The End of an Era

Do I still love MTG? Sure, I do.

MTG has been a big part of my life for more than 25 years. I've met friends, traveled, competed, stayed up way too late, collected cards, made trades, and agonized over how many lands is optimal in my deck list more times than I can count. I've spent hours organizing trade binders, cracking booster packs, and watching MTG matches late into the night. Heck, this blog has several hundred posts!

When Commander was new, it was a heck of a thing. It was a social format that opened up tons of deck building possibilities. I like big spells. The Commander format let me play almost all of them. And I did. I built tons of Commander decks, too many. I built Commander cubes. I went way down the rabbit hole on foils and foreign cards and signatures. I had a lot of fun.

But they broke it.

Well, they broke it for me. You may be having a great time with it and that's awesome. But for me, once they started designing cards for the format, a lot of what made it special went away. It got too good. Too focused. Too consistent.

I get it. It's business. They are in the business of selling cards. And if something is popular, it makes business sense to cater to it. And they did. Big time. It wasn't about digging up a suboptimal pile of jank rares anymore. Entire decks were available to buy right off the shelf. This made the format more accessible, which is great! But it took away some of what I thought made the format special. It was inevitable.

I stuck with it. I still built new decks. I still played. But the pandemic pushed it over the edge for me.

I was already not thrilled to play online games of MTG. I totally understand that online is the only option for some of you. That's certainly better than nothing, but I want to see and talk to the people I play with. That's my thing. MTG:Online doesn't scratch this itch. Arena doesn't even have a Commander option and feels even less like I'm playing with a real person. Webcam Commander games are unwieldy at best. And I no longer have the time or inclination to play long Commander games at my LGS, even if it was open.

That leads me to a rough conclusion.

I'm basically not playing Commander anymore.

Typing that hit me like a ton of bricks. The reality is that I wasn't really playing Commander anyway. I was just thinking about it a lot and that was giving me a vague sense of still being connected to the format. When I did play the occasional Commander game with friends, it was always 1vs1, which isn't really "my" Commander format anyway. That's just competitive MTG with more variance and the mini-game of trying to keep your opponent's Commander at bay.

Will I still collect and play MTG? Sure, I will.

I see more Old School cards and games in my future. No particular Old School format. Just trying to build something interesting. Trying to get a few weird synergies to work. I have cards in my binders I've never cast before going all the way back to Alpha. That's a great place to start.