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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/kickback-artist on 2024-12-31 23:53:29+00:00.

Fandom can be beautiful. Fandom can make something that you already enjoy into something to be built on, engaged with, and fall in love with over again. This is a story about how a fandom was given something wonderful, engaging, and beloved.

And how they murdered it.

This is a story about rage. This is a story about money. This is the story about how fans grip so tight they strangle things.

This is a story about Magic: the Gathering.

WHAT IS MAGIC: THE GATHERING?

Magic: the Gathering (hereafter referred to as Magic) is a trading card game printed by Wizards of the Coast. The game has you casting spells and summoning creatures with the goal of eventually reducing your opponent’s life to zero. The game is one of the earliest examples of TCGs in general, and certainly one of the most successful. It is not a stretch to say that the popularity of the game is at least partially responsible for the proliferation of hobby stores across the United States.

Typically, the game is played in a 1v1, competitive environment, with various formats changing what cards are legal and therefore what strategies are more effective than others. Popular formats include Standard (the last 3 years of printed cards), Modern (all cards after 2003), or Pauper (only cards printed at the lowest possible rarity are allowed), and Commander, the format this will be about.

WHAT IS COMMANDER?

Commander, formerly known as Elder Dragon Highlander (EDH), is a fan-created format attributed to Sheldon Menery1 and popularized by tournament judges.

There are four major differences between Commander and essentially all other formats of Magic. First, players start with double the normal amount of starting life, encouraging longer games. Second, players are only allowed a single copy of a card in their deck, reducing consistency. Third, the game is not played 1v1, but rather 4-player free-for-all. Finally, each player designates a creature card as their “commander,” having essentially guaranteed access to its abilities while restricting the cards in their deck to only those matching their commander’s “color identity”, meaning that players have an upper bound of how many cards they could have access to, and each player knows what general archetype their opponents could have access to before gameplay really begins.

The net result of the format is that it is one that is fundamentally slower, social, and more casual. These are all intentional to the design of the format. On top of actual rule changes, Commander has a large list of somewhat unspoken social rules that tend towards games being at best a fun way to show off your deckbuilding skills and at worst overly slow slugfests.

Commander as a format started as a judge event, where between or after rounds, judges would use it as a way to shoot the shit and socialize. This lasted for a while, but once Wizards of the Coast started to print Commander-specific products, the format rapidly grew until the COVID-19 pandemic solidified Commander as the single most popular way to play Magic at all, and it’s easy to see why: the format is social and low-stakes, with the idea of pushing your deck to an unbeatable state being seen as vaguely tryhard, and while those circles exist, most games are about having fun with the wide card pool and showing off your ability to create interesting or powerful decks rather than going for the throat.2 Combine this with the four-player nature encouraging people to drag down anyone who springs to an early lead, and the format is an enjoyable mess.

WHAT IS THE COMMANDER RULES COMMITTEE?

Remember how I said that Commander was a fan-created format?

More than just the original rules of the format, Commander was a fan-curated format. The Commander Rules Committee, hereafter referred to as the RC, was a group of individuals in charge of monitoring the format, dictating ban lists, rules changes, and otherwise arbitrating the core mechanics of the format since it was established in 2006. The members of the RC were not paid by Wizards of the Coast. They were not chosen by Wizards of the Coast. The format was run by a panel of players, tournament judges, and passionate content creators. This was an unabashed positive for most players. Unlike Wizards of the Coast, who are ultimately a for-profit company, the RC was able to act in whatever way they thought would best serve the format. Sometimes people disagreed with them, but ultimately, the RC was empowered to shape the format.

Wizards of the Coast, for their part, was fairly content with this arrangement. While the RC was not immune to controversy (here is a thread of basically pure bashing, for instance, and it is years old), this essentially allowed them to outsource the blame for any format decisions. The RC was also a talent-rich pool that could be consulted for Commander-specific designs that the company put out.

The RC was a tight group. Members are clear that they considered each other friends as well as essentially volunteer coworkers on a multi-million dollar project that awarded no money outside of sporadic consulting work for Wizards of the Coast (something that all of them as major community figures would have had access to regardless). They were in it for the love of the game.

In early 2019, the RC established the Commander Advisory Group, hereafter referred to as the CAG. Composed primarily of community members like streamers, professional players, YouTubers and judges, the group served as a sounding board for decisions and a way to check community temperature on any potential bans or rules changes.

PART ZERO: ANGUISHED UNMAKING

On September 7th, 2023, Sheldon Menery died after a long battle with cancer.

Menery was, by all accounts, a thoughtful and charming figure. He built the format and was, to many in the community and the company that made it, a dear friend. Fuck cancer.

Menery was the polestar of the format. Historically his decisions had not always been popular with the fandom, but he had a presentation about him that tended to make things blow over. He was beloved. He was gone. Now the RC had to fill the precepted void that he had left as the spokesman and navigator of the format.

The RC would last for one more year.

PART ONE: JEWELED LOTUS

To talk about the death of the RC, we first have to understand three specific cards. I will be explaining them in pretty simple terms that even if you didn’t play the game, you could understand.

Magic is a resource-based game. Each turn, players can play a card from their hand to give themselves access to more and more mana, a renewing resource that allows them to cast spells and summon creatures. Typically, without specific spells, a player can only increase their available mana per turn by 1. Many spells will create things which can provide more mana on future turns. These are called “ramp spells”, and the most powerful of them are what are called “fast mana”, which are essentially spells that put more mana out than it costs to play them. For instance, the card Sol Ring costs 1 mana to play, but can immediately be used to create 2 mana on that turn and on every turn afterwards, meaning you have netted 1 additional mana the turn it was played and are 2 mana ahead on all future turns.

Fast mana is extremely powerful. When played early, these cards can completely warp a game by making one player able to drop mid- or endgame threats onto a table while other players are still trying to start their engines. Sometimes, this can be enjoyable, leading to a three-on-one mentality and an engaging game. Usually, however, this just leads to frustration as someone jumps ahead.

Fast mana is also, generally, extremely expensive. Other than Sol Ring, a card that has been reprinted so often that it is rarely more than a dollar for a copy despite being the most played card in the format, most spells that would be considered fast mana are extremely rare and highly prized for their power, leading to incredible price tags.

The three cards that we are going to be talking about today are some of the most powerful fast mana that the game has ever printed: Dockside Extortionist, Jeweled Lotus, and Mana Crypt. Frankly, for the purposes of this story, their actual effects are completely interchangeable: they make a lot of mana for little to no resource investment. Well, mana investment. What they cost was a different kind of resource: USD.

Prior to their banning, the average sell price of these cards on TCGPlayer were as follows: Dockside Extortionist, $83; Jeweled Lotus, $86; Mana Crypt, $182. (Dockside’s price history is here, others can be searched) I will also note that these were not premium versions of these cards. This was your entry level ticket into playing with them.

Between their power and their price tag, unless you were playing at a very high-powered table where they were expected, someone playing any of these often elicited groans or outright curses in many playgroups. While Commander decks are often not cheap, the bare price floors on these were so high that they could be worth as much a budget player’s entire deck. Every st…

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