Opinion: Commander Was Better Before They Printed Cards

I used to love a good game of Elder Dragon Highlander with the gang in our backyard, cranking the new Beatles album on our boom boxes as the Berlin wall fell and Catcher In The Rye got banned.

Then they started printing these dadgum cards with a bullshit new "Alpha" set, and it's been downhill ever since.

Nowadays the format is being pushed and power crept while they keep making cards in every set specifically for it. I miss the good old days when they didn't print free counterspells, or any spells.

Sure, the idea of a singleton format is novel, but back in my day we played with even fewer copies of cards in our decks. We didn't need no goddamn advisory board telling us what to do, neither.

I miss when Commander tax was stealing my brother's lunch money and the tuck rule was for keeping your beans safe in Vietnam. I want to go back to the good ol' days, where decks weren't as homogenized by stupid geocities like EDHrec and we had to go to the library to report our communists and check out our Duelist magazines.

They keep catering to this casual format, when they should be catering to literally nobody. That's how they made the Reserved List, and that's how they should make everything.

If I had a nickel for every overpowered Commander card that got printed straight to standard, I'd have at least 86 cents. Used to be you could buy a house for that.

The old gang and I have set up a new format called Pre-Pre-EDH just for us. If you want an invite to the Discord server, that's too damn bad cuz we don't have one. Our flier at the library keeps getting taken down, so good luck tracking us down, punks.