Why Constructed, Not Commander
Hello fellow dork. If you’re here, I probably sent you because you nagged me to play Commander. But I don’t like Commander, and here’s why.
The board states are massively overcomplicated. I do like intricate multi-hour Euro games, but that’s not the itch that Magic scratches for me. I think Magic is at its best when games are quick and spunky and where the opponents bring clearly-distinct styles, like tennis. The ~400 unique cards in a Commander game dramatically amplify the complexity that Wizards keeps adding1 when compared to the ~40 unique cards in a Constructed game.
Games quickly become crude, swingy slugfests. Board wipes followed by dumping huge sorceries (or whatever). Lurching between different piles of cards is inelegant and loses out on all the fun subtleties in navigating a well-built deck between your opponent’s swings to land a fatal blow. Hitting your curve perfectly and outracing your opponent with 3 life remaining is much more rewarding than crushing them with an overwhelming force of eleven 9/9 tramplers while you sit at 39 life.
I don’t like politicking and managing social dynamics. In Commander, I avoid knocking someone out of a game early even if that’s the right strategy because it sucks when that happens to you. You don’t generally have to worry about peoples’ feelings in Constructed. (I also can’t stand Diplomacy.)
Like the much-loathed companion cycle, a commander negatively warps deckbuilding around it. A lot of decks feel like random in-color cards that are good with the commander and bad without it. Decks with single points of failure (success?) are antithetical to my deckbuilding style, which is also a big part of the reason I don’t like combo decks or tutors.2 I want, and build, decks with lots of little synergies so that there’s always something available, but not the same thing every time.
The decks take a long time to hone. To be clear, I still spend a lot of time refining my Constructed decks, but you can get a working first draft pretty quickly. In a Constructed deck, substituting even a single playset will often change the feel of a deck noticeably in a way that keeps the feedback loop rewarding and lets you explore more adjacent playstyles without being held back by the required interactions with (or color restrictions of) the commander.
Old cards are ugly. There, I said it. (To be fair, a lot of new card frames are ugly too. At least the old cards are not near-impossible to read. But I’d rather have neither.)
Last time I tried to build a Commander deck, I ended up throwing out the 80% of it that was chaff, and kept the 20% that was fun. And then I put in 4 copies of each card. Oops.
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There’s nothing inherently wrong with increasing the complexity of the game, if it’s done tastefully. But recently Wizards has started adding a lot of state to manage, some of which doesn’t have a good physical representation. Exert is one such mechanic (how many times I have accidentally untapped an exerted thing…), and good luck remembering the 4,000 different types of behaviors available to cards in exile depending on how they got there. All of this before we even get to Wizards printing new sets at breakneck speed with some straight-up shitty mechanics, then having the gall to “reprint” the set while it’s being printed for the first time because Daddy Hasbro is too cheap to shell out for all the rights to Spiderman. Fuck you, Hasbro. (Note that this should not be taken to mean I would prefer more Spiderman cards. Universes Beyond is fucking awful, and I’ve hamstrung my own decks a few times just to avoid some of the more egregious crossovers.) ↩
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My rule of thumb is that any interaction requiring three cards should be considered pure bonus upside, perhaps shading into win-more, and not required for the deck to work. (Unless one of them is lands, since they are always around.) Three-card interactions are often too fragile to be fun or end up with the deck being a tedious tutor/control/delay shell around those three cards. ↩