The High, Lows, & So-Sos of cEDH on MTGO
Thassa's Oracle by Jesper Ejsing
In case you've been living under a rock recently, you may have missed the excellent news that Competitive EDH Leagues have come to the wonderful, horrible program named Magic: The Gathering Online. While it's always technically been playable on the platform, between a range of annoyances (which I'll get to) and a need to make your own matches, it was both hard to get games in; additionally, there was little incentive to do so beyond the abstract of "practice".
Especially since most cEDH players aren't very familiar with the platform, this was an additional layer to overcome. Now that Leagues exist, players have incentives to play in addition to having an easy matchmaking system at their disposal to get games in quickly.
Now that we're a few weeks in, I figured it would be a good idea to take a look at the highs, the so-sos, and the lows of playing on the platform, both from my own experience and the thoughts of others.
High: cEDH is on MTGO!
Of course, the first high for me is that this has happened at all in the first place. I don't think that I ever would have guessed that Daybreak Games would be interested in supporting either Commander or its more competitive counterpart. As I alluded to above, while Commander play has existed on the platform in the past, it has never been very popular. However, Daybreak is now making a bigger push into letting people play EDH online, and I think it's a smart move.
Multiplayer (and most any casual-focused play, for that matter, past Brawl) games aren't available on the main Magic platform, Arena, so that leaves a large potential market for them to conquer. Without it having been added to the platform, we wouldn't be having this discussion in the first place, so this seems like a good place to start! It's here! We're ready to play! We can jam cEDH for online prizes! We have a reason to be here! Let's go!
High: It's Cheaper
Yes, yes, I can hear you now: costing any amount of money is not cheaper than 100% proxy acceptance. However, if we're looking at prices of cards in paper versus on M:TGO, it isn't even close. For example, you can get yourself an Underground Sea on the platform for a little over the equivalent of $15. Meanwhile, that same card would cost you $750 if you wanted one off TCGplayer right now.
Even some newer cards that are expensive by online standards, like Opposition Agent, Orcish Bowmasters, or The One Ring, are still close to the cost of its paper version. On a whole, the decks are much cheaper to get your hands on, both because of Reserved List cards having gotten several reprints AND because of rental services.
What are rental services, you ask? Since MTGO has a full trade system and also allows trading bots, several websites, the most popular two being Manatrades and Cardhoarder, will allow you to borrow from their huge collections in return for a small subscription fee. I myself pay Cardhoarder around $8 a month in order to borrow the nearly $200 worth of cards I need to finish the rest of my Najeela, the Blade-Blossom deck; that's a deal I'm very happy with, especially since I can pause and unpause whenever I want.
High: It's Easier to Get Games
Anybody who's been playing cEDH for a while knows how hard it can be to get in games: even if you have a local playgroup with a consistent night, that only adds up to a few games a week, assuming everyone can make it in the first place, against a limited range of decks. Playing online over a webcam was its own headache with a need to find players, schedule a time, and then also deal with the specific issues that playing over SpellTable provides. Making sure your webcam and mic were ready to go is a constant struggle, for me at least, and I also always struggled staying focused on a game going on on both my screen and right in front of me. Something about that splitting just didn't work in my brain!
On MTGO, as long as you have the cards for a deck, getting a game in is as easy as joining a League & pressing the Find Match button. This is, by far, the easiest matches of cEDH have ever been to get barring weekend-long events that happen to be in your own town. There may be a bit of a wait before you get thrown into your game, but we'll talk about that in a moment. This is a huge step forward for being able to get in a decent number of cEDH games in a timely fashion, something that will help players improve their play, the card decisions, and their decks in general. Plus, these games are run relatively smoothly as well since the game manages the stack and all rule interactions, keeping these things from slowing down matches as well.
High: Chess Clock
One of the oldest debates in the cEDH space is what constitutes slow play. Heck, it's one of the most ancient discussions in the larger Magic community, but it's especially potent here thanks to the addition of multiplayer and political conversations. MTGO shoves aside all concerns about how much time other players are taking out of your game with the addition of a chess clock. If you're on the hook for an action, whether it be in your main phase or on the stack waiting to pass priority, your own personal 30-minute timer is counting down. If it hits zero, you lose instantly. Pretty simple, right?
This helps keep games moving and ensures everybody has a fair share of the time at a table. Granted, with a half-hour per player, this does mean that games have a potential of going as long as two hours, but in my experience it's usually a total of 90 minutes or less before somebody gets the win. This will also improve as people continue to get better at navigating the Magic Online interface!
High: Daybreak is Attentive
This will be a short one, but it's a decided positive: since taking over Magic: The Gathering Online, Daybreak Games has been attentive and quick to solve problems to the best of their ability. They've taken consumer feedback to heart and acted quickly; they even bumped up the aforementioned chess timers from 20 to 30 minutes based on critique from the first few games played in the leagues.
I assume they'll continue to be receptive to feedback and implement the changes that they can. They're also quick to refund you in-game currency for any bug you encounter in a League, which is nice. Thanks Daybreak!
So-So: Queue Timers
So... the league queue timers. Depending on when you get on during the day, you can get a game in less than two minutes, but according to some German players they've had to wait as long as 45 minutes if they don't give up first. Longer MTGO timers are not a new phenomenon, people who have wanted to play Vintage leagues in the past are familiar with them. However, this variability does make getting a game a bit of an uncertainty when you would like to play. If they were more consistent it would make playing more attractive on a day-to-day basis and I hope that longer queue timers doesn't continually discourage people from playing - making wait even longer in the long term as a result.
So-So: Less Politics
Personally, I would put this up in the "high" category, but plenty of people have complained about it so I'm putting it here in the so-so category. Between chess timers, a rock-solid rules engine that doesn't allow for the bending that takes place IRL, and a lack of verbal interaction, the politics and yapping that often define a cEDH game are nonexistent on the platform. This does have some downsides.
For example, you can't really talk an opponent out of making an objectively poor play that would make another player win the game. However, on the whole, I personally have enjoyed a more chill and laid-back game environment where I can focus on just casting my spells and making game actions that maximize my own game win percentage. You don't have to argue for or against every game action you're taking and don't have to deal with the judgment of people around the table. cEDH Taste So Good When U Ain't Got A Kinnan Player In Ya Ear Telling You It's Nasty dot meme.
If you try to drag me into a Discord call during a MTGO match, I will simply just be closing chat.
Low: Combo Difficulty
Here is the definite downside of the chess timer situation on MTGO (and about how MTGO works in general). Since the platform is an exacting, definitive recreation of how Magic works, this makes most infinite combos on the platform difficult and tedious to execute, especially within a good time frame. Imagine with me, if you will, the mechanics of executing a Kinnan, Bonder Prodigy combo. You must click Basalt Monolith, adding four colorless mana to your mana pool. You must click Monolith again, then choose its untap ability. Three clicks and you have netted one colorless mana.
Assuming we have Thrasios, Triton Hero on the battlefield already, a classic winning position for the deck, we must repeat these three clicks four times (12 clicks) to get the four mana we need for a Thrasios activation. Between clicking Thrasios, activating the ability, & navigating the scry, this is another four clicks. So, after 16 clicks, we have completed one iteration of the most simple way we have to win the game: make infinite mana, draw our deck with Thrasios, then cast Thassa's Oracle after we inevitably find a way to also make UU mana.
Assuming we have a relatively conservative 75 cards left in our library, we would have to click 1,200(!!!!!) times to properly win the game through means that in paper we can wave our hands around and everybody concedes to. Granted, people can and will often concede the game to you on MTGO if you demonstrate a game-winning loop, but that is not always the case because, well, if they wait you out you'll probably lose to your chess timer.
This is a pretty dramatic example; you can increase your combo speed by prioritizing getting Nyxbloom Ancient onto the board, but with Kinnan being one of the best performing tournament decks it seems like a relevant example. Other combos, such as those found in Sisay, Weatherlight Captain or Malcolm, Keen-Eyed Navigator decks, also struggle to be executed in a timely mana.
Heck, doing Najeela combat combos is a tough ask in my experience, and that isn't even that many clicks or iterations in comparison to others. This is the major flaw in the Magic Online cEDH experience to me, as it constrains the decks theoretically playable on the platform, at least easily. I myself have already swapped to putting a lot of time into Blue Farm rather than Najeela, just because Najeela combats are so annoying to navigate on the platform.
Low: Conceding, in Theory?
As pointed out in Drake Sasser's article The Best cEDH Decks to Play on MTGO, there is a major problem in playing cEDH on Magic Online, and that is that people can concede at any time. The subject of concession is another one that has been a hot topic in tournament EDH circles, as an untimely quitting of the game can destroy combos, mess up advantageous combats, and even more.
Most tournament organizers have attempted to fix this by allowing a player to leave the game at any time, but the rest of the table does not consider them to have left until whenever their next turn was; this is commonly called sorcery-speed concession. Since this is not implemented, MTGO contains the potential for what people call "spite concessions," which is to say conceding to stop your opponents from gaining advantage.
However, players are not incentivized to conceding in this way because they lose the game no matter what (there's no potential for draws) and also they can not re-queue into another game until their current match concludes. Salt concessions, though, are very possible and even more predictable. People who are frustrated or flubbed a combo line are very capable of just quitting the game, which then messes up future combo lines. I've had a few matches derailed in this way, and it was not very enjoyable; definitely a low.
Low: Missing Cards
Another problem on Magic Online that is only going to get worse with time (it looks like, at least) is the number of missing cards on the platform. Daybreak Games and Wizards of the Coast before them only have so much time to implement cards on Magic Online and as a result some have been missed over time. Historically the only major option that was missing for cEDH play is Sacrifice, a card that is mainly played in Tymna the Weaver/Dargo, the Shipwrecker decks.
However, with the introduction of Universes Beyond and murky legal situations surrounding them, it's quickly becoming apparent that not many of those cards are going to make it onto the platform. We're missing multiple staples from the likes of the Doctor Who Commander decks (Flesh Duplicate) and other more recent UB releases as well. Warhammer 40K decks technically came to the platform but are no longer being sold, and as far as we're aware never will be again.
If more staples come in future sets that they don't have the rights or time to add to the platform, the format experience on the platform will become degraded. Legacy is also heavily impacted by missing cards, so much so that online and paper play are significantly different for some decks. Since my main hope for using MTGO is to be able to test my decks and improve my skills, it would be ideal if the card pool stayed as close as possible
Low: It's Still MTGO
In case you don't know, Magic Online is an archaic, buggy mess held together with toothpaste and string. Under the weight of multiplayer games, it lags much more than it already does for normal games. It sometimes slows down to a crawl and will also outright crash if too many triggers are created at once. For example, I've seen it crash every single time somebody casts a Wheel of Fortune effect into an Orcish Bowmasters.
There's a consistent bug with Jeska, Thrice Reborn, a popular commander, that causes her to come into play with many more counters than she should (this is where two of my league refunds have come from). Even beyond the performance issues, MTGO is tough to get into. As I recently said in a tweet, the worst part about the platform is that your first few matches will simply be miserable auto-losses as you desperately try to figure out how to not pass through your own main phases, the right ways to interact with cards, when you can do what, and how to best utilize the program to maximize your clock.
Maybe somebody should write an article about that sometime. But, if you can get past this difficult aspect of the program, you'll be straight in the land of smooth sailing. I'm still working to fully figure it out myself and gaining percentage points of understanding the program feels directly like gaining percentage points in my win rate.
The Verdict: Despite Everything, This Rocks
The rougher aspects of MTGO probably will not change, unfortunately. Daybreak Games will do their best to fix the most egregious bugs and will probably do some work to try to get missing cards onto the platform. However, concessions will never change (it's literally how Magic works), combos will have to stay very manual, there will always be little to no politics. The performance I can't imagine will get better, as that would require major refactoring across the board on a program that as at this point, largely just having its lights kept on. The program is annoying to learn and even with quite a few matches in, you'll sometimes still lose a game to a misclick, lazy autoselection, or wrong keyboard shortcut press.
However, the addition to competitive Commander Leagues to Magic Online is, as far as I'm aware, still simply awesome. We have the chance to get games more easily than ever before, set up for us automatically, and at a much cheaper rate than you have to pay for real cards, especially if you're using rental services. See you in the queue.
