this post was submitted on 25 Nov 2023
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Can't watch the video right now, but honestly I agree.
My friends and I play Commander, and I enjoy a little hijinks, but with the newer decks I feel like I just need to sit and wait 10 minutes for their turn to finish, and at the end I'm like "So... am I dead or what?"
And of course, the same applies to them with my deck. Synergy is nice and all, but it's nigh-on impossible to follow these days.
There are have always been 2 hurdles getting people to play this game. Complexity and Price(I dont think I need to explain this one).
They've tried to fix complexity in the past(eg: Rosewater's new world order post Time Spiral) but it always came down to "choose a format with a smaller card pool".
Commander is a format that people say is beginner friendly, but that's not totally true. Commander games are low stakes and are usually slower, so they're better in that respect. but on the flipside youre dealing with the Legacy card pool and every bonkers unintuitive interaction is legal. On top of that the new pre-built Commander decks are more competitive than they have ever been, but they are also way harder to learn.
Also, Standard sets are starting to approach or surpass time spirals level of complexity, to the point where vanilla creatures dont even exist anymore. Trying to teach a new player the game in this environment is massively challenging.
Not only are the precons more competitive, but they're also astonishingly complex, so much so that even LoadingReadyRun were getting overwhelmed in their EDSC playthrough. The Doctor Who "Timey Wimey" deck, unmodified, is one that I'll only play as the first deck of the night because there's so much to keep track of that I don't think I could do it after a few games. And I've been playing since the 90s, so I'm hardly new to the game. I'd hate to imagine the experience most people who've tried picking up Magic from some of this UB stuff have had.