without starter decks, is there even a way for a hypothetical customer to find the rules of the fucking game? i literally don't think there is. if you buy a booster box in 2024, you end up with a stack of cardboard cut-outs of naked gay men and no clue what you're supposed to do with them. it's like those uncontacted aztecs who think you carve a runway and airplanes will spawn
There is a design team that's supposed to filter that, so I suppose you could call it intentional, but when you have decades worth of cards it gets pretty difficult to foresee each and every interaction,
My guess is new people get introduced through either mtg arena or friends. Some gaming stores also give demos (I think you even get a free 30-40 card deck) and organize events for new players.
like anyone working at wizards of the coast knows the rules
Commander's original name is Elder Dragon Highlander (EDH). It came about because judges were bored at events and wanted a way to play big dumb cards you couldn't any where else. So they took the Elder dragon cycle of legends and made 100 card singleton decks around them. Cards that were literally unplayable pack filler suddenly became good in this format and the amount of legends you could try made for a lot of fun deck building choices. If you wanted a sweaty EDH table you could all run tutors and counters and fight over what resolved. If you wanted to have Godzilla fights and see who was the alpha Timmy then you could do that as well. The format wasn't designed to be a solution to anything, it was just a way to use cards you couldn't use else where but you thought were fun. 40 life, table politics and always having a commander to work with opened up so much play space compared to 20 life 1v1. Over time Wizards took notice of the format, added it to MTGO and then started printing cards for it. Which is when the whole format falls apart because intentionally printing powerful multiplayer cards undermines the entire concept of EDH. It's finding ways to make big swingy cards playable or letting you cast chaos warp or whatever it's called. And as soon as you start saying "Hey wouldn't this be powerful enough to beat 3 other people?" you immediately destroy the original concept and you're left with Commander pre-cons destroying the format for profit.
they should have just used Universes Beyond as a skin for intro packs and event decks to get new people into the game, like a Rakdos Vampires deck with art from Vampire: the Masquerade or Dragonstorm with Skyrim dragons. the average person doesn't even know how to play magic, why would WOTC promote commander, a multiplayer clusterfuck with 200 cards in play at all times where it's considered offensive to win? how did they think this was going to go?
Casual EDH players get upset when a player wins too early. They want the game to last long enough for them to do something cool. Which creates weird social dynamics where you're supposed to not try to win until everyone's had a turn to do something cool and if you win too fast you're a dick. It's weird tabletop social contract stuff that usually means the person whining didn't communicate what they were expecting.
Damn. Decks that expensive just aren't necessary. You have to really go after some broken pay-to-win cards to reach those numbers. When I started playing in 2008, I had a rule for no deck to be more than $30 (ish). My decks these days run closer to averaging $50 due to inflation and the commodification of the game. I have some faerie tribal decks that I've kept updated over the years which have crept up into a couple hundred dollars, but they're not even my best ones. I host a magic group where we play legacy. Anything but Commander, at least. I built five teaching decks to epitomize each color and give newer players a sense of how the game operates. I also built them to show that the game doesn't have to be pay-to-win. Here are some examples.
40 minutes isn't a very long game if 4 people are playing it. That's less play time than your average 1 on 1 game lasts.
let me correct myself, i don't spend thousands of dollars. Now I have a friend who does/did. He just inventoried his cards recently and it clocked in at tens of thousands of dollars. Granted most of the card he got was when the game was starting out, but my point still stands. The format is becoming less about bulk rares that have no other use in any other formats and more about what ever wizards of the cost shits out in the latest set in order to appeal to commander players. The game was WAY better off when it was an unrecognized format by WOTC.
vintage being power crept on accident by the diversity hires at R&D is legit hilarious
To be fair, is there a game which has successfully avoided creep over a span of 30 years? Is that even possible?
