The Eras of EDH Design | EDHRECast 279

foreign [Music] cast where we're all about commander data and dad jokes I'm Joey Schultz and I'm joined as always by my fantastic co-hosts up first if he ever builds a Bilbo deck he's going to fill it with a ton of new adventure cards it's Matt Morgan Joey this weekend absolutely crazy it was I was so surprised I had Rick Astley as my waiter it was so so amazing but turns out he was a really bad waiter no matter how bad I asked and said I really want this he just wouldn't desert me yeah okay you know what I thought I knew where you were going with that one and I was like I'm pretty sure we've heard all of the Rick Astley jokes that could ever possibly exist but that one threw me so you know what well done actually I'm I'm All About that I I can't get over Rick Astley Jones I you might say I just can't give them up so okay that one I have heard before that one you have heard but I I still like it so you're gonna have to deal with it yes oh absolutely all right up next he knows it's not possible but he's still trying to find a way to put all of those new role tokens onto a single creature it's Dana Roach I'm pretty pumped what the newest uh build I have I think it's pretty good and when I showed it to a mine friend of mine he would speak to us I I think he was really impressed by like how I was thinking outside the box you're um listeners you can't see but Dana's doing the mind gesticulations right now and it's like that's it's that's incredible it is it is cute you guys are too much for me sometimes all right Matt what are we talking about on this episode this week so this week we're going to kind of give ourselves a little history lesson and go through the different eras and kind of Define what they really could have been as far as the eras of Commander design yeah I I'm excited for this one it is a little bit of a history lesson but I think it's very interesting to go over the the years that Commander has not been a thing and then been a thing and identify different moments products specific times years and stuff like that where like oh here was a shift in the way that the company and the player base were engaging with what Commander would eventually become this I'm really excited for this but we got to do some shout outs before we hop to it I first like to thank Chase Austin editing the show and you can find them online at Mana curves we also wanted to let you know we'll be at the magic Summit this year in Salt Lake City October 26th to 29th we had an absolute blast last year and we hope to see you fine folks again this year come say hi and get in some games with us at the magic Summit and you may see us there in our coalesce apparel magic themed merch which you can also get and no matter what you get from coalesce use code edhrec at checkout for 10 off your order they have all types of way cool does designs from The omnath Rock and Royal shirt to of course the edhret collection which you may see us sporting at the magic Summit event once again that's coalesce and code EDH Rec for 10 off your order and if you'd like to support the show you can do so by liking subscribing to this video on YouTube you can subscribe on your local podcast app or you can go to patreon.com edhretcast where we have Patron tiers of all sorts of levels whether you want to join our Discord Community you want to see the episodes a day early where we typically steal the Segway at least you can do that a day early or there's all that and more over patreon.com edhretcast including the weekly Patron shout out which this week we are going to give a very special shout out to Josh Brubaker Salcedo so Brubaker Salcedo is such an impressive last name then it's preceded by Josh that is a very yeah a very uh outweighed on one side versus the other for in terms of names but like Josh has been a patron of ours for like three years so like Josh thank you so much for the support the ongoing support for that long that is so tremendous of you seriously thank you I wanna I wanna say thank you brubacher Salcedo because that sounds so much more impressive that that does like yeah that sounds honestly Josh I hope this doesn't that sounds like like a gazuntite it sounds like if someone sneezes I should say oh Rebecca if someone sneezes I should be like Mariska heart attack you know it sounds like it's that kind of a name anyway I think of stealing that joke from someone anyway but uh let's let's get to it thank you again Josh so much for your ongoing support means the world and now guys we're gonna get into our topic we are talking uh we are defining the eras of Commander design and Dana as our oldest friend um I didn't mean to say it yes you did yes you did yes it was just an automatic it just automatically happens um so Dana as the dinosaur amongst us that one I did mean to say what was the very first uh place that we're going to start with for Commander eras well the first thing I think I guess we'll note is there was an ERA where there really wasn't a thing called Commander or even the concept because there weren't legendary creatures um you know Alpha didn't have Legends and the first two expansions Arabian Knights and Antiquities didn't have legendary creatures so the the entire concept of legendary creatures which is what Commander needs to exist didn't even begin until Legends which was about two years in the magic existence um so we're going to kind of count you know I guess it's already make much sense to talk about that that that kind of alpha phase before anything existed um so I guess we're trying to call it the pre-dh period yeah um and that's it we kind of have defined that as before 2011. so from Legends up until basically before that first batch of pre-cons came out is kind of that first phase work from from when Commander went from basically Highlander was a format that kind of casual people played early on until it became you know the the thing known as as Commander later on or is the Eda Twitter on um that's kind of this first giant phase that we want to talk about um yeah originally when the format was in its early infant steps it was just kind of the elder dragons you had the nickel bolus you had all those original elder dragons that kind of had to helm the deck and that's what everything was based around but it was kind of a weird format cards weren't that great compared to what we're seeing today and so uh cards like rustic study weren't really all that balanced in what kind of Commander was in its original form yeah definitely a lot of designs going looking through the past and it's like I don't think that would fly today now that multiplayer matters design is like such a huge Focus it's just like some of these cards are a little bit cracked but that also like you know even Beyond just the original Elder Dragon this was also like when they did start making more and more Legends they weren't specifically designed to four Commander players but I mean this was back when Alara for example was like a treasure Trove of Legends because we got so much room the hegemon which was just accidentally a very very good Commander this was back when Zur the enchanter was like a Powerhouse tutoring command finder or back when like the NIV miss it firemind combo with curiosity was still a novelty to everyone uh so like this was uh you know these cards were just accidentally really really good commanders but it was slim pickings by far yeah and I guess some things to note about this this phase the commanders that were good were accidentally good it's like that no one was building these cards to be good in a multiplayer 40 life format you would just occasionally stumble across the thieves or the enchanter like the got mentioned or the showroom or the Rafiq of the many cards that just happened to work really well on this format but nobody intended them to do that and I think the other thing worth noting about this era too is when conditions were really thin yeah there's a reason one of the reasons Zur was so good and one of the reasons Sharon was so good is that they were combo engines baked into the commander and combo was kind of probably the best I mean it's you could say it's the best way to win today but at least there's Alternatives today at the time there just weren't a lot of Alternatives other than hope you have a 4-4 out when someone's out for Life yeah like that I mean there were a couple of overrun effects um but for the most part your win conditions were just get lucky with combat damage or to combo out and and we've seen a lot of diversity since those days in a whole bunch of different ways but things were much more narrow back in that that 2011 and earlier era for sure well if you look at like the pre-modern format which is kind of one of those Community run formats as well it's a lot like that it's real weird wind conditions it's a really specific synergies and then the card Advantage engines those also just don't really exist in the same way that they do today either so getting any sort of card selection and that was really hard to do if you weren't playing blue and so I it kind of was the Wild West when you think about it as far as how people were coming about just learning about the format even because it really was wasn't all that common for such a long time even though folks that were playing it had been playing it for a while for sure yeah and like nowadays people who are a little nostalgic for that era Matt I think you've got a pre-dh deck yourself where it's just like hey I want to play in a pod where it's just like we're only using cards from back in this specific time I think specifically the cutoff is like scars of mirrored and or something like that um and that's just a place where you can be like oh these are all some but much older cards and this feels like a very different creature than what Commander has become today um yeah yeah yeah I have a Sig River guide pre-dh deck and it's a lot of fun like it's nice to be able to go back and when I got back into magic when I it was around the therost time so it was still after the the commander pre-cons have been coming out but the cards that I had from when I was a kid fell into this era and so it was a chance to just play one of those Nostalgia driven formats and I very much I enjoy it it's nice just to be able to struggle a little bit you the train training wheels definitely are not there when it comes to how you get to window games but yeah it's fun it's a good deck uh so the next uh era is after they started designing Commander products and it's just those two eras that's the end of the show uh if everyone wants to find us on socials you can look at okay no I'm kidding uh moving on I I I personally feel like the next thing is actually not so much an era as like a standalone moment I don't think it ties into the pre-dh moment and I also don't think that it ties necessarily into the uh the stuff that we're going to discuss a little bit later but the introduction of the commander 2011 product with mimiplasm with Gabe with all of those uh you know Kalia all of those things first coming out that feels to me almost like its own Standalone thing particularly because we didn't get a set of commander pre-cons in 2012 the following year this was a very test the waters moment that I think makes it Standalone in isolation uh and so I don't know to me it feels very first season of RuPaul's Drag Race and we're not sure if this is actually going to work um and so we're just sort of like testing testing out some of these Waters and seeing how it goes so to me the commander 2011 product is kind of its own thing that doesn't belong to the Future and doesn't belong to the Past yeah it's a strange little window where you have a handful of commanders that are are really good in kind of the modern version of what we see today Kylie the vast is still a very solid Commander mimeoplasm is still a very solid Commander there are some things that were designed in this window that that still hold up today but they also didn't quite get what the format would eventually be I shouldn't say they didn't understand it but like where it's evolved at the time there was a whole lot of cards in there that seemed to work under the notion that everyone would like pool their resources so there was join the joint voice forces cards and stuff so yeah the the from the design point of view it seemed to feel like everyone was going to be really friendly in terms of like building up their their armies in a way that that really hasn't been the how Commander has shaped out and how how wrong were they with that as assumption right yeah so it it's an interesting window to see what the the vision of the format what they thought it was going to be and and the places they hit and the places they missed um and once you get to that that kind of next era you can see that they've they realized what worked and what didn't yeah I think so this is also the time where we were still getting designs like spell crumple because remember how Commander tucking used to be a thing yeah um so just like oh yeah rules were a little bit different um but but also not just in terms of the the the pre-con itself but like around this time too um like in the 2010-2011 sort of uh moment of design that was when we were also still getting cards like exsanguinate or Sarah ascendant and exsanguinate draining everyone and you gain that much life total that was drained that's not the kind of design that they make anymore today instead it would just be everyone loses that much life and you gain that much life or Sarah ascendant which has a a big buff if you have more than 25 life well in a like format where you start with 40 life it automatically gets all of the huge big Buffs and those are also the types of the designs that they wouldn't do today so paying very close attention to multiplayer like how these types of designs in standard sets would affect multiplayer also was not necessarily Forefront on the mind I think well and we also were coming out of kind of one of the most powerful eras of constructed magic at the time too you know we just had cobblade formats and so now we're all sudden we're into Delver in standard where that was another very kind of high-powered standard format where it was very skill testing and so one thing that I think really helped out the popularity of a casual format was it was a break from this very very hyper-tuned standard format which standard has been the most popular format pretty much through the existence of or type 2 however whatever you want to call all the old formats but standard has largely been one of the most played formats and so all of a sudden you had a break from standard and extended and Legacy and everything playing this fun casual format and I think that's really what helped because I mean innisdrad's standard was was so so packed oh yeah with a lot of just very very dense decks and so being able to get a break from that probably helped the popularity of Commander just was That Kind of Perfect Storm well there was also just a in a general sense a huge influx of new players from basically in the Strat onward um that was kind of their first experiment with this set that like resonated outside of the magic Community it was playing with a lot of these horror tropes that were really well known by the average person and that there was a big a increase in the amount of packs they sold to new players starting with innistrada and it kind of ramped upward from that point on but that was that break point so you had a bunch of things happening simultaneously you had you were coming off a really strong standard you're moving into a center where all of a sudden they were selling a lot of packs people that hadn't played magic beforehand and you're seeing commanders start to happen at the same time so all of those things were occurring simultaneously and that's a lot of directions for design to have to look at the same time very very much so so yeah that is sort of its own Standalone thing but then comes like we didn't get a commander pre-con product in 2012 but eventually we did again in 2013 and that I think marks the beginning of a new era Matt why was this one defined so this one I I would guess that you can probably Define it as when they finally started realizing that you can do different things out of the command Zone because if you look at some of the especially the pre-constructed Decks that they had that first came out in in the 2013 decks there was a lot that had to do with the commands on whether it was derevi which was that super super popular band Commander that you could cheat the Manukau or the the commander tax and just putting the card just out of the command Zone which hadn't been done before but then you also had stuff like prosh the skyraid of kurwitch was the Junt Commander that the more times you cast it the more times you got to make a huge Army of kobolds and so very very quickly they realized oh maybe this was pushing it a little too far too fast I I think that this era for us is kind of limited within like 2013 up to the like 2015 and it's a lot of the designs like legendary creatures especially at the faces of pre-cons really had a lot of experiments like 2013 we had those or they were messing around with the commands on a different ways but in 2014 we got Planeswalkers as commanders in 2015 we got experience counters another thing that you can't interact with um in its own different Zone as well and uh that that just like yeah like they started playing around not just with the command Zone but also like starting to be like let's try a few other things in this multiplayer format let's see what we can do and we got like random curses in the deck I think that they still needed some time to figure out multiplayer matters cards at this point like we were getting like curse of the Forsaken which is like oh whenever you attack this person you gain one life and I'm like that's not very good um so like some of the card designs in the 99 were still very hit and miss but in terms overall of like what we're getting here is like one pre-con set a year with some experiments beginning to occur yeah I think the notable thing about this particular era is it's the first time when they realized we can do things with these commanders unique to this format yeah I mentioned colleague the fast being still a really good card today and mimeoplasm is still being really good but there's nothing intrinsic about those card designs that says Commander Kalia could very easily have been a card in a Lara that just so happened to be a good Commander card same thing with mimeoplasm there's nothing about those that screamed Commander they just happen to be good in commanders whereas this 2013 through 2015 era it's their first time when they're really playing in that space and kind of feeling out oh we can do things that are specific in in Commander Niche based so what does that look like and they're kind of filling that out and there's misses and there's hits but but that's to me what defines this era is is the realization that they can like do things they hadn't done before because this is a space that doesn't exist anywhere else well in a little bit of kind of pushback I guess against that comment data or maybe more building off of it however you want to frame it I don't think it was their first chance to design for a commander because they did a pre-constructed deck block whatever you want to call it beforehand but it was our first chance to design for Commander now they kind of understood just fundamentally what Commander even was because beforehand I don't I think they just kind of said well let's just do this and we'll see what happens but they had a chance to kind of reevaluate that you know this was a couple years later and so now they started to get cards that were planted for non-standard formats and that's really what kind of messed things up a little bit in the eyes of 60 card players because yes we got bane of progress but then you had cards like toxic Deluge and true name Nemesis and baleful stricts that all sudden yeah those were just Legacy Staples from the instant that they were introduced and in some cases intentionally so yeah because it's easy to if you weren't around back then it's it's easy to to maybe not realize this there just weren't a lot of venues to print cards that would work for Eternal formats that wouldn't destroy standard and it was there wasn't a Modern Masters kind of environment basically your chance to print a card to balance an eternal format without messing up standard was commander so we get things like fluster storm and traded Nemesis popping up and Commander that weren't necessarily that good at Commander cards and were absolute bombs in other formats because like that was the way to introduce cards for those formats because nothing else existed so we're used to a world today where everything is a way to introduce car to the commander there was this weird little window where Commander was a way to introduce cards to other formats I was going to bring up flusterstorm as well because that really felt like a a safety net for the first computer 2011 product of just like let's put this here because we know that at least the 60 card constructed folks are really gonna go for this one in case this whole Commander thing is a total flop yeah Nemesis Matt that you brought up also totally the same toxic Deluge certainly a power House cartoon Commander but like let's be real Legacy has been like ever since it saw that card yes um and we did get some of those gems like bane of progress which still are really great to this day but it was still a lot of like the experimentation of like what's good in commander and we're sort of hedging our bets by having these these other cards planted for other formats in here as well because we know for sure that those are popular and we'll see what we can try out with this whole Commander thing so that's what this 2013 to 2015 era feels like to me is a hedging the bets experiment type of of timeline yeah modern Horizons as a set and concept wouldn't exist if it weren't for how commander and the pre-constructed decks really worked in this time a little bit meta here Beyond just the cards being printed this was the era where people really began to dig back through Magic's history for cards that were really good in Commander that had kind of been forgotten before sure this was the era when riftix study really became a thing not that I hadn't seen play before but like this was the window where our shops actually began putting them in their cases because Commander players wanted them this was the era where people would were like I I had a store here locally in town that was talking about how they would sell 20 strip mines a week and they you know two years earlier they wouldn't sell one a month but Commander players were buying these three dollar strip mines which is what they cost at the time to put in their Commander decks because they were they were digging back these old cards that hadn't seen any previous play and that that really started to take off in this window when people were basically mining Magic's history for stuff that would work in Commander so listeners now they just wouldn't believe this if you weren't playing back then but cyclonic Rift was a bulk rare yeah you would open it in a pack and you would be disappointed and it's so yeah it absolutely it was a time to just dig through all of your bulk boxes that it was probably the last time that Commander was a bulk rare format and that's yeah it was fantastic but yeah it's it's really cool to dig through history and see what you could have found back then kind of like you dig through history and see all the times we've stolen the challenge of stats Segway from Joe crying out loud historical precedent I want wanted to talk about the next era of 2016 and conspiracy stuff onwards so bad but which we can do after we take a quick break oh man you know what I'm actually pulling down the curtain here I'm pulling like Matt Foley in our show notes in our document right now he was just like oh I've got something off of what Dana just said to be like oh okay for Matt to talk and he did have something to say but it turned out what he was going to say was a ham-fisted Segway and to challenge the stats because I'm not allowed to do that so Matt has resorted not just to like the verbal trickery but also like even the cues that we use to make the show just kind of flow better Matt is like abusing the fact that we share a Google doc in order to steal the Segway listeners he goes so extra for you all and I hope you appreciate it because I'm a man of the people I give the people what they want all right there's a lot of data on YouTube but don't always agree with it so we'll come right back after this break bye everyone colored football fans are you ready for week one DraftKings Sport Book is hooking you up with a can't miss offer to start the season strong this week new customers can bet just five dollars in college football and score two hundred dollars in bonus bets instantly anything can happen in college football is this the year we finally see a artificers Academy or maybe a mage School win the national championship who knows all I know is that change comes fast and the only thing that's a lock is the great offers from DraftKings Sportsbook life's more fun when you're in on the action download the DraftKings Sportsbook app now and use code EDH new customers can score two hundred dollars in bonus bets instantly when they bet just five dollars in college football only on DraftKings Sportsbook with code EDH the crown is yours gambling problem call 1-800 Gambler or visit www.1800 gambler.net in New York call 877-8 Hope NY or text Hope NY 467-369 and Connecticut help is available for problem gambling at 888-789-777 or visit ccpg.org please play responsibly on behalf of Boot Hill Casino and Resort Kansas 21 plus age varies by jurisdiction void in Ontario cdkng.co football for eligibility terms and responsible gaming resources phonospets expire seven days after issuance at eligibility and deposit restrictions apply so my challenge this week is for zerium Golden Windex for those who don't recall that's the legendary Griffin we got from back in dominar United it's a 3-4 with flying for four Mana three in a white and it says whenever a griffin you control deals combat damage to a player create a 2-2 White Griffin creature token with flying that's actually a pretty solid Commander uh the problem with that deck being the number one is mono white number two every Griffin is just terrible um but you know what they are bodies with flying you can get through it it actually winds up being a much better deck than you would think um and one of the reasons it's a much better deck than you would think is because the trigger on azarium Golden wind is whatever a griffin you control deals combat damage to a player you create a 2-2 White Griffin creature token there's there's no text here that says once a turn um and you can trigger that off double strike twice so my challenge here is for duelist Heritage which is currently just showing up in 18 oh sorry in the golden Windex dual's Heritage is a standalone enchantment it's not an aura so you don't have to risk getting two for one like with battle Mastery and you could just give a creature double strike during combat and we've talked in the past about how useful that is to just give your opponents creatures when they aren't swinging at you double strike it's fantastic but in this deck it's also really good because it lets you make twice as many Griffins and twice as many Griffins then make twice as many Griffins next turn when they hit somebody having the ability to just double proc that in this deck is really really useful true convictions in about 60 percent of these decks and it absolutely should be because it affects all your Griffins but you just always want to have a double strike enabler out you know you probably don't want to have like four or five of them in the deck because they don't stack but having a backup plan is really good and duelist Heritage is the best backup plan to True conviction you can be running and it should be in more than 18 percent of these area index I I like that redundancy a lot especially because xerium is pretty cheap to cast and true conviction can you can even sandbag that one as like a late game no one sees a coming kind of finisher yeah but but more importantly duelist Heritage is the kind of thing that like this will help me actually get the strategy off the ground earlier as opposed to True conviction which I can't cast until much later when I've got some stuff already established so I really really like that one dualist Heritage really cool design zerium also I really like that design too so I look forward to being uh heritaged by any xerium players that I come across um I'll go to my challenge here and I've got an overplayed challenge for a relatively new Commander uh julo doc void gorger is the colorless face Commander from the new eldrazi Unbound pre-con it's a very spicy card six Mana 7-4 legendary creature eldrazi and cuddle the spells that you cast from your hand with Mana value of seven or greater have two instances of cascade so if you play a seven drop you'll flip until you find say the I don't know the top four drop and also so the top five drop of of your deck or something like that this is a very very spicy Commander I I gotta push back against one of the cards that's showing up on its page though in about 27-28 of your lodoc decks we're seeing endless one show up in in these decks and I I don't think that 28 of people 28 of the 3 800 Julia dock players out there should be playing this one endless one is an X cost 0 0 that enters with X Plus encounters on it we've talked about it before when you're cascading and you Cascade into the thing like X is going to be zero so you will get a total Cascade whiff off of this you will play it it would be a zero zero it will immediately die don't don't play this one ninja if you like eldrazi totally understand that's really cool and yes you can cast this one for seven if it's in your hand but the likeliest scenario is that you're going to Cascade into this and totally with when you could have gotten something really really cool instead so take this one out of your Jula doc Decks that is my challenge yep age-old favorite don't play expels in your Cascade decks ax bells and Cascade pretty dangerous still don't do it yep so I'll move into my challenge then so mine is submitted To Us by a listener who went to patreon.comcast join our Discord community and then we have a channel specifically for challenging stats and so trogdenite is their username good Anya trogdenite um but they had a really good comment a really good catch for overplayed cards which we always appreciate seeing so trog tonight commented that uh they want to challenge stats for Nikki of the old ways decks or really any deck running Primal surge if you're playing Primal surge as more than just a value piece to get a few permanents you can't run any other cards that draw you a card when they enter the battlefield otherwise you're going to deck yourself so they mentioned specifically cards like Elemental Bond Guardian Project those aren't May abilities Garrick's Uprising is not a you may draw card it is you have to draw a card so when you're when you're looking at all these cards in these Primal surge decks and when you look at Nikki of the old ways the page for the commander over a third of the decks are playing Primal surge as a way to generate a ton of value so what you want to be sure of when you're building the deck is not being mindful of when you're gonna cast that Primal surge if you're going to put those Garrick's uprisings those Guardian projects into the battlefield you're going to end up decking yourself if you're playing the oops all permanence version of the deck so be very mindful of that Garrick's Uprising is being played in 12 of those of these Nikia decks and the typical deck isn't playing a ton of non-creatures because of Nikki's ability that says you can't play non-creature spells but there still is going to be at least a few in every given deck so make sure you're mindful of when you're casting these Primal surges because every now and then we see it happen and it's just like well you kind of knew what was going to happen so this is really good catch uh thank you for the sub at the submission trog tonight uh it's always good to hear from our listeners and again patreon.comcast if you want to submit your own challenges hey oh uh yeah Garrix Uprising I I just looked at the page for Primal Surge and Garrix Uprising shows up in 22 of decks that contain Primal surge Guardian Project shows up in 19 of decks that contain Primal Surge and it's just like yeah watch out because like they're great value engines but if you're playing a dedicated Primal surge deck they could kill you so like be careful okay so back to the main topic here um I think the next kind of split we want to delve into is 2016 when we got conspiracy take the crown and that feels like it kind of marks the beginning of multiplayer matters when it comes to design yeah yeah I think this one to my estimation this next like slot of time is like between 2016 up to 2018 but yeah this is where we got like not just one-off pre-cons a year but also like full-on multiplayer matters sets like battle Bond and conspiracy the introduction of the Monarch we had abilities like goad and melee will of the council things like that like we we really got like okay some attention some true attention is now being paid to the way that multiplayer games go and and we're no longer getting some of those silly curses that or those Joint Forces cards that you were talking about Dana we're getting some stuff that's just like oh the Monarch like the lean forward we are compelled by this and there's some stuff that was made here that lingers with us to this day in its like Ingenuity with how it interfaces with multiplayer magic yeah and in the pre-constructed decks too they still continue to push the boundaries as far as what can commanders do I know a lot of folks don't love Eminence but they they were like okay how can we have commanders kind of make an impact without actually being on the battlefield and so that's when we started to see uh the the creature type matters pre-constructed decks those were a big one uh but we also had Partners how many commanders can you put in the command Zone yeah and that also that that continued to evolve too so there was a lot it wasn't just how people are playing with multiplayer formats how are people playing with the command Zone as well and that was there was a lot of experimentation going on that has Ripple effects moving forward that is totally true I I think like to me at least in this uh this era though it still very much felt like the the specific place that I would want to go to for commanders was still like in the commander pre-cons those were still the most engaging things to me and we didn't all like in standard sets the Legends were not always geared quite as compellingly towards the commander players like this this time window is where we got the Ulrich disaster for all those werewolf players who were just like oh we'll finally get a werewolf legend and it was oricator then they did not finally get a werewolf Commander right right so there was still that disconnect where like and to be honest like like in hindsight there are pieces of that where I'm just like thank goodness that they weren't like paying too much attention to Commander and standard says but at the same time like just the the it felt like there was a severe disparity between the legends that we would get in pre-constructed decks versus the legends that we would get in Commander decks I felt like the gishaths were more of a one-off rarity and the ulrichs were more of a common situation in standard constructed sense yeah I think this was the era where Commander players first started to expect watsi to give them treats in every single set for the most part uh-oh kind of um Dana that was troublingly worded yeah yeah well in the artwork is a good example of that like lots of people were kind of frustrated that that card wasn't designed in a way to be really good in commander and I think this is a really good example because I think we're going to come back to this in the very near future where maybe getting what you thought you wanted isn't always the best thing a lot of people thought they wanted wasi to design cards specifically for Commander and I'm not saying it's bad that they did necessarily but getting what you want has impacts that perhaps people didn't anticipate back when they were mad they didn't have their werewolf Commander oh there's a lot to unpack there but yes there is but but to build off of it so Dana alluded to uh something that we're going to talk about here in a second but this was the last time that in standard legal sets we were getting less than 10 legendary creatures per seti we didn't look Ravnica Legions is the last set with single-digit legendary creatures and and Ravnica Legions I remember that block when we the the third time I want to say that we went to Ravnica was a very very good set for Commander players there are a lot of really good cards in there there were some very interesting Legends yeah but there just wasn't a ton of Legends in there about the legends that we did get were really cool like we had tasa Carla we had a lot of really cool things in this era when it comes to the legendary creatures that we were given yeah and one thing I think that that impacts the next layer of design the next wedge we'll get into from this one is the the commander card they designed with commander in mind in other sets that became very popular you mentioned taste as a really good example that became a very popular card and it's a very powerful commander and I think that's the kind of thing the Wizards of the Coast in terms of design took a notice of this was something that is powerful and Commander that was very popular and I think they set out to replicate that in a lot of ways from this point moving forward yeah so if we were uh if there was a lot to unpack about that now we're getting into the next one and there's even more to unpack here because y'all we're getting into 2019. uh Matt you mentioned Ravnica Allegiance was one of the last times if not the last time that we saw a single digit number of Legends in a set well around there right after that was war of the spark Throne of el drain the brawl pre-cons Modern Masters all of which sported like at minimum 20 Legends per set or something like that and um this this was where we really got to see Dana as you were talking about some Powerhouse designs and I think that's kind of how we've designed uh We've defined to this particular era 2019 and 2020 that's where they officially began fire design as they call it which stood for fun inviting replayable and exciting um and they really pushed an envelope they they really made some some designs that are still wreaking havoc to this day they pushed all the envelopes to the point where this is when the United States Postal Service also started struggling wow that's how many envelopes were pushed in this era of design yeah so okay we've we've all heard of corvold and true Lane but like that's also where we got golos that's also where we got Kenworth this is also where we got like urza you know like this is this is like okay there's some stuff happening yeah I think this is the point where there's an intentionality to the cards that are designed where someone behind the scenes is specifically saying this card is going to sell packs to Commander players because they are one going to want to get this very playable and very powerful card to build a deck around I think that was this is really the first time we are seeing that in other sets where where instead of seeding fluster storm into Commander for legacy players they're seating Cards into standard for Commander players with the intent that Commander players will seek these things out for their commanded acts well not only that their seating Commander into standard because they tried the whole companion thing in icore they're like let's literally bring an aspect of Commander into other constructed venues gee what an idea that was just this is where I think a lot of the focus on EDH got so intense that it really became a point of disregarding some of the health of the other four formats out there and I know that a lot of construction players don't like that for the record Commander players didn't like it either yeah the argument can be made that disregarding it for the sake of the commander wasn't healthy for Commander and sorry right yeah yeah my biggest struggle too and to to be very clear this is not taking a shot at anybody and their skills and card design because we've said many times how difficult it is to design cards in a healthy format but I think that a lot of folks that were designing commander-specific cards in this era didn't actually play Commander themselves or they didn't they weren't fans of the format you can tell with some of the the legendary creature designs it was how would a 60 card competitive player approach designing a card and then put it in the command Zone and that's when we saw a lot of these designs where everything was so pushed to what was at the time an unhealthy level now the rest of the Forma has caught up to what a lot of the Legends were doing in this era but for a time there it was almost play these specific commanders or you're putting yourself at a disadvantage yeah and there are ways where I'm just like there were things here that I got that I had always wanted so I I struggled to look at this always as a negative like War the spark is where we got feather one of my beloved commanders that is a deck that I have since taken apart but like at long last I finally had a a commander for a character that I'd loved from the novelizations and it was like oh this is this is wonderful thank goodness and she's also like decent this is like a a slight foray away from what boros has normally been doing for for all this time so I'm like oh this is this is very interesting but everything else that also came along with that was just very uh very difficult to swallow at the same time although one other thing that I'll note that um I don't think was necessarily a bad thing here but like in in this 2019-2020 era like icoria the icoria pre-cons were also the first time that the precons were lining up with the the main sets rather than being random like oh you know whatever was happening in 2016 attraxa was not connected to the main set necessarily um so like that was also an interesting shift that we started to see as a lot of those uh design venues started to come together and that that in general I'm actually like oh that that was at least kind of a kind of a cool thing I think that the fact that there were Fierce guardianship level cards in those pre-cons was maybe not as cool of a thing but the fact that things were lining up and there was some Synergy there and like that is something I do appreciate yeah so so to back up just a little bit I do want to point out that I think Wizards of the Coast and the design team in general between the this 2016 era so the previous era that we were talking about with conspiracy take the crown and this current one here they learned all lot of very very valuable lessons that benefit the designs that we got after this so just because of the delay that we always see within you know a new set is released and they're going to take those notes they're going to learn lessons from what happened and what went wrong especially and then they're going to fix that moving forward it takes about two years from when a card is or from when a set is released until they're able to design the next set that they're able to kind of take that feedback so the lessons that were learned in this time span were extremely valuable for the future health of the format and I do want to give a lot of credit to how a lot of the feedback that players gave to Wizards of the Coast over this time period was implemented and I'm very grateful for the the lessons that were learned here I feel that way and we've been focusing a little bit on the commanders too but like in addition to all of this over the course of this Arc we've also seen the a change in how they're designing cards that are in the 99 yeah you know one of the biggest problems in the early days was like Red's lack of card draw and they spent over the course of this Arc starting you know I I Outpost seizures the card that jumps out at me in terms of like giving red their their kind of quote unquote fraction Arena um with impulse draw at this point I I it very much like and I think we've done shows talking about how Reds kind of that problem's been solved there's so many different card draw or card Advantage options in red now and and they spent this this Arc of time working on addressing that um white took a little bit longer and it's probably maybe still a work in progress oh yeah it was David worked but they've been working on that as well like like there was an attempt to also Shore up some other weaknesses in the format in in colors and color pairing um and they got better at doing that along this this way too as they got better designing commanders and making things work better in the format they figured out what things in the 99 work really well in the format Now Matt I I have a question about this particular Point specifically and there's a thing that you've said on a couple of past episodes here and I wonder if this is the moment to it to interrogate it a little bit further okay but you've kind of noted that there was a certain point where it started to feel like Commander instead of always feeling like an eternal format where yes you can't play anything there was a point where it started to feel a little bit like a rotating format was that point here or was it further on I think this is one of kind of not formally started but when we really started seeing that kind of theory play out because not only did like the card quality like we've all pointed out several cards ago in the 99 you have the Fierce guardianships and all that stuff but not just the the quality of the cards but the density and the amount of cards this is when we started seeing a ramp up in supplemental products so that's when we started seeing a whole bunch not just very very powerful cards but a lot of them coming out where all of a sudden you couldn't really have these low floor role players anymore because they had a high floor role player that was going to do the exact same thing only better they was just kind of pushing a lot of those cards out of the format so I know a lot of the conversation just in the community around this time was like I still want to play these old cards that I want to play but I feel like I can't because these new cards are just too good not to play and that's one thing I think I appreciate a lot about the rules committee the the commander Advisory Group I know our friend Olivia gobert Hicks she's always talking just play the cards you want to play don't feel pressure on and especially don't put pressure on yourself to try to play this new card play the cards you want to play no matter how good they are and that's one sentiment that I I've tried to maintain in my deck building I don't always do a very good job of it but I try to at least yeah yeah no I feel that and I think I would also agree specifically because 2019 uh the the brawl pecans introducing Arcane Signet is just like oh yeah well that's sort of a Best in Class and we started to receive a few more of those cards that felt like Best in Class and especially the fact that they were so ubiquitous was also a problem like if there's a Best in Class for a super Niche strategy like okay that's kind of like you know that's a niche decks need a little bit more extra extra pump to make them get there but when a card can really just go just about anywhere uh I mean that's where even wizard of the coast has been like yeah no stuff like Arcane Signet that was a mistake um yeah uh so that's that I agree with your sentiment here that like this was a point where I started to feel like a lot of cards were getting pushed out of the stuff that you could actually uh feasibly do but it's an important thing to hold on to what you were just saying there too about like just play what you want don't feel pressured even if the cards are like blooming large in some of the ways that they started to hear well let's get into the next phase then and this is one that all the things that we started talking about in this most recent phase of you know we're getting a lot more product we're getting a lot more Legends this is when it becomes not just like a curve but like a deluge of just Legends everything is legendary starting now yeah the caldheim the caldheim curve or the call time Spike because we really got a a very big difference I think it was I like alliteration so but Dana you might be the the breaking vote here calheim curve I think I'm I'm with you that's that's all right there we go because because the set before we had 17 Legends in the zendikar set that came before it but then we got 33 Legends in call time that came right after it and there were more than 70 Legends in this Commander Legend set because draft environment there was more partner experimentation the mono colored Partners there but yeah 2021 was where we started to get what we'll call the Deluge era well and it's it's it's just absolutely absolutely mind-boggling we had dominaria the the first set that we kind of Revisited dominaria where it was a Legends matter set so it's kind of like uh when we first were in kamagawa where oh it's it's kind of got a theme around it of legendary things matter and we had that again in dominaria so we okay we kind of had a reasoning why there were 40 plus Legends in dominaria and then we went to zendikar like oh that's that's a lot of Legends for it not being the theme and then call time it's really just where they established the new normal where everything's gonna be legendary all these signpost comments and uncommons that we used to see kind of telling people in draft formats okay green white you probably want to do this strategy in red black you want to do this all of those suddenly became legendary and just the number of legendary creatures we got in every single set skyrocketed because of it so from this era though the one thing that really stands out at me that that changed was the focus um in the design of the precon decks um a lot of times there was a split Focus prior to this um or if the deck you know had a had a specific focus on thinking of perhaps the Astrid um the mass deck that had three enchantress commanders that was a relatively focused deck but there weren't a ton of cards in that deck necessarily that like were really important to maybe that archetype in this era we started getting very specifically focused Commander Decks that were filled with a bunch of new cards that were really powerful in that archetype and I that's the thing we thought we wanted um and I'm not saying we didn't I think there's a lot of upsides to that if you were a new player for example being able to grab a pre-cut that has a really specific theme and a bunch of good cards that you know maybe push that theme over the top in terms of winning a game or whatever it's probably a pretty good thing to have I think and additionally not everyone has a ton of time to brew it's like being able to find a lot of those things in a single package is very useful too the downside that I think nobody really anticipated when we were asking for all of these things is I think now we have a situation where if you have a deck with a certain theme and a pre-con comes out with that same theme it's just gonna have probably 20 cards in it that are better than your the deck that you brewed up so your choice then becomes either to not run them in which case you're just running a worse version of the deck or to run them and have your deck functionally look like the pre-con that just came out the brew that you may have been playing with for five or six years is now going to wind up looking just like a deck that you know came out last week um is that bad I don't know but it's definitely a change that's that's a new thing that we hadn't experienced before to talk about you know something that's brand new we just got a a two color fairy type of deck um from the from the new eldrain set with a bunch of really good black and blue fairies in it so much so that if you were already playing a black Blue Fairy Deck you're just gonna put almost every one of those fairies in that deck and you're now running basically that pre-con um it's not necessarily a bad thing I I personally don't love it but it's definitely a new thing that we didn't deal with in the past when a deck came out that maybe had a theme similar to yours it wasn't one that felt like it supplanted your deck and I think that's in the era we're in right now that that's what happens yeah like on the one hand I'm glad that we get fewer to fairies protections fewer accidental Dockside extortion it's just like Fierce guardianships like these Chase cards that feel like just about anything can use these um and instead we're getting like in this era we got more of the hordewing scarbs where it's just like oh you know this is only going to be useful for zombie decks or uh like new capena would be in 2022 like 2021 2022 is the the era we're currently looking at and so um it having damning verdict as a card it's like a wrath that is one-sided uh if creatures aren't wearing plus encounters uh or actually any type of counter um and like I do prefer those to just like here's the next good wrath that goes everywhere um you know more cyclonic Rifts we do not need except for or if you are playing white and you're playing a counter deck you're almost always going to be running damning verdict yes um because it's so specifically good in that deck so yeah it's six and one half does on the other I'm not I'm not going to say one is better than the other um but there are unintended consequences of a lot of things that that we and by we I literally mean we in this case like yeah yeah things that maybe we asked for for a lot of years now that we've gotten and we didn't really realize what that meant until we actually got it well and so like especially in this in this era I think we had like two two episodes we've done in the past are coming to mind because we had one about like the the Deluge when when call time came out and we were just like all right the number of Legends is increasing that is affecting the way that we build decks because stuff like clones for example they're different now they don't work as well when you've got like 10 legends just accidentally in your deck and then we've also done an episode about like are these decks sort of just like building themselves now because of the hyper-specific niche cards that we're getting in pre-cons that we saw on this time so like yeah I feel you Dana but also I'm not sure like it like I said it's just like I mean there are some things that we left behind that are good though so I but I also I struggled to think that these consequences that we're getting where it's specific answers for specific decks are worse somehow than oh here's a just generally amazing bomb card and we're getting seven cyclonic riffs a year sure and we're getting all these to fairies protection type of cards I would one thousand percent rather get a super specific role player that it just happens to be great in that one deck or one strategy than a deck that you're gonna see and it suddenly becomes a seven a great hinge for example I would so much rather have cards that aren't great hinge even though I love great henge I have in so many decks but the point is like that card is just so good that not only does it just go on every deck but it gets expensive too everybody wants it's five of those of those cards yeah and it's just so hard whereas you get these specific answers and specific powerhouses that's when the game just gets so much more accessible too because the the cards aren't nearly as expensive yes yeah I I fully agree with you I that this this one it's a hard pill to swallow but I do think it's overall better our medicine for us is maybe uh how we'll phrase it um sure so I feel you want that there is at least there are a few other points that happened in this time slot though that I think are important like I mentioned new capena earlier and the treasure explosion really does happen in this point in time and that is worth noting because like that was a bit unrestrained especially around new capena of just like oh there's Treasures like genuinely just everywhere now um and that is a big shift in the way that we have to interface with like what these little pieces of metal can do to battlefields um but this was also like Commander 2021 I just want to shout out specifically because it was finally a moment in time where they decided that Boris was allowed to have more than just equipment and feather as a personality and I just appreciate that because like like they they were trying on white card design for a long time Dana you were mentioning like oh red impulse draw in the previous era but here we were still struggling like in the last era they were they were trying but like we still got cartographers hawk in the C20 pre-cons and Verge Rangers in the commander 20 pre-cons and like in the previous era they also had marketed Commando Legends as having powerful White cards but we got stuff like terrific Greatsword like I don't think they figured out how to do aboros until 2021 and I don't think they figured out how to do white particularly until 2022 At Last I think it took them about a decade to like really finally figure out all right here's what we need to do with this color in this multiplayer format finally well and Mark rosewater who has always been very very transparent in whether it's his blog or his podcast or anything like that has been very vocal about how they they kind of came to the realization that we can't keep knee capping white because we think it shouldn't be and they need to change their perception because their perception suddenly wasn't really becoming the norm anymore so they had to admit okay white just cannot compete anymore unless we push boundaries and we really play around with how we execute what white does so thankfully they've been vocal and adapting and again this is where we're seeing a lot of the the lessons that were learned in those prior eras and we're really starting to get it yes maybe it took a little bit longer than the typical player would like but we are at least seeing those results and I've said this before but I think I also appreciate amidst the Deluge is that we no longer get that situation that we had in the years before where like Edgar Markov comes out and now everyone has an Edgar Markov deck because that's the thing that that happened uh nowadays we're getting more Legends than we can keep up with which means when you sit down you may not know the commanders that you're facing against at all you may see cards you've never seen before and even if it does sometimes feel a little flustering that we can't keep up with everything that newness experience that is a fresh thing that I have come to really enjoy well fellas that finally brings us to present day uh after all of those we're now here in 2023 and there is another era for us to Define here in in present day uh Matt what should we call the present day era do you think I I don't know it's kind of Beyond expectations and anything that we can really do uh there's no way this universe can comprehend I I don't universes Beyond has just been all over the place uh that's what jumps out to me and just so many different ways and so many different ways to interpret that yeah yeah the the universe is beyond explosion is I think what we've decided to call it here um particularly I think uh something that you mentioned uh before we were recording was that like Baldur's Gate seems to be especially a moment that kind of begins this like we've got a lot of cards from a lot of other IPS that are mixing now into the Magic World and like technically this was a thing that happened several years prior like walking dead was not in 2023 but that walking that like that product did not actually establish a design ethos necessarily whereas in 2023 we're seeing the Baldur's Gate the Warhammer the Transformers the Lord of the Rings um and that's more of a a more common thing and it will continue to be a more common thing and that really feels like a new design ethos that is uh making its way on through in 2023. yeah I think this is also the the point in time where they are just printing win conditions for archetypes they've printed cards we talked about things like the the damning verdicts that work really well in a plus one counter stack but like we're getting cards you know if they print an enchantress deck like they just did they're going to print one or two or three brand new cards in that deck that will probably win you the game and that's not something we had really saw in the past we mean in early days there weren't when conditions at all really um and as the game Advanced and they printed more Commander stuff you found more of those cards that that did work in that way and there was some intentionality of that but like really the last year or so was when we've seen them say okay we're going to make this particular deck and we are going to put two brand new cards in here that if you are playing this archetype and you have an established board State there's a really good chance it's going to win you the game or at least kill one player and that's not a thing we had seen in the past I think and it's also I I would argue what's lent itself to that feeling that like if you have a deck and a pre-con comes out that kind of mirrors your Dex archetype you're just gonna probably need to run a bunch of those cards to stay caught up um so that's that's another part of that that I think is is relatively new I mean I don't know if it's a relatively new because it's still pushing the the rotating format of Commander that we sure kind of touched on a little bit but you are right that it just we're just getting so many cards it's not just like a card or two or a commander or two but it's it's a two or three cards per pre-constructed deck that just become these Auto I I hate using the term Staples but these almost Auto includes for so many different decks especially if you're playing a specific theme and it's not just oh it's a good board wipe if you're playing Decks that care about counters on on things it's just oh this card is just like a win condition and it's very easily achieved at the same time specifically there's a thing here that I I think what sets the 2023 and also like honestly also the 2021 and 2022 like that that period of time I think that stands out differently to me that marks it as a different era from like the fire design of 2019 is that it feels like the powerful commanders that we get here in in these days are not powerful because of the fire design that they were like pushed to be hyper powerful it feels like they are kind of powerful by accident like Shore Kai was not tested fully and it was sort of like oh I guess that's better than we thought it was or like we I mean we still get Powerhouse commanders like Miriam for example but but it feels like since there are so many Legends these days they don't have time to play test and and Power Balance every single one of them that goes out because there are just so many of them so we get more of those oh this is accidentally a whole lot better than necessarily we thought or this strategy or these commanders are not as good as we thought because there are just so many of them that balancing all of them is no longer possible um so the the powerful stuff that we get these days fuels to me more like less like a purposeful thing and more like a listen we wanted to try and design some fun stuff and balancing Commander we're going to rely a little bit more on the the social end of the format um and and players negotiating power levels with each other to to Really balance that stuff out because actually trying to balance it in terms of the cards card design cannot solve a social problem if people want to do powerful stuff we're going to leave that to them and the car designs we'll just try and make sure that it's fun but that means we can't test every single thing that kind of feels to me like a big difference from 2019. I I think that there's a huge and I know Dana you love to bring up this card specifically but there's a huge signpost for they just started doing things just to like make sure there's enough text on the card it feels like and just kind of like oh we're gonna also throw this on there like we're gonna give it Ward 2 just as a treat right but Sheila Sheila child of angolians the the golgari colored Sheila just there's so much text on and it feels like they could have just stopped with either the top half or the bottom half of that card and I know that we'd mentioned this card specifically a lot but it's kind of a perfect example I think that I'm very very glad you brought it up Dana that just this card would have been great with half of the text yeah and the other half would have been totally forgotten and but I just I I don't know how to put this it feels like they're the design team is putting pressure on themselves yeah to make sure that all these cards are powerful instead of just letting the designs speak for themselves and I I know I've said on this podcast a few times like I would be so happy to see a simple elegant design that also happens to be effective it doesn't need to have death touch and oh and this and this in order for it to be something that Commander players are going to want to play make it just something that is going to be fun it doesn't need all these extra words on there if they're doing it for flavor reasons I get that but at the same time do you need to make sure that everything is as flavor specific too and I I don't know yeah well and and the examples that I've invoked when we've had conversations like this in the past like tivet was it probably intended to be a voting Commander because it has this voting ability but the other words that they put on it are so potent in making so many other types of tokens that it is just not voting is the least interesting thing about the commander and it's like if there had been fewer words on it then maybe actually would have done the thing that was uh intended in the first place uh or I feel like this is also the point where we're starting to get commanders that step on each other's toes I've mentioned wolfgar and ishin I'm just like huh those came out very very close to each other and they both double attack triggers the it's weird that we got both of those in such close proximity or Celestine and rodolf are our other other examples as well and it does feel like these commanders are sort of like uh trying to steal each other's gigs and I'm just like I feel like we don't need that and if like so that we've got a lot of lessons from previously that are still making themselves very very well known here or as a byproduct of the fact that there is just so much going on yeah when you're when you're doing two commanders that are so similarly designed like that it I I hate to say this but like they're they're just recycling ideas too soon and just part of that to me is just there's so much pressure on we need so many different legendaries that they're starting to recycle ideas and I know that the team is so good at their job they're able to come up with new designs but just I I think this is Hasbro talking not wizard of the coast talking one just we're doing the same thing over and over again um we just have to meet this quote of legendary creatures so of course they're going to run out of ideas eventually yeah Joey touched on the the increase and how that affects increase in cards they make and how that affects testing when they're printing 10 times as many cards I guarantee they have not devoted 10 times as many hours into testing these cards that's such a better way to phrase it than I did I love that yeah yeah yeah and so so things are absolutely going to slip through however we've also seen a management at watsi where Hasbro is calling a lot of shots in a way that they weren't calling 10 years ago yeah which means there's a lot of pressure to sell packs yeah and while mistakes definitely happen at a higher rate and and by mistake I just mean like things that weren't tested the way they thought they would be tested I also think there's a definite intentionality to printing commanders that are very strong that will replace something that you already had to it's like a planned obsolescence kind of thing almost and no one was confused about how powerful Miriam was I don't think like that was a misunderstanding that that was an absolute bomb that's a card that's going to make you upgrade your dragon deck to a Miriam deck I think there's there's for all the accidental things that probably happened that shaped the format I think there's definitely an intentionality there too where like they want you to go buy more packs in a way that perhaps watsi wasn't too concerned about a decade ago they obviously want to sell product but if there's a there's a cynicalness I think to it that maybe wasn't there once upon a time now there's a note that Matt made before we began the show that I feel like we need to mention here okay um just like kind of going back to like the Deluge of it all since we're still touching on that note um Matt had noted that we had more legendary creatures revealed on the first day of wild devildren previews than we did in all of Ravnica Allegiance and honestly like that that just makes me laugh a lot it's just like oh yeah we're in a new reality but there's a thing in this era especially since we called it the universe is beyond explosion and I I think that we actually might have breezed that past that a little bit too quickly because I think it's important for us to say something a little bit further about the universe is beyond explosion and like like yes there's some some Hasbro doing the influence on the way that design is going these days and that is some bitter boots for a lot of players who've been around for a while and who Miss some of the eras that we talked about at the very beginning of this show and I think to some extent to another all three of us fall into different parts of that argument with that said the absolute reality the the genuine just absolute reality of this is that a lot of these other things the Doctor Who's the upcoming Final fantasies the Lord of the Rings that just happened like Lord of the Rings made big news among so many nerd spaces they're doing this because it is fundamentally bringing more players into the game and I'm not mad about that like a cynical or whatever or not whatever the intentions if people don't like like the absolute reality is that we're getting more people who play Magic and that's nothing but a good thing that specific thing is a thing I am happy to focus on and to applaud that more people will be playing Magic as a result of some of these things I don't necessarily need to be a fan of all of the IPS that are crossing over into magic and if people don't like it I get it but whether it's motivated just by profit or whatever however people want to say it I have more people that I can play Magic against and that rocks yeah selfishly I I want to think that Lord of the Rings was only ever going to be the the set like that because Lord of the Rings is one of my favorite IPS it's one of my it is my favorite set of all time I I can just comfortably say that but at the same time I need to realize like the the joy that that set brought to me and how excited I was and how much I just it reinvigorated me honestly for the game doing that with other IPS doing that with Assassin's Creed or Fallout or whatever it's going to give that exact same feeling to so many other people and and I'm I love Final Fantasy I've played every Final Fantasy game growing up and so maybe that'll happen again I I don't know but I yeah I need to remind myself too because I I for some reason in the back of my mind I think it makes Lord of the Rings feel less special but it's still special to me and that's ultimately kind of what should count well Joey made the point about how like you're happy that all these new players are coming in I I actually am as well but let's say I wasn't that wouldn't change anything right the reality is this is happening whether we like it or not there's going to they're going to continue to print a ton of product they're going to continue to print universes Beyond that's just what's going to happen so you can you might not like it maybe you that's the kind of thing that's going to make you leave and that's unfortunate I guess but it's not going to stop so like that that's what I've come to on this the things I like or dislike that's a rock rolling down a hill and and I'm not going to stand in front of it so like I can either Embrace that change or not but the change doesn't care yeah the change doesn't get oh Dana Dana that was a mic drop moment for me I I freaking love that yeah no that that's a really good thing because like if new people are coming to to this game and the first thing that they encounter at a game store or whatever is someone who's mad at Final Fantasy whatevers like that's not a great environment for them to walk into and like I'd rather be the type of person who's welcoming yeah like I want to be welcoming to the person who who saw this thing had never played magic before and they were like Warhammer I love that game I want to play this thing now and now I've got another opponent that I can play really enjoyable games against cool that like I just like happy or unhappy about it as you said James doesn't care and also I need to be welcoming to that person because their experiences are going to matter so much more than being beeping me being bitter about anything like no one's impressed by how much anyone hates something you know so like being welcoming would be a huge a big priority for sure so yeah yeah I love the way you phrase that so I wonder for you two because I honestly I'm Plum out of any predictions for what anything in the future is going to look like because if you would have asked me in 2015 what card design would look like or just told me this is what it's going to look I I wouldn't have believed I would have said this is these are made up cards that like will never exist do you two have any predictions for what we might be seeing in the future are we going to see design going the same way as it is now or is it going to shift a little bit what how do you think it's going to shape up in the near future the next era I don't know Dana do you have something or I mean we're definitely not going to see less universes Beyond I don't think I think of anything that's just going to to ramp up um I I think we're going to continue to see the trend we've seen right now where they are going to for sales reasons people they're going to want you to have to buy cards to keep your deck updated to keep up with the Decks that are out there that people are buying so like if you are we're playing a slutsny enchantress deck I think that the the intent is to make you want to have to buy cards or buy that salesni enchantress pre-con so you can upgrade your deck so it can it can hang um I think that's just how capitalism works and I think that we need to like just understand that's what's going to be the thing moving forward um and maybe you are just no longer like maybe me speaking of me particularly maybe I'm not going to be able to have a specifically super unique deck anymore because as soon as they print a golgari def touch deck it's going to have 15 cards on it that like I'm gonna have to put in my golgari death touch deck or it can't keep up um I think we're going to see more and more of that as they move forward because having really specific decks makes sense and from a sales standpoint I get why they would do that I get why they want to make you have to continue to be involved in the product to make you keep functioning as a consumer um I just think we're going to see more of the things we've already seen and it's probably going to escalate interesting uh so so I think I've got my my potential prediction um and actually it kind of goes back to the very first thing that we talked about where Matt you said that you had a pre-edh deck um as things swell and swell and swell I don't think this is a balloon that bursts or whatever but I do think that it that something that big like a player base maybe cannot sustain Commander is currently the form of multiplayer magic and it cannot possibly be all things to all people um so if there are people who are craving more of the Nostalgia of the pred what we'll get is more of the a fragmentation of like all right this is going to be a different subsection of stuff and I would anticipate more in that vein um of it just like oh here's going to be I I would foresee a more variant era I guess is the way that I would phrase it of like different ways to engage with this a little bit more experimentation on the player side to see if there are different things that we can do since we've got so much of this pie let's see if we can make some different little slices for it and enjoy it in a couple of different ways rather than having to stomach all of it all at once that's I think my potential future prediction I think Nostalgia driven formats or just point driven formats too I know Canadian Highlander has a really good point system for a lot of the high power cards I think that might creep up in popularity if we hit a certain breaking point so that is a really good point I mean that's kind of why pre-dh came to be is because it was so such a Nostalgia driven format that yeah people just kind of gravitated towards it because they wanted to get away from everything that was happening currently so that is a really good point uh I I really do think that might seem more rise and we'll see like this this has been really fun like history lesson kind of thing like going back through those different eras of design and seeing like different moments in time different products that begin to influence the stuff that would come later I think it's fascinating I think it's been really really interesting to to see those things and honestly we were just talking about the player design we didn't even talk about how like oh you know edhrek became a thing or game nights became a thing and that also influences player Behavior too um and our deck building stuff too so like yeah there's a lot of stuff to dig into that I think is like uh just wonderful and it's been a great going down memory lane with you guys and to also uh you know figure out how things came to be this way because regardless of how things seem to be it's freaking flourishing so like right yeah I'm I'm happy about that and it's been cool to see how we got there because it's flourishing yeah I mean we've seen some pretty Monumental changes in how this game functions since this podcast started um yeah so it'll be interesting to to see where it goes you know where the game is 300 more episodes from now considering where it was 300 ago yeah yeah and I also uh actually Matt I have one more prediction um another another thing in the future that will happen that you'll get the segue for challenge of stats because that's not gonna happen you stole my joke that's exactly what I was gonna say all right all right never mind that error is not happening because Matt won't even let me get my own punch lines God brilliant you you Telegraph that more than Alexander Graham Bell even though he didn't really use the telegraph because he was the phone I it doesn't matter either way I knew what you're going for and it's not going to happen just give it up so angry yo that's amazing all right well you know what Segway you can do is for the outro of the episode so listeners let us know what you think are the different defining moments of the past many years of Commander we really want to hear from you on this one and with that we're going to call this episode so to a close um I'm tempted to not ask Matt you can find me at mathimus 55 on pretty much any social media platform uh whatever it is that's it's the same handle Mathis 55 and don't forget we do stream over twitch.tv slash edhretcast we have guests on whenever we stream it's fun time it's always a good time yeah make sure you tune in and Dana how about you you can find me online at Dana roach I'm writing articles for EDH Rec and you can find all of us together at patreon.comcast and I'm Joey Schultz you can find me online at Joseph M Schultz I just started Instagram the check me out over there I don't know how it works but it's fun to find out you can also find the cast at edhretcast on all of those online places too plus if you got a question for us you can contact us at edhretcast gmail.com or things go out once again to chase for assisting me with the post-production of the show you can find them online at Mana curves and listeners will be back at you next week with more data and insights but until then remember EDH wreck your deck before you wreck your deck [Music] foreign

Channel: EDHRECast

Views: 37,474

Keywords: magic the gathering, commander, edh, edhrec, mtg

Id: YoKTPUmEGxY

Length: 77min 5sec (4625 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 01 2023