Neither of you are wrong, really.

We don't have much actual data about the philosophy of people who voted. If we did, it would be very reasonable if we were to say something like “we can see those people who object are objecting because they want a super competitive cutthroat turn-3-win format, and we're not catering to that, therefore we'll discard that objection.” That's fine, the objection is demonstrably borne out of a philosophical mismatch — that's the people angry at a Pizza parlour because they want Chinese instead. On the other hand, if we were to say “they object, therefore we'll discard their objection” that would not be reasonable of us.

Consider though, what if there's players who voted 1-2, who are players who genuinely love casual for-fun multiplayer with politics and long games? That's EDH's target audience—the people who want a pizza parlour but have problems with this one—and that indicates a problem. What papa_funk said could sound like saying “they voted low, therefore we'll infer that they're the players who want something different, therefore we'll discard their objection.” That would be disenfranchising the casual player group and would not be far from “they object, therefore we'll discard their objection.” Now, that's not what papa_funk said—papa_funk just said there are players who want something different who also vote low, and that's true—but communication is a difficult thing and it's usually a bit ambiguous.


I'd be genuinely interested in a survey like this which also collects data on peoples' philosophies, like “what do you want out of EDH?” and “what styles of games do you enjoy?” and “how many turns should a game at EDH last, minimum and maximum?” and so on. I wonder, does anyone big or the EDH RC conduct those?

Reminds me of a survey done by the YouTuber MatPat, who wanted to compare/contrast personality types to the styles of video games those people played in order to see if there were actual correlations between aggressive personalities and games considered violent and/or competitive (well, more than that, but it was something along those lines...).

I bet that survey could be retooled for this.

I was planning on doing my annual survey again this year, I'll include a question or two so I can try to get a feel for motivations.

But that’s just a theory...

Thanks! That would be super.

I think it's incredibly important to remember where this variant comes from. It's not a democracy, and no-one has any requirement to stick with it. No-one is born into EDH we all choose to go down this path. If you choose to get into commander, you choose to accept the RC.

A better analogy is that someone has baked a cake. Most people take a slice gratefully and enjoy it, some offer a bit of feedback about how the cake could be tweaked, maybe add more sprinkles, or try this kind of icing, or can I have a slice with more choc chips in it, but over all they enjoy the cake and come back for another slice.
A few people don't like how the cake was made, they think it is very bad and the people who made it are poor chefs. They tell the chefs how bad they are at baking and how they should be doing everything differently.

The things is, the people that made the cake just wanted to share it with their friends, and have a good time enjoying cake. They don't owe us anything, we didn't buy their cake, or even ask them to make it, we benefit from their work.

We have a little data. It's not a 100% correlation, but there's definitely a set of people asking for Thrasios and/or Flash (and possibly and/or Urza, though that one will have wider application right now due to the newness) to be banned. Those cards are the big guns in cEDH and largely irrelevant to Commander.



Indeed. All I pointed out was that there was a subset of people who were likely to be bringing the average down because we're explicitly not giving them not they wanted, not doing a bad job at doing the thing we do do.

It is theoretically possible that none of those people voted. However, the preponderance of evidence that we can gather suggests otherwise.



Actually, we're interested in those people too. They have opinions on cake. I'm talking about people who are unhappy because we didn't provide a lasagna.

I've digested this data and the comments. My thoughts are pretty much in line with Toby's.

I'm particularly interested the number of people who feel they have no influence and what level of influence they believe they should have.

I am usually pretty quiet as I often am not able to respond until someone else has said something similar to what I was going to say and my opinions are already documented here and there. I think that we should unban a lot of cards and the requirements to ban new cards should be much higher. I suggest we restrict all the cards (/sarcasm).

I do feel that discussions/disagreements on the internet typically have a Zero percent chance of changing opinions, so I am looking foward to (hopefully someday soon) driving down to play with Sheldon as I now live about 2 hours away (or so).Maybe if I can get in a game or three and maybe that can change something, either my opinion or his.

I think I've got about as much influence on the EDH banlist as a grain of sand has on the shape of a beach. If something gets banned or unbanned or if the rules change it probably won't be because of anything I said or did, and I guess that's fine because it's normal for format management.

As a result I don't really put much energy into discussing ban/unban or rules changes. When I do I know it's mostly irrelevant except to the people having the discussion. Part of me is still like “Someone's saying this card should be banned/unbanned, and them doing so will directly lead to that happening unless you respond and convince them specifically not to do so!” but I put that aside and ignore it because that's not true: them calling for a banning/unbanning has as much influence as me responding objecting to it.

I'm not entirely satisfied with the ban list philosophy. There's some kind of disconnect between how I think of what Commander's supposed to be, and how the EDH is actually running it. I know it's meant to be for casual for-fun games. The EDH RC seems to take a laissez-faire approach to that goal: whatever isn't actually existentially posing an existential threat to the format's longevity is fine and for groups to work out. There's a grade of cards like Iona though that, despite not being an existential threat, seem to be net un-fun on games they show up in, and I don't understand why that grade isn't banned—it seems like a natural step to do that in the stewardship of a casual for-fun format. I don't understand why that isn't a step the EDH RC takes—I have guesses at best—and I haven't seen them talk about that on this site. It leaves me confused about the format and I don't understand how to resolve that disconnect to better understand what I should be expecting to get out of EDH or bring to it. I don't expect the ban list to change on my account, but it would be nice to understand what goes on behind the EDH RC philosophy.

I'm curious what card you lump into that grade other than Iona. Iona seems pretty unique, so I'm always interested what other cards people bucket her with.

Stasis comes to mind, which I've seen in more than one Estrid deck.

Zur the Enchanter comes to mind. So does Winter Orb. Basically any card whose inherent purpose is to outright deny people the ability to play (or at least enjoy playing) the game. Stuff like Thalia and things that add a small tax aren’t that bad, but stuff like Iona and Winter Orb take this concept to the extreme. Zur at least can be used for some not inherently awful purposes but most of the time he ends up tutoring out the same exact enchantments that grind games to a halt. I don’t personally believe Winter Orb or Zur deserve to be banned, but all these years I still don’t understand how Iona has remained legal. There is no way to play Iona that adds anything of value to the enjoyment of the game. It’s always there to lock someone out completely. Seems like it violates a lot of the values that commander holds dear.

For me personally it's mainly these cards for the reasons expressed in there.

There's a piece of philosophy I feel is more important than the cards though: the idea is we've got a casual for-fun format that encourages its players to “create games that everyone will love to remember, not the ones you'd like to forget.” There are cards legal in the format that I believe would be predominantly associated with games people would like to forget, and I am unsure why they're unbanned -- I believe that in stewardship of the format it would be a good thing to ban them.

Braids is a good example of one that's banned. Steel Golem is an example of one that's unbanned. It's virtually exclusively used in Zedruu decks where the point is to donate it to an opponent. This means, possibly as soon as turn five or six, a player hopefully has an immediate answer available or is playing a strategy with no reliance on creatures, or else they stand to be made completely irrelevant for the next half hour or so until an answer comes up or the game ends or they scoop or get eliminated, very likely with having low meaningful involvement in the game. It's not that the card itself existentially threatens the format's integrity and longevity, it's just that it will predominantly be tied in with a game that the targeted player would like to forget. It's got very little good reason to be in the format.



Complementary to this would be updating the philosophy documents on this site to provide deckbuilding guidance towards strategies that work well in the format and guidance away from antithetical strategies: for example, stax is a fairly antisocial strategy for a social format, but the philosophy documents available don't really talk about antisocial stax decks or warn away from them. (Maybe the EDH RC's position is they're an accepted part of the format and people are welcome to build them? I don't know.) Maybe Sheldon does somewhere on his SCG articles, but that's an out-of-band communication method like Maro's blog that most players aren't expected to be across -- the official documents and home site are the place for talking about that.

Can I get an amen?