I appreciate your insight into the community narratives of the format, but this is not my experience at all. On /r/edh, discord(s), and the twitterverse I see a growing discourse that wins are getting faster, less projected, and more resilient, and that this is precarious for the role of removal in the format. Why would I play a Damnation, or even a Swords to Plowshares when mana spent on development outpaces interaction by a landslide? The format is becoming a race to the bottom to interact less and develop your own combo faster, and I do think the community has its ear to the ground about that. I think this article would've really benefited from some links to some of what you're seeing in terms of "educating" the community about combos.
EDIT: As an example, since I understand you play on PlayEDH, their Mid tier recently patched the power level to exclude two-card combos out of the command zone. I maintain that PlayEDH is actually a fairly representative (but by no means monolithic) platform for getting a snapshot of community consensus about the format.
Thanks for the interaction! I appreciate your far more optimistic view of the community's take on the "race to the bottom," but I see a lot more "people who don't like combo big dumb" mentality than I'd like. I considered posting some links but I didn't want to call anyone out (I did plenty of that when I still posted directly to reddit).
I'm not really ready to maintain that PlayEDH is representative of anything other than PlayEDH itself. I'm a level 1 judge (not super high, lol) but I've been around to several events and local playgroups. My experience is that out of every 4 or 5 commander players, maybe 1 of them cares about commander enough to engage in reddit, listen to a podcast like command zone, etc. For the rest it's all pretty isolated to what their group is doing. That's personal experience and the plurality of personal anecdotes is not "data" but I have yet to see any real data on that subject so it's hard to dig up.
I appreciate your insight into the community narratives of the format, but this is not my experience at all. On /r/edh, discord(s), and the twitterverse I see a growing discourse that wins are getting faster, less projected, and more resilient, and that this is precarious for the role of removal in the format. Why would I play a Damnation, or even a Swords to Plowshares when mana spent on development outpaces interaction by a landslide? The format is becoming a race to the bottom to interact less and develop your own combo faster, and I do think the community has its ear to the ground about that. I think this article would've really benefited from some links to some of what you're seeing in terms of "educating" the community about combos.
EDIT: As an example, since I understand you play on PlayEDH, their Mid tier recently patched the power level to exclude two-card combos out of the command zone. I maintain that PlayEDH is actually a fairly representative (but by no means monolithic) platform for getting a snapshot of community consensus about the format.
Thanks for the interaction! I appreciate your far more optimistic view of the community's take on the "race to the bottom," but I see a lot more "people who don't like combo big dumb" mentality than I'd like. I considered posting some links but I didn't want to call anyone out (I did plenty of that when I still posted directly to reddit).
I'm not really ready to maintain that PlayEDH is representative of anything other than PlayEDH itself. I'm a level 1 judge (not super high, lol) but I've been around to several events and local playgroups. My experience is that out of every 4 or 5 commander players, maybe 1 of them cares about commander enough to engage in reddit, listen to a podcast like command zone, etc. For the rest it's all pretty isolated to what their group is doing. That's personal experience and the plurality of personal anecdotes is not "data" but I have yet to see any real data on that subject so it's hard to dig up.