#i don't even care if this becomes a meme template

[bridoesotherjunk]

going to fuckimng get you

[eclipsemeteor]

Commander Is Subjective

Magic's becoming a monster of a game, franchise, and corporate beast that's growing and changing beyond comprehension. And further within that scope, Commander is always a contentious hot button topic due to its more lofty, somewhat ambiguous, and vibes focused goals.

Opinions both online and offline span across the entirety of the format and game, and while you can find amicable discussions among friends and collaborators, you'll find the sheer difference from an enfranchised player vs a disconnected one to be head-spinning. Thus, people look for some sort of structure that's concrete and easy to follow to make this disconnect less disorienting. But what else can you do beyond the format's mission statements and ban list?

My name's Cole, I'm a host of the Hero's Blade Vibe Check Podcast and the former host of Uncommon Commander. Playing commander since 2012 or so has given me a lot of perspective and opinions on Magic, but mostly (exclusively) on Commander.

(Of course, this means you should take my opinions as a player and consumer with a grain of salt, but also keep an open mind because what I'm gonna talk about is not based on cold hard facts and statistics, it's solely vibes and feels based. It's how I operate.)

(Thanks Mark Rosewater for this lovely meme template. We will now run with it)

Commander/EDH exists everywhere: Gameplay videos, podcasts, written articles, tweets, Tiktoks and actual games you experience. In most situations, you're always gonna hear or have an opinion on an individual card, a commander, a strategy, a color/color combination, or even on a person, while also hearing about someone's opinion on something you enjoy.

Commander at its core is about creative expression via deck building, how you bling out or customize your decks visual appearance and socialization! With 27,349 unique cards as of this posting (and excluding the ban list), there are many different permutations for self-expression.

(for example, I'm a big believer in Odric Blood-Cursed, and this is the deck that I've been tuning for 2 years. I've had a lot of fun with it, and have made heads turn)

With that many different ways to build a deck, you're bound to run into things you don't like, and sometimes they're not quantifiable.

The reason for this article, and no doubt others have discussed this at length and much better than I, is that Commander is first and foremost a social experience. It's meant for multiplayer, it's Singleton, and the only stakes are what you make. You start adding quantifiable or monetary incentives, you take away the spirit of Commander. If you make a narrower or broader ban list, you take away from the spirit of Commander. You try to enforce or advocate for a separate ban list, rules committee, etc?

You're right, you take away from the spirit of Commander.

What you make Commander is up to you, but it can't be what it's been for people since its inception without participating with other players. You can goldfish all day, but Magic doesn't exist without the Gathering. That means compromise, healthy discussion, an open mind and heart, and a line in the sand to say when an experience isn't for you. We can sit and discuss how social bans make no sense, so why doesn't the Rules Committee ban mass land destruction? Why does Sol Ring get a pass while Mana Vault doesn't?

At the end of the day, despite how we may socially desire structure, hard enforcement of rules might make this beloved format lose its luster. Looking at it with a finite perspective will deny you opportunities for growth and expansion. Looking at Universes Beyond as only a cash grab will deny you the ridiculousness of having a table consisting of Optimus Prime, Gandalf, Chun-Li and Cloud Strife, but also the well designed cards made with care by people.

None of this would exist without people making the cards, illustrating these stories, characters and landscapes. People who made the rules, people who made this format, and the people who sit down and play this format.

People, like you or I, who are flawed, and have expectations and choices that are different than what we want as individuals. They may be people you respect, you admire. They might be people you love, hate, or feel indifferent about. But they are still people who make this game work.

To like everyone you encounter would be a ridiculous ask, but I ask that you give people a chance when you can allow yourself, and know it's ok if you don't. But I think most people are a lot cooler than you think, if given the chance.

Whether you're as enfranchised as I am, or more or less so, what you owe yourself and the others you play with is a genuine enthusiasm for playing and engaging the format. Take chances where you can engage with new people, be patient as new cards enter your view, and try to find and foster friendships so that the next time, the games are even better when you learn about this game better through the lens of friendship and the Gathering.

Keep an open mind! Be excellent to each other.

[nardaviel]

I've been wanting to do this for ages but I was too lazy to turn on my computer. I got the template here! Only like three of these characters are any degree of well-known, and I think I might actually be one of the only people on Tumblr who knows of two of them... Under the cut I talk a little about how each of them has inspired Sora.

Ibushi Arima: The Original inspiration. The reason Sora exists. The mold that Sora was shaped to fit. Essentially, I needed an OC to fill some holes in my backstory for Ibushi, so I made Sora. He has many things in common with Ibushi for that reason (rich background, unhappy childhood, deeply devoted to a small number of people). He has some key differences, as well, because he needed to have them (less conflict-averse, more ambitious).

Light Yagami: Sora is incredibly, blindingly smart (though not to the degree we're meant to believe Light is, because I'm pretty sure no actual human is as smart as Light is meant to be), and gorgeous, and charismatic, and well-off, but feels a profound disconnect between himself and most others. It takes him in a different direction than Light, however, with more loneliness and self-loathing. Essentially, Sora, like Light, is a guy who seems to have it all, but his internal life is dark and dysfunctional and broken. One of my fav tropes!

Diora di'Marano: She is one of the characters who I might be alone in knowing, which is such a shame, because she's one of my favorite characters in all of media. She's smart as fuck, subtle and patient, good at manipulating people, and overall incredibly skilled at maneuvering through her society to become powerful despite some not inconsiderable barriers. Most importantly for this post, she's motivated by love for a few people, and she doesn't care about much else, including herself. All that cunning and subtlety, and she uses it to protect people, then avenge them, then to protect new people, all the while using herself as a tool like any other. She and Sora would get along, I think.

Haruka and Michiru: Specifically I'm talking about the 90s anime version of these characters. I never watched the anime all the way through, but I remember being drawn to their pragmatism, which influenced the way Sora thinks. The inner senshi don't want anyone to die, and neither do Haruka and Michiru, really, but they recognize that in order to save the most people, they have to commit to causing a few deaths. Sora would do the same calculations.

Amarais Handernesse ATerafin: She is another beautifully pragmatic character. She has more principles than Sora, but she's clear-eyed about what she wants, and she's willing to do literally anything to achieve it; it's simply that some of the things she wants are to never resort to assassination, to leave a positive legacy, to uplift the most vulnerable instead of crushing them under her heel, etc., which rule out some methods of taking and holding power. (Sora does not share these admirable principles; where they are similar is that he, like Amarais, knows what he won't do because he's considered and analyzed it already and decided that it won't produce an acceptable result.) Amarais is also an unapproachable character, aware of her position and expecting others to be aware of it as well, but isolated and made incredibly lonely by that distance. Sora can be very much like that. Lastly, like Sora, she wants power. She wants to get to the top, and she's not sorry about it or ashamed of it, and she's not portrayed as evil for that.

Daemon Sadi: (Look, is he from a Problematic series? Yes. Do I recommend it? Absolutely not. But I read it when I was young, it changed me forever, and now I'm stuck like this.) (Also, he doesn't even have book cover art I could use for this meme; I used @/veliseraptor's fancast of Sendhil Ramamurthy.) Daemon is The Most Powerful Guy To Ever Exist in his canon, which I think freed me early on from the fear of making characters OP. If there's magic or innate superpowers in an AU, and if Sora has them, he's going to be very innately strong, simply because it fits his has-everything-except-happiness-and-love concept and because I want him to be. Daemon is also a rich, beautiful, clever character, subtle and deadly, who lives through a youth full of abuse that follows him for the rest of his life and informs all the close relationships he ever has. Like Sora, he is deeply scarred by his early life and not nearly as stable as his smooth, charismatic facade suggests. His Diora-esque self-sacrificial depth of devotion to his closest loved ones is something else that's really stuck with me, and you can find it in Sora.

Josephine Montilyet: Josie is a diplomat. In a game where you, the PC, are a fighter, and your closest companions are people who fight with you, and two of your three advisors are a soldier and a spy-assassin type, Josephine stands out as the advisor whose skills lie in negotiation, manipulation of social circumstances, pulling strings, and destroying people without ever lifting a weapon. Sora, likewise, is very much a paperwork and private conferences kind of guy. Like Amarais, Josie is more of an idealist than Sora, but also like Amarais, she pursues her goals with Soralike ruthlessness.

[pacificlupineangel]

Who are the OCs?

Honestly it started as a joke- I made doll outfits, and I was inspired by the song Madame Guillotine to make the image of well... The Guillotine. That hasn't quite come to pass yet since I'm tryna keep my hustle going and sell things but, Madame Guillotine has become an OC in her own right. I used to RP as personified countries so, the next bit isn't really that suprising for me.

I started giving her an actual backstory, which ended up in me creating Paris and Versailles... and the backstory grew a little more and Tuileries and Fontainebleau came about.

I don't know if I'd ever RP them on here, for the most part its just been me making memes and art and giggling like a dumbass with my fiance.

But, a little bit of explanation-

Paris has tired single dad energy since France is AWOL and he has to deal with these things on his own. Looks like one of the people, a doctor or a lawyer perhaps, and serves as a deputy to the National Convention. None of them know who he really is though.

Versailles is the awful decadent twink. Face painted, fake moles, silks, feathers, all of it. Very "i have it worse than you" energy. To be fair, this has come about as being the Sun King's favorite and the seat of government for a hot minute, he's never known anything but decadence and during the Revolution is more than a bit spoiled.

Tuileries is just... he's tired. Let him nap. He was almost abandoned and not well cared for and suddenly he's the seat of government AND the home of the royal family and he's just so tired guys. Just so tired.

Fontainebleau is minding her own business during the Revolution- mostly. She's sheltering Versailles after the king's family was taken to the Tuileries, and she keeps him from causing too much trouble. She likes the finer things, there's no secret to that, shes very much an aristocratic woman, but very smart and knows how to play her cards right. She offers support to Paris, and he sees her as one of the very few close "siblings" he has, if they can be called that, along with Tuileries.

Guillotine was the oops child no one saw coming. I visualize personifications coming about once someone gives a spirit to a thing, like calling a country the Motherland or like, calling ships "she" or the Russians having General Winter etc. It's touch and go with wether or not they'll actually gain a spirit, it depends on how well ingrained they are in someone's mind. And Madame Guillotine is very well ingrained in the minds of the world as the Razor Nationale. So she came about while the king was still in power, and it surprised even her siblings, who didn't see the guillotine as anything more thab an instrument. She lived in Versailles the first few years of her life, which, he hated her- but that's another story.

There's a lot more to them i won't bore you about but here's some memes (made with their Faceclaims etc) and more meme templates are appreciated