Why Wizards of the Coast Has No Real Competitive Answer to EDH / Commander

[Card Slinger J]

Wizards of the Coast is actively trying to get EDH / Commander players into Standard and other non-Eternal formats whether it's through Brawl or Companion in Ikoria where it just keeps blowing up in their face every time. So why can't they just focus on keeping Standard players happy while allowing EDH / Commander players to enjoy their format? Especially when most EDH / Commander players have no real desire to dump money into a deck that's going to rotate out in a year. There's this notion that MTG needs Standard in order to survive given the importance of Organized Play and Local Game Stores (LGSs). After all the Local Game Store (LGS) is just as important for anyone who wants to play the format of their choice without having to feel sorry for spending tons of money on cardboard that they could've put to better use.

I'm not even sure If Wizards of the Coast can find a good mechanic to draw EDH / Commander players into Standard and other non-Eternal formats without breaking MTG. They're already off to a terrible start with Companion which looks good in concept but extremely poor in execution. The main problem I'm seeing with Companion is that it's a mechanic that still triggers outside the game without casting the actual card similar to the Eminence mechanic which still triggers while the Commander / General is still in the Command Zone. Oloro, Ageless Ascetic was the first example of this allowing players to gain life without having to cast him at all. I think Wizards of the Coast could've easily fixed Companion by having players cast the Companion card while applying a "Companion Tax" of paying 2 extra mana. There's already a lot of topics discussing Companion's impact on various formats.

So to try to answer this topic I don't think it's something that's really worth pursuing for Wizards of the Coast.

[darrenhabib]

I don't think companion was introduced to lure commander players into other formats, I think it was more of a case of letting other constructed formats have a taste of the commander experience.

You can't blame any business for at least trying to bridge sales between prospective clients.
Brawl was definitely that effort to get commander players into standard like environment, but they really made a meal of that by just not putting any resources or effort into how it would work long term at the start and it suffered as a result.
I really got into Brawl and enjoyed it a lot, but the interest waned very quickly by the masses and I just couldn't find any opponents to play against after a few months. And so I just stopped playing.

At the end of the day all they are really trying to achieve is "how do we sell booster boxes?".
And it is really hard if your player base is entrenched in eternal formats, because the longer time goes on, the harder it is for new cards to break into these formats.

Can you ever really get a Vintage, Legacy, Modern, Commander player to buy a booster box? Pretty low numbers is my guess.

I personally think if you want to sell booster boxes to say at least a good portion of eternal format players, then its got to be a centered around a good mechanic, that is not just one of these one and done for the set (parasitic).
If you print some good legendary creatures to support the mechanic and then start having a good track record of introducing it again in the not too distant future, then I think you'll get more interest in buying boosters.

The example of "mutate" as a mechanic would be fine, except you know that its probably never going to be printed as a mechanic again (or at least not for another 5 years or whatever), so as a commander player are you really that interested in investing in it heavily?
But if they had a better track record of supporting past mechanics then you'd get more players taking the plunge, because they know that in the future they will be able to upgrade their decks.
You could say that they have done this with giving cycling another round in Ikoria, but the reality is that its just so hard to marry powerful eternal formats with the far less powerful Standard and Limited format that they need to cater for.
The cycling cards are just too weak in general to be playable as a bulk for the other formats.

The follow up to Ikoria in Commander 2020 only really sees a few support cards in Gavi, Nest Warden, Otrimi, the Ever-Playful, Sawtusk Demolisher.
I personally think if you wanted to get commander players buying booster boxes, then you need to have legendary creatures that support the mechanic more in a variety of colors. So Ikoria itself needed some cycling mechanic commanders.
Now you could say that Rielle, the Everwise and Zirda, the Dawnwaker are cycling commanders, but its become fairly evident these days that people want to be in 3 or 4 colors when tackling a weaker mechanic to get a decent enough card pool to support it.

[Card Slinger J]

At the end of the day all they are really trying to achieve is "how do we sell booster boxes?".
And it is really hard if your player base is entrenched in eternal formats, because the longer time goes on, the harder it is for new cards to break into these formats.

That's also why cEDH is a hard sell for Wizards of the Coast despite being a competitive format that's Eternal instead of non-Eternal like Brawl. If they ever did decide to officially sanction cEDH like they've already done with Pauper maybe they could spice the format up with individual card rotations similar to what Konami does in Yu-Gi-Oh!'s Advanced format since the game wasn't originally designed to support set rotations like MTG. It's hard nowadays to sell booster boxes when card singles are more lucrative without getting screwed over by the games' predatory lottery system.

That's how Secret Lair drops became a thing when Wizards of the Coast made the mistake of not distributing them to Local Game Stores (LGSs) aside from selling direct to consumer. The absence of MSRP makes it easier for them to price gouge these products to LGSs where they can't even sell them to customers who want to buy these products at a more reasonable price. If Wizards of the Coast sold card singles to LGSs instead of booster boxes for how much they're going for on the Secondary Market then that could possibly open themselves up for a class action lawsuit. Not saying it will happen however they're already treading a thin line.

[RxPhantom]

I think we're forgetting Limited here. Commander Legends is on the way, so we'll see how drafting a Commander deck will work.

[DirkGently]

Brawl was definitely that effort to get commander players into standard like environment, but they really made a meal of that by just not putting any resources or effort into how it would work long term at the start and it suffered as a result.

Hard to know for sure what WotC's goal was, but I like to think Brawl was designed more as an entry point for casual players that isn't either jank standard, 60-card-casual, or commander. Of commander's faults, I think it's biggest problem for new players is that the card pool is far too large and unwieldy for someone just getting into magic and can be daunting. Brawl fixes that, keeping the fun of building around a cool legendary, while removing the implied competitive nature of standard.

Of course, Brawl being a primarily 1v1 format thanks to arena kind of screws that up. And also yes, the lack of support has been pretty awful. If WotC made brawl the first multiplayer arena format, I feel like that might actually help it out. It's a pretty fun format, imo, but formats live and die by who's playing them. Commander is a bit of a miracle that it achieved critical mass and most people can find a place to play it regularly. Any new format needs to clear that bar before it's a "real" format, and that's difficult without tournament support incentivizing people to play it.

[folding_music]

Lots of Commander regulars and posters on the major hubs already talk in competitive terms. I don't think it's really as big of a leap as you think for an EDH guy who knows all the jargon, thinks in terms of match-ups and ascribes all idiosyncratic deck decisions to "extreme budget" to get acquainted with a fully cut-throat format!

[ISBPathfinder]

My issue with standard continues to be how its hard to brew and have off meta things. I have played YEARS of standard and in paper, I think you can still kind of get away with it but on Arena with a good collection its like every single match you play is against a top 5 deck. Its true that some people do brew but I would say that 90% of the matches I got were against the same 5-10 decks all of which are netdecks.

I stopped playing standard on arena probably 6-8 months ago right after rotation. While I kept trying to play off meta decks all I got to do was grind against the same tried and true decks repeatedly. I was sick of it.

[UnNamed1]

My issue with standard continues to be how its hard to brew and have off meta things. I have played YEARS of standard and in paper, I think you can still kind of get away with it but on Arena with a good collection its like every single match you play is against a top 5 deck. Its true that some people do brew but I would say that 90% of the matches I got were against the same 5-10 decks all of which are netdecks.

This right here is why I quit standard. With the Throne of Elraine and Theros Beyond Death releases, I lost major interest in attempting to be competitive. You either have a playset of the new $40 cards (Oko, Uro, etc...) or you are fighting a losing matchup. I have heard multiple people say that commander is too expensive but then net deck a brand new standard deck after every release. At my LGS at least, no one net decked, then people from a couple towns over started coming in for easy wins, with the top tier net decks. Thats just not fun in my opinion and why I quit the format.

However, I do not think Wizards is trying to get commander players into the Standard format. Yes, they are releasing a lot of commander cards that are arguably very strong in the format. But take Thassa's Oracle for example. It is one of the strongest win-cons in commander currently. However, it is no where in standard. One of the strongest simic cards Hydroid Krasis is all over standard, yet hardly seen in commander. In my opinion there really isn't an overlap between the two formats, they are just played way too differently.

[Card Slinger J]

Meanwhile speculators are buying up EDH / Commander cards with more players in quarantine playing from home with $400 webcams because apparently that's a thing now. As the barrier of entry for the format continues to rise so is the demand for that EDH / Commander experience in other formats like Standard, Modern, and Pioneer which Companion failed to do. While I see that demand in Arena I don't see it being as productive for Paper Magic with the future of Organized Play and In-Store Play looking as grim as it is right now due to the pandemic.

Wizards of the Coast probably feels that making EDH / Commander more expensive is better than trying to come up with a new game mechanic that fixes all the problems surrounding Companion due to the issue with variance and how important it is in non-Singleton formats like Standard, Modern, and Pioneer. What better way to get more players into formats they have more control over as opposed to community-based formats in which they don't. Yet people wonder why the EDH Rules Committee doesn't fully trust Wizards of the Coast with handling EDH / Commander.

[onering]

I primarily play edh and I buy boxes, though not every set. Bought a box of unstable, modern horizons, and Dominaria most recently. I usually buy a box or two a year. Make a set interesting and I'll buy it, run a draft night or two with friends, then work it into commandwr decks. Make a set parasitic and I won't.

[UnNamed1]

I primarily play edh and I buy boxes, though not every set. Bought a box of unstable, modern horizons, and Dominaria most recently. I usually buy a box or two a year. Make a set interesting and I'll buy it, run a draft night or two with friends, then work it into commander decks. Make a set parasitic and I won't.

I typically try to pick up a box for each set. I loved War of the Spark and got 3 boxes. Core set 20, 1 box, Throne, 2 boxes, Theros, 0 boxes, Mystery boosters, 3 boxes, Ikoria, 0 boxes. If I will use the majority of the cards in the set, I will pick up a box or even multiple boxes. Ikoria and Theros for example, I only really wanted 5 cards out the entire set, so it made more sense to just get those cards than to try and gamble with packs/boxes. But realistically there hasn't been a set specifically for commander, of cards that can only be used for commander until, IMO, Mystery Boosters. Yes I know a majority of the cards can be used in other formats, however, the power level felt like something for commander.

I may be rambling a bit here, but I really don't think wizards needs to design cards specifically for commander, outside of a few legendary creatures here and there. Many cards aren't made specifically for commander and still see plenty of play. My issue is how pushed some cards get when you know they will fit into commander. Like Chulane, Teller of Tales and Korvold, Fae-Cursed King. Both made for Brawl/Standard, but both became menaces in the format they got pushed for, Commander.

[Sinis]

Wizards of the Coast is actively trying to get EDH / Commander players into Standard and other non-Eternal formats whether it's through Brawl or Companion in Ikoria where it just keeps blowing up in their face every time.

I'm not really all that convinced that Wizards is still trying to lure people to Standard. I think they want to lure people to a rotating format, but that's a tough sell; half of why many people like EDH is that it doesn't rotate.

I'm not at all convinced it's blowing up in their face, though. They keep posting profits, after all.

I'm also not sure I agree with your premise; Wizards doesn't need a competitive answer to EDH. They're still selling the cards you need to play. This is like saying that an ice rink owner should create a different hockey-like game with different rules so they can get a slice of that hockey money. Only, it doesn't matter... renting a rink out to hockey players or figure skaters doesn't make a lick of difference to them, as long as they get to keep renting out their rink and their responsibilities don't increase.

So why can't they just focus on keeping Standard players happy while allowing EDH / Commander players to enjoy their format?

The legitimate answer is that it's not as profitable as trying to leverage EDH.

I'll give you a comparison. There's this drug called Amyl Nitrite. It's a vasodilator used to treat heart disease. It also, when inhaled, provides an instant high. Now, companies manufacturing Amyl Nitrite can sell to hospitals/medical facilities for the use it was intended for (for which it is now rarely used), or they can somehow get it into the hands of people who use it for that secondary purpose.

EDH is a secondary purpose for Magic. The rules and gameplay for EDH only superficially resemble 'regular' Magic. It is known, at this point, that Commander players as a population dwarf that of standard players.

If you can change your product, who do you change it to? The bigger market. That's every reason for them to try and market to Commander players.

Especially when most EDH / Commander players have no real desire to dump money into a deck that's going to rotate out in a year.

Agreed.

There's this notion that MTG needs Standard in order to survive given the importance of Organized Play and Local Game Stores (LGSs).

Support for Organized Play has been waning for years. Wizards knows who their primary audience is, these days.

I'm not even sure If Wizards of the Coast can find a good mechanic to draw EDH / Commander players into Standard and other non-Eternal formats without breaking MTG.

Without breaking Standard/Legacy/Vintage/Modern/Pioneer, perhaps.

"Breaking" EDH would be profoundly difficult, considering it's already pretty broken.

They're already off to a terrible start with Companion which looks good in concept but extremely poor in execution. The main problem I'm seeing with Companion is that it's a mechanic that still triggers outside the game without casting the actual card similar to the Eminence mechanic which still triggers while the Commander / General is still in the Command Zone. Oloro, Ageless Ascetic was the first example of this allowing players to gain life without having to cast him at all. I think Wizards of the Coast could've easily fixed Companion by having players cast the Companion card while applying a "Companion Tax" of paying 2 extra mana. There's already a lot of topics discussing Companion's impact on various formats.

I think Companion is actually fairly well executed. Lurrus was a problem for Vintage and Legacy, and I'm sure the three dozen players who actually have decks for those formats had a rough time for a week or two. The others... eh. Hit and miss. I'm glad they won't be ubiquitous, and they're far from unplayable. I think they got it just right.

If the objection is 'getting a mechanical advantage by making a deckbuilding choice', I can't say I'm bothered. It's acceptable design space, and realistically, there were always advantages to having made some deck choices. You can already change how people play just by having two islands untapped.

At least you have to announce your eminence commander or companion at the start of a game.

So to try to answer this topic I don't think it's something that's really worth pursuing for Wizards of the Coast.

It's absolutely worth pursuing. There are untapped dollars waiting to be be mined. They've been pursing the EDH market for years now.

They carefully dole out nostalgia value for people (like K'rrik, Serra, etc.). More than anything, I think the direction they're going in is to release as many ancillary products geared to commander players as possible. Year over year, they've scrapped products like Archenemy, Planechase, and From the Vaults, especially ones that ostensibly use traditional magic mechanics or appeal to a narrow market, and have adopted sets with Commander-specific cards like Partner (in Battlebond), or draft-centric sets like Conspiracy -- the second of which had explicitly multiplayer mechanics. Even in standard releases, there are cards that are clearly intended to be more multiplayer-oriented (c.f. Run Away Together and Peel from Reality; what an interesting difference they made there).

Whether you believe they're pursuing it well or not is an open question. I happen to think that they're doing an okay job. Companion was less of a way to lure people to Standard, and (perhaps) more of a way to give Commander players more Partner-like options to choose from (Partner as a mechanic, is clearly beloved by Wizards having debuted in Commander 2016, reprised in Battlebond a year later, and returned again for Commander 2020, and I'm sure that affection is very strongly backed by market research). The appeal of those options translates to sales; every Keruga someone is going to play has to have come from a booster pack somewhere.

Whether it's worth it for them to do so or not is not up for debate: It is absolutely worth it to try and sell stuff to the demographic that will give them the most money, and there are just more garden-variety commander players who want to play budget decks than any other demographic. Any opinion to the contrary is just likely just plain incorrect from a business standpoint.

[Cyberium]

There's nothing wrong about trying to bring players from format to format, even Standard players are allowed to play certain cards after rotation by joining Pioneer and Modern. It prolongs business. Even with 2020's attention on EDH, not everyone is used to playing 100 cards singleton either, but they are given more chances to try.

What I have issue with, though, is WotC's seemly power-creeping EDH because they see a business opportunity, ended up damaging it with all the cliche legends like Chulane. Instead of promoting creativity, they lure people to make decks according to narrow designs. It was a lot more fun back when people try to figure out how to create an EDH deck out of new legends, rather than the said new legends paving an obvious passage.

But power creeping had always been a very good way at selling cards.

[UnNamed1]

There's nothing wrong about trying to bring players from format to format, even Standard players are allowed to play certain cards after rotation by joining Pioneer and Modern. It prolongs business. Even with 2020's attention on EDH, not everyone is used to playing 100 cards singleton either, but they are given more chances to try.

What I have issue with, though, is WotC's seemly power-creeping EDH because they see a business opportunity, ended up damaging it with all the cliche legends like Chulane. Instead of promoting creativity, they lure people to make decks according to narrow designs. It was a lot more fun back when people try to figure out how to create an EDH deck out of new legends, rather than the said new legends paving an obvious passage.

But power creeping had always been a very good way at selling cards.

There may be power creep, but some of the new cards seem very healthy. I know I am a minority here, but Golos, Tireless Pilgrim has near limitless build potential. He ramps and given the right pilot, you can build so many different ways. I personally have built him with planeswalkers and artifact tribal. I'm currently re-building him with no care for a mana curve.

[papa_funk]

The answer to the question in the title is largely "because they have no interest in one". Commander is valuable to Wizards because it has pulled in an enormous audience they weren't able to connect with before, not because it opens the door to other formats. They're super-happy having lots of people playing Commander.

They create formats like Brawl to try to appeal to people who might, you know, actually enjoy Brawl! Not everything has to be zero-sum, and not everything has to have sinister motives behind it.

Yet people wonder why the EDH Rules Committee doesn't fully trust Wizards of the Coast with handling EDH / Commander.

Huh?

I mean, there are some things I wish they'd do differently, but I recognize that they're a business and have slightly different goals than we do. Where'd you get the idea that we don't trust them?