a reasonable discussion of the possibility that edh is bullshit

Sometimes, competitive Magic just isn’t doing it for people. Instead of spending weeks tuning someone else’s deck, spending $25 at a tournament, and getting mana-screwed in a rigid bracket, some players want to chill out, play cards they enjoy playing, and not worry about if everything is the most optimal it could possibly be. In other words: play casually.

The issue is that casual sucks.

The solution to “pure casual” sucking is to create some direction for players to follow; that is, a casual format. This attempts to solve the “Just Play Whatever You Want” problem, where someone’s pile of leftover commons and uncommons run into someone’s tuned Affinity.

Casual formats, almost by definition, have to be weird and arbitrary. If they didn’t have bizarre rules and restrictions, they’d just feel like any “normal” constructed format. Hence, we get things like 5-color’s huge deck size, EDH’s singleton and color restrictions, and Tiny Leaders’s CMC rule. The point is not to be permissive enough to allow familiar decks, but to require players to create something entirely new, specifically for that format.^[1]

^[1] Tiny Leaders interests me more than any other casual format, and while I haven’t actually like played the format, I can 100% personally guarantee that Mental Misstep and Vedalken Shackles are absurd and it’s amazing that those weren’t immediately banned, what the fuck.

It is the nature of any invented format that, with enough time and attention from enough dedicated deckbuilders, a metagame of accepted best decks and strategies will emerge. I played in a small “manacost singleton” tournament, for example, where each player chose a specific mana cost and could only use cards with that exact cost. I built combo Elves (G), lost only to burn (R), and it’s tough to think of a deck that would have a good matchup against that deck without being comically dedicated to hating it out.

Once a format comes around to a phase when enough players have worked on it to develop its distinct metagame, players are faced with a choice: do they react to the metagame by tuning their own decks against it? Do they rally the format’s devotees into changing the rules or banning the cards that comprise the best deck? Or do they get all sullen and make passive-aggressive forum posts about people Destroying Are Format?

The more anti-competitive format supporters will be inclined to resist the existence of the metagame, believing that since their format is “for fun,” it should be immune to the natural progression of deck improvement. People on the more competitive side are more inclined to embrace it, and a well-designed format should be able to support a diverse metagame without either collapsing or turning into a one-deck navel-gazing format.

I don’t know exactly how EDH caught on as the only casual constructed format, but personally, I blame judges. This group generally has broad access to cards, wide-ranging knowledge of Magic, a large friend group of people that want to hang out with three-hour games, and very little interest in winning games of Magic.

EDH’s issues as a format spring largely from its non-restrictive nature. Beyond the 99 card singleton construction, if one chooses some generic 5-color general, you can pretty much play a singleton Legacy deck without much issue; because of the concessions to people’s favorite casual cards, there are lots of draws that can be significantly better than an average Legacy deck, because of completely legal cards like Sol Ring, Skullclamp, and Sedge Troll.

I’m not sure if everyone reading this has played games with or against turn one Sol Ring. If the player opposing Sol Ring is playing “fair,” and the Ringed player is doing anything at all reasonable (eg playing a decent four-mana spell on turn two), the latter player is going to win about 80% of those games.

The typical EDH response is to ignore this entirely, because that’s not the point of EDH, maaan. EDH doesn’t need to ban powerful cards like Sol Ring, because if someone’s deck is too powerful, they’ll be shunned from cardshops everywhere and have to wander the streets, Sharuum in hand, desperately seeking someone who will lose to their infinite combo.

Gotta ban Biorhythm, Sylvan Primordial, and Trade Secrets^[2], though, because those risk actually ending a game.

^[2] Reprinted in the Commander expansion, ironically.

For deeper insight into what EDH is really about, I recommend reading articles from the former home of satirical Jesse Mason writing, GatheringMagic. Jason Alt wrote a piece introducing the concept of the 75% EDH deck, wherein decks are purposefully made to be not-optimal in order to fit in better with other peoples’ EDH decks. He explains:

“In a good night of Commander for my playgroup, I will win 1 ÷ X games, where X is the number of players at the table. It isn't about letting anyone else win, it's not about fetching mana dorks with your Tooth and Nail because finding Deadeye Navigator and Molten Primordial is going to make everyone upset, and it's not about being patronizing to your group. Winning that proportion of the games will avoid painting a target on your back or making anyone resent your involvement. You want to make decks that let you “do a thing” that will be fun to do and that don't prevent others from “doing their thing” on principle, but that may provide ways for you to actively stop opponents if they are getting out of hand.”

In short: his idea is that he does not want to win every game of EDH.

It is this attitude, among others, that fundamentally irks me about EDH people. They have constructed Magic decks, with actual Magic cards, each of which should have some sort of gameplay interaction with other Magic cards. But even from deck construction, no one is set out to win the games that they enter. Well, not any more games than anyone else at the table. So what, then, is the intent of EDH? Back to Mr. Alt:

“Some people like being able to play the big, Timmy cards, some people like making decks full of Japanese foil cards and keeping the deck together forever in a format where metagame shifts don't really happen because there is no metagame.”

As far as the big Timmy cards: it should be noted that the Commander banlist is full of big Timmy cards, so don’t go running around trying to cast one of those seven different spells that cost eight or more mana (and no goddamned Protean Hulks, either^[3]). If the goal is to make a format that encourages this big-mana haymaker-type gameplay, there should really be a more elegant way to craft a format without just getting passive-aggressive at people trying to end the game swiftly. Rainbow Stairwell dictated a strict progression of mana costs; perhaps a format with an even higher lifetotal, or a cardpool that excluded the ways that games commonly end before nine mana, could do this.

[3] Protean Hulk/Greater Good aggro/combo was one of my favorite Standard decks that I’ve ever built, so this definitely prevents me from ever playing EDH.

The point about “decks full of Japanese foil cards” seems much more realistic. Basically, people want to spend a shitload of money on the game and force people around them to notice this. When making an efficient deck is socially discouraged, the real “winners” are the ones who have a $10,000 untuned deck, with a horrifically unbalanced manabase all in foils or black-bordered dual lands.

EDH is the best summary of conspicuous consumption I’ve ever seen. People aren’t trying to be good at the game, or build the most effective deck, or even win once they’re inside it. They’re just trying to show off the cool stuff they own.

If competitive Magic is auto racing, EDH is a bunch of people revving their heavily-modded Ferraris at each other in a parking lot without going anywhere.

Think about the standard story of the underdog against the antagonist: the antagonist has every advantage possible, with a privileged upbringing, all the flashiest gear and the latest tech. Our hero, though, through the virtues of hard work and friendship, practices [activity] in his backyard, in the alleyways, in his basement until he somehow overthrows the terrible reign of the antagonist. Egos are shattered, screams are heard, expensive things are thrown against the walls in denial and frustration.

Like most of humanity, I have a natural urge to root for the scrappy, skillful person against the rich egotistical one. In League, I love the idea of a cocky Gold-ranked player with the Championship Riven skin (est. value ~$300 while it was available for resale via third-party sites) getting stomped by some Challenger smurf using Galio because the champion was free that week.

EDH’s ideology seems to be the polar opposite of this. Don’t try to win more than the average number of games, but aggressively move to make your deck as ~pimp~ as it could possibly be. I constantly see people posting blatant brag pictures of their completely foiled-up, as-expensive-as-humanly-possible EDH deck, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone post an EDH gamestate and asking what the proper line of play was. This makes sense, because if people at all value playing optimally, as Mr. Alt says, “there are myriad formats people can play if they want to be Spikes.”^[4]

^[4] Oh wow, have I really not written the essay about how silly the Timmy/Johnny/Spike idea is? Huh.

EDH doesn’t make any sense as far as format design, because EDH doesn’t have to make any sense from a game design perspective. The purpose of EDH’s construction is to give people an excuse to build something as comically expensive as possible; formats that allow less financial showing off are therefore inferior. What are the most expensive cards? Black-bordered Alpha and Beta. Those have to be allowed.^[5] A larger deck size allows more showing off.

^[5] The only problem with this thinking is that EDH bans the power nine, as well as some pseudo-power like Time Vault and Library of Alexandria. I can rationalize this: the dual lands are the perfect cards to include in a format, because of their wide availability in their hideously ugly Revised printings. What’s better than playing a really expensive card? Playing a really expensive card available in other versions for 1/20th that price, and the common player still can’t afford it even in the cheapest possible version. On the other hand, if actual power was allowed, the only way the format could go on is tacitly allowing proxies (because something like 1/10th as many Black Lotuses exist as Underground Seas). A format with the purpose of showing off wealth couldn’t possibly allow proxies; that would defeat the point.

Mr. Alt’s statement that there “is no metagame” is a fundamental misunderstanding of both the term and the idea of a metagame. A metagame is not simply what decks people play (and even by that ceonceptualization, EDH certainly has a metagame with its ramp decks, its combo decks, its reanimator decks, its draw-my-entire library decks). A metagame is everything relating to the game outside of the actual game itself. EDH’s metagame is not just whether Derevi is absurd, but the styles of play that have become common in EDH. And we all know that EDH has a specific style to it: if I describe a non-EDH gamestate, even a 1v1, as looking “like EDH,” people will know what I mean.

EDH’s metagame is nine-mana enchantments that do nothing but combo with a six-mana enchantment. It is purposefully intricate synergies that revolve around copying Doubling Season. But it’s bigger than that, too.

EDH’s metagame is Mr. Alt’s article about the 75% idea (almost a dogma). EDH’s metagame is his idea that the format is appealing because it has “no metagame.” Ignoring the prevailing trends, player types, and tropes of EDH is EDH’s metagame.

Whenever I write something critiquing an aspect of Magic or the community, people will respond by asking whether I even like Magic. Since I certainly expect that response from EDH players, I’ll ask them: do you?

Do you actually enjoy playing games of Magic? No, not the part where everyone looks at your foreign foils. The part where your cards do stuff with the other cards. Are you really paying attention to how everything in the game is progressing? Or are you just waiting for your turn to do your super cool but definitely not infinite combo?

If you love Magic so much, why do you spend thousands on your EDH deck instead of giving away homebrew $20 decks to new players?

Would you play Magic if there were no foils, no promos, no rarity? Would you love your Temporal Manipulation if everyone had five copies?

Would you play Magic if you didn’t have any Magic cards?

To me, the ideal casual Magic format is cube. One person supplies all the cards; doesn’t matter if it includes every piece of power in its original Alpha printing, or if they just picked up the entire cube at Kinko’s yesterday. Everyone starts out at equal footing: you sit down with nothing but your knowledge of Magic, without spending anything. The cube designer gets to decide exactly what about Magic they find the most fun, and if everyone in the draft agrees with that perspective, they’ll have a great time.

Cube is also the most self-expressive way to play Magic. When you’re faced with a pack of 15 powerful cards and have a minute to make the decision, you swiftly find out what you, personally, think of as the “best” way to play. I didn’t think of myself as a devoted control player until I drafted cube over and over and went with a control deck eight out of ten times. Aggro players will find themselves with a higher number of Goblin Guides per capita.

Unlike constructed formats that require a deck built beforehand, cube requires players to build one on the fly. Even if you try to draft the same deck every time, in a well-constructed cube it’ll end up radically different from one draft to the next, by virtue of random card assortment and the natural variance of different drafters’ preferences. You’ll learn what happens when Magical Panic starts, as you find your intended two-color combination is completely absent after the first three picks. If you’ve always heard that Tangle Wire is way underrated, you’ll get a chance to try it for yourself when it wheels.^[6]

^[6] DO NOT PASS TANGLE WIRE.

Cube is an interesting exercise in multiple layers of creativity and expression: Wizards created the cards, and the cube designer expresses themselves via inclusions and exclusions in their cube. Then, each player expresses their deckbuilding artistry in a framework two layers deep. They will make things that even the cube designer had never thought of; they are simultaneously working with and against the designer on their own creation. They are indulging the designer while attempting to break the design, via an overpowered draft deck.

Magic is overall a good game, and a much better game than “acquire the expensive shiny cardboard.” But we should all agree about what the best game is: making EDH players angry on the internet.