Commander is what Magic always should have been

I'm not just some newbie who prefers the novel things. I started playing Magic: The Gathering in 2003, which was 7th edition era. There's only one game I am more passionate about than Magic and that's, you guessed it, Diablo II. 

I have indulged in it all. Vintage, Legacy, Standard, Modern, Pauper, Premodern, Pioneer, Limited, Draft, kitchen table as well as LGS events, prereleases, Apprentice, Magic Workstation, MTGO, Arena, MtGForge... even freakin' Forgetful Fish, and of course, Commander/EDH. 

I'm here to tell you without a single grain of uncertainty that Commander/EDH is the best thing that has ever happened to Magic. 

My intro to Commander began later than most. It was 2019, if my memory serves me correctly. An old Modern/Legacy-focused playgroup of mine that had disbanded years ago was reformed, plus a couple new guys who had just been introduced to the game.  

For about 6 months, we played Modern & Legacy. I decided to invite my cousin, who had been playing a couple of years by then. My cousin said he only had one deck that wasn't a Commander deck, so he just played the same deck all night. He explained Commander format a bit to us while we played. My friends were all intrigued and we all decided to scrape together janky commander decks using our bulk for our next session. 

The deck I threw together was a Zurgo Helmsmasher deck. I basically threw in every boardwipe, kill spell, and burn spell I could cram in it. The first night we played Commander as a group, I absolutely crushed them in nearly every game. Not necessarily because I had built a better deck, but largely due to no one being prepared for the relentless onslaught of removal I brought to the table. 

  After that night, I decided to scrape together a couple different decks, because I kind of felt bad about how that went. 

However, they were quick to evolve. The next session went very differently, especially for poor Zurgo. They came equipped with removal of their own and with Zurgo never being allowed to breath a whole turn-cycle, my deck was rendered nearly powerless. After a few months, it became a catchphrase for us to say "I'm still waiting on Zurgo to do something". 

What started out as a "We'll give this a try", immediately turned into "This is what we play now". We haven't played a single game of Modern or Legacy since. We played one night of Commander and never looked back. 

So what is it about Commander that is so fantastic? Many would say Rule 0 and modeling the experience to your group's liking, but I would disagree. 

I think there's way more than that. After all, my group are all by-the-book players. We have pre-game discussions about expectations, but we Rule 0 nothing. Our banlist is THE banlist, not a single card more or less. We don't tell each other what we can or can't play. Jokulhaups and Winter Orb happen and we suck it up and deal with it like grown ass men. 

Our group is basically the antithesis of what most other Commander groups are. Yet, we love this format so much that it's the only one we ever want to play. So there's definitely way more to the phenomenon than Rule 0. 

One factor that I have been able to pin down is that Commander exposes a much wider breadth of card interaction. Multi-player of any constructed format already achieves this, but 99-card highlander increases it exponentially. You see a larger variety of interaction per game, per player. 

The result is that you learn more from each game and each deck. You are evolving more as a player with each game. I am not ashamed to admit that I have learned far more in my five years playing Commander than the entire previous 15 years of everything else combined. 

Proof of this is that I still brew legacy decks on Moxfield for fun and the decks I build now would absolutely crush anything else I had ever built before... and it is 99% credited to everything I have picked up from playing Commander. 

So, how have we cultivated a positive experience without Rule 0? 

Our routine is to keep things random. No counterpicking, because we roll randomly for our decks (Each of us own at least 12 decks). We also play almost exclusively Two-Headed Giant anymore, except for the first one to two hours of a session when there are only three players. Partners are also decided at random. 

This way, it doesn't really steal much fun that one of my 18 decks is a $950 Thrasios/Ravos deck (The most expensive deck in our whole group currently) that will often win by turn 5. Or that another player has a Beamtown Bullies deck that abuses Leveler. The bulk of our decks are not that high-powered. We/they take that L and we move onto the next game. 

I believe a lot of the associated negative experiences happen when this randomness doesn't exist and partners aren't a thing. If my friend chose his Bruvac Mill deck, I'd get itchy fingers to grab one of my few decks running a "shuffle titan". Salt ensues if I do. 

Having a partner means that even if I did (Or if the dice just determined such a bad matchup), they can still mill my partner instead. 

Having partners also means that even if I do get my higher power decks, my partner may not have gotten theirs. 

It's also amusing just how many otherwise powerful decks get hosed by simple cards like Witness Protection, Declaration of Naught, Douse, Rakdos Charm, or Grafdigger's Cage. 

You really don't see as much dynamic like that in other formats, even when you do play them as multi-player. 

One last factor to consider is that Commander is the casual player's weapon for taking this game back from the spikes & whales that had such a tight clutch on it before. Budget casual Magic is FINALLY, for the first time in its 30-year history, the status quo way to play the game now... and that is a REALLY big deal. 

Again, as a veteran player of 20 years, Commander format is the best thing that has ever happened to Magic: The Gathering.