Bracket System, EDH, and Monkey's Paw
or Why Competitive Commander Event Structures Don't Really Work Casually (or Even Competitively, Honestly)
This post covers two (or more) different situations that may have been better served in separate posts. I apologize for the misleading premise, but I'm not sure I'll have the energy to continue this train of thought if I let it go now. Well, this is why I blog instead of writing for the big press.
So, preface. I play TCGs, and Magic: the Gathering has been my main for the last 8 years. My main format is EDH/Commander, and I have met great many people through the game that one of my coping mechanisms when I'm stressed is teaching people Magic.
Make that what you will.
(If none of that makes sense to you, I suggest you to stop reading now and find another article in this site)
Back when I started, it was difficult to find someone to play with you in the stores. You tell people you play EDH and they would look at you funny, shrugging towards boxes and boxes of Standard decks for Game Day. I yearned for EDH FNMs, EDH events, I tried to teach EDH as people's first format, and every little kid listening to a decent dose of bedtime stories would tell you to be careful what you wish for.
Fast forward half a decade and Standard basically died, an unthinkable thing, while EDH coasted along as the premier way to play. And it's tearing MtG communities apart. EDH has always been something you had to play with friends to appreciate fully, and the guise quickly falls apart when you're trying to quell a nation's worth of hive mind. It's a naturally very broken format ruled by extended "social etiquettes" and "common sense".
It's difficult to Human. It's even more difficult to Human in a society with such a wide range of expectations for Humans.
And so, with things collapsing under its own weight, we have a new system rising from the ashes.
I have trialed the bracket system in several online communities I accidentally fostered, and while I quite like the concept (and I like the current GC list), it's incredibly frustrating to me just how many people try to brush over anything past the deckbuilding restriction. Gavin has addressed this multiple times. Over and over again.
In communities with many new players (something that will be more common as Universe Beyond releases grow), people don't know what they don't know, so it falls on the older players to help steer the newer players towards a 'baseline experience' they could refer to. When there is no "older player" in the group or if the older players are undependable to supervise, the experience is a chaotic mess. Insecure people try to convince each other their bracket 2 deck is bracket 2 while someone strongly believes that their bracket 4 deck can't possibly be that good given that it's their first attempt at deckbuilding, because they rely on their deckbuilding websites to report the number. And when dealing with communities playing online or generous proxy policy (normally a good thing), sometimes that mean one player may bring in a deck with full set OG Duals because... Tundra is not on the GC list?
In the end, it's the players.
I honestly agree now that EDH shouldn't be people's first format. Having 1v1 experience will give most people better grace to cope with loss, hopefully not feeling so entitled when playing multiplayer. And appreciating the place for each archetype instead of blindly hating in the echo chamber. The way the GC list is composed, they're trying to discourage cards with "unfun" play patterns and I had been around to experience most of the list to like what they currently have, but the worrying trend I see is people taking it as "you play this or that, you have bad taste".
I'd rather play with unfun decks than unfun people, but let me digress.
One of the LGS I play in is trying to find a good format to host Commander events. They decide to run a "Bracket 3" event, only instead of reading Bracket 3 philosophy they mean "bring the best deck you can make within Bracket 3 restrictions" because "it's still a competition". In practice this means tons of fast mana and acceleration in decks capable to win from t4.
They're cool people. We had good games. Just don't call it Bracket 3.
I really don't like to reinforce that dollar price strongly correlates with power because honestly with the amounts of reprints we get it's only mostly true on higher power (all those Commander Precon Exclusives!), but time and again I keep finding that budget limit does work better than bracket when it comes to keeping a civil play environment.
It's a tragicomedy for the last item on the now-disbanded Commander Rules Committee FAQ remains to be salient to this day:
How should I run a Commander tournament?
Commander is a multiplayer format predicated on the idea that you should never be required to participate in a game you don’t want to play, which makes it badly designed for tournaments or more formally structured play. We don’t recommend this.
If you want to run a Commander event, the best approach we’ve found is to simply provide space for folks to self-aggregate and let them join in with groups where they think they’ll have fun. Encourage them to have social contract conversations to make better matches, but don’t force it.
Initially there may be a lot of watching of games and people figuring out where they belong, but that will eventually turn players who don’t know each other into trusted groups.
I find that many stores are at a loss when dealing with noncompetitive structures. It seems like we have nurtured an environment where something gotten from a noncompetitive activity feels unearned for. Just let people pay entry fee and play as they wish? How novel! How could we reward the "best" players, then?
EDH really is best played among friends.
I don't want to get into the murky waters of How to Make EDH Great Again. Honestly, reviving 1v1 formats so people could have space for both their competitive and noncompetitive mood is, in my opinion, a better idea.
However, with the rising prices of Standard, continual shortage of products especially if you're outside of the US and Europe and Japan, and the constant chase into Exclusive Collectability...
I'm well aware how much a mess this post is already, so... That, I believe, is a topic for another day.