How do you feel about “narrow” commander designs?

[NGPR]

Laelia can be built very differently. EDHREC is a horrid website that I won't get into. My Laelia deck was dope as hell and I quickly realized shoving every effect with exile in the text box was awful.

I think it falls upon players to build more unique decks, narrow commander or not. Narrow: Tribal lists are always going to be the same 35 Elves that every other schmuck runs and others have good examples, too. I find open-ended lists like Animatou, Muldrotha, Karador, etc end up looking nauseatingly similar, too.

That's not the commander's fault, it is the players doing it.

[DirkGently]

@NGPR Calling it their "fault" kinda implies that they also see the homogenization as a problem. But I suspect most people who are playing a bog standard version of those commanders probably don't care about being unique or original. After all, most people playing standard/modern/legacy/vintage are using a netdecked list and don't seem to have a problem with it. Some people are just looking for different things from the game - maybe they mostly enjoy the social aspect, or focusing on tight gameplay, or just lack the experience or confidence to make a more personalized decklist.

Yes, even fairly pigeonholed commanders can be built in more unique ways, and as someone who enjoys the deck less traveled, that's something I seek out for myself. But other people building less original builds doesn't stop me from doing that (if anything, it makes it easier to find unique builds for myself). And assigning blame doesn't seem productive either. As long as people enjoy what they're doing, I don't see any problem with copying a list from EDHrec. Let them be.

And EDHrec is an invaluable resource, even for rogue deckbuilders. After all, how can you measure how original you are without it?

[NGPR]

@DirkGently

You might be reading too much into my comment. I truly do not care about others' decks as long as everyone is having fun. One of my mates plays the exact same Simic shell ported into the newest G/U/x commander and it is always a blast.

I am more concerned with OP pigeonholing narrow commanders as "solved" compared to open-ended commanders. The onus lies on the deck builder rather than the commander to be unique (if they want to be, of course), not the other way around. That's the core of my argument.

Completely off topic, but I find EDHREC less helpful than most for a number of reasons. It is a still a decent resource, as you mention; you're right that I can't measure "uniqueness" without some baseline LOL.

There's an infamous quote of another game: "The game couldn't possibly capture a person's personality if boring people did not have an avenue to be their boring selves. It wouldn't be self-expression if everyone was forced to act cooler than they really were." That's kinda passive aggressive, but it is true to an extent and I respect anyone who plays what they enjoy.

[duducrash]

I am more concerned with OP pigeonholing narrow commanders as "solved" compared to open-ended commanders. The onus lies on the deck builder rather than the commander to be unique (if they want to be, of course), not the other way around. That's the core of my argument.

What a weird take a way from a statement thats not much more than "Some designs are more narrow than others, which one yo personally perfer"

[NGPR]

@duducrash

I find your interpretation of this statement a bit weird:

"And I feel like a lot of recent Legendary creatures are like [Laelia] and am not sure if am a fan."

OP stated Laelia felt solved and too narrow to be unique, then stated they weren't a fan of this design. You inexplicably felt OP was not leaning one direction, which is bizarre.

[duducrash]

I find your interpretation of this statement a bit weird:

My interpretation of my own words? Its just discussion about how people like their designs. There is no right nor wrong. Magic being open ended isn't the "right" way. It's just what I've been liking in terms of design lately. Some "narrow" designs lead to fun decks, It's just discussion about the personal views of mtgnexus users

[PrimevalCommander]

I don't play extremely narrow commanders. Unless, like others, I get inspiration to break the mold and play them in a vastly different way than expected. Though that doesn't happen much. Or they speak to me at some other level and I feel compelled to build it. Though that is short lived as I don't like decks that are too linear. I generally fall in with many in this thread with commanders that have a particular synergy they are pointing toward, but not narrow to the point that EDH.rec builds the whole deck for me. I do lean more toward goodstuff than I do jank just because I like playing with impactful cards. I recently built 3 decks solely to reduce power level for my current play group and it is quite refreshing. Mainly because all the 2010-2015 erra commander cards come back into playability when we drop the power level, which brings back the nostalgia. Sefris of the Hidden Ways reanimator is pulling creatures like Inkwell Leviathan, Mindleech Mass, and Rune-Scarred Demon instead of Praetors or Vilis, Broker of Blood. Makes games more interesting and more interactive.

Note: a 7/11 shroud unblockable Leviathan, even for almost no mana is still painfully weak in today's format. I didn't realize how far it had fallen until I brought it out and realized it's almost better for blocking than attacking at this point. Not replacing it yet because it is bascialy a meme for my group at this point.

[Jemolk]

Been thinking about this for a few days now. Personally, I'm a huge fan of tribal decks, though I do on some level agree with what Dirk has said about typical tribal builds. I circumvent this in two ways, both of which involve limiting myself even further -- first, I stick exclusively to the theme. All creatures in my tribal decks are required to either be of the tribe or to explicitly reference that tribe in their text box. That means no random Eternal Witnesses in Dinosaur Tribal or Treefolk Tribal, for example. No random sad robots in every nongreen creature deck. The exception to this is Ninja tribal, because I feel that it's more interesting with Sun Quan and Suspicious Bookcase and Conspiracy than it would be with all ninjas. But I was never going to go the more common route of "oops, all Flying Men" that tends to characterize the other Yuriko decks I see around. That's boring. The second way is that I tend to aim at a subtheme -- for example, the dinos are built as comboless enrage dinosaurs. No Polyraptors or any of that, just lots of enrage dinos and enrage synergies, including Fungusaur specifically for the theme. Bird Tribal, meanwhile, has small Morph and Snow subthemes which give it a much more unique identity.

The upshot of all this is, narrowness doesn't have to be boring. In fact, with a reasonable cardpool, you can make a deck more interesting by being deliberately more narrow than required. The problem isn't narrow commanders. The problem is the tendency in some circles to optimize the fun out of the game and out of deckbuilding, and some internet resources can have the unfortunate side effect of increasing this tendency. However, if you want to exercise your creativity, there's still plenty of room to do so, at least so long as your group is not itself overly obsessed with hyperoptimization to the point where oddball card choices don't work anymore.