Hi friends, I'm glad to see so many engaging with the topic. There's one point, however, that I see repeated often even though it's very flawed: it's the idea that you can always just ignore Commander Damage if it's unlikely to be relevant. I agree with this from a player perspective, I think many of us do exactly that. But if I'm thinking about it from a developer lens, then I find it a baffling argument. If I'm creating a game, why would I ever want a rule that most players choose to ignore a lot of the time? I want players to enjoy the rules of the game, not opt out of them. This point even coming up is a massive red flag for Commander Damage's current implementation.
so if i remember correct, Commander damage was created based on the following logic. the format was created by judges to play during the breaks of tournaments and after, originally the only commanders allowed are the elder dragons they all have 7/7 the idea is is based on 3 strikes you are out, if a elder dragon hit you 3 times you take 21 damage so you die
I think you could still have Commander damage, but instead of it all being separate, have it all be a single pool. Each player starts with 40 life, and if at any point they have taken 30 or more damage from commanders, they lose the game. Increase it to 30 since now everyone is contributing to the same pool, and make it so that other players can interact with commander damage that you have dealt or taken. Edit: I literally paused like half a second before you started your first suggestion, and seeing that we came up with the exact same thing makes me happy.
I think the question is less if life gain is oppressive, and more if life gain slows the game down beyond any fun. In a low-medium power level group, any life gain deck playing in a game without commander damage will hold all the other players hostage, so it's either A: Everyone at the table brings alternate win-cons like infect or 'you win the game' cards, or B: Commanders are an alternate win condition baseline.
@ArdentMoogle on the one hand it's definitely annoying tracking everyone's commander damage, but I feel like any attempt to simplify it cheapens other mechanics of the format. Example, if commander damage is shared, then life gain decks are fairly pointless, as collectively the table only needs to hit you a few times to kill you and your gaining life doesn't actually do anything to prevent you from losing. I definitely think commander damage is a bandage fix, but I think ripping the bandage off can do a lot of harm too. ALL OF THAT SAID, I can and have played games where we throw caution and rules to the wind and see what happens, and in a more personal and friendly format like commander, it's super fun, and doing what the four people at your table want to do is always going to be the better option than rigidly following the rules. I mean there's a bunch of people in the comments right now saying that they have their own rules for commander damage and have fun with them. It's really not that serious a format outside of cedh and even then... lol. Just do what your group finds most fun
@@HeraldSchimdtt I mean if you're just playing in a "regular" commander game with "regular" commander decks while simply ignoring commander damage, you're obviously going to come to the conclusion that commander damage can go. If you're playing without a voltron deck or a lifegain deck, you aren't actually investigating the boundaries of the rule change.
Given how many cards out there double tokens or triple damage, I find it hard to believe any non-combo lifegain deck could survive against 3 other decks. If you eliminated your opponents and left yourself in a 1v1 with a lifegain deck, that's your fault.
@@Opaqu.e you know there are cards that lifegain on creature etb, lifegain on spell cast, or give your whole board lifelink, right? The opponents aren't the only players capable of doubling or tripling their strategy.
I think it is fine as is. You just don't track it unless your commander is trying and expecting to use it. My 2|2 commander does not track it. My 5|5 commander that attacks would track it and it gives some inevitability to their combat damage (like infect and mill give some inevitability) because you can't cure the commander damage. Now to listen and review your suggestions: 1) Having all commanders contribute would require the threshold to be adjusted, but also make it much harder for Voltron decks. Since Voltron decks are the typical user, I would discourage this nerf. Aggro decks already have a hard time. 2) You do not want to have it track commander damage dealt to everyone as a single win condition. That encourages them to focus on the mana screwed weakest player. They would feed off that player until they died. Having it as a loss condition causes the Voltron to have reason to prioritize targeting the player that is their biggest threat rather than the player that is already struggling. 3) Commanders dealing double damage removes the inevitability that Voltron decks threatens. This will only come up with lifegain but is broader than solely lifegain decks. I would rather leave the inevitability in to help the Voltron decks. Also you should increase the starting life to 50 or something to compensate. The volume of hp is part of why we get to play the high CMC jank before the game ends. Of the 3, your idea of doubled commander damage causes the least issues. I still think the current rules are better, as long as you don't waste time tracking commander damage for the commanders where it won't matter. So just require the commander to track the damage themselves. Problem drops from the hyperbolic 36 lifebars down to a mere 4 lifebars.
This is something I never hear other people talk about. *You can just not track commander damage*. You know your army of angels is going to get way too big way too fast for your 2/2 Giada to hit someone 11 times, so just don't track it. The onus of tracking commander damage always fall on the person controlling the commander anyway, and you know better than anyone if your commander damage will be relevant. For example, I have a Kess deck that tracks commander damage because it includes extra turn spells. The deck is capable of taking something like 5 extra turns and Kess is a 3/4 flyer, so if I get in on someone twice before entering a loop of extra turns, I can kill them fairly easily and focus the rest of my spellslinging damage at the other players. But that's on *me*. It's not up to my opponents to track *my* commander damage. So if *you* don't want to track it, just don't.
Speaking of there are commanders you track commander damage for and those you don't, it is always funny seeing a player's reaction when after giving the 0/3 Tamiyo a small buff and hitting an opponent and telling them to track that one damage because this is a Tamiyo voltron deck.
I think my only issue with commanders dealing 2x damage is that it ends up with commanders getting targeted a lot more frequently, which hurts commander centric strategies even more. I can't currently think of a good solution to this though, or if it really needs to be fixed. But having a deck focusing on your commander, only for them to essentially never see play, doesn't sound all that fun. I'd have to try it out to know how it feels, but I think I prefer having commander damage being global but higher. 30 is probably the sweet spot. I don't think there's a worry for someone to get targeted any more than being low on life would cause either. If they take 10 damage from anything else and don't have lifegain, it's already negligible.
I've found the solution for commander damage is to just one shot a player. Build up resources and line up your damage and then when the pieces are lined up, BAM, player's dead and gone. Usually target a problem player or control. So you want less incremental damage increases and more card draw and resource generation with a few explosive spells that ramp your commander's damage to 21+. Taking out a single player this way ensures you have resources left over to deal with the other two players, presuming that you took out the strongest, the other two will be easier pickings with your gathered resources. Having some back up creatures and win cons is also good.
The format is called EDH, the commanders back then had to be the old elder dragons, commander damage in its first form was just hitting someone 3 times with your commander, later was changed to 21 combat damage, in reference to the 7 power of the elder dragons, needing to connect 3 times.
Yup. Came here to say this and this is much more succinct than what I would have said. To clarify, EDH stands for Elder Dragon Highlander, and it's what the format was called when it was first created by fans. Originally, it was an extension of the casual format where your deck could only have one of each card in it which was nicknamed "highlander" by the fans--"There can be only one." Eventually the list of allowed "commanders" expanded from just the Elder Dragon Legends to any Legendary creature, and that's when the combat damage rule changed from "3 times" to "21 total damage." It wasn't until after a couple of years that the format grew so popular that Wizards started officially supporting it and renamed it "Commander."
@@alicepbg2042 No, what happened was we all watched far enough in, about 4 minutes or so, for him to definitively state that 21 is a weird number and that he didn't know where it came from, at which point we paused to comment about it before resuming the video to then see that he answered his own question almost 20 minutes later. So if you want to snipe at anyone maybe start with the poor script formatting from the video author?
@@JohnSmith-vk9ds they could have edited the comment or watched the entire video before commenting. you deal with replies to comments you make. it's how it goes
I created a Karlach deck, with the Sword Coast background. With just the commander, the background that is also a commander, and anything that would give double strike, I could easilly deal 20 unblockable commander damage to a single opponent in one turn. The fact that it is 21 means that I would need that the deck does need that bit more creative effort, especially in being efficient to take out other players also quickly once they see the threat. The fact that 21 is not easilly divisible is kind of perfect, it makes it just high enough that a 5 power commander will need nore effort. Even the 10 power commanders need to put just the bit more effort like an extra +1 in hitting twice.
I find it really weird u havent considered the easiest solution to the commander damage tracking issue. Since its 21, exaclty one higher than a d20, u just put a d20 when u take damage, and tick it up accordingly, and once u would need a second die, ur dead. No massive piles of die, health pool we need to know at all times, just a die that everyone can see at a glance
And easily get knocked over when the table accidently gets bumped. I hate using d20 to keep track of numbers, they tumble to easily. Its a problem with all dice, just worse the higher you go.
@PimpTrizkit-42 are u throwing a Party, none of the pods ive played in or play in the lgs i visit have that issue. And dice are used far and wide in this game on many gaming channels, and in many pods, im thinking its a your playgroup issue
@daltronius it's not an uncommon issue, actually. It's against tournament rules to track life with only dice because of the fact they can be nudged. You must use pen and paper in those environments. You can use dice if you like but there's a lot of players that see the reasoning behind the tournament rules and prefer them even in casual games where they want things to run smoothly.
@@RedOphiuchus then use pen and paper if your playgroup bumps the table, or u could use lifetap, an app most people already use that tracks poison, damage, other types of counters and commander damage in easily viewed ways.
I think the biggest issue with removeing comander damage is it shots down the one verson of agro thats still viable. Atleast in the tables ivw seen you have to get in quick to win with comander liek a real agro strat in other formats or play stax
Commander damage exists so that infinite lifegain can't be used to stall out the game forever. It means decks have viable methods of taking out players without _having_ to always bring an infinite combo that wins the game on the spot. Also, you can soft ban infinite combos, but then what about cards like Beacon of Immortality which are basically a 1-card infinite lifegain combo but doesn't play like one? More to the point, I don't see any downside from having commander damage. I'd be happy to make commander damage 21 from any commander, which makes games end a lot faster and makes aggro far more playable since it means opponents getting in for chip damage can help you take out other players. While this does step on the toes of Poison a bit, it's fine since poison strats usually don't interact with life totals so there's not really any crossover.
We used to play without commander damage, but it ended up being impossible to beat combo or grindy decks. Literally impossible, creatures could never push through enough damage to kill a stax or aristrocrats player. We introduced commander damage and now those decks were struggling. Facing down a 6-7 damage flying commander makes stax shit their pants, considering they were untouchable before.
The new wolverine can one shot people with commander damage with just a few enchants. You could just have it be tracked the other way. You accumulate commander damage when you deal damage with your commander to any player. when that reaches some arbitrary number, you win. This then turns the voltron player into a threat for the whole table rather than the person getting focused but still pushes towards ending the game since the voltron player can progress their win-con by attacking any open player.
6:00 new players struggle to understand the board state in a sprawling battlecruiser commander game that’s 2+hours long. New players need constructed 60card formats to learn the rules of the game.
Exactly. Edh should not be how a new player learns magic. There's already so many rules alterations from baseline magic that it's a terrible place to start, and worrying about a rarely relevant mechanic like commander damage would be the least of their conserns.
I find it interesting how part of what makes Commander damage especially wonky is not strictly an issue with the format inherently, but rather ways that it's evolved since WotC started taking an interest in actively supporting it. Namely, the multiplayer expectation and introduction of partner cards magnifying the complexity of the situation. Partner cards, of course, were something WotC added well into the course of their development for Commander as an official format, an exception to the original rules added well after the format had taken off. And as for multiplayer, sure, EDH was always fairly open to multiplayer play, but it wasn't an intrinsic part of the format so much as a product of it being intended to be casual. Casual MtG has always been inclined to incorporate multiplayer elements, as a natural consequence of being more focused as a social activity and not wanting to limit that to 1-vs-1 when you might have 3-6 friends all wanting to play together. But when WotC decided to recognize it as an official format and create cards specifically to support it, they leaned into the multiplayer tendencies of casual play to explicitly promote Commander as a 4-player format, even though that's still technically nowhere in the rules of the format itself. That said, I don't disagree with the analysis; even if it wasn't as strongly a multiplayer-first format originally as it is now, I'm pretty sure it was always meant to support multiplayer, and on that basis alone, the complexity of tracking damage from multiple Commanders should ideally have been avoided. But I do find it interesting how things have evolved.
First, thank you for your well considered discussion on the current state of commander damage and your well stated discussion about general good game design, including stating general principles including: Wanting it to be easier to track for the players, sometimes even requiring up to 8 extra health bars (4 players times 2 individual commanders) Wanting it to be easier to learn for beginners Commander being a parasitic mechanic within the game because it doesn’t work with anything else I disagree with your assertion that this mechanic needs changing and that game design mechanics (easy to learn, easy to track) are the primary reason for wanting to make that change. I prefer learning the history of the game as created and backwards compatibility over being easy to learn and easy to track. In terms of tracking, it’s relatively easy to track in the vast majority of games because they are being played on Spelltable (which has built in tracking) or with a life tracking application on a phone/tablet. While I agree that you wouldn’t want to have electronic be a requirement, we are already bringing so much extra stuff to the table (at least, dice, tokens, playmat, sleeves, extra sleeves, in some cases reusable dry erase tokens, coins, etc) that bringing your phone or even an extra battery pack for your phone isn’t much of an extra burden, particularly because most of us are bringing out phone everywhere with us anyway. And that burden is only for in person games that are ad hoc, the regular games I play with my playgroup the host always provides the tablet and extra battery pack. In terms of learning the rules for commander damage it’s 21 damage from any single commander kills you. Pretty straightforward. Twenty-one is also actually a good number precisely because it is divisible by only 3 and 7 and requires you to get your commander to 11 power which is deliberately awkward with the cards that we have available and then also give your commander double strike. It also makes seven power the magic number for a three hit kill. The historical reason for this is both excellent and worth celebrating. I would rather commander damage someone to death for twenty-one simply because of the historical significance of the elder dragons, particularly from Nicol Bolas because being the big bad of whole swaths of the lore means that if he hits you three times you should be dead. In the lore, it would likely not even take him one hit to kill a regular opponent. The historical significance of this amount outweighs the difficulty of tracking it or of learning it. Your proposed solutions while reducing the overall burdens of numbers to be tracked doesn’t usually save significant mental or tracking burden because most of the time that commander damage comes into play isn’t with a Voltron commander. I have identified that there are numerous decks that hold down players with other effects, attempting to kill them with those effects, while also using commander damage exclusively against a single opponent. I have numerous decks that take advantage of this approach and it allows a combination of strategies which is satisfying. With respect to pure Voltron commanders your changes would weaken them significantly, especially whenever you raise the total amount of commander damage that must be dealt. Raising it doesn’t make historical or lore sense because if Nicol Bolas hits you three times, you are almost certainly dead, without regard to what you have already been doing. I would argue that for a new player your solutions would be similar in difficulty to learn. Additionally, I am not sure that difficulty to learn is a good argument for any game that also has mechanics in it that have not been reprinted in two decades that most current players wouldn’t claim to understand how they work (see: banding). I realize that pointing out other warts to justify the existence of one particular wart isn’t that strong of an argument, but if the person was trying to get into a simple game they wouldn’t be interested in Magic the Gathering in general. Backwards compatibility of the game is more important than being able to learn it easily. The entire game has been balanced since at least 2011 when Wizards of the Coast started making cards directly for commander with commander damage as created originally. That means that cards have had their power altered with the rule in mind. I suspect this leads to thinking about the power of a particular legendary creature deeply as they are constructed. That means that if we adjust the rule it will throw off all the thinking that has happened for choosing the power of commanders. There is an analog in the computer science world to this sort of thing. Microsoft has famously been focused on backwards compatibility, to the point of going back into their operating systems and adjusting them to put bugs back into the code in particular modes because there are programs that are dependent on those bugs to operate properly. This is done so that old programs continue to work for their customers. This practice of backwards compatibility means that you don’t need to buy new programs, particularly expensive business programs in order to continue to service your customers. My argument is that having all of the previous commanders work as intended is more important than ease of learning and ease of tracking. It is uncertain what would happen to the design of commanders after any commander damage rules changes, but it would likely result in commanders focused around the new rules, making them more powerful that older commander within the new rule set, and would require people to upgrade their decks in order to play optimally within the new rule set. While I might enjoy that challenge, one of the largest and best parts of Commander is that you can use your old cards and that the format doesn’t rotate. Changing the commander damage rules would in effect create a partial rotation of the format, which I perceive to be vastly more disliked than tracking the (usually) one person’s worth of commander damage. Your treatment of this mechanic also completely ignores the elephant in the room, which is poison counters. You only need 10 of them to lose the game and they can be proliferated. The first or second most popular commander has a heavy proliferation theme which often includes the use of poison counters to kill multiple opponents. You’ve ignored that those have to be kept track of also, so removing the commander damage counts doesn’t eliminate the problem. Further there are three mechanics that are involved in poison counters: poisonous, toxic and infect. That’s three keywords that must be explained to new players. I would argue that poison counters are more egregious than commander damage is, and harder to explain. Again, this is pointing out another wart just to justify the existence of the wart in question, but if we are really trying to simplify the game then we should do so. The reason we don’t is backwards compatibility. In conclusion, I feel that backwards compatibility and the added complexity actually enhance the game for the type of people who are most likely to play and enjoy it, and don’t bother the people who never concern themselves with it. It’s not worth making the change because of the amount of imbalance it would create in old cards versus the new cards that would be made under the new rule. Just because something isn’t optimal doesn’t mean it is worth paying the cost to change it.
First, I think it's foolish to look at the current state of commander and come to the conclusion that lifegain is bad so we can remove commander damage with no consequences. Lifegain is bad in large part *because of* Commander damage. And you don't need an infinite amount of life for it to be problematic; gaining multiple hundreds of life is fairly trivial to do and will effectively stop most decks from being able to kill you. Second, I think you're blowing the tracking problem waaay out of proportion. In my opinion, one of the best things about Commander Damage is that you don't actually have to track it. You have a very good idea of whether commander damage is likely to be relevant to your game. If your commander's Yuriko, Henzie, Giada, or any of the others you mentioned, *you can just not track commander damage*. You know your angel army is going to get way too big way too fast for your 2/2 commander to hit someone 11 times. As for the physical difficulty of tracking, it's not like you have to actively track that everyone is at 0 commander damage from turn 1. You haven't started tracking it yet, so they're at 0. If they've been hit, and you think it will be relevant, you start tracking it. And despite your insistence that a digital tracker is necessary, many Magic players carry the perfect tool for tracking commander damage: spindown dice. It only goes to 20, sure, but once you're out of faces on the die, they've died to your commander.
The thing is, in other formats forcusing on lifegain is also considered bad, or at least easily disrupted. This doesn't mean lifegain strategies don't exist, but it's always a secondary effect for a deck, rather than the primary strategy. Maybe you're building up life to activate Aetherflux Reservoir, or you're gaining life from Blood Artist triggers, or you trigger another effect that leads to your wincon when you gain life like putting a +1/+1 on an Ajani's Pridemate. Usually the counter to lifegain is to just rush them down before they gain life, and with Commander being a multiplayer format, it's not hard at all for your three opponents to collectively deal 40 damage to you before you've gained hundreds of life. trust me, as a person who loves Lifegain in most formats, people will not let you gain life as easily if they don't plan on just winning through Commander damage anyways.
@@piemaniac9410 I have a couple of lifegain decks in my local meta. I haven't personally run a lifegain deck in years, but there are some quite powerful ones that I regularly play against. One person runs a Darien, King of Kjeldor pillowfort deck where he gains a bunch of life to kind of goad people into trying to take his life total down which results in him just making more soldiers. Another person runs Karlov of the Ghost Council, a deck that's filled with a bunch of lifegain engines to make him a massive creature that he can beat you over the face with. Both of these decks lean heavily into lifegain as a key part of their strategy and consistently gain hundreds of life as a result. They both set up quickly enough that simply rushing them down doesn't make sense. Commander isn't a format where we rush people down. It's customary, if incorrect, to let people do their thing a bit before going in for the kill. The format is built around value engines and slow, midrangey games where lifegain *is* a powerful strategy.
Oh wow, this video randomly popped up on my recommended page. Back in the day I remember you getting me into dota and your dark souls playthrough got me playing souls likes. It's good to see you still around.
Magic doesn't only have "one bar" you also have poison counters, you also have to keep tabs of energy counters, rad counters, experience counters, you have to count storm counter every turn, delirium, threshhold and much more for each player, but those only matter when they are played. Commander damage is the same way, you might have 36 imaginary bars of commander damage but that matters only if that hypothetical really happens, but it doesn't.
This not to mention grave order, because technically speaking for some eternal formats you can't legally change the other of your grave, because of how some cards interact with it.
@@Machiroable ... for all Magic formats. It's always been that way, you never could change the graveyard order. Same as the library. Unless a game mechanic changes your deck (or graveyard) you have to keep it in the order it is.
Amusingly, this video just makes me want a Commander Damage tracker similar to the paper life trackers that often come with the precons. Just a piece of cardboard with four damage wheels that go from 0 to 21, so you can track how much your commander has dealt to each player.
Maybe you could have a variation of the third suggestion, where every time a commander attacks a player, they take an additional ~5 damage. This is simpler than the "damage dealt again after attack", and also doesn't make commanders with high attack gain an inflated bonus compared to ones with low attack.
5:35 the professors tolarian community college takes about a similar mechanic that’s dumb “venturing into the dungeon” if you get a card that says that and you dont have the dungeon token the ability does nothing. Even if you memorize the ability others have to take your word for it
Seeing you in the MTG Community wasn't something I had expected to see this year. I watched you a lot back when I was playing Dota! I felt an insane amount of nostalgia watching this video
The only idea I have for commander damage would be instead of tracking it for each player, each player tracks how much combat damage their commander has dealt to other players (reduces complexity a notable amount). Then, when a player reaches a damage threshold (ex: 40 commander damage), their commander card has player deathtouch. While this would help incentivize voltron players to not focus down one player, I doubt it's a realistic solution.
The difference between 20 and 21 commander damage as a requirement is pretty big in my opinion. Giving a 5 power commander double strike + doubling their power is surprisingly easy. E.g. Kalamax and only one power doubling spell effect = game over for one player without a blocker at 20 commander damage. I don't think commander damage should be any easier, even if it's not really competitive at higher power tables. "it's not being played in cEDH" isn't really an indikator of fun & fairness for casual tables.
To understand what they were thinking, You should Speak with Johnnie Knapp (Arcades Sabbath), David Phifer (Chromium), Adam Staley (Nicol Bolas, and the progenitor of the format), Steve Dixon (Vaevictis Asmati), and Ariel Jones (Palladia Mors). They were the original 5. They introduced EDH to Sheldon, who made changes to it as he popularized it amongst the judge community.
I've shifted philosophy on Voltron approaches from frontloading stacking several spells and abilities onto the commander and more resource generation. Building up a solid foundation for which the commander can stand on and deal immediate lethal damage to one player from nowhere is the goal. This can remove the leading player and positions you to deal with the two stragglers who are unlikely to have nearly the same board state as you.
I started playing Commander in 2016. (I have played MTG for about 25 years) So I STARTED with a set of 5 planeswalker commanders, and in my pod that was all we had. So commander damage was not even a possibility. When we started using creature commanders and needed to track commander damage we just didn't. We didn't really notice much of an impact at all. Our rule is basically: We won't track your commander damage for you. If you want to win with commander damage, you need to keep track of it
>Suggestion 1 You've reinvented infect and all the problems that come with it. >Suggestion 2 In a regular game if I am three damage away from killing someone through the commander damage I have one player that I need to be on guard from. With this rule being three damage away from winning means I will get the attention of the entire table. If I do this early I end up in the precise "sitting out half of the game" scenario you've mentioned earlier. >Suggestion 3 So now I just need to play Wound Reflection effects and my commander knocks out people once I pump it to mere 10 power (10 regular damage, 10 "commander" damage, Wound Reflection procs at the end of the turn for 20 and kills the player). In regular game the player would get 20 damage and only 10 of that would count towards the commander damage kill, meaning I would have to land two more hits or find a way to pump my commander further. There's plenty of other ridiculous scenarios that arise with this design, like being able to deal 60 damage in a single turn with just Karlach, Fury of Avernus and Two-Handed Axe (Karlach attacks, Axe makes it 10 damage, commander damage procs for additional 10, second combat Axe pumps Karlach to 20 power, commander damage procs for another 20). I guess I'll just bring three more d20s with me or something.
@@XenithShadow the problem is not infect being playable or unplayable, the problem is "it create bad gameplay". Infect in casual commander is a bad strategy to win. Kinda like voltron, (or other aggro strategy for the matter) you can usualy knock one player before being beaten down to submission by a midrange vallue engine.
i think it's fine as is, commander damage makes it so every one has a way too kill someone no matter what such as mono green stompy vs mono white lifegain if white has 1mil life then the green player has no way to defeat that person the commander damage base feels more like a ground rule where you can where every one has a win con when all else fails even if its wacking someone with sythis 21 times though damage doublers/triplers should not work in my opinion they should deal their base power as pure damage for example, anything over that is just extra damage
Personally, I disagree. As a player coming from "classic" constructed formats, some playstyles just have hard counters and you learn to either alter your deck or accept you'll have bad matchups. Not every deck necessarily has a fair shot against every other deck. Go wide strategies get shut down by cards like Propaganda or Sphere of Safety, Tron doesn't fare well against land hate like Blood Moon or Harbinger of the Seas, and Lifegain gets entirely disabled for the rest of the game against Stigma Lasher or Screaming Nemesis (and plenty of hate cards that either temporarily disable lifegain or even reverse lifegain into damage). Green is actually particularly poised to take down mono-white lifegain. Toxic/Infect/Proliferate is not uncommon for green, and you even got cards like Triumph of the Hordes which gives all your creatures both Infect and Trample (an absolutely brutal combo for green stompy, since now only 10 unblocked damage across your entire board is lethal.) These hold true for Commander as they do for Modern and other 60 card formats, so it's more the nature of the (meta)game than it is an issue with any one format.
I don't understand how commander increase the work load and tools needed to play. When you can easily write this down on a piece of paper. Are we above writing things down. Then you can noncombat commander damage. It's just unfortunately like limited to mainly one color. Then you can community wise affect commander damage, but again with mainly a few strats. I don't see commander damage as specifically unfun for one player. Cause many other strategies do the same thing(burn, discard, mill, poison counter, curses,etc). I feel this statement mainly comes from value based players. Which I don't blame them cause wizards keeps printing out powerful value cards instead focusing on combat based strategy. I like commander damage cause I tend to build combat based decks. Which gives me another clock to fight with instead of just one. Also what are the standard win conditions of commandeer?.Cause to your point it's mainly combo. Now that doesn't mean there isn't room to change stuff, but I get tired of hearing how it's no important, but people don't like people winning with it too soon.
Everthing you add in rules increases complexity. Now it is argued that the complexity is not worth the effort, and same goals can be achieved with less of it.
@lompeluiten That is true, but that doesn't mean we have to lower it to the lowest common denominator. Again how is keeping track of numbers overly complex and we have to use digital tools? That's why I said we could write it down. That's we used to do. I never had dice to like my mid 20s when I played any form of magic.
@@yellowbelt As he said in the video: Leave the complexity to the cards interaction. This gives already a awfull lot to keep track of in an 4 player game. Trim the fat with comander damage. Or you can play one of the overly complex paradox games xD
@lompeluiten I understand why he said, I just don't agree. We are literally just counting up. It can go lower, only up. Then the commander's that don't attack, to his point what does it matter? But what about the ones that do? That's my biggest thing. I attack with my commanders cause lower life can matter. On top of the chance ofe just knocking someone out who loses track of the damage.
The reason commander damage exists is because of its origing as EDH. Every elder dragon was a 7/7. The rule came about because hitting an opponent 3 time with your elder dragon; your commander; would count as a win
While I get the logic behind the video, I think you're not thinking about the overall implications of commander damage. Commander damage is another source of politicking. You could deal enough damage to a player so you can threaten a kill with the next swing and force a deal, or you could make a deal to not remove a commander so they don't swing at you, buff another commander intentionally so they kill other players, etc. It's also another strategy to have as a backup, and can be surprisingly effective in a non-voltron strategy for commanders like Grimgrin, Grismold, Korvold, etc. A lot of people claim it doesn't come up often in their playgroup, but if they're straight up ignoring it then of course it wouldn't come up. I've seen 2/3 power commanders kill with commander damage before because the game dragged that long. Especially in situations with a stax deck commander damage is very relevant. As for it requiring you to target one player, I'm still not sure why that's an issue. Spreading damage around the table is the reason why commander games take so long, and ignoring threat assessment is partially why games often end abruptly from someone just comboing off after setting up their board and hand. It sucks to get eliminated early, but that's something you need to expect when playing a multiplayer format.
Commander Damage is mainly intended to 1) makes commander special and 2) gives the ability to defeat enemies that may have a ridiculous amount of HP (which does happen fairly often enough to be a valid issue). That said, I 100% agree it's a bad system that needs to be updated with one of the suggestions provided here
Spending 5 whole minutes on something solved by pen and paper (and the various other suggestions in the comments) at the beginning of the video is not convincing me so far Edit: boy do we have comments This continues throughout the rest of the video. Largely complaining about things that aren't actual problems. If i were to summarize: Commander damage is difficult to track and 21 is a weird number. Difficult to track is... sort of understandable. partner commanders are annoying. But most of the time when commander damage isn't going to matter, you don't have to track it. And its not even that big a deal to track to begin with UNLESS you're doing fiddly dice things like in your example. The whole targeting a player because you have commander damage on them at the expense of the boardstate is extremely contrived. Sure there's a mechanic there that lets you kill the person that you have commander damage on, and you can use that to kill them, but saying you have to kill that person because the mechanic exists doesn't make any sense. And regardless, ignoring the boardstate to exploit a rule is a tactical choice. In the contrived example, that player probably has reasons for ignoring the boardstate beyond "commander damage exists". On "Wasting commander damage" because you did too much damage with the rest of the deck - what? your commander did damage... and it added up to lethal. you did commander damage. Some of that damage counts towards a different win condition but you didn't waste any of the damage. If you want all your lifebars to deplete at the same time or something that's on you. The entire "Lifegain isn't overpowered" section - I'm going to summarize this as "lifegain isn't lifegain it's combo and you should rule 0 if combos are ok" - I'm gonna reword that as "Commander damage solves a problem that isn't a problem because you should rule 0 it", which just... is kinda useless. We had this discussion at large with the recent banlist update. You can't just point to rule 0 and say it solves the problem, there has to be a baseline expectation for what people should expect from a game. you can rule 0 to your hearts content with your own consistent playgroups.
On "potential solutions" - Combined commander damage - 1, what is the point of having another lifebar that's the same value as the other lifebar? 2 - this has deckbuilding implications. Now there's a whole new gamespace where I have the opportunity to capitalize on my opponents doing commander damage to my other opponents. This adds a wishywashy kind of "are we all on the same gameplan" dynamic to commander damage at large, while screwing the lone voltron guy by making his job way, way harder. If the goal was to reduce complexity, this doesn't do that. I would also find it enraging to die to someone's 2/2 commander after taking 20 something from someone elses commander. Commander damage as a win condition - I get the fantasy of "oooh this will create fun little I'll save you to save myself moments", but it opens up so, so many shitty play patterns. Say someone's missing land drops. Or got really screwed by a boardwipe, or any number of things that sets a player behind. The tactically correct thing to do is aim your commander at that person so you can avoid all the defenses the actual threat put up. Someone else failed to perform, therefore I lose. Maybe I didn't defend them well enough but since when was defending my opponents part of the gameplan? I've saved plenty of my opponents because i need them against the actual threat. this makes me lose unless I save my opponent. I do not think this is an improvement. Doubling commander damage - This increases 1shot potential a thousand-fold. It completely changes the game to be oriented around commander damage. Double strike on your commander is a native 4x multiplier. It gives a whole new weight to aggressive commanders and combat tricks and Rogue's Passage and the like. Voja, jaws of the conclave will probably do your entire lifetotal in 2 bites, plus whatever the rest of the deck is doing. This probably helps against lifegain decks but completely changes the math for every other deck. This suggestion is a total redesign of the format to be more of a Commander oriented brawl. An interesting idea but it would completely change the relative weights of certain strategies in both deckbuilding and playing, which I'd wager are not currently considered in most people's deck design at this time. I'll stop there. Overall, disappointed. I thought the topic would be interesting but did not find the content compelling.
In my playgroup everyone has to keep track of the commander damage their commander does. If you don't keep track it's considered zero, or the last known value. You want to win with it, so you are responsible to keep track of it. But I haven't seen more than 2 commanders to need to keep track of the Commander damage at a table and against a pillow fort generating a shit ton of life a turn, Commander Damage is a way to get out of the misery.
My solution would have also somewhat helped with random blightsteel colususes. You increase the poison counters need to kill to 20 and all commanders gain "etali primal sickness's static ability of giving poison counters based on the combat damage they deal" The pooled commander damage proposal you gave would also be intresting. I didn't realise partner damage from commanders was tracked seperately, i assumed it was pooled damage from "commanders" owned by each of the 4 players.
you make a compelling argument, Baumi. Proud of your work, and I hope the MTG audience finds your work quickly and gets involved with the channel. Keep up the great work!
In my experience cmd dmg is the only tool to deal with decks that gain life. They usually get SO much hp that it's impossible to win. Faster than you can deal damage. then what? Game takes forever? Sure you have combos or infect or stuff like that. Not every deck has those tools tho. Every deck has a commander. Case solved. Cmd dmg makes so the meta isn't "gain life win all games".
I had a 1v1 (duel) deck that consistently won with commander damage. shu yun. it hits you once, gets buffed instant speed before damage aplies and kills you in one hit.
I completely disagree with some of your statements tho. In a multiplayer game it's often more strategic to spread commander damage and not focus one player. Why attract so much hate and make an enemy on the table if there are still so many players alive? You're just gonna get yourself killed, gotta spread the love. When people start dying, than the bits of commander damage you preemptively applied to everyone will come to hand and might give you the win.
One situation that happened a few times to me, also worth mentioning, is when someone at the table was stupidly strong and clearly winning the game, tons of hp, but some other player was the only one capable of dealing with him because of commander damage. This last player wasn't strong at all, in fact he would be out of the game if not for this fact. Everyone else was trying to keep him alive and help him get rid of the giant player, so they had a shot of winning themselves. These kind of situations where everyone is holding a gun to each other's faces and it's a diplomatic dilemma are my favorite!
also, baumi, if you happened to read this far... I have a closed group that plays together for many years and we've experimented a lot. we have our own formats we created to fit any number of players. there's 1v1v1, or mesinho, "small table", there's the traditional 1v1v1v1, meso = "table", and the mesão with 5. right. 5 sucks cuz it takes forever. THEN, there's 2v2v2 for 6 players or 2v2v2v2 for 8. we go for 60hp and 31 cmd dmg, everything is +50% (infect goes to 15 and so on). Effects like extra turns don't work for your partner. Its basically two headed giant rules, rebalanced. THEN, and this is my favorite... we have ROYALE. 9 players. 3 trios. one is elected king, both others are towers. towers are basically playing 1v1 with the adjacent enemy tower, except their kings count as partners to them and can block or attack with them. Once you kill a tower, you can access the king and attack him. king dies, trio is defeated. kings have 60hp, towers 40. Direct damage is OK and self-winning combos only work for kings (like lab maniac, although we've never had that happen fortunately). It's pretty fucking good, just for fun ofc... but you should try it! we typically do it on birthdays, cuz that's when there's a ton of people present and everyone is willing to play. we also tried a 2v2 best of 3 with banning and picking decks, like dota! each player has to put 3 or 4 decks on the table and there's a drafting phase before each match. this one didn't go far though, people didn't like it as much as I did 😅
I agree with all your points against commander damage! I have always had problems with commander damage. Just as you said in the end of the video, I prefer to just turn it off. It really wasn't solving any problems, but caused many problems. As you said, lifegain decks are not a problem; poison and milling and "I win/You Lose" cards address that already. And heck, once I stop your lifegain and gain board position, I will eventually win with a massive army. And in many cases I can grow an army faster than you can gain life. The only real problem is infinite combos, and maybe stax, and commander damage doesn't address those. Also, turning off commander damage didn't seem to slow down Voltron decks too much (maybe 1 turn slower?). Also, the Voltron deck was able to very effectively voltron support creatures when their commander was too expensive and still pull off the win. And they felt more comfortable spreading the damage around instead of popping off players too early. Which can eliminate the problem you mentioned of targeted social confrontations. Also, Voltron + Poison is already a problem.... Voltron + Poison + Commander Damage... even more so. I also don't like any game mechanics that don't have a counter. For instance, another reason that I don't like commander damage is because once you receive commander damage, you can't heal from it. I don't like poison counters for the same reason. Excepting leeches, you can't get rid of them. Also, I think the poison count should be raised to 20 in commander. Poison was made for regular magic games and 10 seemed intuitive but it in commander.. its not. I also don't like Emblems for the same reason, you can't get rid of them. I don't really have a problem with "Daybound/Nightbound" except that you have to constantly keep track of it once it starts. You can't get rid of it when it doesn't mean anything, so that's also annoying. "Monarch" and "Initiative" also can't be removed from the game. But you can easily remove it from a player, which is about just as good. So no real functional issues there. PT
My LGS actually just discards the rule usually, which honestly makes for less complexity than there needs to be. The only detriment of not having Commander Damage however, is that if a Lifegain deck really cooks off, it's very difficult to overcome. But usually we focus on the guy who's doing that anyways, so it's only really an issue if the deck can gain more life than we can dish out damage. Sometimes people agree on having Commander Damage though. Depends on if they feel like it or not, ultimately.
The voltron cope is so wild to me. "You know this strategy that has a linear play pattern, isn't particularly strong, AND that people complain about despite it being somewhat weak? Without commander damage we would lose it!" I like piling equipment on a Rafiq as much as the next guy, but if I wanted to play a serious aggro strategy I'd play Jetmir or Winota.
Maybe I'm in the minority here, but I actually really like how "parsitic" commander damage is. Voltron is my favorite strategy and I have over 10 voltron decks. I don't know whether this would make me more or less justified in having an opinion on this topic, but I would still like to give my 2 cents. Keep in mind that my playgroup plays almost no combo's (which makes sense, if combo's are a thing you are not in a meta where commander damage matters) The reason why I like the parasticness of voltron is that it really makes voltron a strategy that you have to commit to. In your third proposal commanders like korvold, Fae-Cursed King would become crazy annoying to deal with, since it would facilitate killing players with korvold by itself, no synergy necessary. I like that commander damage doesn't matter in most games, it only matters when you specifically build around it. You can build korvold as a voltron commander, but you would have to make compromises elsewhere. In this way it is similar to something like mill In your first I feel like you would change the game for voltron players too much in my opninion. If there is only one voltron player in the game, suddenly you have to deal 30 damage more to win the game, which is already quite hard with a voltron deck, since you sort of have a target on your back from the get go. If there are 2 voltron players at the table, the other players are suddenly in a major disadvantage, they will likely just die as the voltron player have little incentive to attack each other (if they attack each other they have to deal 30 damage with their commander while if they attack other players they would on average only have to deal 15). And the 4th player to join a table with 3 voltron decks... yeah not a great experience I presume. As it happens I play quite a bit of star which comes in handy when discussing your second argument. Star is a really fun format, but it is not for everyone. Why is it not for everyone? Because a lot of players hate it when they lose to something without being able to do anything about it. There have been so many games in star where you lose because your enemy gets eliminated and it leads to genuine feel bad moments for some players that they did not get to block, did not get to interact with your win. This would create the same feel bad moments that star does in my opinion. It would also remove the political aspect of voltron. Speaking about politics, I feel like this is where a lot of voltrons strength comes from. How I usually operate my voltron decks is that I go really aggressive early spreading the damage around. Unlike what you say in your video, it is really strong to spread it around, because it leaves everyone on death's door. At least in my playgroup when I'm playing a voltron deck, people actually keep their value engines in hand, afraid that I might kill them. You create a sort of standstill in which nobody wants to do anything in fear of retaliation from the voltron player from seeming ahead. My decks also don't really draw any hate because people know that if they were killed, it was because they were ahead. People who try to win usually do so by removing my commander, which I pack protection from of course. My decks even have high winrates with this tactic as you always eliminate the strongest player while not even being behind the others because you already have commander damage on them. As a voltron player you have to surprise people, otherwise you are never winning, it is part of the strategy. If you rush everyone down 1 by 1 no one will be surprised by your win
My response to the point you brought up regarding Partner commanders is, "I agree with you, but Partner was not a well-designed mechanic, and people should be using Backgrounds from Battle for Baldur's Gate instead. Partner was a mistake. Backgrounds were a better version of that same idea." 😅
Me and my friends all agreed that commander damage is now just 20 damage flat from all commanders on the table. If you get hit for a total of 20 life from all the commanders on the table you lose.
1. Life gain *not* being an issue may simply be the result of a chicken/egg scenario. Life gain decks have NOT been prominent, possibly BECAUSE of the Commander damage rule. Perhaps the rule, itself, has dissuaded players from going down this path in the first place. We may be unable see how problematic it might have become, simply because the issue has been stopped dead in its tracks. 2. In a multiplayer format, having one person sitting there gaining life and not bothering anyone else would cause the entire game to be a battle of attrition, where the other 3 players would weaken each other, and the person with the massive life pool at the end would just win against his weakened final opponent. 3. Infinite Combos are, in general, much more difficult to pull off than achieving "massive life gain." The limit of 1 copy of a card per deck amongst 100 cards makes combos more difficult to pull off.
Good video Baumi! I was pretty skeptical, me and my friends haven't had much issue with commander damage (using lifetap app) and with the decks we use it always felt like a valid concern to track and people occasionally lost to it (but not too often). However your third solution sounded pretty solid, a good fix to your criticisms. Good video.
Nothing wrong with commander damage, since it’s one of the harder ways to win, unless you go infinite but then again basically ANYTHING can go infinite
I like it more the second suggestion because it can improve the ways that social interactions occur in the table. I really think that commander have some oddities derived from an adaptation of a 2 players game for a 4+ players game and rules to enrich the ways that players can interact with it other that were restricted by the original format of MTG are golden for this format. As an example, I was very frustrated when they implemented the battle cards, because the way they were designed for a two players game greatly restricted their potential for formats like commander. I really think that beating a battle (siege) card should have global consequences that would be equal but asimetric in the board (like buff to creatures, board wipes of some type of card, one free spell from hand), in a way that some players would benefit from it and others not in a way that it could estimulate aliances for attacking or defending some sieges.
What about commander damage doesn't need to be Combat Damage anymore ? As long as you lose life because of the commander, it works for commander damage.
I've been playing 20 life games with my friends with no commander damage. It has been a great way to play the game as it makes more strategies viable while also not hurting Voltron as they benefit from opponents hitting each other. Life is a resource and in 40 life commander players can just absorb damage before needing to act. 20 life games are faster and raise the stakes from the beginning.
I always felt frustrated with the commander damage rule. Not enough to complain, but it was annoying to keep track of to the point where I just didn't unless someone mentioned it or someone started gaining infinite life.
The most powerful aspect of Commander is "Rule Zero". One rule we often implement is that "Commander is a four player game." There is one winner and three losers. There is no second place. One PK wins the game. Start a new game. This allows the game to be determined by the weakest deck/player/shuffle instead of the strongest. The biggest threat at the table is ANY player who can take out the weakest player first. In that game, a full 21 point Commander Damage just starts a new game for all four players. Another play style is that Commander Damage only applies when the target player has 30 points or less remaining. My Vampire deck often affords me 100+ points at various times in a given game. If I'm sitting on 116 points, I refuse to bow down to a meager 21 point hit.
Rule 0 aside, you could just use removal or plan your blocks to avoid being hit by a Cmd. Cmd damage was specificaly designed to keep lifegain in check. You can rule 0 this out, but it makes you a less skilled player overall.
My suggestion would be to raise the poison threshold to 20 to match the "double normal amount" that life gets. Then make commanders give an equal amount of poison counters whenever they deal combat damage a player. It maintains the "infinite life protection" aspect. It consolidates tracking not just across different players, but also with poison counters. Instead of having four alternate life totals that may or may not need to be tracked each game (poison plus each individual enemy commander), we just have one alternate life total that covers all of them, and thus we can be much more confident in needing to track. I think the silent disgust people get from doing the admin of tracking commander damage in 10 games where it does not matter is real, and even just having them be more confident that it matters is an improvement in and of itself. It fixes the complaint some people have about the poison amount not making sense. It makes poison a little less parasitic as other players always have at least one way to team up with you against an archenemy. Opens up the hot new Leeches tech for saving yourself from death by Commander Damage 😆
@@daltronius Seriously? 5 mana, once per turn cycle, deal 1 damage to your opponents that can not be healed. That's hardly troublesome. Maybe it would be good enough to be a mildly homogenizing factor in deck design, but that is not a new problem in commander, and this would hardly be the worst example (command tower, arcane signet, etc).
@eepopgames2741 but why change something that isnt actually broken to a system that adds homogeny for no reason. If u honestly cant use a d20 to track mander damage, how are u gonna track poison damage.
@@daltronius If you hate the idea of changing the commander damage rule, this may not be the video for you. I am not beating any drum that it "HAS TO CHANGE". But we're here on a video discussing how the current rule has some issues, and possibilities to find something better. There is no need to be defensive at speculative design talk. Also, it is not a single d20. It is a d20 for each opponent, and a d10 for poison. Then the 2d20 or d100 you are using for your own main life total. How many dice do you want to be using here? Its not a problem of capacity to track these things, and suggesting it is makes your comment seem more aggressive than it needs to be. But how many times do you want to track 3 different commander damage amounts and poison only for them to no actually matter over the course of a game? If you track all those numbers for 10 games and it never has an effect, you feel like its pointless busywork. Then you all agree to ignore it. And you realize halfway through game 11 that, oh wait, it probably would have mattered in this game but we have not been tracking it. Should we grind the game to a halt to try to retroactively recreate what the totals would be?
@@eepopgames2741 then by the idea here, we should maybe remove or change poison, by the very same token of c damage "not mattering" as being a reason, poison also doesnt always kill, so why is it always commander damage. Also this video itself uses the difficulty to track as a reason to change, so u dislike me bringing it up, take it up with them. And dont even get me started on the "how many dice are supposed to be using" its mtg, we use dice for litterally everything, life totals, loyalty counters, charge counters, basically any kind of counter, sometimes to track how many of a thing we have, are you telling me that you draw the line at c damage.
Commander damage is DEFINITELY necessary. Do you know how many games ive seen someone gain basically infinite life? I think we should be able to interact with it more than literally none at all.
I see a lot of problems with the second suggested solution. Mainly the fact that other players can lose the game because another player was unable to block. It removes player agency in a really negative way. Because if I die from being attacked, then that is completely fair because I was unable to play well enough to protect myself. But with this rule, I could die despite investing really hard in strong defenses, just because another player outside of my control did not have equally good defenses. I can also see it encouraging other negative play patterns. For example you would be more incentivized to play global fog-effects rather than protection for yourself specifically. You would be encouraged to play things that protects not only you, but everyone else as well just so you don't lose by proxy, and could easily lead to games becoming a slog fest
I'm going to counter your digital complexity point: You can still track commander damage with a pen and a piece of paper in the middle of the table. When the commander damage is declared, everyone gets to see it get written down, and then any cheating is immediately called out. Since pen+paper is a legal and viable option for regular play, it is a viable option for commander damage. I do think that Commander Damage is necessary for the format. I think it could be fixed by combining it into a single pool and doing something like 50 Life/30 Commander Damage - but I do like the wincon idea. From a gameplay perspective, commanders need more than just color identity and the command zone rulings to be more than just a glorified color picker. There should be a reason to build around the Ruhans and Urils of the world. On top of that, there should be a viable way to keep turbo lifegain decks from being overly oppressive. It wouldn't be fun to be chipping for 1-2 every turn as the lifegain player gains a lot more than that. What I've noticed is that part of the problem with Commander is that combat isn't incentivized enough, especially Commander Damage. You're incentivized to wait until you have the ability to beat everyone. If you can't fully wipe out everyone, you're the target and probably losing to a team up. On top of that, it socially feels "bad" to attack people early - they haven't done anything yet, they're just ramping, they have no board, etc. That's true to an extent, if someone legitimately isn't doing much/anything, then you should feel a bit bad about attacking...but not if they are "just ramping" or "don't have any creatures".
21 is indeed 7x3, but it is also half + 1 I get that there is a bit of a... clerical burden, but other than combining partners into a single number, there's not a whole lot that can reasonably be done without it feeling bad Infinite life isn't really played all that much *because* commander damage exists. If you remove the built-in answer almost every deck has, those'll start popping up and force every deck to have an answer. Scoring points against everyone toward a goal to win is VERY interesting, but it encourages picking on the weakest player specifically, basically removing the need for picking priority targets for voltron If we want to get rid of Commander Damage, we need a non-trash mana rock or land that you can pay mana into and sacrifice (or exile) to reset an opponent's life total to starting - and I feel like Wizards needs to stop making commander cards, so... How about a new rule entirely where it says if a player lost 80 or more life between his or her own turns (not including his or her own turn), that player loses? This allows lifegain to still matter, but it gives recourse to decks that might not be able to play a combo to counter infinite life. Yes, it's a number to track, but almost never because 80 life lost is already lethal in 99% of situations - so it'll be fairly obvious when it matters. You could even say Commanders count 3x toward that number, giving voltron decks a realistic goal of 27 (assuming no other life is lost)
I bristled a bit at the assumption that infinite combos are "obviously" something you would discuss pre-game. Infinite combos exist at all power levels. I have never seen the need to ask about them beforehand. Hell, we've had a few precons with infinites included
Commander damage idea, havent finished the video yet so dont scold me if he gives an idea like this, one commander must deal combat damage to a given player on a number of separate turns, maybe around 5 turns. Doesnt matter how much damage. multiple instances of damage wouldnt count as more than 1 instance of commander damage on a turn, this would prevent double strike or multiple combats from becoming too strong for this idea. Also could throw in a rule where commander damage only counts the first instance of damage a commander deals to any player, to stop multiple combats from allowing a player to attack each opponent.
I completely agree, commander damage sucks as it is currently implemented, and I think your suggestions would be a big improvement, a rework is definitely in order, or just removing the mechanic completely.
I don't see any problems besides people not having alternative win-cons in their decks. I like to try to have 3 different ways to win in a deck, ex: Combo, commander damage, token swarm, mill, etc... Dev lens: Commander damage is in the game to help balance stuff like life gain decks. I don't get suggestion 3: When a commander does damage the damage is taken from your life total and is counted toward commander damage, that is normal, you take damage either way. Are you suggesting that commanders do damage but it doesn't affect your life total? I use spin downs to keep track of commander damage it isn't hard what is hard is keeping track of all the interactions from the combinations of cards on the tables.
i despise life gain (period). it doesnt matter whether you gain infinite or have >40, if the pod happens to wanna play decks that cannot deal commander damage or become absolutely massive, it is absolutely miserable to play against life gain. none of my decks ever seek to kill by commander damage and most cannot ever even do that, i would much rather have a set limit to max hp than commander damage... being physically forced to always keep the white player in check just because a lot of white cards happen to gain tons of life as a side effect makes me ragingly miserable. even if every color could do this reasonably well including in creative decks that dont simply run all kindsa staples but try to stay on a theme or budget, i would despise it as it would drag games out forever. absolutely the worst mechanic in magic (not just commander), by a long shot - to me, anyway.
I agree that from a design perspective, commander dmg is clunky and unnecessarily complicated. That said, in practice, as you rarely see cmdr dmg being a goal for a deck, you can normally ignore this rule other alternatives are using counters for each commander, if you get hit in combat by it, then you get a counter, get 3 of them and you die, although that would make voltron decks less special (which is bad imo) for your solutions, I don't really like any of them, they come with drawbacks too big to bear imo, shared damage pool between the cmdrs is bad for an entire archetype, you rarely see cmdr dmg being a thing, now you killed it with that change. too low, and it's game breaking, too big and it's not a thing anymore cmdr deal double combat damage has too many interactions with other cards that allow 1HKO situations. having a plater accumulate their cmdr dmg overall to win makes them a target (which means they get picked off early) or makes them target the weakest link (which knocks them out early) and is almost the same thing as before, but reversed to simplify partners, you could change the rule so cmdr dmg is tracked by owner of the card, so if you get 21 dmg from cmdrs owned by player Z, then you die, although that would mean you get the initial 5 life bars per player, and still, rarely cmdrs are focused on dealing combat dmg anyway
I find the lifegain arguments people make very unconvincing. At the extreme end, if someone can establish an infinite lifegain combo they could likely establish any number of other win conditions. In casual, outside of the outer edges of high-power, A+B combos are already considered a faux pas. Typically you see combos that require 3 or 4 specific pieces to be executed, which are insanely interactible. If someone gets you with a 4 card combo then yeah, you should lose if you don't have a way to deal with it. Someone going to a billion life still loses to any number of infinite combos, mill, infect, and other alt wincons which you'll have ample time to execute. Why gain infinite life with my 4 card combo (or A+B combo) when winning the game conclusively ends it? If someone is playing a strategy with lifegain as a pillar of it they're more interested in lifegain payoffs, and padding their life total is a benefit. Like every other strategy, dismantling their engines is the way to defeat them. Someone going to 80 life still dies without a board. When it comes to voltron and commander damage wins, I have a lot of voltron players in my local meta. This is anecdotal, but the amount of times that commander damage ended up not mattering anyway is substantial. Very often if they can do 21, they can do a lot more. But frankly, they often do much less since counting to 10 is easier than counting to 21. Infect is a factor. Whatever other arguments you may have - "the tracking isn't that bad" (as he mentioned, if you're ignoring a mechanic that is in play because it is unlikely to matter, it is that bad), "it comes from the Elder Dragons having 7 power" (that's not a mechanic, that is just self-referential trivia), or what have you - people still value lifelink despite the presence of commander damage. The relationship between lifegain and commander damage is far weaker than people seem to believe. I've gotten run over by Craterhoof and chipped out by Blood Artist more often than someone has domed me for 21 with a Slicer.
The problem that one player gets repeatedly attacked is something I have never seen. For non Voltron commanders we don't track it because It never becomes relevant and for Voltron commanders they usually deal (at least) 21 damage in one git, in case of my mono green omnath it deals more like 50+ in one hit.
Your change should come in tandem with a life total cap. That would devalue infinte lifegain, and by extension infinite damage combos. Otherwise voltron and aggro, that are already weak archetypes, would just fold to lame lifegain.
Is it really that many "Health Bars" as it where. As an outsider to MTG, I had the impression that you have only 2 Health Bars, The Regular 40 Life Pool and the Commander Damage Pool. I had no impression that you had other Commander Damage to track.
You gotta track 4 per player. So 5 numbers per player including life total. Technically 6 if you include infect in a game. So to play correct and abide by all the rules, you need to be tracking 24 numbers for a game of commander.
I think an important aspect you might be over looking is how sometimes you can feel cheated out of a game by commander damage. Ive had this experience before several times where a haste/flying commander just keeps coming back from board wipes and even with many stabilization tools there is no commander damage healing either. which also feels very awkward due to the very nature of normal healing existing. with double damage commanders these harder to stop commanders can still threaten you with lethal, but at least you can stop the bleeding to some extent. my group also doesnt typically have many if any healing focused decks and commander damage may be exactly why that is, so commander damage as it is feels like it is limiting our design choices as well. looking forward to trying to convince my group that that increasing commander damage is a good change for us to implement. as for the safety stop gap you implemented i believe it to be a good thing to leave in even though it adds complexity, but i do use a Gishath, Sun's Avatar deck so i may already be biased towards those decks preforming well.
Do you also feel cheated out of the game if someone uses poison counters? In my experience, it's virtually the same as commander damage in that there's rarely multiple people in the game playing towards the same goal (multiple people going for commander damage or multiple people going for poison). They're both essentially an alternative life total that only one player at the table is playing towards.
Do you feel cheated out of the game with the alternate wincon cards? They're much, much more egregious than commander damage - especially Maze's End, where it's socially unacceptable to destroy lands. What about infinite combos? That comes more out of nowhere than commander damage. The thing about the haste/flying commander consistently coming back is that the player running that commander is stuck using more and more resources to get back on track. There's eventually a point where they either can't recast the commander or it isn't worthwhile to do it and they need to find an alternate path. That's why I don't like the "I got cheated out of this" argument. If the commander is taking you out in one hit, you then need to question how it reached that point and what you can possibly do in the future to combat it.
He might have used bad wording. He gave an example of how to do it with out using electronics in the beginning. I think he just meant that its messy and at that point you might as well have electronics do it for you. They are so much easier than pen/paper or dice or whatever. Just one or two clicks on the smartphone, done. And everyone has a smartphone nowadays, not necessarily pen/paper.
@@GG-bi8tbyou're currently never safe to attack anybody because expending resources on one player is bad and puts you and that player at a disadvantage compared to the other two players. That combined with the high life total are the reasons commander is dominated by combo decks and even decks that win by combat are effectively just slower combo decks because organically dealing 40, or more accurately, 120, is just too much. 20 life might not be the answer but 40 life definitely encourages players to play passively unless they can instantly win in one turn with a combo as it is.
I am pleasantly surprised with suggestions 2 and 3. I actually would be most inclined to try suggestion 2 though where to set the damage limit at might be really tricky. I think total combat damage done by a commander might be easier to find the right number for, and it would set a clock on max game length instead of becoming a chump blocker fest.
Consider how suggestion 2 encourages the voltron player to beat up the mana screwed player. Sure the other players could help (if they drew interaction), but it would be easier for them to use use player removal and kill the mana screwed player to stop the involuntary feeding. This exacerbates the "eliminate one player early" problem and makes it worse by having it be the player in the weakest position.
@@Ent229 Hence another reason why I threw out the idea of total combat damage done by a commander. Doesn't matter as much if it is hitting face vs hitting bodies. Hitting the player with bigger creatures is actually better as long as your commander will survive. It still punishes a completely creature empty board, but at that point they deserve it.
A life gain deck can literally NOT win by just gaining life. There isn't a life point you hit and then win. There are cards with win conditions that change that but all cards can be countered or removed in some way.
My playgroups always liked abiding by all of the rules, but we got so confused by commander damage, keeping track of 21 commander damage from each commander to each player, that is another 12 life totals to keep track of. There are other issues like commanders get targeted enough already and poison adding to the confusion too. But it's simple enough to ignore it.
Its not hard to track, when u take mander danage put a d20 out on the damage u take, and tick it up, once it would require a second dice ur dead, no 12 life totals flr memorization, just easily seen dice so everyone who wants to kno can tell
4:45. Here is the thing about life apps. The game is going thatvway on its own now. You are suppose to use the mtg life app in all tournaments as well. I use life apps even in modern or other formats because it is simpler than using dice or paper.
Option 3 kills cEDH meta, Naus decks like rog si lose half of what makes their decks playable because it will drastically diminish the resource of their life, it would also drastically buff commanders like Tivit. No one is gaining life in cEDH and commander damage is usually similarly negligible but taking double or losing your value engines sounds insane for cEDH.
I don't think it makes Tivit significantly better. Tivit is generally winning through infinite extra turns anyway, so having that be half as many attacks is just not that helpful. I do think it makes Turbo Naus decks, K'rrik, and other decks that heavily utilize their life total much much worse.
People sure are afraid of these pesky life gain decks that will just run rampant the moment that commander damage is gone.. As if half commanders arent tiny utility creatures that wont be dealing commander damage anyway. If people say its not worth tracking all the time, why the heck is it a core mechanic of the format?
Hi friends, I'm glad to see so many engaging with the topic. There's one point, however, that I see repeated often even though it's very flawed: it's the idea that you can always just ignore Commander Damage if it's unlikely to be relevant. I agree with this from a player perspective, I think many of us do exactly that. But if I'm thinking about it from a developer lens, then I find it a baffling argument. If I'm creating a game, why would I ever want a rule that most players choose to ignore a lot of the time? I want players to enjoy the rules of the game, not opt out of them. This point even coming up is a massive red flag for Commander Damage's current implementation.
so if i remember correct, Commander damage was created based on the following logic.
the format was created by judges to play during the breaks of tournaments and after, originally the only commanders allowed are the elder dragons they all have 7/7 the idea is is based on 3 strikes you are out, if a elder dragon hit you 3 times you take 21 damage so you die
this is accurate. I was just about to post the same thing. The original elder dragons from the Legend set.
I think you could still have Commander damage, but instead of it all being separate, have it all be a single pool. Each player starts with 40 life, and if at any point they have taken 30 or more damage from commanders, they lose the game. Increase it to 30 since now everyone is contributing to the same pool, and make it so that other players can interact with commander damage that you have dealt or taken.
Edit: I literally paused like half a second before you started your first suggestion, and seeing that we came up with the exact same thing makes me happy.
You could even add a rule that commanders ONLY deal commander damage to help simplicity.
I think the question is less if life gain is oppressive, and more if life gain slows the game down beyond any fun. In a low-medium power level group, any life gain deck playing in a game without commander damage will hold all the other players hostage, so it's either A: Everyone at the table brings alternate win-cons like infect or 'you win the game' cards, or B: Commanders are an alternate win condition baseline.
Definitely makes sense to have an alternate win con in a format with a central mechanic. I agree with Baumi that it could be much simpler though.
@ArdentMoogle on the one hand it's definitely annoying tracking everyone's commander damage, but I feel like any attempt to simplify it cheapens other mechanics of the format. Example, if commander damage is shared, then life gain decks are fairly pointless, as collectively the table only needs to hit you a few times to kill you and your gaining life doesn't actually do anything to prevent you from losing.
I definitely think commander damage is a bandage fix, but I think ripping the bandage off can do a lot of harm too.
ALL OF THAT SAID, I can and have played games where we throw caution and rules to the wind and see what happens, and in a more personal and friendly format like commander, it's super fun, and doing what the four people at your table want to do is always going to be the better option than rigidly following the rules. I mean there's a bunch of people in the comments right now saying that they have their own rules for commander damage and have fun with them. It's really not that serious a format outside of cedh and even then... lol. Just do what your group finds most fun
@@HeraldSchimdtt I mean if you're just playing in a "regular" commander game with "regular" commander decks while simply ignoring commander damage, you're obviously going to come to the conclusion that commander damage can go. If you're playing without a voltron deck or a lifegain deck, you aren't actually investigating the boundaries of the rule change.
Given how many cards out there double tokens or triple damage, I find it hard to believe any non-combo lifegain deck could survive against 3 other decks. If you eliminated your opponents and left yourself in a 1v1 with a lifegain deck, that's your fault.
@@Opaqu.e you know there are cards that lifegain on creature etb, lifegain on spell cast, or give your whole board lifelink, right? The opponents aren't the only players capable of doubling or tripling their strategy.
I think it is fine as is. You just don't track it unless your commander is trying and expecting to use it. My 2|2 commander does not track it. My 5|5 commander that attacks would track it and it gives some inevitability to their combat damage (like infect and mill give some inevitability) because you can't cure the commander damage.
Now to listen and review your suggestions:
1) Having all commanders contribute would require the threshold to be adjusted, but also make it much harder for Voltron decks. Since Voltron decks are the typical user, I would discourage this nerf. Aggro decks already have a hard time.
2) You do not want to have it track commander damage dealt to everyone as a single win condition. That encourages them to focus on the mana screwed weakest player. They would feed off that player until they died. Having it as a loss condition causes the Voltron to have reason to prioritize targeting the player that is their biggest threat rather than the player that is already struggling.
3) Commanders dealing double damage removes the inevitability that Voltron decks threatens. This will only come up with lifegain but is broader than solely lifegain decks. I would rather leave the inevitability in to help the Voltron decks. Also you should increase the starting life to 50 or something to compensate. The volume of hp is part of why we get to play the high CMC jank before the game ends.
Of the 3, your idea of doubled commander damage causes the least issues. I still think the current rules are better, as long as you don't waste time tracking commander damage for the commanders where it won't matter. So just require the commander to track the damage themselves. Problem drops from the hyperbolic 36 lifebars down to a mere 4 lifebars.
This is something I never hear other people talk about. *You can just not track commander damage*. You know your army of angels is going to get way too big way too fast for your 2/2 Giada to hit someone 11 times, so just don't track it. The onus of tracking commander damage always fall on the person controlling the commander anyway, and you know better than anyone if your commander damage will be relevant.
For example, I have a Kess deck that tracks commander damage because it includes extra turn spells. The deck is capable of taking something like 5 extra turns and Kess is a 3/4 flyer, so if I get in on someone twice before entering a loop of extra turns, I can kill them fairly easily and focus the rest of my spellslinging damage at the other players. But that's on *me*. It's not up to my opponents to track *my* commander damage. So if *you* don't want to track it, just don't.
Speaking of there are commanders you track commander damage for and those you don't, it is always funny seeing a player's reaction when after giving the 0/3 Tamiyo a small buff and hitting an opponent and telling them to track that one damage because this is a Tamiyo voltron deck.
I think my only issue with commanders dealing 2x damage is that it ends up with commanders getting targeted a lot more frequently, which hurts commander centric strategies even more. I can't currently think of a good solution to this though, or if it really needs to be fixed. But having a deck focusing on your commander, only for them to essentially never see play, doesn't sound all that fun. I'd have to try it out to know how it feels, but I think I prefer having commander damage being global but higher. 30 is probably the sweet spot. I don't think there's a worry for someone to get targeted any more than being low on life would cause either. If they take 10 damage from anything else and don't have lifegain, it's already negligible.
I've found the solution for commander damage is to just one shot a player. Build up resources and line up your damage and then when the pieces are lined up, BAM, player's dead and gone. Usually target a problem player or control.
So you want less incremental damage increases and more card draw and resource generation with a few explosive spells that ramp your commander's damage to 21+. Taking out a single player this way ensures you have resources left over to deal with the other two players, presuming that you took out the strongest, the other two will be easier pickings with your gathered resources.
Having some back up creatures and win cons is also good.
The format is called EDH, the commanders back then had to be the old elder dragons, commander damage in its first form was just hitting someone 3 times with your commander, later was changed to 21 combat damage, in reference to the 7 power of the elder dragons, needing to connect 3 times.
Thanks, I came here to say this!
Yup. Came here to say this and this is much more succinct than what I would have said. To clarify, EDH stands for Elder Dragon Highlander, and it's what the format was called when it was first created by fans. Originally, it was an extension of the casual format where your deck could only have one of each card in it which was nicknamed "highlander" by the fans--"There can be only one." Eventually the list of allowed "commanders" expanded from just the Elder Dragon Legends to any Legendary creature, and that's when the combat damage rule changed from "3 times" to "21 total damage." It wasn't until after a couple of years that the format grew so popular that Wizards started officially supporting it and renamed it "Commander."
so you watched the video too? neat
@@alicepbg2042 No, what happened was we all watched far enough in, about 4 minutes or so, for him to definitively state that 21 is a weird number and that he didn't know where it came from, at which point we paused to comment about it before resuming the video to then see that he answered his own question almost 20 minutes later.
So if you want to snipe at anyone maybe start with the poor script formatting from the video author?
@@JohnSmith-vk9ds they could have edited the comment or watched the entire video before commenting.
you deal with replies to comments you make. it's how it goes
I created a Karlach deck, with the Sword Coast background. With just the commander, the background that is also a commander, and anything that would give double strike, I could easilly deal 20 unblockable commander damage to a single opponent in one turn. The fact that it is 21 means that I would need that the deck does need that bit more creative effort, especially in being efficient to take out other players also quickly once they see the threat.
The fact that 21 is not easilly divisible is kind of perfect, it makes it just high enough that a 5 power commander will need nore effort. Even the 10 power commanders need to put just the bit more effort like an extra +1 in hitting twice.
I feel the suggestions just push voltron decks to be Infect or bust.
My table didn't realise it was meant to be tracked seperatly and I still dont think anyone has ever died to commander damage
I find it really weird u havent considered the easiest solution to the commander damage tracking issue. Since its 21, exaclty one higher than a d20, u just put a d20 when u take damage, and tick it up accordingly, and once u would need a second die, ur dead. No massive piles of die, health pool we need to know at all times, just a die that everyone can see at a glance
And easily get knocked over when the table accidently gets bumped. I hate using d20 to keep track of numbers, they tumble to easily. Its a problem with all dice, just worse the higher you go.
@PimpTrizkit-42 are u throwing a Party, none of the pods ive played in or play in the lgs i visit have that issue. And dice are used far and wide in this game on many gaming channels, and in many pods, im thinking its a your playgroup issue
@daltronius it's not an uncommon issue, actually. It's against tournament rules to track life with only dice because of the fact they can be nudged. You must use pen and paper in those environments.
You can use dice if you like but there's a lot of players that see the reasoning behind the tournament rules and prefer them even in casual games where they want things to run smoothly.
@@RedOphiuchus then use pen and paper if your playgroup bumps the table, or u could use lifetap, an app most people already use that tracks poison, damage, other types of counters and commander damage in easily viewed ways.
@@daltronius Man, seeing people complain about having to keep track of 4 two-digit numbers in a *turn-based* game? We're cooked.
I think the biggest issue with removeing comander damage is it shots down the one verson of agro thats still viable. Atleast in the tables ivw seen you have to get in quick to win with comander liek a real agro strat in other formats or play stax
Commander damage exists so that infinite lifegain can't be used to stall out the game forever. It means decks have viable methods of taking out players without _having_ to always bring an infinite combo that wins the game on the spot.
Also, you can soft ban infinite combos, but then what about cards like Beacon of Immortality which are basically a 1-card infinite lifegain combo but doesn't play like one?
More to the point, I don't see any downside from having commander damage.
I'd be happy to make commander damage 21 from any commander, which makes games end a lot faster and makes aggro far more playable since it means opponents getting in for chip damage can help you take out other players.
While this does step on the toes of Poison a bit, it's fine since poison strats usually don't interact with life totals so there's not really any crossover.
We used to play without commander damage, but it ended up being impossible to beat combo or grindy decks. Literally impossible, creatures could never push through enough damage to kill a stax or aristrocrats player. We introduced commander damage and now those decks were struggling. Facing down a 6-7 damage flying commander makes stax shit their pants, considering they were untouchable before.
The new wolverine can one shot people with commander damage with just a few enchants.
You could just have it be tracked the other way.
You accumulate commander damage when you deal damage with your commander to any player. when that reaches some arbitrary number, you win. This then turns the voltron player into a threat for the whole table rather than the person getting focused but still pushes towards ending the game since the voltron player can progress their win-con by attacking any open player.
6:00 new players struggle to understand the board state in a sprawling battlecruiser commander game that’s 2+hours long. New players need constructed 60card formats to learn the rules of the game.
Exactly. Edh should not be how a new player learns magic. There's already so many rules alterations from baseline magic that it's a terrible place to start, and worrying about a rarely relevant mechanic like commander damage would be the least of their conserns.
I find it interesting how part of what makes Commander damage especially wonky is not strictly an issue with the format inherently, but rather ways that it's evolved since WotC started taking an interest in actively supporting it. Namely, the multiplayer expectation and introduction of partner cards magnifying the complexity of the situation. Partner cards, of course, were something WotC added well into the course of their development for Commander as an official format, an exception to the original rules added well after the format had taken off. And as for multiplayer, sure, EDH was always fairly open to multiplayer play, but it wasn't an intrinsic part of the format so much as a product of it being intended to be casual. Casual MtG has always been inclined to incorporate multiplayer elements, as a natural consequence of being more focused as a social activity and not wanting to limit that to 1-vs-1 when you might have 3-6 friends all wanting to play together. But when WotC decided to recognize it as an official format and create cards specifically to support it, they leaned into the multiplayer tendencies of casual play to explicitly promote Commander as a 4-player format, even though that's still technically nowhere in the rules of the format itself.
That said, I don't disagree with the analysis; even if it wasn't as strongly a multiplayer-first format originally as it is now, I'm pretty sure it was always meant to support multiplayer, and on that basis alone, the complexity of tracking damage from multiple Commanders should ideally have been avoided. But I do find it interesting how things have evolved.
First, thank you for your well considered discussion on the current state of commander damage and your well stated discussion about general good game design, including stating general principles including:
Wanting it to be easier to track for the players, sometimes even requiring up to 8 extra health bars (4 players times 2 individual commanders)
Wanting it to be easier to learn for beginners
Commander being a parasitic mechanic within the game because it doesn’t work with anything else
I disagree with your assertion that this mechanic needs changing and that game design mechanics (easy to learn, easy to track) are the primary reason for wanting to make that change. I prefer learning the history of the game as created and backwards compatibility over being easy to learn and easy to track.
In terms of tracking, it’s relatively easy to track in the vast majority of games because they are being played on Spelltable (which has built in tracking) or with a life tracking application on a phone/tablet. While I agree that you wouldn’t want to have electronic be a requirement, we are already bringing so much extra stuff to the table (at least, dice, tokens, playmat, sleeves, extra sleeves, in some cases reusable dry erase tokens, coins, etc) that bringing your phone or even an extra battery pack for your phone isn’t much of an extra burden, particularly because most of us are bringing out phone everywhere with us anyway. And that burden is only for in person games that are ad hoc, the regular games I play with my playgroup the host always provides the tablet and extra battery pack.
In terms of learning the rules for commander damage it’s 21 damage from any single commander kills you. Pretty straightforward. Twenty-one is also actually a good number precisely because it is divisible by only 3 and 7 and requires you to get your commander to 11 power which is deliberately awkward with the cards that we have available and then also give your commander double strike. It also makes seven power the magic number for a three hit kill. The historical reason for this is both excellent and worth celebrating. I would rather commander damage someone to death for twenty-one simply because of the historical significance of the elder dragons, particularly from Nicol Bolas because being the big bad of whole swaths of the lore means that if he hits you three times you should be dead. In the lore, it would likely not even take him one hit to kill a regular opponent. The historical significance of this amount outweighs the difficulty of tracking it or of learning it.
Your proposed solutions while reducing the overall burdens of numbers to be tracked doesn’t usually save significant mental or tracking burden because most of the time that commander damage comes into play isn’t with a Voltron commander. I have identified that there are numerous decks that hold down players with other effects, attempting to kill them with those effects, while also using commander damage exclusively against a single opponent. I have numerous decks that take advantage of this approach and it allows a combination of strategies which is satisfying. With respect to pure Voltron commanders your changes would weaken them significantly, especially whenever you raise the total amount of commander damage that must be dealt. Raising it doesn’t make historical or lore sense because if Nicol Bolas hits you three times, you are almost certainly dead, without regard to what you have already been doing. I would argue that for a new player your solutions would be similar in difficulty to learn. Additionally, I am not sure that difficulty to learn is a good argument for any game that also has mechanics in it that have not been reprinted in two decades that most current players wouldn’t claim to understand how they work (see: banding). I realize that pointing out other warts to justify the existence of one particular wart isn’t that strong of an argument, but if the person was trying to get into a simple game they wouldn’t be interested in Magic the Gathering in general.
Backwards compatibility of the game is more important than being able to learn it easily. The entire game has been balanced since at least 2011 when Wizards of the Coast started making cards directly for commander with commander damage as created originally. That means that cards have had their power altered with the rule in mind. I suspect this leads to thinking about the power of a particular legendary creature deeply as they are constructed. That means that if we adjust the rule it will throw off all the thinking that has happened for choosing the power of commanders. There is an analog in the computer science world to this sort of thing. Microsoft has famously been focused on backwards compatibility, to the point of going back into their operating systems and adjusting them to put bugs back into the code in particular modes because there are programs that are dependent on those bugs to operate properly. This is done so that old programs continue to work for their customers. This practice of backwards compatibility means that you don’t need to buy new programs, particularly expensive business programs in order to continue to service your customers. My argument is that having all of the previous commanders work as intended is more important than ease of learning and ease of tracking. It is uncertain what would happen to the design of commanders after any commander damage rules changes, but it would likely result in commanders focused around the new rules, making them more powerful that older commander within the new rule set, and would require people to upgrade their decks in order to play optimally within the new rule set. While I might enjoy that challenge, one of the largest and best parts of Commander is that you can use your old cards and that the format doesn’t rotate. Changing the commander damage rules would in effect create a partial rotation of the format, which I perceive to be vastly more disliked than tracking the (usually) one person’s worth of commander damage.
Your treatment of this mechanic also completely ignores the elephant in the room, which is poison counters. You only need 10 of them to lose the game and they can be proliferated. The first or second most popular commander has a heavy proliferation theme which often includes the use of poison counters to kill multiple opponents. You’ve ignored that those have to be kept track of also, so removing the commander damage counts doesn’t eliminate the problem. Further there are three mechanics that are involved in poison counters: poisonous, toxic and infect. That’s three keywords that must be explained to new players. I would argue that poison counters are more egregious than commander damage is, and harder to explain. Again, this is pointing out another wart just to justify the existence of the wart in question, but if we are really trying to simplify the game then we should do so. The reason we don’t is backwards compatibility.
In conclusion, I feel that backwards compatibility and the added complexity actually enhance the game for the type of people who are most likely to play and enjoy it, and don’t bother the people who never concern themselves with it. It’s not worth making the change because of the amount of imbalance it would create in old cards versus the new cards that would be made under the new rule. Just because something isn’t optimal doesn’t mean it is worth paying the cost to change it.
First, I think it's foolish to look at the current state of commander and come to the conclusion that lifegain is bad so we can remove commander damage with no consequences. Lifegain is bad in large part *because of* Commander damage. And you don't need an infinite amount of life for it to be problematic; gaining multiple hundreds of life is fairly trivial to do and will effectively stop most decks from being able to kill you.
Second, I think you're blowing the tracking problem waaay out of proportion. In my opinion, one of the best things about Commander Damage is that you don't actually have to track it. You have a very good idea of whether commander damage is likely to be relevant to your game. If your commander's Yuriko, Henzie, Giada, or any of the others you mentioned, *you can just not track commander damage*. You know your angel army is going to get way too big way too fast for your 2/2 commander to hit someone 11 times. As for the physical difficulty of tracking, it's not like you have to actively track that everyone is at 0 commander damage from turn 1. You haven't started tracking it yet, so they're at 0. If they've been hit, and you think it will be relevant, you start tracking it. And despite your insistence that a digital tracker is necessary, many Magic players carry the perfect tool for tracking commander damage: spindown dice. It only goes to 20, sure, but once you're out of faces on the die, they've died to your commander.
The thing is, in other formats forcusing on lifegain is also considered bad, or at least easily disrupted. This doesn't mean lifegain strategies don't exist, but it's always a secondary effect for a deck, rather than the primary strategy. Maybe you're building up life to activate Aetherflux Reservoir, or you're gaining life from Blood Artist triggers, or you trigger another effect that leads to your wincon when you gain life like putting a +1/+1 on an Ajani's Pridemate.
Usually the counter to lifegain is to just rush them down before they gain life, and with Commander being a multiplayer format, it's not hard at all for your three opponents to collectively deal 40 damage to you before you've gained hundreds of life. trust me, as a person who loves Lifegain in most formats, people will not let you gain life as easily if they don't plan on just winning through Commander damage anyways.
@@piemaniac9410 I have a couple of lifegain decks in my local meta. I haven't personally run a lifegain deck in years, but there are some quite powerful ones that I regularly play against. One person runs a Darien, King of Kjeldor pillowfort deck where he gains a bunch of life to kind of goad people into trying to take his life total down which results in him just making more soldiers. Another person runs Karlov of the Ghost Council, a deck that's filled with a bunch of lifegain engines to make him a massive creature that he can beat you over the face with.
Both of these decks lean heavily into lifegain as a key part of their strategy and consistently gain hundreds of life as a result. They both set up quickly enough that simply rushing them down doesn't make sense. Commander isn't a format where we rush people down. It's customary, if incorrect, to let people do their thing a bit before going in for the kill. The format is built around value engines and slow, midrangey games where lifegain *is* a powerful strategy.
Oh wow, this video randomly popped up on my recommended page. Back in the day I remember you getting me into dota and your dark souls playthrough got me playing souls likes. It's good to see you still around.
Magic doesn't only have "one bar" you also have poison counters, you also have to keep tabs of energy counters, rad counters, experience counters, you have to count storm counter every turn, delirium, threshhold and much more for each player, but those only matter when they are played. Commander damage is the same way, you might have 36 imaginary bars of commander damage but that matters only if that hypothetical really happens, but it doesn't.
yeah, but if someone is putting poison counters on you, then there's probably their win condition, and it's pretty meaningful.
Yea, I only track commander dmg if its a win-con or there is a life gain deck.
This not to mention grave order, because technically speaking for some eternal formats you can't legally change the other of your grave, because of how some cards interact with it.
@@Machiroable ... for all Magic formats. It's always been that way, you never could change the graveyard order. Same as the library. Unless a game mechanic changes your deck (or graveyard) you have to keep it in the order it is.
You don't track something if it doesn't change (poisone etc.). Commander damage changes quite often but is mostly irrelevant. That's the difference
Amusingly, this video just makes me want a Commander Damage tracker similar to the paper life trackers that often come with the precons.
Just a piece of cardboard with four damage wheels that go from 0 to 21, so you can track how much your commander has dealt to each player.
Maybe you could have a variation of the third suggestion, where every time a commander attacks a player, they take an additional ~5 damage. This is simpler than the "damage dealt again after attack", and also doesn't make commanders with high attack gain an inflated bonus compared to ones with low attack.
5:35 the professors tolarian community college takes about a similar mechanic that’s dumb “venturing into the dungeon” if you get a card that says that and you dont have the dungeon token the ability does nothing.
Even if you memorize the ability others have to take your word for it
if only we had a magic rectangle that could conjure images in an instant that almost everyone carried in there pocket
Seeing you in the MTG Community wasn't something I had expected to see this year. I watched you a lot back when I was playing Dota! I felt an insane amount of nostalgia watching this video
"If you got hit 3 times by those things you deserve to lose." Too good 😂
The only idea I have for commander damage would be instead of tracking it for each player, each player tracks how much combat damage their commander has dealt to other players (reduces complexity a notable amount). Then, when a player reaches a damage threshold (ex: 40 commander damage), their commander card has player deathtouch. While this would help incentivize voltron players to not focus down one player, I doubt it's a realistic solution.
The difference between 20 and 21 commander damage as a requirement is pretty big in my opinion. Giving a 5 power commander double strike + doubling their power is surprisingly easy. E.g. Kalamax and only one power doubling spell effect = game over for one player without a blocker at 20 commander damage.
I don't think commander damage should be any easier, even if it's not really competitive at higher power tables. "it's not being played in cEDH" isn't really an indikator of fun & fairness for casual tables.
The number of times I've scraped by at the tables for being AT 1 life left or 20 commander damage is way higher than I should probably be okay with.
To understand what they were thinking, You should Speak with Johnnie Knapp (Arcades Sabbath), David Phifer (Chromium), Adam Staley (Nicol Bolas, and the progenitor of the format), Steve Dixon (Vaevictis Asmati), and Ariel Jones (Palladia Mors). They were the original 5. They introduced EDH to Sheldon, who made changes to it as he popularized it amongst the judge community.
I've shifted philosophy on Voltron approaches from frontloading stacking several spells and abilities onto the commander and more resource generation. Building up a solid foundation for which the commander can stand on and deal immediate lethal damage to one player from nowhere is the goal. This can remove the leading player and positions you to deal with the two stragglers who are unlikely to have nearly the same board state as you.
I started playing Commander in 2016. (I have played MTG for about 25 years)
So I STARTED with a set of 5 planeswalker commanders, and in my pod that was all we had.
So commander damage was not even a possibility.
When we started using creature commanders and needed to track commander damage we just didn't.
We didn't really notice much of an impact at all. Our rule is basically: We won't track your commander damage for you. If you want to win with commander damage, you need to keep track of it
I've yet to have a game where I need to track commander damage from more than one player
Yeah good point. Why should it be a core mechanic of the game if you rarely have to track it?
@@pinkstarburst99 because the one player often threatens or kills with the commander damage
stoked for the Commander Lore Video
>Suggestion 1
You've reinvented infect and all the problems that come with it.
>Suggestion 2
In a regular game if I am three damage away from killing someone through the commander damage I have one player that I need to be on guard from. With this rule being three damage away from winning means I will get the attention of the entire table. If I do this early I end up in the precise "sitting out half of the game" scenario you've mentioned earlier.
>Suggestion 3
So now I just need to play Wound Reflection effects and my commander knocks out people once I pump it to mere 10 power (10 regular damage, 10 "commander" damage, Wound Reflection procs at the end of the turn for 20 and kills the player). In regular game the player would get 20 damage and only 10 of that would count towards the commander damage kill, meaning I would have to land two more hits or find a way to pump my commander further.
There's plenty of other ridiculous scenarios that arise with this design, like being able to deal 60 damage in a single turn with just Karlach, Fury of Avernus and Two-Handed Axe (Karlach attacks, Axe makes it 10 damage, commander damage procs for additional 10, second combat Axe pumps Karlach to 20 power, commander damage procs for another 20).
I guess I'll just bring three more d20s with me or something.
Pretty sure if infect was at 30 counters and couldnt be proliferated it would be completly unplayable.
Just use an app dude
@@XenithShadow the problem is not infect being playable or unplayable, the problem is "it create bad gameplay". Infect in casual commander is a bad strategy to win. Kinda like voltron, (or other aggro strategy for the matter) you can usualy knock one player before being beaten down to submission by a midrange vallue engine.
i think it's fine as is, commander damage makes it so every one has a way too kill someone no matter what
such as mono green stompy vs mono white lifegain if white has 1mil life then the green player has no way to defeat that person
the commander damage base feels more like a ground rule where you can where every one has a win con when all else fails even if its wacking someone with sythis 21 times
though damage doublers/triplers should not work in my opinion they should deal their base power as pure damage for example, anything over that is just extra damage
azami players:
Personally, I disagree. As a player coming from "classic" constructed formats, some playstyles just have hard counters and you learn to either alter your deck or accept you'll have bad matchups. Not every deck necessarily has a fair shot against every other deck.
Go wide strategies get shut down by cards like Propaganda or Sphere of Safety, Tron doesn't fare well against land hate like Blood Moon or Harbinger of the Seas, and Lifegain gets entirely disabled for the rest of the game against Stigma Lasher or Screaming Nemesis (and plenty of hate cards that either temporarily disable lifegain or even reverse lifegain into damage). Green is actually particularly poised to take down mono-white lifegain. Toxic/Infect/Proliferate is not uncommon for green, and you even got cards like Triumph of the Hordes which gives all your creatures both Infect and Trample (an absolutely brutal combo for green stompy, since now only 10 unblocked damage across your entire board is lethal.) These hold true for Commander as they do for Modern and other 60 card formats, so it's more the nature of the (meta)game than it is an issue with any one format.
I don't understand how commander increase the work load and tools needed to play. When you can easily write this down on a piece of paper. Are we above writing things down. Then you can noncombat commander damage. It's just unfortunately like limited to mainly one color. Then you can community wise affect commander damage, but again with mainly a few strats. I don't see commander damage as specifically unfun for one player. Cause many other strategies do the same thing(burn, discard, mill, poison counter, curses,etc). I feel this statement mainly comes from value based players. Which I don't blame them cause wizards keeps printing out powerful value cards instead focusing on combat based strategy. I like commander damage cause I tend to build combat based decks. Which gives me another clock to fight with instead of just one. Also what are the standard win conditions of commandeer?.Cause to your point it's mainly combo. Now that doesn't mean there isn't room to change stuff, but I get tired of hearing how it's no important, but people don't like people winning with it too soon.
Everthing you add in rules increases complexity. Now it is argued that the complexity is not worth the effort, and same goals can be achieved with less of it.
@lompeluiten That is true, but that doesn't mean we have to lower it to the lowest common denominator. Again how is keeping track of numbers overly complex and we have to use digital tools? That's why I said we could write it down. That's we used to do. I never had dice to like my mid 20s when I played any form of magic.
@@yellowbelt
As he said in the video: Leave the complexity to the cards interaction. This gives already a awfull lot to keep track of in an 4 player game. Trim the fat with comander damage.
Or you can play one of the overly complex paradox games xD
@lompeluiten I understand why he said, I just don't agree. We are literally just counting up. It can go lower, only up. Then the commander's that don't attack, to his point what does it matter? But what about the ones that do? That's my biggest thing. I attack with my commanders cause lower life can matter. On top of the chance ofe just knocking someone out who loses track of the damage.
If commander damage was eliminated and Commander simply had 20 as the life total like every other format, I wouldn't object...
The reason commander damage exists is because of its origing as EDH. Every elder dragon was a 7/7. The rule came about because hitting an opponent 3 time with your elder dragon; your commander; would count as a win
love people commenting before they actually watch even half the video
While I get the logic behind the video, I think you're not thinking about the overall implications of commander damage. Commander damage is another source of politicking. You could deal enough damage to a player so you can threaten a kill with the next swing and force a deal, or you could make a deal to not remove a commander so they don't swing at you, buff another commander intentionally so they kill other players, etc. It's also another strategy to have as a backup, and can be surprisingly effective in a non-voltron strategy for commanders like Grimgrin, Grismold, Korvold, etc.
A lot of people claim it doesn't come up often in their playgroup, but if they're straight up ignoring it then of course it wouldn't come up. I've seen 2/3 power commanders kill with commander damage before because the game dragged that long. Especially in situations with a stax deck commander damage is very relevant.
As for it requiring you to target one player, I'm still not sure why that's an issue. Spreading damage around the table is the reason why commander games take so long, and ignoring threat assessment is partially why games often end abruptly from someone just comboing off after setting up their board and hand. It sucks to get eliminated early, but that's something you need to expect when playing a multiplayer format.
I think that commander damage should be able to be "healed" to a cap per each of the recovering player's turn.
All three of your ideas sound pretty good, Baumi! Might try them out next time I play.
Commander Damage is mainly intended to 1) makes commander special and 2) gives the ability to defeat enemies that may have a ridiculous amount of HP (which does happen fairly often enough to be a valid issue). That said, I 100% agree it's a bad system that needs to be updated with one of the suggestions provided here
Spending 5 whole minutes on something solved by pen and paper (and the various other suggestions in the comments) at the beginning of the video is not convincing me so far
Edit: boy do we have comments
This continues throughout the rest of the video. Largely complaining about things that aren't actual problems. If i were to summarize: Commander damage is difficult to track and 21 is a weird number. Difficult to track is... sort of understandable. partner commanders are annoying. But most of the time when commander damage isn't going to matter, you don't have to track it. And its not even that big a deal to track to begin with UNLESS you're doing fiddly dice things like in your example.
The whole targeting a player because you have commander damage on them at the expense of the boardstate is extremely contrived. Sure there's a mechanic there that lets you kill the person that you have commander damage on, and you can use that to kill them, but saying you have to kill that person because the mechanic exists doesn't make any sense. And regardless, ignoring the boardstate to exploit a rule is a tactical choice. In the contrived example, that player probably has reasons for ignoring the boardstate beyond "commander damage exists".
On "Wasting commander damage" because you did too much damage with the rest of the deck - what? your commander did damage... and it added up to lethal. you did commander damage. Some of that damage counts towards a different win condition but you didn't waste any of the damage. If you want all your lifebars to deplete at the same time or something that's on you.
The entire "Lifegain isn't overpowered" section - I'm going to summarize this as "lifegain isn't lifegain it's combo and you should rule 0 if combos are ok" - I'm gonna reword that as "Commander damage solves a problem that isn't a problem because you should rule 0 it", which just... is kinda useless. We had this discussion at large with the recent banlist update. You can't just point to rule 0 and say it solves the problem, there has to be a baseline expectation for what people should expect from a game. you can rule 0 to your hearts content with your own consistent playgroups.
On "potential solutions" -
Combined commander damage - 1, what is the point of having another lifebar that's the same value as the other lifebar? 2 - this has deckbuilding implications. Now there's a whole new gamespace where I have the opportunity to capitalize on my opponents doing commander damage to my other opponents. This adds a wishywashy kind of "are we all on the same gameplan" dynamic to commander damage at large, while screwing the lone voltron guy by making his job way, way harder. If the goal was to reduce complexity, this doesn't do that. I would also find it enraging to die to someone's 2/2 commander after taking 20 something from someone elses commander.
Commander damage as a win condition - I get the fantasy of "oooh this will create fun little I'll save you to save myself moments", but it opens up so, so many shitty play patterns. Say someone's missing land drops. Or got really screwed by a boardwipe, or any number of things that sets a player behind. The tactically correct thing to do is aim your commander at that person so you can avoid all the defenses the actual threat put up. Someone else failed to perform, therefore I lose. Maybe I didn't defend them well enough but since when was defending my opponents part of the gameplan? I've saved plenty of my opponents because i need them against the actual threat. this makes me lose unless I save my opponent. I do not think this is an improvement.
Doubling commander damage - This increases 1shot potential a thousand-fold. It completely changes the game to be oriented around commander damage. Double strike on your commander is a native 4x multiplier. It gives a whole new weight to aggressive commanders and combat tricks and Rogue's Passage and the like. Voja, jaws of the conclave will probably do your entire lifetotal in 2 bites, plus whatever the rest of the deck is doing. This probably helps against lifegain decks but completely changes the math for every other deck. This suggestion is a total redesign of the format to be more of a Commander oriented brawl. An interesting idea but it would completely change the relative weights of certain strategies in both deckbuilding and playing, which I'd wager are not currently considered in most people's deck design at this time.
I'll stop there. Overall, disappointed. I thought the topic would be interesting but did not find the content compelling.
In my playgroup everyone has to keep track of the commander damage their commander does. If you don't keep track it's considered zero, or the last known value. You want to win with it, so you are responsible to keep track of it.
But I haven't seen more than 2 commanders to need to keep track of the Commander damage at a table and against a pillow fort generating a shit ton of life a turn, Commander Damage is a way to get out of the misery.
My solution would have also somewhat helped with random blightsteel colususes.
You increase the poison counters need to kill to 20 and all commanders gain "etali primal sickness's static ability of giving poison counters based on the combat damage they deal"
The pooled commander damage proposal you gave would also be intresting.
I didn't realise partner damage from commanders was tracked seperately, i assumed it was pooled damage from "commanders" owned by each of the 4 players.
you make a compelling argument, Baumi. Proud of your work, and I hope the MTG audience finds your work quickly and gets involved with the channel. Keep up the great work!
In my experience cmd dmg is the only tool to deal with decks that gain life. They usually get SO much hp that it's impossible to win. Faster than you can deal damage. then what? Game takes forever?
Sure you have combos or infect or stuff like that. Not every deck has those tools tho. Every deck has a commander. Case solved.
Cmd dmg makes so the meta isn't "gain life win all games".
I had a 1v1 (duel) deck that consistently won with commander damage. shu yun. it hits you once, gets buffed instant speed before damage aplies and kills you in one hit.
I completely disagree with some of your statements tho. In a multiplayer game it's often more strategic to spread commander damage and not focus one player. Why attract so much hate and make an enemy on the table if there are still so many players alive? You're just gonna get yourself killed, gotta spread the love. When people start dying, than the bits of commander damage you preemptively applied to everyone will come to hand and might give you the win.
I do agree voltron decks suck tho.
One situation that happened a few times to me, also worth mentioning, is when someone at the table was stupidly strong and clearly winning the game, tons of hp, but some other player was the only one capable of dealing with him because of commander damage. This last player wasn't strong at all, in fact he would be out of the game if not for this fact. Everyone else was trying to keep him alive and help him get rid of the giant player, so they had a shot of winning themselves. These kind of situations where everyone is holding a gun to each other's faces and it's a diplomatic dilemma are my favorite!
also, baumi, if you happened to read this far... I have a closed group that plays together for many years and we've experimented a lot.
we have our own formats we created to fit any number of players. there's 1v1v1, or mesinho, "small table", there's the traditional 1v1v1v1, meso = "table", and the mesão with 5. right. 5 sucks cuz it takes forever.
THEN, there's 2v2v2 for 6 players or 2v2v2v2 for 8. we go for 60hp and 31 cmd dmg, everything is +50% (infect goes to 15 and so on). Effects like extra turns don't work for your partner. Its basically two headed giant rules, rebalanced.
THEN, and this is my favorite... we have ROYALE. 9 players. 3 trios. one is elected king, both others are towers. towers are basically playing 1v1 with the adjacent enemy tower, except their kings count as partners to them and can block or attack with them. Once you kill a tower, you can access the king and attack him. king dies, trio is defeated. kings have 60hp, towers 40. Direct damage is OK and self-winning combos only work for kings (like lab maniac, although we've never had that happen fortunately). It's pretty fucking good, just for fun ofc... but you should try it! we typically do it on birthdays, cuz that's when there's a ton of people present and everyone is willing to play.
we also tried a 2v2 best of 3 with banning and picking decks, like dota! each player has to put 3 or 4 decks on the table and there's a drafting phase before each match. this one didn't go far though, people didn't like it as much as I did 😅
My solution would be to have the commander deal double damage, it's more threatening this way and you don't have to track extra health bars
WHAT ABOUT THE BIG BOIS, LIKE PROGENITUS?? Whit that rule I would play Progenitus with a straight face.
I agree with all your points against commander damage! I have always had problems with commander damage. Just as you said in the end of the video, I prefer to just turn it off. It really wasn't solving any problems, but caused many problems. As you said, lifegain decks are not a problem; poison and milling and "I win/You Lose" cards address that already. And heck, once I stop your lifegain and gain board position, I will eventually win with a massive army. And in many cases I can grow an army faster than you can gain life. The only real problem is infinite combos, and maybe stax, and commander damage doesn't address those. Also, turning off commander damage didn't seem to slow down Voltron decks too much (maybe 1 turn slower?). Also, the Voltron deck was able to very effectively voltron support creatures when their commander was too expensive and still pull off the win. And they felt more comfortable spreading the damage around instead of popping off players too early. Which can eliminate the problem you mentioned of targeted social confrontations. Also, Voltron + Poison is already a problem.... Voltron + Poison + Commander Damage... even more so.
I also don't like any game mechanics that don't have a counter. For instance, another reason that I don't like commander damage is because once you receive commander damage, you can't heal from it. I don't like poison counters for the same reason. Excepting leeches, you can't get rid of them. Also, I think the poison count should be raised to 20 in commander. Poison was made for regular magic games and 10 seemed intuitive but it in commander.. its not. I also don't like Emblems for the same reason, you can't get rid of them.
I don't really have a problem with "Daybound/Nightbound" except that you have to constantly keep track of it once it starts. You can't get rid of it when it doesn't mean anything, so that's also annoying.
"Monarch" and "Initiative" also can't be removed from the game. But you can easily remove it from a player, which is about just as good. So no real functional issues there.
PT
Baumi, what do you think about creating a series on deck design? The way you explain things will fit perfectly with this kind of content.
My LGS actually just discards the rule usually, which honestly makes for less complexity than there needs to be. The only detriment of not having Commander Damage however, is that if a Lifegain deck really cooks off, it's very difficult to overcome. But usually we focus on the guy who's doing that anyways, so it's only really an issue if the deck can gain more life than we can dish out damage.
Sometimes people agree on having Commander Damage though. Depends on if they feel like it or not, ultimately.
Double damage for commanders? I’m in!
The voltron cope is so wild to me. "You know this strategy that has a linear play pattern, isn't particularly strong, AND that people complain about despite it being somewhat weak? Without commander damage we would lose it!"
I like piling equipment on a Rafiq as much as the next guy, but if I wanted to play a serious aggro strategy I'd play Jetmir or Winota.
Maybe I'm in the minority here, but I actually really like how "parsitic" commander damage is. Voltron is my favorite strategy and I have over 10 voltron decks. I don't know whether this would make me more or less justified in having an opinion on this topic, but I would still like to give my 2 cents. Keep in mind that my playgroup plays almost no combo's (which makes sense, if combo's are a thing you are not in a meta where commander damage matters)
The reason why I like the parasticness of voltron is that it really makes voltron a strategy that you have to commit to. In your third proposal commanders like korvold, Fae-Cursed King would become crazy annoying to deal with, since it would facilitate killing players with korvold by itself, no synergy necessary. I like that commander damage doesn't matter in most games, it only matters when you specifically build around it. You can build korvold as a voltron commander, but you would have to make compromises elsewhere. In this way it is similar to something like mill
In your first I feel like you would change the game for voltron players too much in my opninion. If there is only one voltron player in the game, suddenly you have to deal 30 damage more to win the game, which is already quite hard with a voltron deck, since you sort of have a target on your back from the get go. If there are 2 voltron players at the table, the other players are suddenly in a major disadvantage, they will likely just die as the voltron player have little incentive to attack each other (if they attack each other they have to deal 30 damage with their commander while if they attack other players they would on average only have to deal 15). And the 4th player to join a table with 3 voltron decks... yeah not a great experience I presume.
As it happens I play quite a bit of star which comes in handy when discussing your second argument. Star is a really fun format, but it is not for everyone. Why is it not for everyone? Because a lot of players hate it when they lose to something without being able to do anything about it. There have been so many games in star where you lose because your enemy gets eliminated and it leads to genuine feel bad moments for some players that they did not get to block, did not get to interact with your win. This would create the same feel bad moments that star does in my opinion. It would also remove the political aspect of voltron.
Speaking about politics, I feel like this is where a lot of voltrons strength comes from. How I usually operate my voltron decks is that I go really aggressive early spreading the damage around. Unlike what you say in your video, it is really strong to spread it around, because it leaves everyone on death's door. At least in my playgroup when I'm playing a voltron deck, people actually keep their value engines in hand, afraid that I might kill them. You create a sort of standstill in which nobody wants to do anything in fear of retaliation from the voltron player from seeming ahead. My decks also don't really draw any hate because people know that if they were killed, it was because they were ahead. People who try to win usually do so by removing my commander, which I pack protection from of course. My decks even have high winrates with this tactic as you always eliminate the strongest player while not even being behind the others because you already have commander damage on them. As a voltron player you have to surprise people, otherwise you are never winning, it is part of the strategy. If you rush everyone down 1 by 1 no one will be surprised by your win
My response to the point you brought up regarding Partner commanders is, "I agree with you, but Partner was not a well-designed mechanic, and people should be using Backgrounds from Battle for Baldur's Gate instead. Partner was a mistake. Backgrounds were a better version of that same idea." 😅
Me and my friends all agreed that commander damage is now just 20 damage flat from all commanders on the table. If you get hit for a total of 20 life from all the commanders on the table you lose.
That seems quite harsh but I guess it speeds the game up quite a bit so it's also pretty fun to think about.
Why though? It seems like it would cheese out a lot of undeserving wins and foment archenemy style gameplay.
1. Life gain *not* being an issue may simply be the result of a chicken/egg scenario. Life gain decks have NOT been prominent, possibly BECAUSE of the Commander damage rule. Perhaps the rule, itself, has dissuaded players from going down this path in the first place. We may be unable see how problematic it might have become, simply because the issue has been stopped dead in its tracks.
2. In a multiplayer format, having one person sitting there gaining life and not bothering anyone else would cause the entire game to be a battle of attrition, where the other 3 players would weaken each other, and the person with the massive life pool at the end would just win against his weakened final opponent.
3. Infinite Combos are, in general, much more difficult to pull off than achieving "massive life gain." The limit of 1 copy of a card per deck amongst 100 cards makes combos more difficult to pull off.
What if when your commander deals combat damage to a player, each other player also loses that much life
Good video Baumi! I was pretty skeptical, me and my friends haven't had much issue with commander damage (using lifetap app) and with the decks we use it always felt like a valid concern to track and people occasionally lost to it (but not too often). However your third solution sounded pretty solid, a good fix to your criticisms. Good video.
Nothing wrong with commander damage, since it’s one of the harder ways to win, unless you go infinite but then again basically ANYTHING can go infinite
I like it more the second suggestion because it can improve the ways that social interactions occur in the table.
I really think that commander have some oddities derived from an adaptation of a 2 players game for a 4+ players game and rules to enrich the ways that players can interact with it other that were restricted by the original format of MTG are golden for this format.
As an example, I was very frustrated when they implemented the battle cards, because the way they were designed for a two players game greatly restricted their potential for formats like commander. I really think that beating a battle (siege) card should have global consequences that would be equal but asimetric in the board (like buff to creatures, board wipes of some type of card, one free spell from hand), in a way that some players would benefit from it and others not in a way that it could estimulate aliances for attacking or defending some sieges.
I HAD TO DO A DOUBLE TAKE SEEING THAT SUMMORS RIFT
Baumi I am interested in what you think about infect as a mechanic in commander upon hearing this discussion about commander damage
What about commander damage doesn't need to be Combat Damage anymore ? As long as you lose life because of the commander, it works for commander damage.
I've been playing 20 life games with my friends with no commander damage. It has been a great way to play the game as it makes more strategies viable while also not hurting Voltron as they benefit from opponents hitting each other. Life is a resource and in 40 life commander players can just absorb damage before needing to act. 20 life games are faster and raise the stakes from the beginning.
I always felt frustrated with the commander damage rule. Not enough to complain, but it was annoying to keep track of to the point where I just didn't unless someone mentioned it or someone started gaining infinite life.
We've always dismissed this rule in my playgroup.
The most powerful aspect of Commander is "Rule Zero". One rule we often implement is that "Commander is a four player game." There is one winner and three losers. There is no second place. One PK wins the game. Start a new game. This allows the game to be determined by the weakest deck/player/shuffle instead of the strongest. The biggest threat at the table is ANY player who can take out the weakest player first. In that game, a full 21 point Commander Damage just starts a new game for all four players.
Another play style is that Commander Damage only applies when the target player has 30 points or less remaining. My Vampire deck often affords me 100+ points at various times in a given game. If I'm sitting on 116 points, I refuse to bow down to a meager 21 point hit.
Rule 0 aside, you could just use removal or plan your blocks to avoid being hit by a Cmd. Cmd damage was specificaly designed to keep lifegain in check. You can rule 0 this out, but it makes you a less skilled player overall.
Very good video. I completely agree with what you said in the video. Always felt weird about commander damage.
I was half asleep when listening to the video so when you mentioned revision 1(commander damage is shared) i was like "wait thats now how it works"?
My suggestion would be to raise the poison threshold to 20 to match the "double normal amount" that life gets. Then make commanders give an equal amount of poison counters whenever they deal combat damage a player.
It maintains the "infinite life protection" aspect.
It consolidates tracking not just across different players, but also with poison counters. Instead of having four alternate life totals that may or may not need to be tracked each game (poison plus each individual enemy commander), we just have one alternate life total that covers all of them, and thus we can be much more confident in needing to track. I think the silent disgust people get from doing the admin of tracking commander damage in 10 games where it does not matter is real, and even just having them be more confident that it matters is an improvement in and of itself.
It fixes the complaint some people have about the poison amount not making sense.
It makes poison a little less parasitic as other players always have at least one way to team up with you against an archenemy.
Opens up the hot new Leeches tech for saving yourself from death by Commander Damage 😆
Then this makes proliferation busted, every deck would play karns bastion mandatory to deal damage
@@daltronius Seriously? 5 mana, once per turn cycle, deal 1 damage to your opponents that can not be healed. That's hardly troublesome.
Maybe it would be good enough to be a mildly homogenizing factor in deck design, but that is not a new problem in commander, and this would hardly be the worst example (command tower, arcane signet, etc).
@eepopgames2741 but why change something that isnt actually broken to a system that adds homogeny for no reason. If u honestly cant use a d20 to track mander damage, how are u gonna track poison damage.
@@daltronius If you hate the idea of changing the commander damage rule, this may not be the video for you. I am not beating any drum that it "HAS TO CHANGE". But we're here on a video discussing how the current rule has some issues, and possibilities to find something better. There is no need to be defensive at speculative design talk.
Also, it is not a single d20. It is a d20 for each opponent, and a d10 for poison. Then the 2d20 or d100 you are using for your own main life total. How many dice do you want to be using here?
Its not a problem of capacity to track these things, and suggesting it is makes your comment seem more aggressive than it needs to be. But how many times do you want to track 3 different commander damage amounts and poison only for them to no actually matter over the course of a game? If you track all those numbers for 10 games and it never has an effect, you feel like its pointless busywork. Then you all agree to ignore it.
And you realize halfway through game 11 that, oh wait, it probably would have mattered in this game but we have not been tracking it. Should we grind the game to a halt to try to retroactively recreate what the totals would be?
@@eepopgames2741 then by the idea here, we should maybe remove or change poison, by the very same token of c damage "not mattering" as being a reason, poison also doesnt always kill, so why is it always commander damage. Also this video itself uses the difficulty to track as a reason to change, so u dislike me bringing it up, take it up with them. And dont even get me started on the "how many dice are supposed to be using" its mtg, we use dice for litterally everything, life totals, loyalty counters, charge counters, basically any kind of counter, sometimes to track how many of a thing we have, are you telling me that you draw the line at c damage.
Commander damage is DEFINITELY necessary. Do you know how many games ive seen someone gain basically infinite life? I think we should be able to interact with it more than literally none at all.
I see a lot of problems with the second suggested solution. Mainly the fact that other players can lose the game because another player was unable to block. It removes player agency in a really negative way. Because if I die from being attacked, then that is completely fair because I was unable to play well enough to protect myself. But with this rule, I could die despite investing really hard in strong defenses, just because another player outside of my control did not have equally good defenses.
I can also see it encouraging other negative play patterns. For example you would be more incentivized to play global fog-effects rather than protection for yourself specifically. You would be encouraged to play things that protects not only you, but everyone else as well just so you don't lose by proxy, and could easily lead to games becoming a slog fest
I'm going to counter your digital complexity point: You can still track commander damage with a pen and a piece of paper in the middle of the table. When the commander damage is declared, everyone gets to see it get written down, and then any cheating is immediately called out. Since pen+paper is a legal and viable option for regular play, it is a viable option for commander damage.
I do think that Commander Damage is necessary for the format. I think it could be fixed by combining it into a single pool and doing something like 50 Life/30 Commander Damage - but I do like the wincon idea. From a gameplay perspective, commanders need more than just color identity and the command zone rulings to be more than just a glorified color picker. There should be a reason to build around the Ruhans and Urils of the world. On top of that, there should be a viable way to keep turbo lifegain decks from being overly oppressive. It wouldn't be fun to be chipping for 1-2 every turn as the lifegain player gains a lot more than that.
What I've noticed is that part of the problem with Commander is that combat isn't incentivized enough, especially Commander Damage. You're incentivized to wait until you have the ability to beat everyone. If you can't fully wipe out everyone, you're the target and probably losing to a team up. On top of that, it socially feels "bad" to attack people early - they haven't done anything yet, they're just ramping, they have no board, etc. That's true to an extent, if someone legitimately isn't doing much/anything, then you should feel a bit bad about attacking...but not if they are "just ramping" or "don't have any creatures".
We just use a d20 in my group, it's really not hard.
21 is indeed 7x3, but it is also half + 1
I get that there is a bit of a... clerical burden, but other than combining partners into a single number, there's not a whole lot that can reasonably be done without it feeling bad
Infinite life isn't really played all that much *because* commander damage exists. If you remove the built-in answer almost every deck has, those'll start popping up and force every deck to have an answer.
Scoring points against everyone toward a goal to win is VERY interesting, but it encourages picking on the weakest player specifically, basically removing the need for picking priority targets for voltron
If we want to get rid of Commander Damage, we need a non-trash mana rock or land that you can pay mana into and sacrifice (or exile) to reset an opponent's life total to starting - and I feel like Wizards needs to stop making commander cards, so...
How about a new rule entirely where it says if a player lost 80 or more life between his or her own turns (not including his or her own turn), that player loses? This allows lifegain to still matter, but it gives recourse to decks that might not be able to play a combo to counter infinite life. Yes, it's a number to track, but almost never because 80 life lost is already lethal in 99% of situations - so it'll be fairly obvious when it matters. You could even say Commanders count 3x toward that number, giving voltron decks a realistic goal of 27 (assuming no other life is lost)
I bristled a bit at the assumption that infinite combos are "obviously" something you would discuss pre-game. Infinite combos exist at all power levels. I have never seen the need to ask about them beforehand. Hell, we've had a few precons with infinites included
Just get rid of it. Wizards can introduce "level-up commanders" or whatever if they want to incentivize commanders actually attacking
I like the suggsetions! I do however live in a large city so trying to implement something like this would be very difficult :D
Commander damage idea, havent finished the video yet so dont scold me if he gives an idea like this, one commander must deal combat damage to a given player on a number of separate turns, maybe around 5 turns. Doesnt matter how much damage. multiple instances of damage wouldnt count as more than 1 instance of commander damage on a turn, this would prevent double strike or multiple combats from becoming too strong for this idea. Also could throw in a rule where commander damage only counts the first instance of damage a commander deals to any player, to stop multiple combats from allowing a player to attack each opponent.
I completely agree, commander damage sucks as it is currently implemented, and I think your suggestions would be a big improvement, a rework is definitely in order, or just removing the mechanic completely.
Skill issue
I don't see any problems besides people not having alternative win-cons in their decks. I like to try to have 3 different ways to win in a deck, ex: Combo, commander damage, token swarm, mill, etc...
Dev lens: Commander damage is in the game to help balance stuff like life gain decks.
I don't get suggestion 3: When a commander does damage the damage is taken from your life total and is counted toward commander damage, that is normal, you take damage either way. Are you suggesting that commanders do damage but it doesn't affect your life total?
I use spin downs to keep track of commander damage it isn't hard what is hard is keeping track of all the interactions from the combinations of cards on the tables.
I really like the third solution, the second one was pretty close to my own idea.
i despise life gain (period). it doesnt matter whether you gain infinite or have >40, if the pod happens to wanna play decks that cannot deal commander damage or become absolutely massive, it is absolutely miserable to play against life gain. none of my decks ever seek to kill by commander damage and most cannot ever even do that, i would much rather have a set limit to max hp than commander damage... being physically forced to always keep the white player in check just because a lot of white cards happen to gain tons of life as a side effect makes me ragingly miserable. even if every color could do this reasonably well including in creative decks that dont simply run all kindsa staples but try to stay on a theme or budget, i would despise it as it would drag games out forever. absolutely the worst mechanic in magic (not just commander), by a long shot - to me, anyway.
I agree that from a design perspective, commander dmg is clunky and unnecessarily complicated. That said, in practice, as you rarely see cmdr dmg being a goal for a deck, you can normally ignore this rule
other alternatives are using counters for each commander, if you get hit in combat by it, then you get a counter, get 3 of them and you die, although that would make voltron decks less special (which is bad imo)
for your solutions, I don't really like any of them, they come with drawbacks too big to bear imo, shared damage pool between the cmdrs is bad for an entire archetype, you rarely see cmdr dmg being a thing, now you killed it with that change. too low, and it's game breaking, too big and it's not a thing anymore
cmdr deal double combat damage has too many interactions with other cards that allow 1HKO situations.
having a plater accumulate their cmdr dmg overall to win makes them a target (which means they get picked off early) or makes them target the weakest link (which knocks them out early) and is almost the same thing as before, but reversed
to simplify partners, you could change the rule so cmdr dmg is tracked by owner of the card, so if you get 21 dmg from cmdrs owned by player Z, then you die, although that would mean you get the initial 5 life bars per player, and still, rarely cmdrs are focused on dealing combat dmg anyway
I find the lifegain arguments people make very unconvincing.
At the extreme end, if someone can establish an infinite lifegain combo they could likely establish any number of other win conditions. In casual, outside of the outer edges of high-power, A+B combos are already considered a faux pas. Typically you see combos that require 3 or 4 specific pieces to be executed, which are insanely interactible. If someone gets you with a 4 card combo then yeah, you should lose if you don't have a way to deal with it. Someone going to a billion life still loses to any number of infinite combos, mill, infect, and other alt wincons which you'll have ample time to execute.
Why gain infinite life with my 4 card combo (or A+B combo) when winning the game conclusively ends it?
If someone is playing a strategy with lifegain as a pillar of it they're more interested in lifegain payoffs, and padding their life total is a benefit. Like every other strategy, dismantling their engines is the way to defeat them. Someone going to 80 life still dies without a board.
When it comes to voltron and commander damage wins, I have a lot of voltron players in my local meta. This is anecdotal, but the amount of times that commander damage ended up not mattering anyway is substantial. Very often if they can do 21, they can do a lot more. But frankly, they often do much less since counting to 10 is easier than counting to 21. Infect is a factor.
Whatever other arguments you may have - "the tracking isn't that bad" (as he mentioned, if you're ignoring a mechanic that is in play because it is unlikely to matter, it is that bad), "it comes from the Elder Dragons having 7 power" (that's not a mechanic, that is just self-referential trivia), or what have you - people still value lifelink despite the presence of commander damage. The relationship between lifegain and commander damage is far weaker than people seem to believe. I've gotten run over by Craterhoof and chipped out by Blood Artist more often than someone has domed me for 21 with a Slicer.
The problem that one player gets repeatedly attacked is something I have never seen.
For non Voltron commanders we don't track it because It never becomes relevant and for Voltron commanders they usually deal (at least) 21 damage in one git, in case of my mono green omnath it deals more like 50+ in one hit.
Thats a good reason why you don't need commander damage at all. You are already killing in one hit without it.
@@PimpTrizkit-42 often it is just 21 or 22, but even then you don't need to track it from turn to turn.
People forget pencil and paper exsist
Your change should come in tandem with a life total cap.
That would devalue infinte lifegain, and by extension infinite damage combos.
Otherwise voltron and aggro, that are already weak archetypes, would just fold to lame lifegain.
Is it really that many "Health Bars" as it where. As an outsider to MTG, I had the impression that you have only 2 Health Bars, The Regular 40 Life Pool and the Commander Damage Pool. I had no impression that you had other Commander Damage to track.
You gotta track 4 per player. So 5 numbers per player including life total. Technically 6 if you include infect in a game. So to play correct and abide by all the rules, you need to be tracking 24 numbers for a game of commander.
I think an important aspect you might be over looking is how sometimes you can feel cheated out of a game by commander damage. Ive had this experience before several times where a haste/flying commander just keeps coming back from board wipes and even with many stabilization tools there is no commander damage healing either. which also feels very awkward due to the very nature of normal healing existing. with double damage commanders these harder to stop commanders can still threaten you with lethal, but at least you can stop the bleeding to some extent. my group also doesnt typically have many if any healing focused decks and commander damage may be exactly why that is, so commander damage as it is feels like it is limiting our design choices as well. looking forward to trying to convince my group that that increasing commander damage is a good change for us to implement. as for the safety stop gap you implemented i believe it to be a good thing to leave in even though it adds complexity, but i do use a Gishath, Sun's Avatar deck so i may already be biased towards those decks preforming well.
Do you also feel cheated out of the game if someone uses poison counters? In my experience, it's virtually the same as commander damage in that there's rarely multiple people in the game playing towards the same goal (multiple people going for commander damage or multiple people going for poison). They're both essentially an alternative life total that only one player at the table is playing towards.
It's an alternate win-con just like any other. Do you feel cheated when someone uses Thassa's Oracle to win the game?
Do you feel cheated out of the game with the alternate wincon cards? They're much, much more egregious than commander damage - especially Maze's End, where it's socially unacceptable to destroy lands. What about infinite combos? That comes more out of nowhere than commander damage.
The thing about the haste/flying commander consistently coming back is that the player running that commander is stuck using more and more resources to get back on track. There's eventually a point where they either can't recast the commander or it isn't worthwhile to do it and they need to find an alternate path. That's why I don't like the "I got cheated out of this" argument. If the commander is taking you out in one hit, you then need to question how it reached that point and what you can possibly do in the future to combat it.
@@shadowfate05 Yes
@@jolteon345 Yes, Yes and Yes. In casual, I don't want to see any of this. In cEDH, anything goes.
paper and pencil. no digital necessary. Not saying you don't make a good point but the necessity of an electronic device isn't true.
He might have used bad wording. He gave an example of how to do it with out using electronics in the beginning. I think he just meant that its messy and at that point you might as well have electronics do it for you. They are so much easier than pen/paper or dice or whatever. Just one or two clicks on the smartphone, done. And everyone has a smartphone nowadays, not necessarily pen/paper.
too har for mtg player to use paper and pencil
Yooo you just listed my favorite games. dota, melee, and magic. Only MapleStory is missing lol
The problem with Commander is we start with 40 life for some ungodly reason. Just put everyone back to 20 and get rid of Commander damage.
20 life free for all games were boring even 30 years ago because you were never safe to attack and everybody stalled
@@GG-bi8tbyou're currently never safe to attack anybody because expending resources on one player is bad and puts you and that player at a disadvantage compared to the other two players. That combined with the high life total are the reasons commander is dominated by combo decks and even decks that win by combat are effectively just slower combo decks because organically dealing 40, or more accurately, 120, is just too much.
20 life might not be the answer but 40 life definitely encourages players to play passively unless they can instantly win in one turn with a combo as it is.
@@RedOphiuchusskill issue. My pod banned infinite combos as those are lame. Never had issues dealing 40 damage, and can also properly block threats.
I am pleasantly surprised with suggestions 2 and 3. I actually would be most inclined to try suggestion 2 though where to set the damage limit at might be really tricky. I think total combat damage done by a commander might be easier to find the right number for, and it would set a clock on max game length instead of becoming a chump blocker fest.
Consider how suggestion 2 encourages the voltron player to beat up the mana screwed player. Sure the other players could help (if they drew interaction), but it would be easier for them to use use player removal and kill the mana screwed player to stop the involuntary feeding. This exacerbates the "eliminate one player early" problem and makes it worse by having it be the player in the weakest position.
@@Ent229 Hence another reason why I threw out the idea of total combat damage done by a commander. Doesn't matter as much if it is hitting face vs hitting bodies. Hitting the player with bigger creatures is actually better as long as your commander will survive. It still punishes a completely creature empty board, but at that point they deserve it.
make it so if you take damage from a commander 3 times you lose. simple as that. no value. just track instances of damage up to 3
"lifegain decks should always win" - truly a 300iq take
A life gain deck can literally NOT win by just gaining life. There isn't a life point you hit and then win. There are cards with win conditions that change that but all cards can be countered or removed in some way.
My playgroups always liked abiding by all of the rules, but we got so confused by commander damage, keeping track of 21 commander damage from each commander to each player, that is another 12 life totals to keep track of. There are other issues like commanders get targeted enough already and poison adding to the confusion too. But it's simple enough to ignore it.
Its not hard to track, when u take mander danage put a d20 out on the damage u take, and tick it up, once it would require a second dice ur dead, no 12 life totals flr memorization, just easily seen dice so everyone who wants to kno can tell
Skill issue. Just use an app
4:45. Here is the thing about life apps. The game is going thatvway on its own now. You are suppose to use the mtg life app in all tournaments as well. I use life apps even in modern or other formats because it is simpler than using dice or paper.
Option 3 kills cEDH meta, Naus decks like rog si lose half of what makes their decks playable because it will drastically diminish the resource of their life, it would also drastically buff commanders like Tivit. No one is gaining life in cEDH and commander damage is usually similarly negligible but taking double or losing your value engines sounds insane for cEDH.
I don't think it makes Tivit significantly better. Tivit is generally winning through infinite extra turns anyway, so having that be half as many attacks is just not that helpful.
I do think it makes Turbo Naus decks, K'rrik, and other decks that heavily utilize their life total much much worse.
People sure are afraid of these pesky life gain decks that will just run rampant the moment that commander damage is gone..
As if half commanders arent tiny utility creatures that wont be dealing commander damage anyway.
If people say its not worth tracking all the time, why the heck is it a core mechanic of the format?