Category: Rants

A friend who wanted to learn how to play Magic recently reached out to me. Because I’m me, I said yes, and then they mentioned that they were interested in Commander.

I said sure, because I’m stupid and don’t think about the consequences of my actions. Anyway, it’s been one of the worst experiences I’ve ever had, because Commander is an awful format to try to teach this game with.

So today, I’m just going to be ranting about a few things that make Commander awful as a learning experience for Magic, and hopefully convince you to avoid my mistake.

Now, at least part of the reason I’m writing this is because Commander is such a popular format. And because when people pick up new games, they want to play with their friends, and if that means playing Commander, they want to play Commander.

I’m going to argue that it’s really not worth it.

It’s Too Dense

Many of the things that make commander the format of choice for those of us who’ve played a lot of Magic make it an absolutely miserable format for learning the game. The first one is card density.

Let’s look at a few standard decks as an example. (Some of these numbers may be a bit off with double counting cards that are both in the main deck, and side deck.)

Deck	Unique Cards	Unique Lands	Sideboard
Azorius Control	13	10	10
Esper Midrange	14	13	11
Temur Land Combo	9	8	7
Golgari Midrange	16	10	5
Boros Convoke	12	8	7

Notably, each of these decks asks the player to understand a total of at most 30-40 different cards,with many closer to 20. When we keep in mind that a lot of these are just special lands, that number comes down to 10-15 cards per deck.

Every single Commander deck asks the player to understand (likely at a minimum) 60+ cards. That’s 4-6 times the number as in a standard deck. And it gets worse, because again, this is per deck, not per player.

If a standard game has maybe 30 unique cards in it, a 3 player Commander game has over 180.

So while Commander/Brawl is great for those of us who love novelty and varied games (cEDH players, you don’t count) it’s a pretty awful experience for folks who are new.

That’s without even going into the fact that Commander is going to have a much higher mechanical density, potentially being packed with mechanics from across dozens of sets.

It obscures strategic choices and their outcomes

If you haven’t heard the phrase “Bolt The Bird”, there’s a very good little writeup that covers the idea. The short version is that it can be a good idea to remove early game mana dorks, because otherwise you get run over by the cards they pump out.

It’s one of a billion little strategies that Magic players tend to learn. But it’s not the easiest one to pick up on, especially when the time between taking an action (like bolting a bird) early in the game and eventually victory or defeat can be 90+ minutes. It’s much easier to figure out patterns like “if I bolt the bird, I win” in a series of 30 minute games than in one 90 minute game. And that’s true for any higher level strategy as well.

But because of the higher life totals, and game variability, Commander makes it much more difficult to track actions and outcomes, and that’s before even taking into account the multiplayer aspect of the game.

It costs too much

I waffled on putting this on the list, but I think it deserves to be called out, even though it’s not super relevant to me personally.

(Not because I’m rich, but because I play almost entirely digitally, and the folks I play with would let me proxy anything I want.)

I’m gonna call out a single specific card here as an example, mostly because it’s a card I enjoy. Boseiju, Who Endures is fantastic card. It slots pretty much seamlessly into any green deck, offers an incredible amount of utility in removing threats, and does it all while being a land.

It is also $30. For one card.

The Ixalan Bundle is $40. It’s 8 boosters, some basic lands, and a few special cards. It’s a much more fun product, and much more interesting for someone new to the game.

But if you wanted to play, and be competitive with your friends, Boseiju would be the better choice.

Commander is not a cheap format.

Just play kitchen table Magic

Hopefully I’ve convinced you not to introduce anyone to the game with these formats. I didn’t list every problem I’ve run into trying to teach the game. There are plenty of others! From understanding different permanent types, or how Sagas work, to the fact that all cards are spells, there are many complexities that EDH adds that don’t make it fun for new players.

So, yeah. Please don’t try to introduce people with Commander. It won’t be a good time. Now, if they’ve played years of other TCG’s, maybe it’ll work! But for someone fresh to the genre, it is going to be suffering.

So, I got to see the totality yesterday. In a fair world, this would have been something I planned for, and then executed that plan. Instead, a bunch of my friends were going to see it, so I kind of just grabbed a lawn chair, hopped in their car, and rode with them.

Traffic was pretty light on the way up. Dense, but it was still possible to drive the speed limit. It took maybe an hour and a half to get to Crystal Lake Park in Barton VT from our starting location. The place was pretty packed up, so we parked nearby, and carted stuff into the park.

The park itself was nice, but the recent snow melted off pretty quickly, so things rapidly went from damp to wet. At this point, it was maybe 11:00, so we sat down, waited, cracked jokes, and ate food and had soda. Not too much though.

It turns out that the real limiting reagent for staying at the park was access to bathrooms. There were 3 portable toilets, and what felt like 500-1000 people, if not more.

Outside of that, we had enough food, water, and other supplies to last quite a while.

And then the eclipse started.

The Eclipse

The eclipse is cool, but for me, it was mostly interesting because of the tension that arose from the impending totality. It’s fun to look up with your glasses and see the sun start to get covered up, but it’s more a “Hmm, neat” sort of experience. At least to start.

As things got closer, everything started to feel slight weird. It had been a very bright day, and all of sudden, it was not so bright, and I didn’t need the sunglasses I had been wearing. It had been a very warm day, and all of sudden it got a bit colder. That said, most of this didn’t feel super apparent until maybe 70-85% of the sun was covered, at which point things started to feel a bit weird.

And then we hit totality.

Totality

I’ve seen photos of totality before. They don’t capture the experience. I can tell you that the sun turned into a black hole in the sky surrounded by a white corona, but just saying it isn’t the same. I can tell you that at 3:00 PM, that everything went from feeling like a quiet afternoon, to a deep summer’s 7:00 PM. I can tell you that the temperature dropped; but instead of a creeping chill, all of a sudden it was just cold.

It’s unlike anything else I’ve ever witnessed. There are no photos or video I could take to do it justice, and the ones I did absolutely don’t. To look up, and see a hole in the sky, to be able to just stare at the sun is insane. For the light to just vanish mid-day is crazy.

It’s the sort of thing you witness, and you understand why you could found a religion on something like this.

And then it was over. It lasted just under 3 minutes. Shorter than it took me to write this paragraph.

Drive Back

We waited a few hours after it finished to head back home.

Remember how I mentioned that traffic was dense, but manageable on the way down? Yeah, absolutely not on the way back. A one hour trip easily became a four hour one. This (and some sunburn that I absolutely could have avoided) was the only real downside to this trip. There was a ridiculous number of cars on the road, and we slowed to a crawl. We were lucky to be able to go 20 MPH; mostly it was stop and go.

Worth It?

It’s tricky to assess the value of an experience. The costs to me were low.
I took a day off work, rode in a friend’s car, and ate other people’s food. Outside of the mild sun burn, I did not have a very difficult time. My costs were pretty much non-existent.

That wasn’t a universal experience though.

There was a family behind us who’d come up from Massachusetts. It’s a bit longer of a drive, but they were there because they’d tried to see the eclipse in 2017, but it had been cloudy. They’d then tried to schedule to see it in Texas, but after flying down to Texas, they realized it was looking like wasn’t gonna work out yet again, so they cut their trip short, flew back to the East Coast, and drove all the way up to the same park we were at.

They also seemed to think it was pretty cool, but they had a different set of
costs for the experience.

Why did I write this?

Gametrodon is technically my longest running project. In some ways, it’s not very successful. In other ways, it has done some of what I intended.

Ultimately, it’s a very abstract thing. It’s way of displaying text in a manner that could theoretically be seen by anyone in the world who wants to read it, to a world that doesn’t know or care that it exists.

All of that text is about self imposed little worlds; little places where we make up rules about how things work, and I write about how those rules feel.

Most days I’m okay with that.

The eclipse, and the totality was in some ways the opposite of that. It’s a reminder that what I actually am is a single lump of chemicals that lives on a small rock, surrounded by a slightly smaller rock, circling a ball of fire. And sometimes those rocks line up just right.

Those rocks will outlive the memory of anything I have ever written, anything anyone alive right now has written, and perhaps the idea of writing itself.

The next continental eclipse will apparently be happening in 2045 or so, by which point I’ll be over 50. Statistically, I’ll probably have lived most of my life by then.

Will this site still be up? I don’t know.

Will I remember seeing the last eclipse? I suspect the answer is no.

My memory isn’t very good. At some point, maybe in a week, maybe a month, maybe a year, I’ll forget.

I’ll forget what it’s like to look up at the sky, and see the sun with a hole punched through it, and a shimmering white crown around its edges. I’ll forget the quiet, the darkness, the cold, and all the little reminders that my existence is the result of good fortune whose odds are so incredibly low that I cannot perceive them. I’ll forget that I live on a rock, in the middle of infinite nothing, next to a ball of fire.

Hopefully when I do, I find this post.

And I’ll be briefly reminded.

In response to Mike Drucker.

Hi. I’m the stupid person who gives review scores! You might know me from the byline of a million terrible reviews on Kotaku, GameInformer, or other gaming media sites swallowed up into useless reviews, copy pasted guides, and SEO milking trash. I might also not be real, and be a product of Chat GPT, but it’s not like you would know.

Of course, when I say that I give review scores, that isn’t entirely true. See, I can’t actually give a super low score, because that would make us look bad to the companies that purchase a majority of our advertising. And I can’t give too high a score either. So really, the editor gets to give out the score. And edit my review to make it work.

Here’s my job: I play a copy of Starfield, or Armored Core, or what have you two weeks before release for 10 hours, and then I have to write 50 pieces of junk about it for the next three months. I bet you think you’d like that wouldn’t you? Well, I’ve spent the last eight hours writing about how Elden Ring could be in the Armored Core universe. It isn’t, but rent is due, and I need those clicks.

Sure, I do have to give out that 8/10, but it’s not like I have any real choice in the matter. And yeah, my actual job is churn out garbage at a rate high enough that the internet will be flooded with white noise, in an attempt to boost our pages over a fandom wiki.

You know, at one point in time I really liked games.

I miss that time.

But hey, it’s fine. It’s good that we gave it an 8. After all, it’s not like art is subjective, and review scores are an ultimately pointless attempt to access a complex series of functions, and provide little to no value. I can’t really even blame consumers for this one. It’s not like you woke up and hounded us to assign arbitrary numbers to every piece of entertainment media over the last thirty years.

Frankly, it’s probably pretty good that I can just act like it’s your fault for being upset. It was kind of awkward when everyone started asking questions about nepotism, and how industry connections worked, and who actually assigned review scores.

Bit of a lucky break for us that “Ethics in game journalism” turned out to be a dog-whistle for neo-nazi misogynists. If they’d been reasonable instead of being jackbooted fascists for even 30 seconds, maybe people would have listened to what they were saying. And maybe even asked some questions!

Questions like, “Wait, is all your advertising coming from the product you’re reviewing?” and, “Is all gaming news just an incestuous cycle of freebooting and regurgitating press releases?” Something, something, even a racist and women-hating clock can be right about journalism twice a day and all that.

But that didn’t happen, and now we can continue to blame you, the consumer, for being angry and stupid, while we do our best to turn your search results into the world’s least helpful internet thread when you try to look up where to find an item.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to put up 800 words on how Animal Crossing is coming to Pokémon Go, or my car gets repossessed. And if you could follow my twitter real quick, that would be great, since that’s where I put all of my real opinions about this hobby I used to love.