all with the same commander?

What's crazy is all these new cards are commander fodder that do 3 things and generate value like no other time in magic history... And yet if lightning bolt was in standard it would run rampant.

Genuinely curious if this is partly a byproduct of extending the standard rotation an extra year. Every card does 3 things so that 2 of them might have persistent relevance in a wider card pool. But Bolt does just that single thing too well.

One of the major design changes they have found to be successful is that you can make cards more powerful if they have a more limited scope. So they have started to do it everywhere. "Elves get +3+3 and vigilance" on a 2/2 for 3 at uncommon would have people saying "yeah but you have to play elves"

Nothing feels "nimble". Its not really jockeying for board presence with little micro advantages, it's just making your engine pay off bigger than the opponent.

Meanwhile I played in the local Premodern tournament yesterday for the first time (5 rounds), and that was probably some of the most fun and by far the least exhausting Magic I have played in the last 5 years

The games were taking quite an amount of turns, but because most cards do like 1 or 2 things at most, and mostly do it once, the game states are way easier to parse

Even the Gruul landfall deck plays the same as a Gruul landfall Brawl deck. It's so weird to see.

blankly, without shade — decks are value synergy machines that take ~10 game actions per turn. every card is three cards. just unrecognizable to me as standard.

The amount of triggers in the game is overwhelming

I can’t count the number of times I’ve crashed Arena because I had too many triggers on the stack

in my headcanon there was a tweet from a pauper player about not holding removal for a better threat or more advantageous board state which made me go to several people "see! see it's real!." the change to combat priority might have done me in because that rule otherwise just falls out of the design

Something I’ve observed in the modern game is this annoying thing where people have a redundancy of removal in their decks now. Usually in Brawl on Arena I’ve noticed they hold removal for my Commander even if there’s better targets. Makes the game almost unplayable.

It was a much better game when most cards did one thing.

This. As predominantly a Commander player because that's all there is to play, I miss the days of Modern where your deck was razor sharp and pin-point focused.

then again, commander is the standard, so sometimes circles square themselves.

As someone who has only played for a year,I actually really enjoy the number of actions that cards enable. Yes, Vivi bad, but the decision tree is really fun to navigate when you remove the broken shit.

This sort of ties into my belief that Commander was much better before they designed for it. A lot of the fun was finding the cards that fit your decks theme. They’re all handed to us on a silver platter now.

And at 500 dollars a box.

Honestly it's more that it was good when it was being designed for in a Bespoke way instead of design integrating into everything as it's done.

2011 to 2016 commander was a ton of fun

Oh, I thought you meant actual commander

yeah but dana rocks