For a Social Format, Commander keeps distancing us from each other

George hates Universes Beyond, considering it detrimental to the health and identity of the card game, which has been his favorite hobby for two decades. Few things bother him as much in the game as seeing SpongeBob or any other mainstream character at the table.

John loves five-color decks with synergies, but he loves winning even more. His favorite Commander is The First Sliver, which he adjusts for each bracket as needed.

Ringo is so fascinated by Fallout that he prefers to keep the list exactly as he bought it, and at most, he considers picking up a few Fallout-themed cards to enhance his list in the future. Paul is a purely casual player and has no experience with Magic outside of Commander.

The four agree that their decks fall into the Bracket 3 category. For ease of communication, each player briefly discusses their decks, the Game Changers they run, and how they intend to win the game. Then, each player reveals their Commander: George reveals Edgar Markov, and Paul gives a slight eye roll as he looks at Edgar across the table.

Ringo, piloting a precon, asks John if his deck's mana base is "optimized"—not to question his deckbuilding choices, but to assess how much that player needs to be policed during the match—while George openly tells Ringo that he will be his primary target because he "hates Universes Beyond."

The match hasn't even started, but animosity is already building at the table. Each player already has an internal issue with someone else at the table, and what should be a moment of relaxation and happy hour turns into a sort of arms race between the four.

The game starts. Ringo opens the first turn with a mix of Sol Ring and Arcane Signet, drawing the attention of the rest of the table to its explosive potential. Suddenly, it's not just George's attacks that are focused on him because he doesn't like Universes Beyond; John's combat phase also starts to focus on him, despite everyone's disgusted expression when Paul cast Rhystic Study on turn three.

Eventually, Paul decides to "reset the board" with Supreme Verdict, but Ringo responds with Heroic Intervention, protecting his board. On his turn, he casts Almost Perfect, which, combined with Champion's Helm, causes Dogmeat to attack John for 12 Commander damage. Although George had been actively targeting him the entire game, he opted for the five-color deck because he considered it the biggest threat at the table.

The game progresses, and in the next turn cycle, Paul manages to deal with Dogmeat, Ever Loyal with a Farewell right after George had exhausted his hand resources to regain his board position—though he doesn't say so outright, his facial expressions convey his frustration at not only having lost his creatures again in a turn cycle but also at feeling that Paul isn't letting the game run its course and is "locking the board down."

The game's friction persists for a few turns, creating a strange, tense atmosphere between the participants every turn, until John uses Manaweft Sliver to cast Eladamri's Call, searching for a Witherbloom Apprentice and casting it, then plays Chain of Smog for an infinite combo that leads to victory.

The game ended, but the feeling for all players was bittersweet. When asked why he would use the Chain of Smog and Witherbloom Apprentice combo in a Bracket 3 list, John says that he only has the means to search for one half of the combo and that both are poor targets for his Commander's Cascade, meaning they can "fail" since he doesn't restrict his mana costs to consistently find these cards.

Some at the table disagree, saying that, regardless of whether it can be searched or not, it is considered fast, as it can be executed as early as the third turn and end the game. In the end, instead of having fun, the experience of this Commander game was stressful for everyone involved—they then left the table and found other players to play.

The fun of the format, for each of them, was ruined in the pregame. , during the game and after the game. It's a Friday, 8 p.m. They've had a tiring week at work, and this Commander event should be a good time for them.

The reasons may vary. Perhaps they didn't communicate their game intentions well, or perhaps they have very different views, despite similar communication, of how a Commander game should work. Some had preconceived notions of another's deck, while others have a natural bias against a Wizards action and want, through their actions, to "drive" this audience away from the same tables as them.

What everyone is certain of, however, is that they are right. Within their spheres and ideals, they consider that every deckbuilding decision they made, every word spoken, and every attitude or stance in the game were assertive for their objective in that game.

At the end of the night, no one will think, "I shouldn't have this combo in my deck even though it's not easy to find," or "I could have avoided that board wipe after the game had already lasted 50 minutes," or "I should be nicer to Magic players, regardless of where they came from or how much they've invested in their mana base."

There are a few points that, in part, reinforce this narrative, and they're all inherent to the nature of Magic. First, the card game was originally conceived as a one-on-one game and spent the first two and a half decades nurturing a system designed for 1v1 play. The concept of multiplayer, while existing since 1995, only became a full focus of the project with the massive popularity of the Commander format, which began less than a decade ago.

Furthermore, Magic is a game designed for someone to win. Whether you're an experienced player or a beginner, one of the first things you learn about Magic is that the goal of a game is to win. Commander, however, is a collective and social experience: yes, all players can—and often should—do their best to win, but the ends don't always justify the means: there are tables and scenarios where just because you can lock out your opponents' tables doesn't mean you should, as it's ruining the game for everyone but yourself, which goes against Magic's primary goal: winning the game.

Third, there's a monkey's paw when Wizards, or before it, RC, says that Commander can be whatever players want it to be. This discourse, aimed at creating consensus among players, tends to create more discussion and disagreement about what the format should be among them: you can use removal, but not just any removal. You can interact with Counterspell, but not too much. You can play a board wipe, but it can't be Farewell. You can play any Commander you want, except those that group A or B hate for reasons that have much more to do with them than with the game experience itself.

In trying to make Commander for everyone, what we managed to do was create a format for no one. Because the sheer number of unwritten rules and limitations of each environment and group, not to mention each player's individual focus and perception of how a game should proceed, makes the format much more a game of disagreements than entertainment, which goes against Commander's main potential: to bring people together.

Consider the four players we mentioned earlier. Perhaps, if the intentions had been better communicated, or if the players weren't so concerned with how the game should be for them but in a collective experience, George, John, Paul, and Ringo might have formed a new friendship there and, who knows, discovered they were all talented musicians and formed a band and a friendship that would last for many years.

Instead, each player ended that game considering the other a bad person because something didn't go according to their expectations, and it's possible they'll never play at the same table again. They'll seek out like-minded individuals who share their goals and ideals of how Commander should work, and eventually, they'll form groups that play almost perpetually with each other. They'll form, for each of them, bubbles in their card game environment.

The term "bubble" is already quite overused, but there's no simpler word to explain this common occurrence at Commander tables. But when we always lock ourselves into the same groups in the format, we lose the greatest potential it offers Magic—the ability to be a social catalyst.

Despite the expansion of our connections through social media, adults today are more isolated individually. Our cultural differences and beliefs, even in matters as simple as a hobby, have never been so prominent in our interpersonal relationships in the 21st century—which, it's worth noting, will complete a quarter of its life cycle in 2025—and tools capable of bringing us closer together beyond our screens have proven to be more than necessary.

An example I admire in this regard is Pokémon. Those who are part of this community love Pokémon and can speak the same language with the same admiration for their favorite pocket creatures or for the new title that's about to be released. Many, both inside and outside the community, still remember the Pokémon GO craze of 2016, where dozens, if not hundreds, of people walked the streets together with the sole purpose of capturing little creatures around the city with their smartphones.

Card games have this same capacity as a social tool to bring people together rather than tear them apart. Unless you play on a digital platform, they require interaction with other people, and while this can be a source of stress in more competitive matches, casual environments are excellent ways to have fun with other human beings, whether they're friends, family, lovers, or complete strangers who share a hobby and entertainment with you.

Commander is by far the easiest Magic: The Gathering setting to create positive social interactions, to connect with people with different perceptions of reality than your own, to tell stories, to express yourself through your deckbuilding choices, to embrace your passion for Final Fantasy or Lord of the Rings with the same fervor as someone might admire the Brothers' War with their Urza, Chief Artificer deck, and to learn a little more about things you might not even know about the Magic universe or the Universes Beyond partnerships.

To get to this point, however, we need to find ways to make Commander less arbitrary and individualistic in the players' perception. We'll have fewer negative conversations about what's "acceptable to me" and more collective discussions about what "should be acceptable to everyone." No impositions, no "I won't play with you because I don't like your Commander/playstyle." Otherwise, what we have is an amorphous environment where, not unlike what bubbles do to us in society and on social media, we're left yelling at each other, trying to impose our wills and idealized visions of what Magic should be.

Conversations need to be more open and elaborate, social rulesets need to be better established both within and outside the current committee, and we need to collectively understand that, while Wizards says there's no wrong way to play Magic, that doesn't entitle us to dictate what kind of Magic other people should play.

After all, Magic is for everyone, and Commander should be designed for everyone, but always with the goal of facilitating harmony between different categories of players.

Much like our group of players who could be maybe-not-so-famous musicians, how many times have we missed the opportunity to meet other incredible human beings and have a good time with them due to our differences in Commander? How many bonds haven't we established due to our personal bias toward what the game should be?

But this isn't the real world. In it, we're conditioned to hate and consider that every category of entertainment must be practiced, made, or planned according to our whims. In a world that has never had so much information available and so much capacity for collective mobilization, we've never been so separated, apathetic, and incapable of establishing collective concepts, even to decide what's best for our entertainment with a card game.

Hope remains. And this, unfortunately, comes with arbitrary concepts: that the Commander Format Panel should be able to take the reins in the medium term to more assertively define how to categorize tables in the format.

Communication methods are needed that don't rely on individual minutiae and whims but rather a set of collective options that work universally within the Commander community. The Bracket system, while effective, doesn't resolve many of the nuances and inconsistencies that the format still presents, and while Rule 0 and pre-game conversations can address many situations, they are subject to individual interpretation, and one person's concept of fun may differ in several details from another's.

A Stax player and someone with an improved preconstructed deck with some improvements have very different expectations, despite fitting equally into Bracket 3. One person may have a definition of combos that falls far short of someone else's ideal, and someone new to the game who may still lack the maturity to understand that taking a Counterspell is part of the game will definitely not feel comfortable at the same table as someone who has known Magic for 25 years.

My recommendation, finally, is that the panel's maintenance address these details, creating easier ways to fit your deck into experiences and categories that the entire community can universally understand. The Rule 0 conversation can and should be conducted more assertively, not through human verbalization, full of flaws and cognitive distortions, but through an optimized set of options that allows players and the community to understand each other.

Commander is, after all, Magic: The Gathering's most famous format and its main asset, along with Universes Beyond, to become a mainstream cultural product. Caring for everyone's well-being in the format requires much more than just saying "play it however you want."

Until then, I advise players to keep an open mind. Maybe that Commander you saw at the table isn't your cup of tea, or maybe you don't like Universes Beyond and still find yourself facing a Sonic the Hedgehog on the other side of the table. Likewise, just because a player put a Winota, Joiner of Forces on the table doesn't necessarily mean you have to expect the worst possible outcome and behavior.

It's possible that the Smothering Tithe you can cast on the second turn isn't the best way to make the game worthwhile. Maybe a specific interaction you made that ended up locking down one player's table created a miserable experience for that player.

Commander is a casual, social game, gradually becoming more and more like a board game. And just like ideally in a board game, what matters isn't victory, but how much you enjoyed that game with the others around you—even if this goal runs counter to the inherent nature of Magic and definitely doesn't apply to "Commander tournaments" or cEDH.

Thanks for reading!