The biggest problem with Magic, and how we can fix it
The biggest problem with Magic today is the sad state of 60-card casual play. We can fix this by giving casual the kind of community Commander has.
Formatless "kitchen table" Magic is widely played, but only in disconnected groups that don't talk to each other. There's no casual scene. If you don't have a regular casual group, you likely don't play the (non)format. You can't just sit down at a game store and play kitchen-style against a random person; even if you find an opponent, odds are good that the game will be utterly one-sided because one player's idea of casual is vastly more powerful.
Most of Magic's other problems are made worse by this. A couple are more or less entirely caused by it.
Casual play is the cheapest and easiest way to get into paper Magic, and the fact that casual play is inaccessible to someone joining the game alone raises the barrier to entry substantially. Magic doesn't have to be an expensive or competitive game, but when Standard is the main entry format it always ends up that way.
The average card is only really useful in Limited and casual. When people aren't playing casually, this means that the average card becomes useless shortly after it's opened. This is pretty awful; it's horribly wasteful and it concentrates the financial weight of each set on a few bombs. Uro costs $37.50 because Allure of the Unknown, The First Iroan Games, and a fair number of other rares from THB are worth about twenty cents.
(Let's not even get started on Un-cards, conspiracies, and the like.)
Almost everybody hates dealing with rotation, but non-rotating formats are all either very weird or very powerful. Opting out of rotation as a not-super-serious player is hard and inconvenient, and will remain so as long as casual play remains in the dumps.
Funneling all 60-card play into the competitive formats also magnifies the impacts of WotC's mistakes. Companions ruining Standard and Modern is a much bigger problem when Standard and Modern are all that's available.
But to me, none of that is as bad as what the weakness of casual does to deck-brewing. There are thousands of thousands of fun, interesting, and unique decks out there that aren't good in any format they're legal in. So the decks just...molder. I want to build those decks and I want to play them, damn it.
So what can we do about it?
I think we need to follow in the footsteps of Commander. Commander is a casual format too, but it doesn't suffer from the same problems as kitchen-table play. It's hard to build for, preposterously convoluted in play, poorly suited for duels, usually expensive, and yet still often the best option for new players. Because it's casual, and it has a healthy community.
Commander players know how to talk about disparities in deck strength. Commander players know how to bring new people onboard, how to talk about deckbuilding, and how to set up games that don't end in one-sided blowouts. Most of the time, anyway.
Building that kind of community isn't exactly easy. But I have some ideas about how we can do it.
First, there's the obvious. Talk about casual play online. I'll put my money where my mouth is on this one; you can expect to see me posting casual lists and talking about formatless play on here going forward.
Second, we could really use some vocabulary for talking about casual deck strength. When you ask someone, "how good is that deck?" it should be possible for them to give a useful answer. It is in Standard, in Legacy, in Commander...but casual has no words for its tiers. I'll take a crack at writing up something along these lines over the next few days.
Third, we need people to understand this fundamental point: in casual play, you don't try to win until the match starts. You can always raise your win percentage with some Sol Rings; you almost never should. Make each deck as fun as it can be, and as powerful as it wants to be. If a deck happens to be very strong, avoid playing it against weaker decks. If giving someone a free Conspiracy helps even up the game...go ahead and do it! Why not?
Fourth, it would help if people made a habit of carrying a 60-card deck or three. Many people have them and they're not exactly heavy. So why not bring them whenever you go to hang out with Magic players? Bring enough to lend, or to play at multiple different power levels, if you can.
Fifth, we should have some casual events. Ideally, the host of a casual Magic event should have a whole bunch of borrow-able decks available at a wide variety of power levels, so that people can find matches for whatever they happen to have. And, of course, so that people can try playing new decks. But obviously this will need to wait.
