Having Your Voice Heard

[papa_funk]

FWIW, I think it's very important to keep an ear to the ground at Reddit - quietly, if nothing else.

Often your biggest enemy is also your most honest critic. If you can dig past the extreme hostility and hyperbole, there is usually some element of underlying truth (or at least, common opinion/perspective) that is missed by avoiding the place... even if it isn't pleasant to visit.

I've been on Reddit for more than 10 years; I used to do AMAs and things regularly. At this point, I only post when I feel I have to, but still lurk. We know what's going on there.

[RxPhantom]

[mention]Sheldon[/mention]

For what it's worth, I think the RC is doing the best they can despite the inherent limitations of four (five?) people managing a format played by thousands. I suppose I only have one real request: please provide an up-to-date, easy-to-access rationale for each card on the banlist. Maybe you all discuss this kind of thing on the regular, but I feel periodic reevaluation is good for the format. It would be nice to see said reasoning for each card.

[BloodyWensday]

Mirroring [mention]LabManiac_Cameron[/mention]'s experience:
I have also been playing EDH for around 8 years, since the moment those first 'Commander' decks hits the shelves. In those eight years I have played with and against almost every gradient of EDH and have come to appreciate them. Currently I mainly play 'tuned EDH', as Cameron referred to it, and mainly freshly built Riku deck. Both types of decks have the same goal: use the stack in a variety of ways, be it by creating wild boardstates with Riku where the play is dictated by how well I stacked various triggers or careful use of interaction as someone tries to sneak a win through a table (or try to pull off my own) in 'tuned EDH'.

For me, the perfect world of is simple but EDH requires effort from both the Rules Committee (and the CAG by extension) and from players all over the EDH-Spectrum. Luckily that effort only really needs to be expended in two things: communication and understanding. The community, all of it, needs to understand that there are various ways to enjoy this format, but they also need to communicate what they expect from it, specially when sitting down with new people. No amount of bans or rule lawyering will ever stop someone from sitting at a table with a deck that's too powerful for the rest of the members, wether intentionally or not (though I'd argue that those who do it intentionally are not playing EDH), and that can only be solved by dialogue. On the side of the Rules Committee, people need to hear from the people in charge that there are other ways to play the format and that it can also be enjoyable if the group enjoys it. Unfortunately there have been comments in the past that have helped to 'other' a mostly small portion of the EDH-Spectrum, wether intentional or not is mostly irrelevant, that have aided in creating a divide from the top down. That said, I like and appreciate that there seems to be effort to breach that gap in these past few days, but there has to be more of it.

My perfect EDH world isn't about bans and unbans, or where you fall in the EDH-Spectrum, it's about sitting down with your friends or strangers, pulling out a brick of cards led by a card you enjoy, and having fun, it's about glancing to the side and seeing other people enjoying the same thing in maybe a slightly different way, and it's about reading posts and updates from the 'leaders' of the format and being happy to be a part of it.

[toctheyounger]

My perfect EDH world isn't about bans and unbans, or where you fall in the EDH-Spectrum, it's about sitting down with your friends or strangers, pulling out a brick of cards led by a card you enjoy, and having fun, it's about glancing to the side and seeing other people enjoying the same thing in maybe a slightly different way, and it's about reading posts and updates from the 'leaders' of the format and being happy to be a part of it.

This right here is pretty much where it's at. Level of play aside, this issue is about communicating as a community so that we can all enjoy the fruits of our labour in the way we choose to.

[MRHblue]

I suppose I only have one real request: please provide an up-to-date, easy-to-access rationale for each card on the banlist.

I don't see how this lands on anything but a nit-pick-fest about whats banned, why its banned, and why X that 'clearly meets those requirements' isn't banned.

[darrenhabib]

I think that Mana Crypt, Sol Ring and Mana Vault are here to stay I would love to see them banned, but I think it would be too big of a change. Command Zone did some analysis on something around 300 games, and they realized that people with fast mana in first 3 turns were actually more likely to lose the game.

Well in a 4 player game, given that all decks are relatively equal, you start off with a 75% chance of losing. I can tell you that your odds of winning with fast mana improve significantly. Now even if your odds go up to 49% chance of winning, you can still make the statement "that people with fast mana in first 3 turns were actually more likely to lose the game.". It's a ridiculous statement.
I think it's a poor use of wording to try and represent fast mana as some how detrimental to winning, because it improves your chances of winning significantly to the point that you might be near 50% chance to win even though there are 4 people playing, and it's only the first three turns.

[mdl0114]

Well in a 4 player game, given that all decks are relatively equal, you start off with a 75% chance of losing. I can tell you that your odds of winning with fast mana improve significantly. Now even if your odds go up to 49% chance of winning, you can still make the statement "that people with fast mana in first 3 turns were actually more likely to lose the game.". It's a ridiculous statement.
I think it's a poor use of wording to try and represent fast mana as some how detrimental to winning, because it improves your chances of winning significantly to the point that you might be near 50% chance to win even though there are 4 people playing, and it's only the first three turns.

The Command Zone, as EDH content creators, understand this and so did the previous poster. In their game stats episode the players with early fast mana won less than the 25% base expected winrate. Their pool of a couple hundred or so games may not have been the perfect sample size but that was what they discovered when they looked at the stats, which if I remember the episode right surprised them as well. They were expecting a huge advantage for an early fast mana player that didn’t come up.

Back to the topic of the thread, other people are saying better than I can right now my own feelings about the high powered side of my favorite format. I’ll try to collect my own thoughts about how the rules could support all EDH players, regardless of play style or power level, later.

[MRHblue]

The data showed it pushed the chance to win below 25%, they assumed 25% chance to win as the default. The justification was people attack you as 'the threat' until you die or the boost goes away. Just an FYI.

I still agree fast mana is bad, the games that win with it are bad blow-outs.

[cryogen]

I suppose I only have one real request: please provide an up-to-date, easy-to-access rationale for each card on the banlist.

I don't see how this lands on anything but a nit-pick-fest about whats banned, why its banned, and why X that 'clearly meets those requirements' isn't banned.

Really? I view it as "hey, you guys have been messing with your philosophy amd approach to the ban list, do these cards still meet your threshold?"

[Hermes_]

I often see this

Hello [mention]Sheldon[/mention] ,

They are mad because some accusations, such as massive Paradox Engine sellouts/Painter Servant buyouts are still unanswered, giving rise to the speculation and rumours of insider trading. This makes people question whether RC and CAG, or at least some portion of them are using their position for monetary gain. This I believe is a reason of concern even for the most casual EDH players. As Josh from CZ mentioned, whenever you ban/unban a card, particularly a card of significant value, the economic impact of it is in millions, perhaps in tens of millions range. At this point, a casual format EDH might be, as its curators you no longer have the luxury of banning/unbanning cards without transparency, and without answering such questions.

and I wonder exactly, what are they supposed to do say who owns the card and how many copies they have of it? If I recall correctly the last card and as far as i know the only card that has had price factored into it's banning/unbanning is Library of Alexandria [mention]cryogen[/mention] can correct me if i'm wrong.

[Transformatron]

[mention]LabManiac_Cameron[/mention] With another wonderful post! I look at cEDH as a Rule 0 distinction not a separate format. A Keyword meaning no holds barred, everything goes, tuned decks and prior knowledge of things you may encounter are preferred. It’s a way for me to know if I’m pulling out Enchantress Angels or Najeela Stax. If somebody doesn’t know what I mean I’ll go with the lower power deck and tailor my play style as needed because most cEDH decks will pubstomp or flounder in EDH.

[cryogen]

As far as I know, "Potential Barrier to Entry" (which is tied into price but not entirely) is something which hasn't affected cards since the original ban list which hit Power, Library, et al.

As for the question of the secondary market affect when a card gets banned or unbanned, either Sheldon and/or Toby have said that they do take the impact a card will have on the secondary market, but that isn't the be all or end all. But I think this is more likely to affect card unbans and not bans. Library of Alexandria might be the weakest card and wouldn't affect the format whatsoever, but its price alone would be a huge reason to leave it banned, while if all of a sudden Nether Void became oppressive and needed to be banned, they would ban it for the greater health of the format.

I'm paraphrasing and injecting my own opinions, but they dis say that they consider the secondary market. To what extent I am only speculating.

[pokken]

Hey do you guys member when I predicted the insider trading accusations were gonna start in the library thread last year? Lol.

It's only gonna get worse with a wider group of people in the know.

Its dumb. But it's the world we live in.

[RxPhantom]

I suppose I only have one real request: please provide an up-to-date, easy-to-access rationale for each card on the banlist.

I don't see how this lands on anything but a nit-pick-fest about whats banned, why its banned, and why X that 'clearly meets those requirements' isn't banned.

Fair point. I would relish some open discussion about some of them, though.

[pokken]

Fair point. I would relish some open discussion about some of them, though.

I think I would like it if they would give a detailed review of one contentious card periodically, but I'm not sure how much value that would add other than giving ammunition. It'd be interesting to *me* for example to hear what they're currently thinking about recurring nightmare.

The other issue is I suspect that the financial markets would take that sort of communication as signals nowadays, and people would be out buying recurring nightmares just because they talked about it and try to interpret how likely it is to be unbanned and so on.

In the end I think it is probably a bad idea for them to discuss currently banned cards openly because the net controversy would probably outweigh the benefit. But I definitely see the appeal of the discussion. I think there is a large number of cards that could be unbanned safely, at least 4 or so.

But I sure would like it too just on a personal level. There's a lot of cool cards on there that I would love to hear talked about. Gifts, RN, even Fastbond I think is a little overrated except as a combo piece. But serious discussion on fastbond? That's an RL card that's 10 bucks. You can bet if they even talk about it there's a buyout.

[MRHblue]

I suppose I only have one real request: please provide an up-to-date, easy-to-access rationale for each card on the banlist.

I don't see how this lands on anything but a nit-pick-fest about whats banned, why its banned, and why X that 'clearly meets those requirements' isn't banned.

Really? I view it as "hey, you guys have been messing with your philosophy amd approach to the ban list, do these cards still meet your threshold?"

Yes really. I am sure there is plenty of discussion to be had in that vein, but its going to very quickly devolve into people yelling about the list from the people who question every move ever made by the RC. If it was heavily moderated, sure. Regular level forum discussion? Hard pass.

Fair point. I would relish some open discussion about some of them, though.

Agreed, but as usually I think discussion extremists stop the majority of us from having nice things.

[Spleenface]

If cards are only used in cEDH decks, even for the most degenerate purposes, we're not going to ban them. We talk a good deal about our core demographic, the people for whom the philosophy document does resonate, the audience we're trying to reach. We focus on what their games look like and how certain card or sets of cards might impact them. We get that Flash/Hulk is a cEDH staple and easy/early win condition. The core demographic isn't playing it. They might be playing Protean Hulk for value or even some wonky combo engine, but they're not comboing out on Turn 1.

This is from your recent article for SCG. Now, as a competitive player, I heard:
1. I'm not part of the "core demographic"
2. You are focused on the "core demographic"
3. You actively refuse to consider the wants and desires of the competitive community

I didn't see: "If cards are used in cEDH for degenerate things, but provide a useful function and interesting experience in more casual pods, we aren't going to ban them". This would have indicated that you were giving consideration to your core demographic, I.E. "Because you aren't the 'core demographic', we give your desires less weight than the desire of that core."

I saw "Even if cards are only used for degenerate things in cEDH, we aren't going to ban them" instead. In this, you indicated that you were not giving consideration to cEDH because it was outside the core demographic, I.E. "Because you aren't the 'core demographic', we give your desires no weight".

Setting aside that I don't think the core aligns all that closely with your stated preferred style of play, probably more in the tuned/mid power range (and only about 1/3 survey respondents were "extremely" or "moderately" satisfied with how the RC manages the format), this felt a little like burying your head in the sand to me.

How can we convince you that something is an issue? It sometimes feels like when we raise a concern that you or the other members of the RC don't share, we get told that you don't feel you need to address it because it isn't an issue for the "core demographic". But how can you be certain what this "core demographic" really wants? What defines the "core demographic", and is it possible that whatever definition you use automatically excludes players with substantially different concerns than yours?

[freelunch]

Well, I had a nice big post all written up and the forum logged me out and clobbered it when I tried to submit. I really don't want to write it all again, so I will try to summarize my points.

• I've been playing commander for 7 years.
• Reddit is my primary mode of discussing the format.
• Other locations where the format is discussed suffered from many problems that turned me away: They look outdated, lacked activity, or appeared to be an insular community
• I've received plenty of helpful discussion on Reddit when it has come to sharing my decks and thoughts of the format.
• I think of myself as a casual, kitchen table player of EDH

Then, I see messages like this from the creator of the format:

BTW, I'm willing to have this discussion in other places as well. I'd even consider reddit when it stops being actively hostile and troll-infested.

This makes me feel like:

• I am not currently a voice that the RC/CAG hears when curating the format.
• I will never be heard, because of where I choose to discuss the format.
• The founder of the format is willing to sling insults at me, and how I identify with the format (talk about actively hostile! I recognize that I'm an individual, and the comment was not directed at me specifically, but its like sitting with your minority friend, and you tell them that members of their minority are all rapists and thieves. They likely won't be your friend after that point, and that's about how I feel right now. Intentional or not, this is the image that you're crafting for yourself, the RC, and the format as a whole.)
• Not only are entire subsets of the player population intentionally ignored, but the RC is incapable of getting THEIR voices heard by the community at large.
• I think this last point is more important that individual members of the community having their voices heard by the RC

Potential solutions to the last point:

• Engage what appears to be the largest online community of EDH players on the Internet. (This also means don't sling insults at them, in case that wasn't clear.)
• Develop a public facing method of publishing discussions from the RC and CAG. Think Rosewater's blogatog, but you don't have to answer questions like he does.
• Get the philosophy document published with the Commander pre-cons. Include a URL for the public facing blog, mtgcommander.net, or some other way for players to hear the RC (a web ring? a distribution list? whatever.)
• (Pipedream) The RC and CAG should be writing the introductions for the Commander pre-cons- let your personalities out while you describe the decks. Wizards' introductions are frankly a snoozefest, and it might help drive more product sales to have more personal introductions to the decks.

I think that about covers it. I would have liked to present this in a better format, but I'm not willing to spend another 2 hours on a post that (at this point) I believe is likely to be ignored by the people who most need to read it and internalize it.

[ev3rywhen]

I created an account to respond to this post directly. I've played EDH since the original Zendikar, when I was first introduced to the format, and now I play a wide range of decks from fully tuned / highly competitive (cEDH) to jank. As a disclaimer, I also found this thread via Reddit.

If there's space to be able to serve the extremes of the community without crumbling the middle, we'll do our best to find it (although it's not actually that balanced; I don't think there's a casual extreme that equals the competitive). We'll consider all rational opinions and ideas. I'd like to heal some of the rift in our community, especially since some of the things I've said in the past may have contributed to it.

I think viewing this as a 'rift' is probably doing the actual situation a disservice because it presupposes that there are two sides. As you've seen in this thread - and across the many forums of discussion, mostly everyone agrees on the same basic principles - some combination of 1) communicate to establish ground rules; 2) the RC plays a critical role in fostering the format beyond 'kitchen table'; 3) breaking the format into 'competitive' and 'noncompetitive' is probably not correct.

What I think you and the RC are actually grappling with is an evolution of your community as a whole moving towards more competitive lines of play. As you detail further on, more and more people who enjoy the 'F1 way' is on the rise. Players do not 'switch' from Civis to F1s; they work their way up by investing in pieces at a time, until they reach a place where they feel comfortable. Some will transition fully to 'full F1s' while others will just be powering out souped-up Civics. This is the true 'middle' you refer to in your comments above. I would argue that the 'rift' you describe is simply people in the middle aligning themselves more as F1s or more as Civics based on their individual opinions and ideas, not an actual 'Team A vs. Team B' mentality.

Accordingly, my opinion is that framing it as 'us vs them' is actually doing the middle - the very group you don't want to 'crumble' a disservice. You and RC are making decisions for all players, full stop - and any rhetoric around protecting or favoring any one type of player in that group goes against your stated goal of the middle not 'crumbling.' Taking that leadership stance I believe is critical to the health of the format.

Some people are under the impression that if I lose to something, I want to take a stand against it. I can't say strongly enough (and I suppose no matter how often I say it, if you're not disposed to believing it, there's nothing I can do to convince you) that what happens in my local play group and in the groups of the RC has little to no impact on what kinds decisions we make for the format. I've said it before: I'm more likely to want to ban something that I won with than I lost to.

I'm going to ask a favor here. To the people who think that I don't like or don't understand competitive Magic, please just stop. You're simply wrong. Moreover, it doesn't help forward the discussion, and that's what we're here to do.

I don't know you. The only reason I am responding to you is because you are effectively the 'face' of the format. I don't know your qualifications, your history with Magic, your IQ, your ability to make logical decisions, your favorite color - and I don't care. However, I would recommend that you realize there are people - especially players who maybe are not long-time EDH players - who do not know who you are and do care about all of those things.

People want to feel a sense of trust towards you and the RC as a whole because of your ability to change circumstances for those people at effectively your whim. Stating comments like above, while personally satisfying, do not build that trust; they just make things worse. If you really want to change that impression, you need to show people that you understand. Do some YouTube videos in cEDH, play in Game Knights; there are probably X number of marketing geniuses who play the format that would be glad to help you figure out that path forward.

But please don't double down with this sort of response.

Someone earlier in the thread made a good analogy about Formula 1 cars and Honda Civics, so I'll try to use it. I believe that the true cEDH player doesn't want to race against Civics. F1 v. F1 and Civic v. Civic make better races. Here's the problem. If someone brings a Civic to an F1 race, they're a non-factor. If someone brings a F1 to a Civic race, they're going to dominate and render all the Civics irrelevant. Unfortunately, there are still plenty of people who have no problem with bringing their F1 to the Civic race, since it's not against the rules to do so. The only way to let the Civics race is to either make F1s illegal or put governors on them (doesn't NASCAR do the latter to some level?).

So again - this F1 vs. Civic analogy is nice and easy, but is inaccurate and overly generalized. The real situation is a bit more nuanced and understanding that is really critical.

You have people who race cars. Many of them start in different places - some with F1s, some with Civics. As they race, some decide they want to downgrade; some decide they want to upgrade; some want to stay the same. There are people who have started with F1s and said you know what, I want to do Civics instead. The majority of people, however, end up in the middle - a souped up Civic or a depowered F1. This is the 'middle.'

Now, as time goes on, this 'middle' is trending more and more towards F1s. This is due to there being more accessible tech manuals on how to soup cars (i.e. Command Zone, discussion threads on the Internet, etc.) and greater availability of those pieces (i.e. via Commander decks, etc.). This is also due to there now being better prizes for racing cars (i.e. LGS support), which will be enough to turn at least some of those Civic drivers into Civic+ drivers. It is unclear how much the middle will move to F1s; we are reasonably sure that they won't ever 'all become F1s' but certainly, they are unlikely to stay where they are now.

If this is the situation, your problem statement is no longer 'how do we stop people bringing F1s to Civic races' because there is no clear line for the middle. What your problem statement REALLY is is 'How do we set expectations so racers know which type of cars they should bring to which races?'

So here's the dilemma. We don't want to make F1s illegal, but what do we do in the face of those people who keep bringing them to the Civic races? We created a space--one that really wasn't there before--for the goofiest of Civic races. Our first responsibility is making sure that those races still get to happen, no matter how many F1s there are. By doing so, we're not saying that people who drive F1s are bad. Like I quoted from The West Wing in my article, increasing life expectancy isn't trivializing undertakers. Obviously, the direct analogy doesn't work, but it gets to the heart of what I've been recently saying. We're not taking a stand against F1s, but we're definitely pro-Civic, and it's an uncharitable reading of what we're trying to do if you draw the former from the latter.

This goes back to my opening paragraph about leadership. You state here openly that your preferred focus is Civics, but your market - the EDH / Commander community - is asking you to make decisions for everyone (because you do). I understand that you're not 'taking a stand' against F1s - basically, you won't do anything in direct opposition to that community - but by focusing on Civics, you are underserving that part of the population. Most people will perceive being underserviced as negatively as things done in direct opposition.

To writ, your scope has changed - and your focus needs to follow. You have created a space for the 'goofiest of Civic races' but that has expanded and grown to include races for everyone, including Civics, super Civics, bad F1s, and F1s. Your decisions are now impacting all of those races, and to only focus on Civics - no matter if that is where you started - is simply not reflecting what people expect and are asking for you to do. You and the RC have to lead.

As an aside, I understand why you perceive this as uncharitable - and to some degree, it is. However, leadership roles, as you probably already know, will nearly always result in this sort of situation occurring. It is on the onus of the leader to read through uncharitable comments to try and understand exactly why people react the way they are. I think you are taking concrete steps in this direction and would simply like to remind you that the focus should never be on how 'uncharitable' comments are but why they were said. You can trust, I believe, that the community you are effectively leading will self-correct itself if things get too far.

Since we don't want to legislate F1s out of existence, we use the remaining tools that we have at our disposal--hence a social contract. This whole analogy, by the way, is also the reason a split list wouldn't work. Unless the casual list also contained all the cards on the competitive list, there would be no prevention against crossing the streams, as it were.

So, the social contract. I have a lot of problems with this, and I'll tell you first and foremost why - the 'social contract' is not a tool you can use.

What you mean by a 'social contract' is effectively a culture - a series of informal rules that don't 'have to be followed' but have enough of a standing to ensure adoption. This culture, however, is borderline uncontrollable given how complex social interaction is. To be more pointed, if leaders in other large communities - gaming, eSports, the United States population, - are unable to leverage culture effectively, what makes you and the RC think that this is a tool that can be leveraged?

The tools you actually have at your disposal are the format rules, the most notable of which is the ban list. However, banning cards does little to answer your actual problem statement - which again, is likely not how do we protect Civic vs. Civic races but 'How do we set expectations so racers know which type of cars they should bring to which races?' To solve this problem, you need something like a set of standards players can agree with so that that expectation can be set.

I fundamentally believe that rather than looking to the social contract as a way to 'protect Civic vs Civic races,' you need to look at it as how do you give players a way to 'know' what type of car to bring ot which race. Right now, you are relying on informal communication (part of your 'social contract' idea) to solve that problem, but why not look to formalize it? Why not look to create a series of formal power levels so that that expectation on what to bring can be communicated? There are tons and tons of good things that can come out of this approach, and it will likely be a better solution to your fundamental problem vs. 'the social contract.'

So back to the problem that we're trying to solve. If people enjoy the format in radically different ways, how do we maintain our vision without alienating someone? I don't think we can make Commander all things to all people (but I'd sure be happy to be wrong there). The number and percentage of people who enjoy it in the F1 way is on the rise; we can't dispute that. It's a growing pain that we're going to have to learn how to adapt to. That doesn't mean we're going to let it wipe out the Civics. I'm fully committed to figuring out how we can share the road.

I know I've written a lot - and some of it is abstract, so here is it in a more condensed form.

1) The EDH / Commander player base is a continuum, ranging from 'casual' players (i.e. 'Civics') to 'competitive' (i.e. 'F1s') and all levels in between. Segmenting the group, while easy, does not provide the nuance you need to make better decisions.
2) The EDH / Commander player base's expectation of your and the RC's responsibilities is to steward the format for all players across the format. Underserving one population for another is as detrimental as making decisions in opposition of one group vs. another. Focusing your 'vision' on one group vs. another will only run counter to the community's expectation of you and the RC.
3) Your central problem is not about protecting one group or even one type of interaction (i.e. 'race') but how do you create tools to help players understand expectations (i.e. 'what kind of car should you bring to this race').
4) Reliance on the social contract is not the optimal way to address the above problem because the social contract is actually not a tool you can leverage effectively given how heterogeneous EDH / Commander games and playgroups are.
5) A set of standards - such as power level - would be more effective in helping players communicate their expectations. It will also allow players to know exactly what type of deck to bring to which games (i.e. which cars to which races).

Hope this helps.

[FireStorm4056]

@[mention]ev3rywhen[/mention]
Great post - I agree with pretty much all of it. I only hesitate about creating a "power level" system, since the tiers would be difficult to establish, and most players aren't that accurate in their evaluation of power level. It also opens the door for lots of "feel-bad" categorizing of people's decks / abilities.

Instead, how about establishing a standardized "template" of playstyle identification + communication? Sort of like a Myers–Briggs Indicator, except applied to EDH. To spice things up, you could have a different Planeswalker represent each "gamestyle" preference. Then, write up short but flavorful "biographies" describing sorts of games they like, interactions they desire, and issues such as budget restrictions / competitiveness. Players can then decide which Planeswalker "gamestyles" they best identify with and make it much easier to communicate their interests. It wouldn't be perfect (and would be completely optional), but I believe it could be a great icebreaker and help to correctly set the "bar" in an unfamiliar playgroup.

[pokken]

You state here openly that your preferred focus is Civics, but your market - the EDH / Commander community - is asking you to make decisions for everyone (because you do).

A very vocal minority is asking for this. Many people do not want decisions made with respect to the fringes. I wouldn't want pathbreaker ibex banned for dominating super casual games any more than I would want ad nauseam banned for dominating CEDH (hypothetically).

I don't want to go sidetrack into the Us vs. Them debate but I would ask that those advocating for this position try not to generalize so much because I don't think we know for sure that even a majority would prefer all fringes of the format be considered in decision-making.

(I am largely steering clear of this thread as requested by, well, being repeatedly shouted at by CEDH players - but if you guys say something that is patently untrue I will weigh in).

[Sheldon]

Thanks to everyone for the well-thought responses so far. Sorry that you lost the post, [mention]freelunch[/mention] , but I certainly get the gist. I appreciate posts like yours and the one from @[mention]ev3rywhen[/mention] , even if they expose hard truths about how we could communicate better, because they're written in the spirit of moving forward together.

I think it's helpful (for me, at least), to not see "sides" between casual and competitive as we go forward, but more of a continuum like @[mention]ev3rywhen[/mention] mentions, maybe even a sliding scale, since people frequently move back and forth across it. Not only will I do my best to adjust my attitude in this regard, I'll make sure our language reflects it.

Since someone mentioned content, one of the things I want to do with our revamped website is to create content. Philosophy pieces on what some folks above mentioned, expectations management, would be some of that content. And it wouldn't be just content from the RC/CAG, but from the community. I actually got an email today from someone discussing how he was going to focus on adjusting his expectations and communication not just before, but during games. It would be the kind of thing we could turn into a short article, for sure.

Here's the message I would like to continually focus on (in addition to better communication, both at the macro- and before-game level): the real spirit of Commander is simply considering the experiences of the other people at the table as well as your own. If we--and I, in particular--take that view out to the 10,000-foot level, we'll do just fine together.

[Styrofoam]

That was a very good post [mention]Sheldon[/mention]

@[mention]ev3rywhen[/mention] certainly put into words a lot of how i feel about commander. If nothing else, this post, and my conversation with Sheldon yesterday has made me more confident that Commander is in the hands of people who genuinely care about the format, and the people playing it.

[freelunch]

I've lost posts before to forum silliness, nothing new there. Was a little disappointed I'd hit it on my first post, but thems the breaks.

[mention]Sheldon[/mention], your note about more content on the mtgcommander site reminded me of another suggestion I wanted to add to my post above. I was going to also suggest regular status updates about the format, but in the time between then and now I've found that you do actually do this! Unfortunately, I also found that they seem to only be posted as articles to StarCityGames website. I say unfortunately, because this site (and Channel Fireball) seem to cater to the tournament grinder crowd. I know this image isn't something that you would have control over, but as a casual player I wouldn't think first to visit these sites for Commander content. I don't think choosing to write Commander articles at SCG is wrong, but I think that might be part of why a casual player like myself wouldn't have seen them.

Ultimately, this leads to a question of outreach, and I think new and more content at the mtgcommander site and elsewhere will go a long way help alleviate that problem. I know it is a difficult problem to solve, especially with the many MTG communities that exist across the web. I certainly don't envy the task before you! I just wanted to share an additional thought with regard to getting the RC's voice heard by the casual players.

Thanks for your time and the great format!

[Sheldon]

I've been writing for SCG (with a small break) since 2000, first Ask the Judge, then returning in 2007 to write exclusively about Commander. I'm about to hit my 500th article since that return. I've always thought of SCG as a site that caters to all styles, and it seems natural to me that it's a place for Commander content.

We're working on getting our website revamped. This is personally one of my most important goals for the remainder of 2019. It's going to take time and resources, but we'll get there. When we do, I wouldn't mind it being a one-stop launching ground for sharing lots of Commander content as well as creating some of our own.