Scription: Capybara and his Trading Cards

Chapter 2: Power level 7

Ever since somewhere like 2020, MTG has pivoted into its casual format from it's more competitive days. This format known as Commander was a multiplayer (mostly 4 player) format and is actually my least favourite format in the game.

For context, I started the game playing the competitive constructed formats like standard and modern so this shift towards the more casual side kind of made me switch my focus to FaB which was the new card game catering very heavily to its competitive organised play.

Anyways I really hate this dog shit format because now I had to worry about nonsense like "politics" and "threat assessment". I mean, what the fuck man I was so happy just playing against a single opponent and measuring who has the better deck, skill and whatever. Well, at least there is still a good 60 card 1 on 1 format active in Singapore called legacy, although the entry is.... Prohibitedly expensive.

In EDH, there is this nonsense known as "rule 0 discussion" where everyone agrees on what decks to play and not to play so that the power levels are appropriately matched.

For example during my earlier days of EDH, I had extremely busted decks that usually won on turn 3 or turn 4. As time went on and I kept winning, people started excluding me from their games and said my decks were unfun or something. I was like, ohhh fuck yeah actually everyone is just playing random nonsense that doesn't win.... I guess it does make sense that I would win all the time.

So I made some very average power level decks and everything was fine in my playgroup for awhile. I'm not sure which year it was but sometimes in the 2020 era, I noticed that the games were getting shorter and people were winning a lot faster. I bitched and moaned about it and my friends were like "but I'm just playing the preconstructed deck as it came out of the box... How the fuck is that too strong".

Wait... They're right. They were playing preconstructed decks that were designed to specifically be introductions to the game. Naturally these kinds of products in any multiplayer game would be weaker in power level as it would just be an introduction to the game.

But Wizards, the designers of the game those fucking cunts... Ever since they switched their focus on this casual format, they've started printing stronger cards that would do well specifically in this format. Meaning if you wanted to play with the new fun stuff, the average deck would naturally become stronger.

There is this power scale that players love to use that ranges from levels 1 to 10 and there's always a big argument on the internet happening on how powerful a "level 7 (High medium powered)" deck should be. I don't know why 7 is the magical number but I don't really care, I just want to complain about this shit.

The concept of level 7 continues to plague this format, pissing off everyone who tries to have a casual game of EDH especially in a public pick up game setting in card shops. Last time, when the main pick up game in the store was 60 card 1 on 1, we all just agreed that we wanted to play the strongest shit ever to win a game. If we wanted to have fun in a random pick up game, we would just show up for say a weekly standard event with what we thought was a cool deck that could win and be done with it. Level 7 being everyone's favourite power level has made it so that people started arguing about what deck is actually level 7 while forgetting level 7 in 2018 is wildly different from level 7 right now.

I concluded that it's not the EDH players' fault that I'm angry with. It's the fucking company that forced their probably innocent game designers to pump up the power level of this bullshit format to sell more god damned product.

I don't really care about winning in EDH anymore, I just play whatever deck lets me live long enough in the game that I get to do shit and interact with the other players. If I felt like playing to win, there's still legacy and FaB events happening everyday... God is in his heaven and all is right with the world I guess.