Draft still use the regular gameplay rules of magic though. I played with those 40 card theme decks from old core sets, and I still view it as regular magic.
I liked the sports analogies better; the constantly shifting goalposts made a lot more sense, in a meta sort of way.
Over half of a given player's current life total implies there is no commander damage memory, nothing to be tracked between phases and rounds; if your commander can deal just over half whatever a player's life total is at that moment, that player loses the game. At 40 life, that's 21 damage. Anything short of that means you would have to deal half of their life total during your next combat phase, even if you managed to squeeze in 20 the turn before. That also means it's harder when they have more life, but scales as the game goes on and everybody else gets their hits in. At 30 life, you need to do 16 in a single combat phase, at 20 you need to do 11, etc. In theory, this means you could actually win with commander damage without building a deck around it, and gives you a reason to risk spending mana in the double digits after your commander tax has gone up 3 or more times. For existing commander damage strategies, it gives you the ability to pull off a late game win against players you hadn't even swung at yet, without nearly as much setup.
It's.... theoretical, and needs some better wording for the actual rule to be intuitive and not broken, but I think it could work. Personally, I'd prefer to be able to swing in for a win after setting my commander up by dealing non-combat damage beforehand, or piggy backing off of what the other players at the table have been doing all game. Instead, for commander damage to have any meaningful impact right now you need to pull off a successful voltron strategy, which is easily disrupted and has to work against multiple players over the course of several turns.
Personally, I don't think it's a bad rule. It means that even relatively vanilla legends can be useful beyond just deck flavor.
This is more or less what I meant. It doesn't take anything away from the game by existing, apart from maybe being a chore to track, and still gives you some marginal benefit should you need it. Whether it's competitive or not won't stop the occasional person from dawdling with infinite life gain.
The only real reason the number 21 was chosen was simply because the original elder dragons when commander started were all 7/7, so exactly 3 attacks from them, which are 21, would kill the player. The origin of this rule is simply for very narrow flavor reasons, than for gameplay reasons.
Is that true? Seems far more arbitrary than just "over half / majority of a given player's starting life total." Personally, I'd like to see them change commander damage to "over half of a given player's current life total."
If you want to play Commander, the person you want to play with would immediately know you want to play Commander if you said "Do you want to play Magic the Gathering" Does that happen? No.
Ask anyone to teach you MTG. They will not teach you how to play Commander unless you specifically told them you wanted to learn Commander.
The only answer to the question "Do you want to play Magic?" should be "What format?", because there is no default version of the game that everyone defers to. On those occasions that I've played Magic in a public space, people have come up to ask if I was playing Magic - they didn't think to specify whether it was "regular," commander, or anything else. Incidentally, we were playing commander, and we didn't bother to correct the question by responding "no, we're not playing Magic, we're playing commander." Not all Magic needs to be commander for all Commander to be Magic.
I agree that commander should not be the first format taught to a given person; having recently taught a friend how to play, I laid out all the options available first, because again, there is no default version of the game - just personal preference. The reason why I wouldn't teach commander first has absolutely nothing to do with any of the reasons you've given. Commander is a difficult first format to learn because of a) the sheer breadth of cards available, and b) the number of separate interactions to track across several players in a multiplayer game. Both of those things still fall under the limited description you keep giving us of "regular Magic."
There's definitely a kind of Magic that isn't regular, and it's silver border.
Isn't the "breadth of cards available across the entirety of Magic's history" comparable to Vintage or Legacy, though? I never bothered checking out the relative size of ban lists. I just think that a "format" is also another axis, another decorator you can add to a variant e. g. the 60-card Constructed variant can be played in different formats like Modern and Core Set 2021-Standard.
Yes, that was very much my point. EDH uses all the same "regular rules" of Magic, but functions predominantly as an alternate format. Personally, I don't like the phraseology of "regular"; it implies that anything outside of a specific person's subjective tastes is irregular, abnormal, unintentional, or otherwise part of an outgroup. It's a puritanical and, frankly, entitled way of perceiving the game.
I'm really not worried about it, but it's nice to have the option without needing to specifically build around countering it. If I were going to go that far, I might as well just build all decks into Thassa's Oracle, which I find patently unfun.
There are over 80 new cards in Strixhaven Commander / 2021.
I liked the sports analogies better; the constantly shifting goalposts made a lot more sense, in a meta sort of way.
Would you like to play Magic on TTS with me?
It's.... theoretical, and needs some better wording for the actual rule to be intuitive and not broken, but I think it could work. Personally, I'd prefer to be able to swing in for a win after setting my commander up by dealing non-combat damage beforehand, or piggy backing off of what the other players at the table have been doing all game. Instead, for commander damage to have any meaningful impact right now you need to pull off a successful voltron strategy, which is easily disrupted and has to work against multiple players over the course of several turns.
This is more or less what I meant. It doesn't take anything away from the game by existing, apart from maybe being a chore to track, and still gives you some marginal benefit should you need it. Whether it's competitive or not won't stop the occasional person from dawdling with infinite life gain.
Is that true? Seems far more arbitrary than just "over half / majority of a given player's starting life total." Personally, I'd like to see them change commander damage to "over half of a given player's current life total."
The only answer to the question "Do you want to play Magic?" should be "What format?", because there is no default version of the game that everyone defers to. On those occasions that I've played Magic in a public space, people have come up to ask if I was playing Magic - they didn't think to specify whether it was "regular," commander, or anything else. Incidentally, we were playing commander, and we didn't bother to correct the question by responding "no, we're not playing Magic, we're playing commander." Not all Magic needs to be commander for all Commander to be Magic.
I agree that commander should not be the first format taught to a given person; having recently taught a friend how to play, I laid out all the options available first, because again, there is no default version of the game - just personal preference. The reason why I wouldn't teach commander first has absolutely nothing to do with any of the reasons you've given. Commander is a difficult first format to learn because of a) the sheer breadth of cards available, and b) the number of separate interactions to track across several players in a multiplayer game. Both of those things still fall under the limited description you keep giving us of "regular Magic."
There's definitely a kind of Magic that isn't regular, and it's silver border.
Strong disagree.
Yes, that was very much my point. EDH uses all the same "regular rules" of Magic, but functions predominantly as an alternate format. Personally, I don't like the phraseology of "regular"; it implies that anything outside of a specific person's subjective tastes is irregular, abnormal, unintentional, or otherwise part of an outgroup. It's a puritanical and, frankly, entitled way of perceiving the game.