The Pursuit of “Casual” and the Discovery of a Dead End

I have a very love/hate relationship with constructed magic. I have twice bought-in to standard thinking it would be fun (kamigawa/ravnica and zendikar/scars), and twice been soundly disappointed at the return on my investment. My main beef with constructed is how the vast majority of the cardpool is simply unplayable. A handful of decks emerge as the competitive options, and you play those or you lose. This is anathema to someone who gets most of their joy in magic from building decks and looking for creative ways to use marginal cards.

I’ve largely resolved this issue by playing limited formats, including developing a limited variant called “league” which is like constructed with a very limited cardpool. While I’ve turned my back on constructed for the most part, I’ve kept trying to make EDH work since its the “casual” constructed format. This blog has largely been about articulating what my idea of casual is, but as time goes on I think its becoming clear that there is no such thing as casual magic.

Casual means some variant of “fun” and “not competitive”, but any way you slice it the definition is in the eye of the beholder. In my earliest EDH days I wanted to ban loxodon warhammer, then maze of ith, and even pulse of the fields. As time went on my distastes changed, but the principal stayed the same - there are a lot of things I don’t like seeing in a “casual” game that your average player probably has no issue with. As of this moment, I can think of at least 13 things I don’t want to see in my “casual” EDH games:

1. No mass land destruction
2. No mana screw (winter orb, targeting signets, vorinclex)
3. No tuck spells on generals
4. No infinite / game-ending combos
5. No nuisance “counting” cards (lord of extinction, chaos moon, multani, etc)
6. No repeatable graveyard abuse (mimeoplasm, karador, genesis)
7. No mass tokens
8. No (or maybe minimal) tutors
9. No eldrazi (annihilator is basically mass LD)
10. No stupid-in-multiplayer cards (mind’s eye)
11. No nuisance “random” cards (grip of chaos, confusion in the ranks)
12. No 1-shot generals
13. No abusive/chronic triggers (rhystic study, genesis)

And that’s not counting individual cards I loathe like mindslaver or merieke ri berit.

With no less than 13 extra rules required, its clear that turning EDH into a format that I could truly enjoy is just not possible. Even if I could define everything I’d take out of the game, who in their right mind would want to make decks for such a stripped down, arbitrary format? Which doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with EDH, it just means “casual” doesn’t really mean anything and it certainly doesn’t address my issues with constructed formats. So I’ll probably hang up my EDH decks for a while and focus on limited/league play, at least until I feel the masochistic call of standard or the familiar itch of EDH again.