LogFAQs > #978954651

ChaosTonyV4 posted...

Commander Precons

35/100

Fair warning: I am an EDH fossil. My mind of "what the format should be" is still a bunch of us Judges jamming our shitty Invasion-era legends the night before an SCG Open that we loved from the Weatherlight Saga, and the goal wasn't winning as much as "Can you play an obscure enough card to make the greybeards at the table need to read it, yet it makes sense in your deck?" When the first Commander precons came out, I got super excited.

If only I knew what they had been harbingers of.

Commander precons pre-pandemic were poisoning the format. Not only were they fucking up Eternal formats (not that HotC gives a shit about those anymore), they were also teaching new players, either to the format or to Magic in general, that Commander was designed to be competitive solitaire. Experience counters and Eminence are design atrocities that discourage or outright punish interaction and push for linearity. They've also constantly included Sol Ring, which I've come to recognize as antithetical to the fun of any given game where it gets played early -- and because it's in every single precon, it can never be banned.

Post-pandemic, I just haven't paid attention. The well's tainted. I rarely see a Commander game that ends with more than half the table being glad they played. I genuinely believe the awful design of most early precons are to blame for a lot of it.

Lopen posted...

The original Kamigawa block

75/100

I'm glad people have largely come around on OG Kamigawa. It had the unfortunate fate of being placed between Magic's most obnoxiously broken block since Urza (Mirrodin) and Magic's most beloved block (Ravnica). So many of the mechanics just didn't work: The hand-size stuff was too finnicky, Arcane was parasitic as hell, Soulshift was too insular and required you to play overcosted cards in order to get back other overcosted cards, and Bushido did nothing but discourage blocking in general. Legends-matter was neat in theory, but the iteration of the Legend Rule at that time made it awkward as hell. Jitte broke the game. Ninjutsu remains one of the coolest mechanics ever designed, but it's a diamond in a heap of trash.

But the world, the general design, the genuine effort they took to make it as Shinto as a game company based in Seattle could do, and many of the individual cards? C'est magnifique.

It was also the first time I'd gotten invested in Magic's lore. I'd enjoyed some of the Weatherlight saga but was too young to really "get it." The actual prose of the Kamigawa novel trilogy hasn't held up compared to when 13-year-old Trdl read it, but the story beats are a fantastic picaresque adventure with a self-described scoundrel protagonist who lies, cheats, and steals his way to begrudging heroism. Having a black-aligned protagonist and white-aligned antagonist was executed brilliantly.

I was too young for it at the time, but some of my fellow greybeards have told me that Kamigawa-Ravnica was the peak of Standard, and I believe it. There was enough spice in individual card designs that mixed well with the unique stuff Ravnica brought us.

I'm so glad Neon Dynasty was good. Kamigawa deserved to have another moment in the limelight.