The purpose of this thread is not to continue ragging on Toby Elliott and the Rules Committee, but I will start with an anecdote that includes him, because it's relevant to where I'm going.
Yesterday I was able to catch about an hour and a half of Olivia Gobert-Hicks's stream, which featured various EDH community members and luminaries. The game I watched featured Jim from the Spike Feeders, cryogen, Toby, and a fourth person whose name I'm afraid I forget. Now, the points I want to stress are that this game looked both a) super fun and b) super casual.
Like I've been playing EDH for eight years now, both with friends and at my LGS, and I've never participated in such a casual game. Like, I don't know if I've ever seen an MTG Muddstah game that was this casual. Like, "it's-turn-11-and-nobody-has-played-a-counterspell-or-a-boardwipe" casual.
Jim was rocking his ultra casual Kangee meme deck, which seems to be all about shapeshifters and weird synergies. The dude whose name I didn't catch was playing super fair Boros. cryogen was playing super fair Karador and didn't mulligan a bad hand. And Toby, finally, was playing his
Niv-Mizzet Reborn deck featuring zero counterspells, zero cards that aren't a "hit" for Niv — no signets, no
Rampant Growth, etc. — and
Allure of the Unknown.
I have to underscore again that this game looked super fun. Toby's and Jim's decks, in particular, seemed really thematic and unique. It actually made me want to build a really low powered, thematic deck, something I haven't ever really done.
It's also true that these decks would have been absolutely annihilated by a typical Josh Lee Kwai or Kyle Hill deck. Every deck except cryogen's looked like it would have seriously struggled against one of the "tuned" budget decks Mitch builds on the Commander's Quarters.
I bring this up because of a consistently irritating and I think insidious way in which community members continue to talk about competitive EDH — and it's not just the Rules Committee. Just today, I heard both JLK — who sits on the Commander Advisory Group (CAG) — and the EDHRECast refer to cEDH as "their format" and refer to those who play at the most competitive level as "them" and "they." People who do so will also often then take the next step of speculating as to the very small percentage of players who play at this level — "3% to 5%" was Josh's guess — as opposed to the "vast majority" of players who play "casual," there by reinforcing a binary: competitive players vs. casual players.
Ironically, in doing so they overlook the generally useful (though insufficient) distinctions they themselves promote with respect to power rankings. For me, it really begs the question, why is the whole ocean of decks below the power level of competitive Gitrog or Meta Pod or Consultation Kess referred to as "casual" and everybody else is "them"?
EDH is the format we all play. EDH is the format we all love. Because EDH is awesome.
It's awesome when you're jamming your "chair tribal" deck against my "Kev Walker tribal" deck.
It's awesome when you're jamming your slightly upgraded precon against my slightly upgraded precon.
It's awesome when you're jamming your budget deck with tons of deckbuilding constraints — no MLD, no stax, no infinite loops — against my budget deck with tons of deckbuilding constraints.
It's awesome when you're jamming your optimized Meren deck against my optimized Breya deck.
And it's awesome when you're smashing your Najeela tempo deck against my Opus Thief.
It's slightly less awesome when you roll over my slightly upgraded precon with your optimized Meren deck, but hey — miscommunication happens to the best of us.
In addition, it bears repeating that a lot of people enjoy playing EDH at the most competitive level and at other levels. And even among people who only play at one particular level, a lot of them consume content from a different power level. (I, for instance, have never played a game above what most people would call an "8", but I love love love Playing With Power, Play to Win, etc.)
cEDH is not "their format", it is a particular way of thinking about the format we all play and love. Or — if you want to insist that it is, in some crucial way, a different format — then it is one format among at least several different and distinct "EDH formats." Because you casting
Solemnity into
Decree of Silence sure ain't the same "format" as me trying to cast a
Star of Extinction into
Broodhatch Nantuko. And you restricting yourself only to cards painted by Rebecca Guay sure ain't the same "format" as me restricting myself to only modern border cards.
And by the way, if you're playing zero pet cards, zero lands that ETB tapped, and your response to most new cards you see is some variation on "not good enough," "not powerful enough," or "not efficient enough" well then buddy — I encourage you to consult the definition of "casual" in the OED.
The only lesson here is that EDH — like Magic itself — is many things to many people; and sometimes many things to the same person in the same day. And that's awesome! The space to brew at wildly different power levels, with wildly different kinds of games in mind — and over 20,000 different cards — is a large part of what brings us to this one format.
And props to the RC, by the way. Approximately nobody wants zero changes to the current banlist — whether in the form of bannings or unbannings — which makes their job one I do not envy in the slightest. But they definitely made the right call here, and they continue to do an overall great job of shepherding this format we all love.
One love.