IN DEFENSE OF LITTLE TIMMY
I’m kind of a Magic: The Gathering hipster. I’m not, like, an old fan or anything — I started playing in 2023, I have no nostalgia for blocks or tie-in novels — but I’m as pretentious as the next autistic tgirl about, for example, preferring weird, bad, niche cards to the generic printed-for-Commander value piles we get in every set. Especially when the value piles have Sheldon Cooper’s face on them.
So I hang out in Magic hipster spaces, and there’s this thing I see other Magic hipsters say: the problem with Commander is that the ‘social format’ aspect is used as a shield against parts of the game that make it dynamic, or interesting. Commander is a bad format, they’ll explain, because little Timmy is an entitled whiner who’ll freak out if you play stax, or land destruction, or even combos. These are parts of the game like any other, the hipster says, and Commander is warped around avoiding them for no other reason than that they hurt little Timmy’s feelings.
And when I hear that, I feel obligated to step up to the stand and argue like a defense lawyer: little Timmy is literally right, though.
Obviously, I’m not denying that there are people who are obnoxious to play with because they get mad if you interact with their gameplan. I haven’t encountered any myself, probably because I don’t play with strangers at game stores, but I believe they exist. Obviously, the hypothetical player who thinks counterspells and Murder should be banned in EDH is in the wrong. But for every single common boogeyman of the format: stax, combos, mass land denial — there is an entirely reasonable, straightforward reason why it sticks in the craw of Commander players specifically. It has nothing to do with them being casual, or whiny, or not understanding the game, and everything to do with how the actual rules of Commander warp the way they play.
Your Honour, let me present the case in favor of my client:
Figure 1: Combos
Let’s be clear: I’m not going to bat for the idea that combos never belong in Commander, or even casual Commander. Hell, if you ask me, any eight creatures + Craterhoof Behemoth is a combo for all intents and purposes. But there’s two big differences between 60-card formats and Commander that make combos an entirely different — and in many cases much more frustrating — beast.
Firstly, there’s the card knowledge check. If you’re playing Standard right now, there’s only one combo deck you’re likely to have to worry about: the Dimir Doomsday Excruciator list, which you can sniff out as early as seeing a Restless Reef for their turn one land drop (I suppose there’s technically the Bant airbending deck, but that one’s fallen off pretty hard). Modern has more variety, but you’ll always know the big names you’re likely to run into: Amulet Titan, Ruby Storm, Broodscale, Goryo’s, Living End, Oops! All Spells. But in Commander — unless you’re playing cEDH, where Underworld Breach and Thassa’s Oracle lines are undisputed king s— there’s absolutely no telling which of the nearly 90,000 combos in the format might be in an opponents’ deck.
This is both because EDH has a much larger card pool — nearly 10,000 more cards than Modern — and because in a casual format where you generally don’t play the most cutthroat, lean package possible, the number of combos that are suddenly viable balloon exponentially. So there’s the first reason why little Timmy might not enjoy playing into combos: unless the combo player proactively discloses their gameplan, a combo’s pieces might be totally undetected on the board until the win. It feels like it “comes out of nowhere” — it turns the game into an anticlimax, and makes new players feel like there’s no way they could have anticipated or planned around the win.
An additional downside is how this can create really undesirable social dynamics at a table with varying degrees of card knowledge, where a more experienced player without removal in hand essentially has to try to teach a breakneck course in Magic to explain to a newer player why it’s more important to remove an Ashnod’s Altar than a random 6/6 trampler. Losing to your own lack of card knowledge is one thing, but losing to someone else’s lack of card knowledge can be infuriating and produces awful vibes for all parties involved.
To this, the prosecution might say “Okay, so? Card knowledge is a legitimate part of the game, and if Timmy can’t recognize a combo, then it’s a skill issue. Besides, you can only be surprised by a combo once.”
And sure, being caught out by a combo, shaking your head, and going “Okay, I know what to do next time” is a correct and healthy response that’s very reasonable… in a 60-card format, because 60-card formats are played in best-of-3 matches with a sideboard. In Modern or Standard, it’s not enough to just get a cheap win over an opponent who isn’t familiar with your combo — that can snatch you a free game 1, but you’ll be fighting the next game or two as an uphill battle into an opponent who now knows what to sideboard in and what to kill on sight.
In Commander, though? That cheap win is it. You don’t get a game two with your new knowledge and a few sideboarded cards — maybe you shuffle up and play again, but just as often you don’t. It doesn’t feel worse to lose to combo in Commander because little Timmy doesn’t have the titanic strength of will needed to have fun with card games, it feels worse because it’s a meaningfully different experience, one that offers less chance for correction and recovery.
“Fine,” says the prosecution, “maybe getting caught out by an off-the-wall combo and that being your game for the night sucks. But it’s really just a deckbuilding issue — the real problem is that little Timmy refuses to run removal.”
I’d be the first to co-sign the position that the average Commander player needs to play more removal. However, I think this argument misses a really huge aspect of Commander that puts significant deckbuilding decisions outside of a player’s control: colour identity.
The colour pie is one of Magic’s great triumphs. Not every colour can deal with every kind of threat. If you want to shore up your weaknesses or include good role-players, you’ll have to play more colours, which you’ll pay for with a less reliable mana base and trouble using pip-heavy cards. But in Commander, it doesn’t really work that way: you can play the colours in your Commander’s colour identity or you can fuck off home and play Dandân.
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With ‘fair’ gameplans, that doesn’t present a huge problem. Every colour can handle creatures, even if red and green need to jump through a couple hoops for it. Even with gameplans revolving around non-creature permanents, you have options — in the worst case scenario, a problematic permanent can always be removed by eliminating the player who owns it from the game.
But if something’s a combo piece, and you’re going to lose the turn it comes down unless you have removal in hand right away — then sometimes you’re just fucked. This is especially the case with combos that unfold on the stack at instant speed: if you’re not in blue, there’s nothing you can do (this is one reason why cEDH is overwhelmingly dominated by blue decks). There’s no splashing in Commander, and most effects or deck archetypes simply aren’t supported in every colour — you can’t tell a Mardu vampire typal player they should ‘splash blue’ to deal with instant-speed combos without telling them they should just build an entirely new deck.
Do I think you shouldn’t play combos in casual Commander? No, of course not. It’s completely fine to play a combo deck at Bracket 3, or Bracket 2 if it’s slow enough. I do think it’s sporting to be explicit and clear about what your combo is before the game starts and when you start setting it up instead of squeezing cheap wins out of people who haven’t spent as long on Scryfall as you have, and I also think it’s reasonable to be a little put out by losing to a combo your deck literally couldn’t have responded to. Combos are fine. My fellow Magic hipsters should try to put a bit more thought into why they’re widely disliked by the EDH crowd, but combos are fine. Unlike…
Figure 2: Stax & Mana Denial
This is the one that really unbutters my biscuits. The argument here goes like this: “It’s completely legitimate to play Blood Moon in Commander. EDH players just aren’t used to being punished for their greedy manabases”. For my own sanity, I usually assume that this is reflexive contrarianism, but to take it in good faith, this is a bad argument because there is no such thing as ‘a greedy mana base’ in Commander in the way that there is in 60-card formats.
It comes back to colour identity. The delicate interaction between the colour pie and Magic’s mana system — the very idea of splashing, of trading versatility or average card power level for consistency — breaks down entirely in Commander. Sure, if you’re playing a very well-supported theme: elves, or vampires, or aristocrats — you can choose between mono-colour, two-colour or three-colour options. But in many cases, to play the type of deck you want, you’re going to be in three-colours, and you’re going to be playing a ton of nonbasic lands because a non-game where you don’t get the third pip you need to cast your commander is not only less fun for you but for everyone else at the table, who are now for all intents and purposes down one from a full pod.
Say I’ve been sucked into the game by Universes Beyond, as a non-insignificant number of players have. I’m a huge fan of Noctis from Final Fantasy XV. I really liked it when he leaned on that car (I’ve never played a Final Fantasy game). If I want to play a deck helmed by my favourite character, that deck’s going to be Esper. There’s no theoretical lower-colour deck I could be building instead. The colours are purely downstream of the commander.
Okay, though, on seconds thoughts, I’m arguing before a jury of Magic hipsters, so perhaps my client’s image is not improved by making him a Universes Beyond fan. So imagine that little Timmy is instead a huge fan of one of Magic’s original characters (I know, they really did use to have those, if you can believe it). Timmy loves the melodramatic archvillain Nicol Bolas, and wants a Nicol Bolas deck — same problem. It’s Grixis or nothing.
Or take a non-Timmy player for a moment: I’m a Jenny, through and through. If I want to make a deck that combines blink, reanimator, and artifacts, do I have any choice other than Sharuum the Hegemon? Plenty of three-colour or even five-colour legends have totally unique effects that aren’t printed on anything else. Calling someone’s manabase ‘greedy’ because they have the temerity to want to cast their spells in a deck with a character they like, or a unique mechanical interaction they want to explore, doesn’t add up: applying the logic of 60-card magic to Commander is like arguing for basketball players to be declared offside. So yes, little Timmy is absolutely in the right to bludgeon you with the bracket system until you agree not to bring your Blood Moon to game night.
Right, that’s out of the way. Let’s tackle stax more generally. Sure, something like Blood Moon might unfairly punish little Timmy for making decisions that have nothing to do with deck power or the risk-reward calculus that goes into a 60-card manabse, but what about something like Winter Orb or Stasis? Stax pieces are a completely accepted part of every 60-card format, what’s so special about Commander? It must be little Timmy’s hurt feelings again, keeping those damn casuals from playing real Magic.
First things first, stax has all the same unique-to-Commander problems as combo. In fact, it doubles down on them. In a 60-card best-of-3, you might get caught under a lock in the first game, shuffle up, sideboard against the stax piece, and go into the next game better prepared. Sideboarding into a stax matchup is even more important than into a combo deck, because as well as picking up any silver bullets you might need to break the lock, you can also take out cards that are dead draws if they get their stax pieces online. Commander, however, doesn’t give you that. There’s no game two, no freshly sideboarded deck. If a stax piece turns your whole deck off, that’s it.
“Okay, big deal,” you might say, “If you’ve basically lost, you should just scoop anyway.”
This is true, and good advice. Someone having an awful match playing Lantern Control to time has only themselves to blame for hanging in there long past the point of no return. So, yeah, a hard lock or sufficiently powerful soft lock would be good grounds to shuffle up and go again. You can end the game at any time… in a 1-v-1 format.
Because, oh, yeah, there’s other players here, and you have no control over what they do. Say there’s a lock on the table, the stax player is content to chip you all down with a 2/2 hatebear. You do the smart thing, and scoop. Tweedledee next to you says “I want to see if I draw my Boseiju.” Tweedledum on your other side says, “Contrariwise, I want to see if the stax player doesn’t draw her win condition.” So now you’ve gone from a game where you’re effectively spectating to one where you’re literally spectating — not a big improvement!
Besides, even if you do play a game against a prison deck all the way to the finish line, that finish line is much closer in 60-card than it is in a game of Commander. A winconless Armageddon in a game of Modern adds ten minutes to the match — an Armageddon in a game with twice the players and eight times the life points adds forty.
Closing Arguments
So, you know, there’s a place for combos at every bracket of Commander. There’s even a place for stax and resource denial. You can play Armageddon all you want at the lower echelons of Bracket 4, where casting a four-mana sorcery that’s not Culling Ritual isn’t yet considered a cry for help. But when little Tammy stands at the gates of her casual Commander nights and says “Not today!”, she’s not just inexperienced, or coddled, or unable to cope with the harsh realities of what pieces of cardboard can have written on them. She’s responding reasonably to the very real differences between Commander and 60-card Magic.
I think a lot of Commander-exclusive players would learn a lot about the game by playing other formats — the sheer brilliance of Magic’s mana system when allowed to work as intended, the deep satisfaction of making a correct sideboard call, the fun of building up a mental rolodex of meta decks and their tells, these all amazing parts of this game that I want everyone to have a chance to experience. I’d also like for Commander players to play more 60-card formats in the hope that some of them might develop less horrible opinions about hybrid mana.
But if you play a competitive 1v1 format and you vocally look down on Commander play culture, I just think you should first have an understanding on where that play culture is actually coming from and how it develops from the rules of the format itself.
You can come away from this trial thinking “damn, sounds like Commander’s rules are stupid and sabotage the game”, and that’s not an unfair position to have, even if I don’t share it. But even if that’s true, my client is innocent. Blame it on the format: little Timmy did nothing wrong.
