How do you get 5 damage at instant speed from Goblin Grenade? That card is printed as a sorcery '^^

The commander ruleset is an attempt at immersion. Instead of being a planeswalker yourself, summoning the monsters from other planes and carrying the spells from your hand (which is the Vorthos interpretation of how magic is played), you choose a general to lead your deck. This general is a creature from a magic card. Its capabilities stem from colors of Magic. Only the colors that your general is well versed with (colors on the card, either in mana cost or in abilities from the text box) are the colors the deck has access to. Nicol Bolas has no access to green or white magic, so a deck with Bolas at the helm can only use grixis cards.

To say those flavorings don't mean anything to you is valid of course, nobody can tell you how you want to enjoy magic. However, Magic is created by the company that also makes Dungeons and Dragons, and the play-pretend part does matter to a lot of people. Building a commander deck is like creating a new D&D character, scrolling through the card pool like a rulebook, checking for the coolest thing to do while being tied and restricted to a color identity like a race/class combination. I'd say the overlap in audience is there for this to be a part of the fun. It's part of the reason we still have art and flavor text on the cards.

There's a lot of room for personal preferences, and the color restrictions contribute to increasing playability of a wider arrangement of cards. If al you can play is , you've got to be more creative in your card choices to tackle opposing problems than you'd have to be if you could include other colors. It invited me to expand my search of cards to play, and the feeling of stumbling upon a forgotten card from 2001 that's perfect with this other card I opened at the prerelease last week, is very satisfying indeed.

That's more rewarding to me than building a Standard deck could ever be. There you work towards the same goal as the rest of the world with the same card pool, the results tend to get very similar, and you'll be rewarded for doing the same thing per archetype, ending up playing the same cards, doing the same thing. That's where merit is mostly skill based, leaning towards the competitive aspect of Magic.

EDH was not created as a competitive format though. The original EDH tables were judges who after refereeing a big tournament all day, wanted to entwine playing magic, but a lot less serious magic than the matches they've been dealing with all day. A way for their cool type 2 (Standard) cards to do cooler things than they ever got to do in their intended formats. Singleton, so every game should play out different than the last one you played. Where you get the time to build something that you can't in other formats. And they started out with just the Elder Dragons from Legends as commanders. They all have 7 power and they all cost 7 mana, if you took 3 hits from a commander it was legal because let's be fair, game's got to end. It was casual as in anti-competitive in its baby shoes.

Now that the format has both sped up immensely, and other legendary creatures can be your commander, I can imagine that rule makes less sense out of the blue. Commanders are engines or combo pieces, and not combat behemoths like they used to. But it's still a part of the identity of the ruleset, due to the "roleplay" aspect of how the format began.

Every commander is it's own archetype. That makes the cards performing well in your deck, vastly different from the cards performing well in your opponent's deck. Color identity makes it so that more cards are played in the format, diversifying play experience. Playing commander is a great way to expand your card knowlegde, because every card choice is influenced by all this weirdly-tacked-on red-tape to be a creative personal choice rewarded by a greater knowlegde of card interactions that you personally might not have thought of. Ripping off the red tape will turn commander into the form of Magic it was trying to escape from.

That's what I want to see more of in Commander. Creative combinations of existing cards not necessarily designed to be played together, rather than an amalgamation of designed-for-strategy cards. Because Commander is the most popular format, precons are probably the best way to showcase card interactions to new players, but I subscribe to legendofa 's suggested way to start playing magic. Get the basics in Standard or Jumpstart, and when you're ready to dive deep, buy and upgrade a precon, start playing Commander to step up your learning curve. I don't think we need as many precons and printed-for-commander cards as we are getting. To me, the spirit of the format is scouring the entire pool of cards to discover and showcase impressive things other people might not have thought of, with a very personal touch of style. It makes me want to play my decks over and over again if I'm proud of what I found, and most games I lose, I did cool stuff that made my friends go "Oh wow!" anyway, leaving me fulfilled anyway.

I played a The Unagi of Kyoshi Island deck. An opponent playing the new Lorwyn Elementals precon evoked a Maelstrom Wanderer out for cheap. Cascades ensue, silly board stuff happens, I had a Thing in the Ice  ^Flip with two counters remaining on my battlefield. As soon as the Elemental player tried moving to combat, I used Reenact the Crime on his evoked (so sacrificed) Maelstrom Wanderer, spinning into Arcane Denial allowing me to counter my own Wanderer ànd flip my Awoken Horror  ^Flip to bounce the board, then cascade the second time into Teferi's Tutelage to capitalize on the 3 cards Arcane Denial will draw me the next upkeep.

Quite the interruption to the the Elemental combat plans.

Dude... you are kidding right? You accuse me of dishonest discussion by putting words in your mouth, but:

@DragonMaster420 says...#19 plakjekaas don't put words in my mouth. the only restrictions i listed were the number of copies of cards.

@DragonMaster420 says...#12 plakjekaas still singleton vs 4 copies. still 100 cards vs 60. still a difference in legal sets. and unless your group allows proxies, 5c commander players are shelling out hundreds of dollars for good lands.

(Emphases mine)

If you can't even be trusted to know what you yourself said in your previous post, you're not even bothered to scroll up and read it again to make sure before you accuse me, I don't trust you're conducting an honest discussion here. At this point you planted your heels in the sand and don't want to agree with me even if I do make sense.

@DragonMaster420 says...#19 everything you said was subjective at best.

What objective arguments do you expect when asked about opinions about the format? What objective arguments have you brought up? "Sideboards in commander would be cool" is equally subjective as "changing how hybrid mana works would be a horrible idea". The difference to me is mostly that I explain my choices of why I feel the way I feel, my posts are on the lengthy size because of it. You, however, cherry pick out of my long texts the thing you can criticize, and try to throw it back in my face to defend against, just because I don't agree with what you say. That's your last three posts tagging me.

And when I do defend, and give multiple reasons why I think the train of thought you presented in this thread is flawed, you ignore 80% of what I say, discredit the other 20%, and attack me in a different way. Then you accuse me of cheating the conversation to put you in a bad light. I don't need to do that... you're doing a great job yourself.

And that unwillingness to admit your own words are flawed, shows back in your reasoning about what constitutes creativity. If the only thing causing creativity is the amount of options you can select from, then my random 2018 commander deck that I haven't updated in 7 years, would be more creative today than it was when I built it, just because 18000 cards have been printed since. The very same deck is now more creative than it was, according to your logic, and will get more creative with every future set release. That's what you try to tell the world, and you refuse to see how silly that sounds. Nothing about making the choices about why you'd put which cards together, thàt is where opportunity for creativity exists. That's how a 1500 card format can feel more creative because there's more options to combine more different cards together and still function as a competitive deck, than a 7500 card format where you play one of 4 template tier decks with no room for flexibiliy because anything else is not good enough. You fail to see that any amount of options does not add to creativity if they're not worthy of being selected. All because it seems more important to you to call out the people who disagree strenuously enough with you.

You accused me of nostalgia glasses, refuted very small specific passages with flawed definitions or ignorant nonsequiturs that showed you didn't even try to understand my point of view, then tried to tell me I'm being subjective and putting words in your mouth. You've played ad hominem the entire conversation, and you quotably contradicted yourself to try and make me look bad. I feel I had to call that out.

I'm not arguing you because I dislike you, I argue because I think you're demonstrably wrong and to find out why I think what I think while putting it down in words. I learned more about what I think is creative deckbuilding, why I think Wish effect would be a detriment to how I think commander should be played, and my possibly biased respect for the rules of commander as they are now. I think I made my points, I'll refrain from beating the dead horses further along.

Oh so you do agree the Commander format is unique due to its restrictions compared to other magic formats? Can we keep it that way?

Difference in sets? Well Legacy then. Those people shell out hundreds of dollars for two color mana bases already anyway, let alone five.

Yeah, 100 card singleton vs 60 card 4 copies. In commander, every game should play out different by design of its restrictions, so there's a lot of room for the social aspect. In Standard/Modern/Legacy, your plan needs to come together as consistently as possible every game to beat the opponent. Now what good is a Sideboard going to do in commander, except for consistently having access to the same cards every single game through Wish effects? The same good Demonic Tutor, Vampiric TutorGC, Imperial SealGC and GambleGC are going to do, which is why those cards are gamechangers that you'd need to disclose using. That's why Companions are pretty universally considered the worst mechanic to ever be put to cardboard. In a game built on variance as a key component, too little of it will ruin the play experience. The 4 copy rule was only made after people tried to play 40 Lightning Bolts with 20 Mountains which made for especially uninteresting gameplay.

You can list every detail I didn't mention, in which the formats are still different, but every change you've suggested thus far would make those differences less pronounced and their play patterns and play experience more similar. You recognize Commander to not be the same as Modern, but by everything you said in this thread, I infer you want to feel similar playing either format, instead of celebrating their difference.

As someone who plays Commander especially because it's unlike any 1v1 competitive 60 card format, I'm trying to explain it's a terrible thing to lose your identity as a format because you have to accomodate people who don't like to stick to the well established rules and traditions that made Commander the most popular way to play magic. Especially now that the format is curated by the same party that prints and sells the cards, it's important to adhere to those traditions, and not let the format be blandly blended together with all others so you need even more copies of the same expensive cards that are good in every deck in every format.

That's what I'm saying, they're very different; at least before your suggested changes. Those make them a lot more alike. Which I'm not a fan of.

There's already plenty of ways to play magic the way you're suggesting. Coincidentally, they're all 1v1 competitive formats where finding advantage is the only useful aspect of the game. Commander is designed to be a very different way of playing the game, limiting the options for the cards you can play in a unique way, forcing you to make unconventional choices while building your deck, leading to every game playing out differently.

That's why 5c commanders are heckled earlier in this thread, their abundance removes the restriction that brings the most creativity in deckbuilding. That's why tutors are a bracket deciding factor, they make decks play out the same way too consistently, diluting the singleton rule, the other big restriction the format was built around.

Expanding color identity with the hybrid rule would homogenize the format, making it lose the uniqueness that made it succesful in the first place. I'd hate to see it happen.

Just like tokens can die and trigger "when this permanent is put into a graveyard"- effects, tokens can be returned to hand. It doesn't exile, it won't trigger a Ketramose, the New Dawn for example, but it will trigger Barrin, Tolarian Archmage in the end step. The token just stops existing as soon as it arrives in its new zone (your hand, instead of the battlefield) and can't be retrieved from anywhere after it stopped existing.

If you want to play hybrid cards in a single color, have restrictions be just banning the overpowered cards, and play with sideboards, what you actually want to do is play Modern. You can already do all that in there, no need to bring it to other formats.

More options gives you more possible creativity, I can conceptually get behind that. But making beter options more available for more people will limit the choices you make. There's plenty people who joke that building a new commander deck starts with Sol Ring, Arcane Signet and then the actual commander. There's only 97 choices left then, instead of 99. Less options for creativity now. The fact that you can put 7409 different cards in those slots instead of 7423 is not the limiting factor of, or making a difference in your creativity.

Homogenizing the aspects of what makes the format unique makes for less interesting decks and shorter games with less different cards being used. You can disagree all you like, but Standard decks were a lot more fun and creative 10 years ago, when you had to find the synergy among 1500 different legal cards and different archetypes could be successfully fleshed out. In the Pro Tour that happens this weekend, 45% of the field is built around Badgermole Cub. You argue that today's Standard decks must be more creative because they can choose from 7500 cards instead of 1500, but I played the decks and I strongly think otherwise. With more cards available there's also a bigger difference in power/quality, which will eliminate a bigger part of the cardpool faster for playability. You don't need to make creative choices, you let the internet do it for you because someone else already figured out what's "optimal", leaving you to consider just a fraction of all possible cards for your deck. Which limits your options for creativity.

I'm not afraid of losing to the cards, I'm afraid when this rule would take effect, Wizards will start printing hybrid cards that are the best choice for either monocolor they have, meaning at least two other cards will be less likely to ever see play again. Concentrating the viable options in a smaller volume of cards, limiting the amount of creative choices a deckbuilder can make.