Thread by @ghirapurigears

No one asked for this, so here we go. Shivam's state of commander, a thread.

https://twitter.com/ghirapurigears/status/1371581868760461318

Let's start with the obvious: 2020 sucked for humanity. Like, out and out ended time levels of suck. Raistlin at the end of legends desperately draining life out of stars because evil cannot create, it can only destroy levels of suck.

Sure, the year started out fine, with a very meek GP Reno and the dawn of mystery boosters at conventions. But 2020 was gonna be the year of commander, right?

I'll be honest, the phrase, and the idea that went along with it, chilled me to the bone. EDH had finally stabilized in 2019, and here we were, poised for an earthshattering 70+ new commanders in CMR at the end of the year, and i was certain the format would collapse under it all

And then we got covid, and time stopped.

How the hell are we gonna have a year dedicated to the most social, casual way to play multiplayer magic in a time when even seeing your next door goddamned neighbor or the postman was a potential death sentence?

And right after we closed everything down, Ikoria came into existence, and with it Companion, ie Commander for the sixty card set. And Jumpstart, which would have been incredible in any year but this.

and yadda yadda, the sets came and went. We banned cards. Thassa's Oracle still Thor up tables on the spikier end of the pool.

60 card pro magic, 40 card friday magic, nearly everything ground to a halt. except, somehow, commander

Somehow, in the midst of a literal global lockdown, perhaps one of the worst pandemics in human history, the casual scrub end of magic finally marshalled its collective might and without any hyperbole at all, genuinely saved Magic from extinction.

Folks like Olivia reminded everyone that we could still play magic, real magic, with real magic cards and real people on the other side of the table (and screen and world), with nothing more than a shitty headset mic and webcam propped up with bubblegum and duct tape

Discord and Skype and gotomeeting and zoom were how we started, and we made it work. And out of the ether rose Spelltable

Spelltable, may the gods bless them, gave us a perfect new tool for specifically Commander. 4 players, voice chat, a scanner that magically gave everyone a beta savannah, and an ideal tool to play magic when you aren't worried about cheating or judging

and lo, it was fucking fabulous! Seriously, we were looking at a world where the only available magic was gonna be Arena. Arena, home to draft, constructed queues that threw you up against Hall of Famers on the daily, and brawl i guess

There was no chance in hell that EDH was gonna be coded onto it, and we weren't about to all flock to MTGO or Cockatrice to try to make that work, let's be real

But the ingenuity that turns draft chaff into infinite combos and takes shitty cards from Judgement and marries them to cards from Dominaria was the same ingenuity that gave birth to a new way to Gather.

And props to CFB for those two online Command Fests and that weeks long online Magic Fest for giving us a way to at least find other people to play with

and love em or hate them, PlayEDH definitely made a space for some kind of persistent matchmaking so that there was always a place to find a pod if you wanted one, at any time of day or night, with people from around the world.

In a year where we became intimately familiar with the paint on our bedroom walls, Magic actually became the global game that we were promised but only pros ever really got to experience. It's completely wild to imagine.

And let's give it up for InfiniTokens, yeah? Their awesome little dry erase tokens made online EDH so fucking easy. Even cards that you'd think were unplayable over webcams, like Thada Adel or Control Magic, suddenly became available with cute little bespoke arts.

More people bought magic cards this year than any before. More people played commander this year more often than ever before. it is absolutely stunning to think about.

And we found new and amazing ways to innovate the game. Boxing League is an absolute Triumph, a format where we took a sealed box of whatever and built an edh deck out of it, and added packs to the pool over time to shake it up. It is now my favorite way to play.

All love to BDM for the genesis of the idea, and to Sheldon for spreading the good news. It brings back a feel of the earliest days of commander, of building a deck out of what you had, and spiking it with a booster or two.

But seriously, think about it. people play edh weekly now, or even multiple times a week, something that wasn't possible before just due to life circumstances or getting together or whatever. I miss hanging with people in person, but in lieu of that, we made it work.

However, not all was green and golden in this year of commander. WotC overwatered the plant, pumped out waaaay lots of product, and gave us a secret lair fiasco that damn near killed the community, or at least the terminally online portion

some beloved content creators turned their anger away from the faceless behemoth and onto the CAG and RC, and let loose the dogs of war, fracturing us in a year where all we had was each other.

That mutiny damn near scuppered the Good Ship Commander, and was absolutely misguided and unnecessary. And yes, I say this with extreme bias as one of the people who bore the brunt of it.

And let's be real, WotC definitely overwatered the plant with product this year. There were so many releases that it was incredibly difficult to keep up. And bored people with money drove old card prices to insane heights

The flip side to that price rocket, and the incredibly bizarre secret lairs, was that the proxy making community finally started to surface into the mainstream discourse. I don't know where that goes, or what happens, but there has been a lot of incredible art created regardless.

Culturally, Commander is in for some turbulence that I can see coming on the horizon. The death of legacy and other eternal formats means that folks who love playing hyper powerful old cards want somewhere to go, and the only light in the fog is commander right now.

and the raw numbers of people who are gonna casually want to play magic and come to commander are just gonna go up, and that means that there's gonna be a lot of soul searching about what it means to be a casual format, and who we're shaping this for

Is this a casually competitive format for edge riding spikes to throw down hyper focused partner decks? Is this a format for people to make Koma-Koma-Koma-Koma-Koma-Chameleon decks?

it comes and goes.

Regardless, we all know it's coming. Sheldon's AMA the other week reiterated a position that I also hold- the RC is making a format based on what they want to see and play, and the hope is that everyone chooses to come along with us.

but there's a larger and more vocal player base that wants a more formalized structure to the format with more 'logic' and less 'feelings' and a retuned ban structure that creates and nurtures a high powered metagame

*more vocal than before, not more vocal than the RC

However, as large as that segment has grown in raw numbers, the number of legit casual kitchen table players has also proportionately grown, and they still exist.

Does this lead to a fractured identity? Does CEDH exile EDH and take its spot in the wotc pantheon? Do we mitotic slime ourselves into two pieces? or do we hold steady, let commander players be commander players, ban infrequently, and just give the format room to thrive?

because holistically speaking? EDH is the best it has ever been. It's not the best it could ever be, but we're making steps towards that goal. It is vibrant, varied, colorful, and fun for every level of player, and there's room for more.

CEDH is thriving! it's fantastic to watch the format grow, and evolve and change without the blade of Flash dangling overhead. And there are a ton of content creators there doing their thing, and it's rad to watch.

Casual is also thriving! we've been given so many new tools and unique commanders and ways to approach and build, and there are more content creators doing wacky things than ever before.

2020 wasn't just the Year of Commander, it was the year that Commander became Magic itself. and just as Magic is many games under one umbrella, so is Commander. I think we're in a brand new world, and all the breachers and loti can't take away the optimism i feel going forward

2020 sucked. Thank the stars we had Commander to light the beacons of community and fellowship and keep our spirits up in the seemingly endless night. As i say every ep of my pod, It's not Magic without the Gathering, and even in a year without gatherings, we made it work.

~fin

You'll note I didn't tag anyone in the main thread. I did not want them to become inundated with replies or whatnot as a result of this thread. No slight was intended.

(also, i don't think i've ever megathreaded on this account before. welcome to what it's like to be shivam on main, lol)