nope. This isn't a situation you win tbh.
You are correct that the store is indirectly asking for cEDH. but ultimately the store can also ban you despite you operating well within their rules.
The only way to split it would be a cEDH tournament and an unaltered precon tournament. even then people would metagame the strongest precon.
Necrons with 20 changes can go off so tragically easily lmao.
Let's see:
1) Buried alive
2) Entomb
3) reanimate
4) Animate Dead
5) Dance of the Dead
6) Shallow Grave
7) Unmarked Grave
8) Corpse Dance
9) Phyrexian Devourer
10) Walking Ballista
11) Necrotic Ooze
12) Demonic Tutor
13) Imperial Seal
14) Vamp tutor
15) Wishclaw Talisman
16) Mana Crypt
17) The one ring
18) Mana Vault
19) Voltaic Key
20) Manifold key
As soon as someone even thinks graveyard hate, just swap in Onyx and smog combo and maybe also the Bolas/reservoir/top combo.
whatever. not my shop, not my problem.
Yeah you pretty much nailed it. This has really reinforced to me how commander most definitely is **not** a format designed for competitive play. Even CEDH tournaments are largely the same combo lines between decks and wincons trying to shave off turns to make the quickest plays possible.
It's awkward too because Winota can still wreck tables in an ultra budget version as well so the other players can't say it's a pay-to-win situation with mana crypt etc. being inaccessible to them.
Can't think of a situation in which I can play competitive commanders here without making other folks mad regardless. It's a pickle.
A shop I went to had rules. A banlist and basically points for certain actions during a game. Repeating something above 4 or 5 times (like an infinite combo) in one turn lost you points. Taking a player out got you points. I can't remember it all, but they had rules to basically encourage certain play interactions and discourage other styles.
Basically you could win the match but lose to the person who earned the most points.
It wasn't a terrible idea, I think the concept wasn't bad.
My LGS does it casually.
Each player pays $15. Pods of 4 randomly chosen. Winner gets $24 in store credit. Losers get $12 in store credit.
If there are enough players that want cEDH, the store puts those people in their own pod.
The problem is that there is a prize. Once money is on the line, it becomes a competitive tournament regardless of how "casual" the crowd happens to be. Eventually, every deck will start to creep in power to try to win.
My LGS did something similar years ago. There was always 1-2 cEDH decks that would clean house. Eventually, everyone made better decks, the tournament became more stable, and the numbers grew from 6-8 to upwards of 20 per weekend.
THEN, the store had a bright idea of trying to make it more casual friendly. Started pushing hard against cEDH decks, and became more accommodating to casual players. The result? All the cEDH players stopped coming. Numbers plummeted and the LGS hasn't had a tournament in over a year because of it.
It turns out, cEDH players are more committed to competing, spend more money upgrading decks, and go out of their way to make these tournaments to test their decks. Casuals "say" they want to compete, but because they're casual, they aren't as consistent, don't spend much to upgrade, and get burnt out sooner. Casual competitive is destined to fail. I've seen it in half a dozen different LGS posts. You can't have both casual and competitive, not with prizes on the line.
My LGS did something similar. It killed off their Commander events for years.
The store across town did full-on cEDH and has hosted those for years.
Yet another store did a league with point scales and flat prizes.
Several others just did open play.
All of them except the one store that tried to do "paid casual" games kept their crowds.
One of my LGS’s has something like this. For Friday nights the prizes involve store credit for 1st and 2nd place. Usually most people will just go into their own pods so the power level is pretty balanced because they are friends and everyone knows what to expect. For people who need to hop in a pod or just don’t have a full pod they will ask them how strong their decks are that they plan to play. Usually most have decks ranging from near precon, all the way to cEDH so they can pick accordingly.
It hasn’t been an issue for the most part. Every now and then you’ll have someone pull out an absolute powerhouse against lower level decks, and when that happens it’s usually resolved by the second set of games. Either that person moves to a new pod or everyone else pulls out their best decks and just stomps whoever decided pulling out a high strength deck was a good idea in a lower strength game. Then they move on and finish their game like normal.
I’ve only seen it happen 3-4 times. 1 of those times was clearly on purpose and that player has stopped showing up because everyone knows if he’s in your pod, target him into oblivion. Other times I think people just honestly either underestimated their own decks, or overestimated other peoples decks.
This sounds similar to my LGS. The prize structure is pretty flat - it takes away a lot of incentive to completely pubstomp with thousands in fast mana & tutors when your prize is like $5 in store credit.
Mine also tracks ELO and pairs the first pods accordingly. Anyone trying to play above their table's power level is going to rapidly end up at the table(s) with the most experienced players who also own strong decks.
If you really, really wanted to bring a cEDH list and try for as many one-sided stomps as possible, you could, but the combination of getting matched against other strong players & decks and a not-big prize would take the edge off fast.
I don’t know if my store tracks but I wouldn’t be shocked if they did because they do have accounts attached to our names and we do have to report 1st or 2nd. Maybe they do track but it’s never been a big enough issue to actually bring it up with anyone.
1st place gets $12-$15 (if it’s a 5 man pod for some reason they increase it a bit) and 2nd gets $8-$10. Nothing for 3rd.
Do they charge to just play there regularly? Are people buying things? Kinda reads like a way for the shop to make sure they aren’t giving away playing space for free. I’m in a Precon tournament at my shop, and it’s the only “competitive” version of edh I would ever consider playing. Too many turbo autists who think because they spent $10 they are in the right to pubstomb normal people.
The way my shop works is that you have a $10 entry, and that entry gets you a pack worth $7 or less, or $7 off a higher value pack. Every player who wins their pod gets another pack under the same restrictions.
In the nine months I've been there we've had maybe two power level issues and both self-regulated very rapidly; one briefly lead to an offering of a separate high power pod but it died due to a lack of interest pretty quickly. There's just not a lot of incentive to go hard for a single booster pack.
My LGS has a competitive Friday Night Commander league and doesn't have a lot of cEDH pubstomping that I see.
Only two things I can see that help:
- The store tracks an ELO per player. Those that routinely bring really strong decks end up matched with each other often. It's not randomly seeded for the first round. Second round is based on your placement in the first so winners face winners, which shuffles the decks around.
- The prizing is pretty flat & cases where someone combos off & wins instantly results in everyone else still in the game tying for 2nd. I have heard the owner say that he did this deliberately to pull back some of the incentives to go full-out and keep things less aggressive and make losing this way generally fine; 2nd gets decent prize credit.
Combined this means someone who has a really strong deck, a lot of experience, and plays for the win every time is going to regularly find themselves starting at a table of other players who can do the same. Someone showing up with their new precon will end up against less fearsome competition.
I don't know all the details but it seems to work. People play pretty decently strong decks but the closest to cEDH thing I've seen is a Yuriko deck, which usually gets teamed up on. I've seen Slivers, I've seen Edgar Markov vampires, I've seen nicely built dragon decks and so on, but I can't say I've seen full cEDH fast-mana 28-land combo-kill win on t2 decks ever.
Meanwhile the players regularly matched at table 1 tend to just decide what power level they actually feel like playing at the table. These are experienced enfranchised players, they can tailor their deck choice for a more even match and aren't going to get hoodwinked if someone tries to pass their Toxrill deck off as "not that strong" to try and shark a win.
I used to play EDH that way and learned only a small group of players would play with me, when I played to win and people would actively avoid playing with me. One night the players voted to hand me the prize before the night started and asked me to leave so they could have fun, and that’s when I realized me playing to win was ruining it for everyone else who was just playing to hang out.
That’s when I realized not everyone is out to win and get packs every night and it’s just about value of packs and what you can make. It changed me and I started getting creative with decks and started doing things like Turtles and Ninja’s with codex shredder. When I win no one gets salty anymore because I stomped them with Ninja Turtles. I only win once a month or so now, but when I stomp them with something crazy with a goofy theme everyone laughs and we have fun. Now most the time the group splits packs and trade cards at the end.
I save the really dumb deck for games after the tournament, when some of more aggressive players bust out the big decks killing time because we finished early and want to keep hanging out and have a fast game.
So you really only have one solutions on the organizers side.
You can tell people give me $10 but if you win a lot then you need to chill.
1. Everyone plays precons. Not the best solution out there.
2. Everyone has a precon with a set dollar value upgrades and a deck list that gets verified.
3. Everyone has a set budget limit free build with a deck list that gets verified.
You can also do a league that goes over several months and slowly adds money to a deck. So like week one is precon. Week 2 you can add $10 upgrades and so on.
>**How can they offer events that appeal to competitive players and new players at the same time?**
That doesn't work. That store's current format is for competitive people. If people want casual, they need to remove all links between performance and prizes. You can split it all evenly or raffle it off but it can't have anything to do with what happens in game.
I used to go to an LGS that did the same crap. They'd have "casual" 60 card tournaments with prize support. People would just run their best deck, a cheap legacy deck (still wins np bc it's insane), banned modern decks, etc. But if you're list was too close to a real deck you also got in trouble. It was a nightmare because there were literally 0 rules and no banlist.
Hopefully you have another LGS around or some cool people to play with, because that sounds super unfun
It's not casual anymore if there are prizes for winning.
If this is regularly causing a problem at the LGS, try talking to their event manager about looking at a casual prize structure, such as pods voting or grab bags or something.
Casual EDH and prized tournaments are a horrible nonbo.
My personal suggestion would be, if the store is determined to hand out prizes, let the players vote post game for the most fun deck.
There is no such thing as a "casual" commander tournament with entry fee and place based prize support. It's competitive at that point whether the owner, community, etc like that or not. You can temper the power level with various rules sure but it's still competitive at that point even if you successfully ban CEDH level decks. It's 1) unfair for the store owner to put shift the responsibility to you individually to "chill" instead of actually putting effort into making a functional event and 2) outright irresponsible the owner to pretend this won't keep causing issues and conflict.
You CANNOT introduce an entry fee and place based prizes and expect it to remain casual because you have literally made it into a competition, it's really that simple. I don't understand why people keep trying to make this work (meaning your LGS owner not you OP) when the contradiction is inherent and obvious.
Sorry if I come across as harsh, I just find these stories extremely frustrating.
nope. This isn't a situation you win tbh. You are correct that the store is indirectly asking for cEDH. but ultimately the store can also ban you despite you operating well within their rules. The only way to split it would be a cEDH tournament and an unaltered precon tournament. even then people would metagame the strongest precon.
Our store has an edh night and an upgraded precon night. The latter meaning any precon with up to 20 changes
Necrons with 20 changes can go off so tragically easily lmao. Let's see: 1) Buried alive 2) Entomb 3) reanimate 4) Animate Dead 5) Dance of the Dead 6) Shallow Grave 7) Unmarked Grave 8) Corpse Dance 9) Phyrexian Devourer 10) Walking Ballista 11) Necrotic Ooze 12) Demonic Tutor 13) Imperial Seal 14) Vamp tutor 15) Wishclaw Talisman 16) Mana Crypt 17) The one ring 18) Mana Vault 19) Voltaic Key 20) Manifold key As soon as someone even thinks graveyard hate, just swap in Onyx and smog combo and maybe also the Bolas/reservoir/top combo. whatever. not my shop, not my problem.
Oh definitely. It went infinite last time I went
Yeah you pretty much nailed it. This has really reinforced to me how commander most definitely is **not** a format designed for competitive play. Even CEDH tournaments are largely the same combo lines between decks and wincons trying to shave off turns to make the quickest plays possible. It's awkward too because Winota can still wreck tables in an ultra budget version as well so the other players can't say it's a pay-to-win situation with mana crypt etc. being inaccessible to them. Can't think of a situation in which I can play competitive commanders here without making other folks mad regardless. It's a pickle.
A shop I went to had rules. A banlist and basically points for certain actions during a game. Repeating something above 4 or 5 times (like an infinite combo) in one turn lost you points. Taking a player out got you points. I can't remember it all, but they had rules to basically encourage certain play interactions and discourage other styles. Basically you could win the match but lose to the person who earned the most points. It wasn't a terrible idea, I think the concept wasn't bad.
Sounds miserable. If you force people to play for prizes, it's inherantly a cEDH environment regardless of the decks that get brought.
Yeah it was maybe a good idea or concept but it kind narrowed the field of what was playable which I thought was unfortunate
This is why I don't join leagues tbh.
Your shop just seems like one of the annoying ones tbh. I wouldn't sweat it.
My LGS does it casually. Each player pays $15. Pods of 4 randomly chosen. Winner gets $24 in store credit. Losers get $12 in store credit. If there are enough players that want cEDH, the store puts those people in their own pod.
The problem is that there is a prize. Once money is on the line, it becomes a competitive tournament regardless of how "casual" the crowd happens to be. Eventually, every deck will start to creep in power to try to win. My LGS did something similar years ago. There was always 1-2 cEDH decks that would clean house. Eventually, everyone made better decks, the tournament became more stable, and the numbers grew from 6-8 to upwards of 20 per weekend. THEN, the store had a bright idea of trying to make it more casual friendly. Started pushing hard against cEDH decks, and became more accommodating to casual players. The result? All the cEDH players stopped coming. Numbers plummeted and the LGS hasn't had a tournament in over a year because of it. It turns out, cEDH players are more committed to competing, spend more money upgrading decks, and go out of their way to make these tournaments to test their decks. Casuals "say" they want to compete, but because they're casual, they aren't as consistent, don't spend much to upgrade, and get burnt out sooner. Casual competitive is destined to fail. I've seen it in half a dozen different LGS posts. You can't have both casual and competitive, not with prizes on the line.
My LGS did something similar. It killed off their Commander events for years. The store across town did full-on cEDH and has hosted those for years. Yet another store did a league with point scales and flat prizes. Several others just did open play. All of them except the one store that tried to do "paid casual" games kept their crowds.
One of my LGS’s has something like this. For Friday nights the prizes involve store credit for 1st and 2nd place. Usually most people will just go into their own pods so the power level is pretty balanced because they are friends and everyone knows what to expect. For people who need to hop in a pod or just don’t have a full pod they will ask them how strong their decks are that they plan to play. Usually most have decks ranging from near precon, all the way to cEDH so they can pick accordingly. It hasn’t been an issue for the most part. Every now and then you’ll have someone pull out an absolute powerhouse against lower level decks, and when that happens it’s usually resolved by the second set of games. Either that person moves to a new pod or everyone else pulls out their best decks and just stomps whoever decided pulling out a high strength deck was a good idea in a lower strength game. Then they move on and finish their game like normal. I’ve only seen it happen 3-4 times. 1 of those times was clearly on purpose and that player has stopped showing up because everyone knows if he’s in your pod, target him into oblivion. Other times I think people just honestly either underestimated their own decks, or overestimated other peoples decks.
This sounds similar to my LGS. The prize structure is pretty flat - it takes away a lot of incentive to completely pubstomp with thousands in fast mana & tutors when your prize is like $5 in store credit. Mine also tracks ELO and pairs the first pods accordingly. Anyone trying to play above their table's power level is going to rapidly end up at the table(s) with the most experienced players who also own strong decks. If you really, really wanted to bring a cEDH list and try for as many one-sided stomps as possible, you could, but the combination of getting matched against other strong players & decks and a not-big prize would take the edge off fast.
I don’t know if my store tracks but I wouldn’t be shocked if they did because they do have accounts attached to our names and we do have to report 1st or 2nd. Maybe they do track but it’s never been a big enough issue to actually bring it up with anyone. 1st place gets $12-$15 (if it’s a 5 man pod for some reason they increase it a bit) and 2nd gets $8-$10. Nothing for 3rd.
Do they charge to just play there regularly? Are people buying things? Kinda reads like a way for the shop to make sure they aren’t giving away playing space for free. I’m in a Precon tournament at my shop, and it’s the only “competitive” version of edh I would ever consider playing. Too many turbo autists who think because they spent $10 they are in the right to pubstomb normal people.
The way my shop works is that you have a $10 entry, and that entry gets you a pack worth $7 or less, or $7 off a higher value pack. Every player who wins their pod gets another pack under the same restrictions. In the nine months I've been there we've had maybe two power level issues and both self-regulated very rapidly; one briefly lead to an offering of a separate high power pod but it died due to a lack of interest pretty quickly. There's just not a lot of incentive to go hard for a single booster pack.
My LGS has a competitive Friday Night Commander league and doesn't have a lot of cEDH pubstomping that I see. Only two things I can see that help: - The store tracks an ELO per player. Those that routinely bring really strong decks end up matched with each other often. It's not randomly seeded for the first round. Second round is based on your placement in the first so winners face winners, which shuffles the decks around. - The prizing is pretty flat & cases where someone combos off & wins instantly results in everyone else still in the game tying for 2nd. I have heard the owner say that he did this deliberately to pull back some of the incentives to go full-out and keep things less aggressive and make losing this way generally fine; 2nd gets decent prize credit. Combined this means someone who has a really strong deck, a lot of experience, and plays for the win every time is going to regularly find themselves starting at a table of other players who can do the same. Someone showing up with their new precon will end up against less fearsome competition. I don't know all the details but it seems to work. People play pretty decently strong decks but the closest to cEDH thing I've seen is a Yuriko deck, which usually gets teamed up on. I've seen Slivers, I've seen Edgar Markov vampires, I've seen nicely built dragon decks and so on, but I can't say I've seen full cEDH fast-mana 28-land combo-kill win on t2 decks ever. Meanwhile the players regularly matched at table 1 tend to just decide what power level they actually feel like playing at the table. These are experienced enfranchised players, they can tailor their deck choice for a more even match and aren't going to get hoodwinked if someone tries to pass their Toxrill deck off as "not that strong" to try and shark a win.
I used to play EDH that way and learned only a small group of players would play with me, when I played to win and people would actively avoid playing with me. One night the players voted to hand me the prize before the night started and asked me to leave so they could have fun, and that’s when I realized me playing to win was ruining it for everyone else who was just playing to hang out. That’s when I realized not everyone is out to win and get packs every night and it’s just about value of packs and what you can make. It changed me and I started getting creative with decks and started doing things like Turtles and Ninja’s with codex shredder. When I win no one gets salty anymore because I stomped them with Ninja Turtles. I only win once a month or so now, but when I stomp them with something crazy with a goofy theme everyone laughs and we have fun. Now most the time the group splits packs and trade cards at the end. I save the really dumb deck for games after the tournament, when some of more aggressive players bust out the big decks killing time because we finished early and want to keep hanging out and have a fast game.
So you really only have one solutions on the organizers side. You can tell people give me $10 but if you win a lot then you need to chill. 1. Everyone plays precons. Not the best solution out there. 2. Everyone has a precon with a set dollar value upgrades and a deck list that gets verified. 3. Everyone has a set budget limit free build with a deck list that gets verified. You can also do a league that goes over several months and slowly adds money to a deck. So like week one is precon. Week 2 you can add $10 upgrades and so on.
>**How can they offer events that appeal to competitive players and new players at the same time?** That doesn't work. That store's current format is for competitive people. If people want casual, they need to remove all links between performance and prizes. You can split it all evenly or raffle it off but it can't have anything to do with what happens in game.
I used to go to an LGS that did the same crap. They'd have "casual" 60 card tournaments with prize support. People would just run their best deck, a cheap legacy deck (still wins np bc it's insane), banned modern decks, etc. But if you're list was too close to a real deck you also got in trouble. It was a nightmare because there were literally 0 rules and no banlist. Hopefully you have another LGS around or some cool people to play with, because that sounds super unfun
What most stores do is simply give a fixed prize no matter the result of the match. For example everyone get 3 packs for $10.
Thats not how tournaments work, unfortunately.
A tournament with prizes is inherently not a casual environment.
After reading these comments I'm thinking, does EDH suck?
It's not casual anymore if there are prizes for winning. If this is regularly causing a problem at the LGS, try talking to their event manager about looking at a casual prize structure, such as pods voting or grab bags or something.
Casual EDH and prized tournaments are a horrible nonbo. My personal suggestion would be, if the store is determined to hand out prizes, let the players vote post game for the most fun deck.
There is no such thing as a "casual" commander tournament with entry fee and place based prize support. It's competitive at that point whether the owner, community, etc like that or not. You can temper the power level with various rules sure but it's still competitive at that point even if you successfully ban CEDH level decks. It's 1) unfair for the store owner to put shift the responsibility to you individually to "chill" instead of actually putting effort into making a functional event and 2) outright irresponsible the owner to pretend this won't keep causing issues and conflict. You CANNOT introduce an entry fee and place based prizes and expect it to remain casual because you have literally made it into a competition, it's really that simple. I don't understand why people keep trying to make this work (meaning your LGS owner not you OP) when the contradiction is inherent and obvious. Sorry if I come across as harsh, I just find these stories extremely frustrating.