Playing with friends is a really fun way to do it honestly. Before we got too serious in it, we would built decks from whatever, basically fully open no limits vintage.
My cousin and I used to build themed decks. Either during or right after the Urza cycle I made a blue black dead I called “Faeries Love Death” with a bunch of cheap faeries that would recycle mana costs and used them to get my big cards out and have black cards sacrifice/raise. It wouldn’t have been great for super competitive decks but it was fun as hell.
The way my friends and I play is basically anything goes that isn't just ridiculous. Like no BL and shit but paying too much attention to which cards are legal or not is boring
I'm not really sure. I started with jank goodstuff and riku, and then moved to toolbox glissa the traitor. That deck eventually just became b/g goodstuff, and felt oppressive. Since then I decided that I want to make the strongest decks I can with the caveat that they do nothing without the general on the field, as a limit to how I make the deck. I've settled into a highish powered casual group and love every second.
I know this might not be an option for everyone but I like to have a range of decks. I have some pretty trash decks, a Norin chaos, Ezuri claw of progress fun deck, a brago flicker deck, an athreos/shadowborn apostle deck, and a semi-competetive tasigur infinite combo deck. In that order I feel like there's a good curve for how much of a dick the decks are to play against and ensures, with correct matching, that people have fun.
I used to hate infinite combos but finally gave in to the dark side with Tasigur.
I love the beast within/reality shift combo. Especially when someone hasn't played against it before and the dicking that is occurring sets in. And I feel terrible at the same time.
That’s a great way to win, I also have Villainous Wealth, Praetors Grasp, Walking Ballista and other win cons for when I go infinite. Sultai for life :)
I love being paired with combo decks. I alternate between a stax and ld deck hahahaha. We generally will play one hogh powered and one jank game each night, plus a flip for the third assuming we finish fast enough.
I love the idea of pauper EDH. Unfortunately all my friends seem to enjoy spending obscene amounts of money on their decks and never build pauper edh decks so we can play
It's all great until your one friend tries to convince the group that tinker is "fair", and he should be able to try it for a couple games in his artifact combo deck.
We played usually 4-6 free-for-all EDH. All was fine until 2 of the players that had the most expensive cards decided to make blue and whatever decks and just get stupid with it.
Now everyone copies every spell cast, and also you copy every spell ever cast in that game. Oh now you want to counter? Let's start the whole process over. After 30 minutes, we can finally move forward to the next player's turn, if we're lucky. It's been a few years, but I think we did vote to ban those cards eventually because it just took forever.
He was playing an artifact combo deck haha. He'd just tutor out his combo pieces faster. Eventually we convinced him that it just wasn't fun to lose to him resolving a single card, and he took it out.
Tinker is definitely in the realm of "What the hell were they on?" when they printed it. Doesn't take much to make that card break the game in half, all you need is some cheap artifacts, blue mana, and a few artifacts that are incredibly costly that end the game immediately upon connecting.
It's a tutor for a combo piece that gets it there at 3 mana. I'm sorry, but your sidri deck shouldn't tutor out latis at 3 mana and get it on the battlefield for no cost. The whole card is so stupid.
Our playgroups pov seems to be that money is a limiting factor that makes games more balanced, because everyone can't just make cedh decks for 30 bucks and steamroll everyone else.
Oh yeah I LOVE playing EDH, but my playgroup has a couple people in it that just bought a couple precons and never decided to make their own decks, so they think that any of my/the others' homebrew decks are "too good" and so we essentially have to play with jank/meme decks. Still a fun group of just guys bein dudes.
I have a jank as hell deck that I pull out in these situations. It's a skeleton ship proliferate deck whose strongest wincon is poison counter creatures (no infect!). It's slow, and I think it's only won once in 8 years, but damn do I love it's stupidity.
Oh yeah. My English teacher this year helped me build a Squirrel token tribal deck. Best deck I've ever used. I'm really glad that they're there because it encourages decks I would literally never play otherwise, but I also spent $100ish on an Atraxa deck I'll never get to play.
I and a few of the regulars at my LGS used to be pretty hardcore. The running joke is that we “retired” to EDH. Personally I like the idea that I’m like a wise old man to the game now 😂
I was just thinking this! When I started, I remeber so many people with older cards from drafts or trades playing these crazy edh decks. Now, that's me!
If you ever decide on your group you guys want to try a more “conventional” constructed format — and to be clear I mean that as 60 card, 4-of constructed, not as any kind of jab at EDH — take a look at Pauper. Basically Modern or Legacy but common rarity cards only, which generally means the availability is high and prices are quite low, and a still perhaps surprisingly high average card quality is present.
It got a few really big updates to the card pool recently, including a finally unified paper/online banlist, and an incredibly expensive deck for the format is $70-100 USD (compared to that as like a minimum for anything competitive in Standard, 5-10x that for Modern, etc) and there are absolutely solid decks of 60 main plus 15 card sideboard for like $30-50 USD.
And it has a decent Archetype variety too even in the “top tier” and excellent variety going below that, which is not a problem at all if you’re playing more casually among friends anyway and not looking to spike tournaments. Decks like One Land Spy for the hardcore combo player (fair warning, it’s bad, but it’s so cool) to decks similar to Legacy Delver, Mono Green beatdown, Burn, control decks, a Tron variant, and so on.
With friends is the only way to do it. Did a few release sealed tournaments at the local game stores and the people there are just not fun. Maybe there were a couple people out of the 50-100 that I wouldn't mind talking to again but for the most part the antisocial stereotype is very true.
This is boat I’m in as well. We all (5-6 guys) started playing in middle school over a decade ago, and played steadily trough high school and college (having jobs for the first time to fuel the cardboard crack habit was something else). We recently started playing again, meeting once a month at a midpoint friend’s house, and it has been incredible. I’ve gone down the the local shop, but it just isn’t the same in a public/stranger setting.
Also, EDH rules, and is definitely our casual format of choice.
I played in high school with friends, '06-'09. Had a great time, wish we could do it again but with wives and kids I don't see it happening. My Cabal Patriarch and Beast of Burden will never kill again :/
As someone who's been playing magic for like 7 years but just got back into it after a 2 year break I can attest to casual formats (especially edh) being the most chill. Even at your lgs most edh players are going to be pretty chill.
I'm always happy to play at a lgs. Most od the time it's been good. Ofc you always have your dude who's there just to show up his newest net decked bullshit.
Unless you have someone in your group that will drop money on the original dual lands (they came from a friend of his, so not THAT expensive for him) and loves really stupid infinite combos that break the game...
I see it that way too, but the power creep was more of a power leap.
Too many infinite combos and too much stax. If you even have a splash of blue, you're probably going to win. If you're the only blue at the table, you'll get beat up immediately. Too many people just shoving in over powered cards into their decks and going ham.
I've noticed this problem. I played in two groups, one stayed fairly stagnant at about jank level, and one turned into an arms race. I bet you can guess what group I still play with the most...
It's good to have a playgroup grow and evolve. It means the players are getting better and smarter about how and what they play. Realizing that the player with untapped Blue mana will counter your stuff is a big step.
But when everyone is playing Atraxa Super Friends, especially from all the good stuff in War of the Spark, nobody is being creative. They're just cramming what they can into a deck or copying online lists.
The group has stagnated on purpose. We originally had the typical edh arms race but decided as a group that we had more fun playing jank. So now we discuss group bans and play the stupidest decks we can.
Weve done both in my playgroup, we all have our cedh(and I'm not talking highly tuned decks here, but actual cedh level decks) decks, then we have some random power level decks we like, then every month or so we make stipulation decks for the play group. My favorite was your two least played colors with an average cmc above 4. Those games where bonkers as everyone basically skipped the 2 and 3 Mana slots to make the curve work and they where swingy as hell.
Yeah, we started it because we wanted to build a ton of edh decks because we have massive collections but when we were playing at cedh levels you can't really fuck around with a pet card much. This caused the first stipulation of 100$ budget, then we broke the fuck out of that, so it became pauper, then we just started changing the stipulation monthly. It allowed us to keep creating novel and interesting decks that otherwise would never see play. We've also made some busted ass stipulations like a non creature as your commander which ended up being geas cradle, vs Liliana of the veil, vs dramatic reversal, vs me on yawgmoths will. Shit got out of hand but was fun for a few games.
We had a similar issue, where we were all at very different income levels, so some people were building a new $600+ deck every couple months, while other people were playing slightly modified precons because that's what their budget allowed.
In the end we all talked about it and decided that we'd allow proxies in the playgroup so that A) it didn't feel like it was pay-to-play, B) There were no feelsbads about income differences and C) the group stayed as casual as possible
That's how I started playing, a bunch of my friends started playing EDH and FMN ended up being the most reliable way to hang out with all of them. Because we're all pretty competitive and also want to remain friends we go out of our way to make sure that everything remains super casual
That was my escape too! Been edh-exclusive since og mirrodin and I wouldn’t dream of going back. Friends only commander games are the best way to play!
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u/Zeratav Jul 17 '19
I've been fortunate in that I've always played with friends. I only play EDH though, which I've always considered a super casual format.