the negative connotation of the term cEDH

[BeneTleilax]

I don't mind anecdotes. The issue is when they're coming from someone who demanded "I think you need some pretty firm evidence" in response to statistical evidence that I spent the better part of an hour gathering.

I mean, I think calling an entire (sub)format an existential threat demands a higher burden of evidence. Your initial contention with my description of the local cEDH community was that they didn't exist. Anecdotes can show existence, not prevalence. This is basic evidence-based reasoning.

I also think saying you've seen a desire for clear format separation from "the cEDH community" implies a much broader perspective than just "the cEDH people in my local area".

Which is why I added "from what I've seen". I don't play online much at all, outside of a discord group in the early pandemic, because in my view online games bring out the worst in everyone. The cEDH community I've seen has been respectful and separate. The two people I know who play both have a clear delineation between their competitive and casual decks, that if anything gives a clear example of the difference to new players.

I think it's good at changing how people want to be perceived. What they say is part of that, of course, but so is what they play.

That's the crux of our disagreement. I think experienced players (and new players who come into the game knowing what they want) will build decks they want to play. At most they will avoid certain cards if they become taboo, like swapping out Thoracle for a Monolith combo, but casual doesn't have enough cheap stack interaction to really make that difference matter (nor should it). That's why I think hostility towards cEDH won't help anything.

I think in terms of how we actually act in an LGS environment is probably not dissimilar. As I've said, I'm much nicer about cEDH in person.

Then why are you knowingly more of a tool about it online? If this thread was "cEDH is the better format" or even another "notice us, RC-sempai" thread, your hostility might make sense. This was someone wondering about a name change, offering no hostility towards casual, and you jumped in to berate them. This is also why people continue to call you out, it's not just that you're obnoxious in debate threads, it's that you'll hop into random threads and do your darndest to turn them into belligerent debates. I reckon you'll take this as a compliment, but you're impossible to ignore if one wants to use this site.

[Dragonlover]

This entire conversation reminds me of the discourse around 40k about 10-15 years ago when tournament lists started getting disseminated a bit more widely and you get the pubstomper equivalents show up and just murder you.

I think we mostly got past it with the pre-game chat of "OK what's in your list" and adopting a stance of just not playing against lists we don't want to play. I also adopted the RPG.net mantra of "No gaming is better than bad gaming" some years ago, which has helped tremendously.

My personal situation is weird though, cause we have people that enjoy cEDH locally but they don't come to us because they're in the minority and they don't get the level of game they want. I'll agree with Yatsufasa though, we've got a guy from the "new baseline" crowd he describes and his threat assessment is trash. We're working on him though.

Dragonlover

[pokken]

This entire conversation reminds me of the discourse around 40k about 10-15 years ago when tournament lists started getting disseminated a bit more widely and you get the pubstomper equivalents show up and just murder you.

Yeah a lot of the things about the EDH dynamic reminds me a LOT of my old 40k tournament days

I always remember the sportsmanship score cards and painting scores when people start talking about how to have EDH organized play that doesn't overly reward CEDH decks.

--

There are just so many parallels between the way wargames are played by actual people and how commander is played. The social aspect is super important. The rules are fuzzy as heck and can easily be messed up in a group setting. List construction has clear optimization vectors but there's also story, fluff and aesthetic elements and styles of gameplay, etc.

My old wargaming group played a LOT of multiplayer games both free for all and teams, and I'm constantly struck with the similarities of the types of things we did. Like usually our lists were fairly optimized but we had knock down drag outs over things like whether terrain blocks line of sight that just have so many parallels with sportsmanship in commander.

I remember our fluff guy would alwayse be like "6 man las/plas squads are bullcrap, the adeptus rules are blah blah." And extolling the virtues of mixed cavalry forces despite *in the way the game was played* mixing armor and foot troops was almost always a mistake in the same way mixing high cost jump troops with foot troops was usually not great.

Probably a lot we can learn from those communities and their missteps and successes.

[Legend]

Wow, and I thought the WISH thread was fun.

I mean, I think calling an entire (sub)format an existential threat demands a higher burden of evidence.

That's a fair demand that I think can be easily met. I personally have no issue with cEDH, but I can see why it's viewed as an existential threat. Simply, the precedent has already been established and in no small way. The reason Commander exists and is the second most played format and the most played structured format is because of the competitive meta, the attitudes competitive play engenders, the arms race it perpetuates, and so-forth. It became so antithetical to Magic that it effected sales so negatively that Wizards overhauled their entire tournament structure and image. Though, I don't think there's cause for alarm as long as a competent, independent RC manages the format. Also, less than estimated 1/2 a percent of the Commander community plays cEDH. Just food for thought.

My personal experience with cEDH has always been positive.

[onering]

but you're impossible to ignore if one wants to use this site.

I finally bit the bullet and did just that. While he often makes good points, its not worth the %$#%$#%. Responding to people telling him to cool it with doubling down on being a dick shows he's moved on from just being occasionally sarcastic and smug to making it his go to schtick, and I don't have the patience for dealing with douchebags who care more about scoring internet points and talking down to people than just engaging in conversation. He seems to want to have his cake and eat it too, to have discussions and have people engage with his points while being a pompous ass.

Warning issued for Flaming. - benjameenbear

[onering]

This entire conversation reminds me of the discourse around 40k about 10-15 years ago when tournament lists started getting disseminated a bit more widely and you get the pubstomper equivalents show up and just murder you.

Yeah a lot of the things about the EDH dynamic reminds me a LOT of my old 40k tournament days

I always remember the sportsmanship score cards and painting scores when people start talking about how to have EDH organized play that doesn't overly reward CEDH decks.

--

There are just so many parallels between the way wargames are played by actual people and how commander is played. The social aspect is super important. The rules are fuzzy as heck and can easily be messed up in a group setting. List construction has clear optimization vectors but there's also story, fluff and aesthetic elements and styles of gameplay, etc.

My old wargaming group played a LOT of multiplayer games both free for all and teams, and I'm constantly struck with the similarities of the types of things we did. Like usually our lists were fairly optimized but we had knock down drag outs over things like whether terrain blocks line of sight that just have so many parallels with sportsmanship in commander.

I remember our fluff guy would alwayse be like "6 man las/plas squads are bullcrap, the adeptus rules are blah blah." And extolling the virtues of mixed cavalry forces despite *in the way the game was played* mixing armor and foot troops was almost always a mistake in the same way mixing high cost jump troops with foot troops was usually not great.

Probably a lot we can learn from those communities and their missteps and successes.

I think shops could run a point system for commander tournaments (and I think some do), that gives out points for winning, but also gives out points based on the commander and where it falls on a competitive tier list with lower tier commanders netting more points, points for creativity in deck design, points for unlocking "achievements", or like mtgo did every player in a pod votes for a deck other than their own as their favorite and each player gets points for each vote. It would be a neat way to do it, and makes more sense than any other sort of multiplayer tournament.

That said, I have no problem with people bringing cEDH decks to events with prizes. Once something is a tournament, it is definitionally not casual. If a shop has a commander night where its all just people stopping in to play that's one thing, but once money is on the line and the stated goal is winning then its pretty absurd to expect everyone to arbitrarily handicap themselves, especially since while cEDH is fairly easily defined by exclusion (if you wouldn't bring a deck to a cEDH table, then its not cEDH), casual, and what is appropriate in a casual pod, is a broad category that needs rule 0 talk to ensure everyone is on a more or less level playing field. Even if you spell out "no tier 1 or 2 decks" and point to a ranking site, arbitrary as that may be, there's still going to be people that bring strong casual decks that are more than capable of stomping people down while being very fringe competitive at most. Rule 0 doesn't make sense when its a tournament, so the onus falls on the organizer to set rules that create the games they want to see. If they hold an event that just awards prizes to pod winners, that is absolutely going to promote cEDH, because the message is come and compete with no limits. They can avoid that by incentivizing other things, like some of what I mentioned in the first paragraph.

I don't think that commander tournaments are generally a good idea anyway, because its the antithesis of what the format was created for, but I understand that stores need money and need to generate income on commander nights. Because of this, I think its up to organizers to get creative in how they structure tournaments in order to shake things up. Don't want your LGS events dominated by cEDH? Structure the prizes so that winning a pod isn't the most important thing. Win with Djinn tribal? Expect to get a lot of points for creativity and votes from your opponents in addition to the points from winning. Win by comboing off with Codie? Enjoy the points from winning, because that's all your getting.

[lyonhaert]

"No gaming is better than bad gaming"

<adds to mental phrasebook>

[Rorseph]

but you're impossible to ignore if one wants to use this site

That's what the foe list is for. It can make your forum experience better.

[DirkGently]

I mean, I think calling an entire (sub)format an existential threat demands a higher burden of evidence.

If you're going to hide behind "from what I've seen" then I'm going to hide behind "I think". We're all operating from personal experience here.

I'm really not sure what burden of evidence WOULD satisfy you though. I've experienced similar situations in multiple places on opposite sides of the world, I've gathered statistical evidence from EDHrec, and other people have experienced similar things too. Whatever else you want, I don't think it's possible.

Your initial contention with my description of the local cEDH community was that they didn't exist.

I said you lived in Narnia OR you weren't paying attention. Since you claim it's not the first one, it sounds like it's the second one.

Which is why I added "from what I've seen".

From what I've seen of the elephant community, all of them live in zoos. You see how using a broad group category when you're really talking about a very selective part of that group is misleading?

I don't play online much at all, outside of a discord group in the early pandemic, because in my view online games bring out the worst in everyone.

I agree with that, I also don't play online, but it pops up all the time on reddit and youtube too. Kind of hard to avoid if you're online imo.

That's the crux of our disagreement. I think experienced players (and new players who come into the game knowing what they want) will build decks they want to play.

I don't think experienced players (nor I suppose people who are confident about what they want to build) are the problem. If they want to build high-powered decks, they know that they're building cEDH and can go play with those people. The problem is when the inexperienced players try to emulate cEDH decks without understanding the distinctions.

If anything, I think animosity has declined significantly against cEDH in the past 5 years, so you're getting your wish. I don't think it's working out, though.

Then why are you knowingly more of a tool about it online?

Because (I thought) we're adults and could handle some reality. Pretty sure I already said that. Plus it's a lot more fun.

If this thread was "cEDH is the better format" or even another "notice us, RC-sempai" thread, your hostility might make sense.

For how much you've whinged over my early posts, (outside of the last paragraph laying some beatdown on the people who constantly pop up on reddit, who apparently everyone has seen except you) they were almost clinical in their assessment of cEDH's negative connotation. It wasn't until certain people started misreading everything I said and then demanding I account for their misreadings that I started to get a bit annoyed.

This was someone wondering about a name change, offering no hostility towards casual, and you jumped in to berate them.

You don't see why it might come off a bit insulting to respond to people's legitimate grievance with your group by suggesting a rebrand and then ignoring their actual complaints and trying to lock the thread?

This is also why people continue to call you out, it's not just that you're obnoxious in debate threads, it's that you'll hop into random threads and do your darndest to turn them into belligerent debates.

He said he wanted to discuss the negative connotation. I think there have been some productive discussions on this thread on that topic. Not with people who are obsessed with tone policing, though, those tend to be wastes of time.

I reckon you'll take this as a compliment, but you're impossible to ignore if one wants to use this site.

Neutral, I guess?

I finally bit the bullet and did just that. While he often makes good points, its not worth the %$#%$#%. Responding to people telling him to cool it with doubling down on being a dick shows he's moved on from just being occasionally sarcastic and smug to making it his go to schtick, and I don't have the patience for dealing with douchebags who care more about scoring internet points and talking down to people than just engaging in conversation. He seems to want to have his cake and eat it too, to have discussions and have people engage with his points while being a pompous ass.

If you don't want me to dunk on your points so hard, you should try being right more often.

Warning issued for Trolling. - benjameenbear

[onering]

but you're impossible to ignore if one wants to use this site

That's what the foe list is for. It can make your forum experience better.

Yep, people who choose to act like that don't deserve to be interacted with.

[TheGildedGoose]

I like that Dirk is a condescending little %$#%. He's got gumption.

[Jemolk]

To offer a real recommendation to the cEDH community, from someone of the casual community who thinks this would actually go some way toward healing the rift and resolving the problem Dirk was pointing at -- there are two ways we could describe cEDH in contrast to casual at this point that are both broadly accurate as far as I'm aware. The first is "rules-as-written, beyond that anything goes." The second is simply as the very upper limits of power allowed by the format -- a sort of 4-player Vintage, if you will. The first is really bad and to be avoided wherever possible. The second is fine, so long as it's what you prefer.

Essentially, what I'm saying is this -- cEDH needs to emphasize pregame Rule-0 discussions as much as casual. This means, if Thassa's Oracle is making things not fun, rather than petitioning the RC to ban it, you just don't play it. Yes, I realize this is very at odds with a competitive mindset, but this is the one format where that mindset is not the baseline. Playing EDH, in any of its power levels or variations, requires certain concessions to the social nature of the format in order to get good games, but in return, it offers a way to sculpt the resulting social environment to your needs.

This is the best compromise I can offer. In the end, there is no one set of rules that would be totally unproblematic when followed to the letter and treated as the only constraints on the format, save for those that would fundamentally transform the format into something else. Demanding an absolutist and final ruleset with no explicit room made for tinkering is, thus, very much an existential threat to the format itself, and even asking for one is at best misguided and problematic in itself. Rule 0 can be messy, yes, but easy-to-implement, totally clean solutions don't always exist, and this, I believe, is one of the places where simple answers are absent.

[benjameenbear]

At the request of the OP and in light of recent comments, I am locking this thread. - benjameenbear