Atraxa, Grand UnifierAtraxa, Grand Unifier | Art by Marta Nael

I've been in my feelings lately about my win rate in Commander.

It's not a surprise a Black, immigrant, fem-presenting person would have some problem ironing out the connections between success and effort and self worth. However, I was wondering if was a me thing or a Commander player problem. I want to explore the connection between Commander and winning.

Turn It Off, Like a Light Switch

Before we can begin to address the complaining about my win rate, we have to talk about winning, or rather success, in Commander. I received a comment on a post I made on Bluesky, which I believe was sent with an honest heart.

I'd written about how losing a lot of Commander games doesn't necessarily make you a bad player, and this commenter said (I'm paraphrasing) what if you stopped focusing on winning, then you wouldn't crash out.

This seems like a relative naïve perspective about the ambitious. If we could, let alone would want to, turn off the part of our brain that feels bad when we lose, wouldn't we? It's in sort of the same vein as people telling you to just ignore your bullies because they're jealous or ignorant.

It doesn't stop the bad feeling; it covers it up.

It lets it fester, and sooner or later that person who pretends not to tilt when they lose back-to-back games to people lying about their deck's power is going to explode.

However, it's not an unfounded way of trying to think. In a typical Commander game, there are four players, which should, with the help of Rule Zero conversations, be a balanced game with a 25% success rate. This is hoping that players are all evenly matched in decks and skill.

Hopefully the tick of percentage away from success shouldn't be an indication of poor playing, but the RNG of a 100-card singleton format. This is likely true for cEDH as much as casual.

Maybe We Just Suck

Losing that much is tough, though. Another commenter - a less kind one - pointed out that losing that much might mean you're bad at the game. I'm not sure that's really true, though, for the reasons above.

Sometimes it's a numbers game. You'll want a way out of this negative self-talk if you're like me, though, and feel like you're a worthless waste of cards if you lose 10 games in a row, even with your busted decks. You're bound to explode at some point if winning matters even a little bit to you.

Maybe this is a bit drastic of me. I'm not unaware of strategies people can take in therapy to mitigate and transform this bad feeling into something more productive, but the rub comes in with if we truly want to turn that feeling off.

I'm a firm believer that winners don't turn that part of the brain off. Magnus Carlson's viral crashout video has been memed over and over because he's the best there is and he still takes losing poorly.

That might be convenient of me, but if you'll allow me, I suggest that a strong motivator for the ambitious, or the less kindly named "competitive," is the negativity with losing, or better yet, being bested - knowing that you're not good enough...yet.

Commander Winning

What does this have to do with Commander in particular? We all know cEDH is where the competitive go to play Commander, right? Wouldn't regular Commander automatically make itself the casual format, where winning must be, by definition, less important?

I don't think in practice I've seen four Commander players sit down at a table and feel comfortable losing to just about any strategy in the game. I'm not saying players aren't capable of playing a game where they had a chance of winning but lost it to a sneaky or effective play or RNG. I think the Bracket System is built on people wanting this exact thing: a well-balanced weight class for games where everyone wins by chance, luck, or slight deckbuilding advantages.

What I mean here is that I don't think casual players want to lose either. There is a fire, a desire to win in most players, even in this casual format. So then if winning does in fact mostly (I know not everyone is ambitious) matter, then the question here now is is it the most important thing?

What's the Most Important?

If winning is not the most important thing, then what would trump this? We have to talk about cEDH again. In my simple observation of PlayToWin's podcast and gameplay youtube, combat is a last ditch way to effectively close out a game. I'm sure Dylan and Cam can correct me in this, but infinite combos or "win the game" effects are far more consistent and effective ways to win in cEDH.

I have wanted to dabble in cEDH myself, but I've struggled with this simple fact. I'm not a combo girlie. I'm not a fan of winning this way, because I simply prefer not to lose this way. Which creates this weird new value in me. I don't want to build a deck that is unpleasant to play against. It always goes back to salt scores.

Salt Wins

Thassa's OracleThassa's Oracle is still one of the Top 10 Saltiest Cards on EDHREC. It's the sort of card that repels me, similarly to Tergrid, God of FrightTergrid, God of Fright.

I'm not interested at winning at any cost. I'm sure this idea divides the community because I think this is the essence of a Salt Score. Some players want to win any way possible. Other's don't. Some might have some deviation in the middle.

These cards or strategies make people upset. Maybe not angry, but definitely unhappy. Players might prioritize managing the saltiness of their pod over winning at any cost. I guess my question here is, is that more important than winning? I'm not exactly sure, but I'm stricken by this decision.

I want to win desperately, but I would never put together a consistently competitive Tergrid deck for my local play pod.

Deck Building

If winning isn't most important then what motivates players in a game that must have a winner? Another note about my post on Bluesky: Bracket 1 decks have often eluded me.

Decks, as far as I was concerned, needed to be tuned to win as best as they could without dipping too many toes into cEDH. I usually understood a deck's capability defining it's Bracket. Some decks, no matter how you optimize, could only produce so much value, if you actually factored in the commander into the strategy, of course.

Bracket 1 isn't like that at all (I promise this is related to the topic at hand). Bracket 1 players prioritize flavor over functionality. It sounds crazy because of the extremeness of this idea. I think to a lesser extent we all as casual Commander builders agree with this. We pick our commanders not because they are the objectively best commander in those colors. At least, most of us don't seem to.

We usually like some flavorful mechanic or design about a commander and build around it. Somewhere in there we sacrifice efficiency for flavor, making us a little like the Bracket 1 players - only a little.

There's a new interesting interaction here with the goal of the game. We're building decks we enjoy to pilot and play. We will sacrifice power for flavor, which means we prioritized something over winning.

Is Winning All It's Cracked Up to Be

I'm stumbling towards my conclusion here. There's an interesting pie here, about playing casual Commander - even cEDH. There is in all of us a combination of wanting to win, wanting to design a deck we like, and prioritizing the emotional integrity of those we play with.

This pie is different for each of us; each slice is different in size.

This is why we have so much friction in games with random opponents; we're unable to gauge their pie's ratios without playing against them. And this pie's demonstration of its slices might even fluctuate between decks. Some players have decks that prioritize winning more than flavor or saltiness.

Why is this even important? As always, I will always run back that your successful game nights come down to knowing this stuff. Aligning these pies is a good way to define a play group.

Losing

But lets get back to my crisis here: losing. Obviously some of us are in conflict like I am about their pie. I feel at times the desire to win is the whole pie, but it isn't. I don't build particularly busted commanders even though I can afford to, and I don't play strategies that salt players out either. The point I have to make here is that limiting any aspect of the winning pie will result in you losing to those with a more dominant winning pie slice.

And like that person who commented initially on my Blue Sky post meant: it is okay to feel bad for losing while prioritizing things that are more important to you, like deck building or managing the emotions of your play pod.

It's tough, but at least you can tell yourself that you're holding back when you lose your 16th game of commander in a row. "Losing games of Commander doesn't mean you're a bad player" was my initial post, and I still agree.

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