporting the LGS in other ways inherently.
The current casual meta of 5 people sitting down and all of them pulling out proxied decks directly means 5 less instances of people actively walking into their LGS to shop.
You can say what you want but as someone friends with LGS owners, I can definitely say the chilling effect of proxying on the casual economy has been very noticeable. The market for casual cards has heavily dried up.
Tonnes of people take the next step of "well if I am proxying 10 cards why not proxy all 100 who cares"
Shops demand for cheap staples dries up.
Shops stop buying cheap staples bulk cuz they arent selling.
Non proxy'ing players can't find their cards that need... so they guve up and turn to proxying too
You can see how that feedback loop is unhealthy, right? Thus here I am, promoting a format that aims to counter this feedback loop and try and inject health back into the local casual tabletop ecosystem
So yeah, if you proxy in the aforementioned format, you are not playing in the "spirit" of it.
Commander has always been my least favorite way to play. I have no comment on anything else because I lost interest completely when they started pushing it. But I will say, every time I hear news about it I'm glad that I stopped dumping money into that cash cow of a card game. And from a business standpoint, I feel they've shot themselves in the foot. The reason why Pokemon cards are still so widely sought after is because, for the most part, things have stayed the same (And collectors, of course). With MTG there's basically no point in owning any cards before 2016 since they're all underpowered or illegal in any formal setting. Besides hardcore collectors, they're basically just cardboard.
I’d say power creep in Pokemon might even be worse than in Magic. Looking at old cards vs new cards makes it painfully obvious.
I think that's just a side effect of making new editions for any TCG. If you don't provide an incentive to get the new hotness no one will buy it.
Psh I love playing commander. Me and 3 buddies just getting hammered and shit talking for 6 hours is great fun. I’m not a super magic purist though. I can see how if you’re into other formats the pandering to commander players would be annoying. But I’m the one being pandered to so I’m fine with it.
Planeswalkers broke the game.
Agreed. They sort of made sense as an experiment in Lorwyn, but planeswalkers became the face of the game and had to be shoehorned into every set since then. They're bad game design as all the rules and strategy need to be adjusted just to make them work, and they still take over games on their own.
The real shark jump was when they made a set with dozens of planeswalkers in it. Way to take your worst-designed cards and just shove a set full of them.
The idea for planewalkers is just crazy.
- new requirement to split combat damage between player and a new card type
- hard to kill: can't use kill/burn cards, unless they're new, special kill/burn cards that you have to add to deck.
- multiple gameplay effect options on each card
- these are special characters, so they tend toward game-breaking effects.
- escalating threats - gotta kill it by time the last option is available or game is over.
Its like its designed to be annoying, in your face, and fundamentally change how every game is played.
Originally, they were treated as players. A damage spell that could hit a player could be redirected on resolution to damage their planeswalker instead. This led to some pretty dumb situations when rather than declare a spell targeting the planeswalker, you would declare it targeting the player, essentially tricking them into thinking the planeswalker was safe and allowing a spell to resolve, only to redirect the damage after the spell is allowed.
Creatures having to be declared attacking a planeswalker specifically made the game tedious as well.
The fact that you have a game-breaking permanent on the board that you have to turn your attention to immediately even if you're way ahead in the game, it just feels worse than stabilizing the board and turning the tide. And then they have to keep making new, more powerful ones to get people to buy new product.
I haven't played since before Wizards started pushing Commander, at that time called EDH.
So you haven't played in two decades. Hard to take your opinion seriously. You can play for free with their app now.
I visit many of the game shops in my area to try to find TTRPG's and players, but all I find is Magic players and they will talk about the game in length.
Its so funny to see opinion posts that start with "I haven't actually consumed this product yet/since the update that I have an opinion about"
My unpopular opinion is I don’t mind the tie ins (mostly). I remember being a kid and wanting all my favorite characters to have cards, so I’d feel bad yucking someone else’s yum just because I don’t care for a particular franchise. That being said I’m also a bit confused, op. Standards still exists. This feels like you’re saying “I don’t like Super Mario Advanced 3, because Mario Bros isn’t as good a game as Super Mario Bros 3.” Though if you said any of the following I’d agree: Wizards focuses too much on commander; changing standard rotation rules wasn’t the best idea; the last few standard sets have had somewhat ridiculous themes; using standard design space to print cards targeting commander players might muddy the standard card pool.
I get what you are saying about what I said with Standard. It is that Wizards focuses too much on Commander, and some of these tie-in could have awesome CCG on their own, like Fallout. I think Fallout could stand to have an awesome CCG that would sell pretty amazingly. Regarding Standard, yes the format still exists, but the way sets are released it feels like it's only there for the old players like me.
I like to play Commander... in a sense that I have a deck dedicated to larger games where I'm happy to mostly mash shit together in an oversized deck and only have one copy of each card. I have plenty of fun in games where nobody knows what I'm about to do, including me!
3+ player games would make Arena more fun as well.
The game has to evolve or die. There's only so many 1 cost 1/1 mana dorks you can print before people stop caring.
But when things evolve, some people join, others leave. You sound like a leaver. It sucks that you lost something you liked, but it's not that unpopular of an opinion. I'm sure most people playing 20 years ago don't still play.
I dunno if I'd say it's never been good in those two decades. There's definitely been a few great Standards Wizards lucked into, and they had a really strong run of limited formats for awhile too. It's definitely been trending downward for the last two decades though, and largely because of unchecked corporate greed.