Your Deck Isn't Casual If You Play These Cards | Commander Clash Podcast 129

I just wanna say that I've been loving the past month of podcasts. Between Family Feud, Smallest Hills you'll die on, and now this y'all have had super interesting topics that aren't just talking about what new cards are good and I'd love to see more of these podcasts

I think people have it backwards when they compare Mana Crypt and Sol Ring and say Mana Crypt is only excluded from casual circles because of its price tag / availability. I think that Sol Ring is only included in casual circles because of its price tag / availability. Sol Ring is banned in Legacy and restricted in Vintage! It's insanely powerful and considering it a casual card is one of the biggest pieces of wool to ever be pulled over the heads of commander players!

I think of Imperial Seal and Cruel Tutor as cards that indicate something sweatier is going on. They aren't powering down their tutors for you, they're playing every tutor known to man if they have these.

Casual IS NOT a power level, it's a deckbuilding and gameplay philosophy. How strong a card is in competitive is NOT the same as how strong a card is casually.

Tomer on basics: This week: not hating on anyone Last week: who are these animals that don't match their basics?!

The main issue with most combos in commander is that they don't involve you establishing your board and introducing pieces that can be disrupted. Nor do they involve you expending resources to keep your opponent from rushing you down. They most often involve sitting there, doing nothing, complaining if anyone targets you, and then out of nowhere ending a game you didn't participate in otherwise. This is usually what I notice with infinite turns. Magistrate's Scepter + Emry + Coretapper is a cool, disruptable combo that I don't normally find people annoyed by, particularly since each individual piece works with other moving parts. The guy who sits there doing nothing but complaining and pops off a two-card combo with three counters' worth of protection is more the one that gets the ire... and the more common combo munchkin.

For me as a struggling college student, mana crypt is not casual because when we sit down for a causal game of commander there's a kind of unspoken rule that sol ring is only fine because everyone has one. Thank you Richard for pointing out the "second sol ring" point.

Love the Cat Seth! Needs to make more guest appearances.

They should have Seth, Tomer and Richard create a casual artifact commander deck that Crim then plays after swapping in KCI.

LOVE Richards points on time equity. I've taken apart tons of decks because it was basically solitaire, yet those decks weren't hated by my friends. The minute you cast a Karn's Temporal Sundering though the whole table will lose their minds

I think the problem with "Is X card casual or not?" as a question is kind of hiding the forest behind the trees. There are more buckets than "Casual" and "Competitive". Boiling things down into binaries always shows how many outliers there truly are, which goes toward showing why binaries are almost always inaccurate.

I'll die on the hill that free spells are not casual.

I think the thing with a lot of these cards is like, it's not that you can't put them in a casual deck. No one can stop you. But what will happen is that occasionally with no control on your part your deck will basically shoot up six power levels out of nowhere. You build your deck to be competitive with your friends decks and most of the time you're on even footing, but then there will be one game where you're just like "oops, guess I win with this super unfair thing". And you can decide if that's an experience you like, but that is the effect of putting fast mana/underworld breach etc in your deck

I can never say 1 individual card makes your deck non-casual. However I would say what kind of "packages" does your deck have. These "packages" can either be very powerful synergies or very effecient combos but a generic term for about 3 or more cards that do something you want extremely well.

Seth has to be joking with the “it was in a precon so it must be casual.” Cards like Fierce Guardianship and its cycle are in there. The myriad of hated cards from the brawl deck like arcane signet, korvold and chulane are also in precons, from a weaker format.

I feel the most missed question about this… is what does casual even mean?

34:36 The joy on everyone's face and Tomer's laugh as Richard describes Blood Mooning ppl irl 😂😂

High power casual is a thing, this isnt cedh but is different than casual. High power casual decks can feature cards that could be in cedh decks, but also includes cards that would be bad cards except for the synergy with the decks that would not make a cedh deck.

Blood moon scales with the competitiveness level to a degree. I feel like blood moon has a higher chance of hosing people that bring decks full of duals, fetches, etc. In my experience the more casual the player is the more basics they play and less they care about blood moon.

Consistency and speed to win/be winning is how I define the difference between cedh and casual. That’s why instead of power level, I ask opponents “what turn does your deck want to win or what turn does your deck normally win?” If they are saying turn 5 or below I’d probably consider it cedh. But that’s just me. There are so many variables and factors that impact a player’s perspective of competitiveness vs. casual. A dude pulled out a “casual” deck and won turn three at my lgs so what do I know.