Polyhedron Gamestore

06/08/2026

The Problem with Magic Isn’t the Magic

For years, Commander players have had the dreaded Rule 0 conversation.

The original solution was the 1–10 power scale. A deck was a 5, a 7, an 8, or a 10. The problem was that nobody agreed on what those numbers meant. One player’s 7 was another player’s 9. Every game began with a conversation intended to avoid miscommunication, and somehow the conversation itself became the source of miscommunication.

In response, the community began moving toward bracket-based systems. The current Commander brackets attempt to create broader categories of deck strength. Proponents argue that brackets are easier to understand, easier to communicate, and less subjective than a 1–10 scale.

They are probably right.

The problem is that neither system addresses the actual issue.

The biggest predictor of success in a Commander game has never been the hundred cards in a decklist.

It is the player.

Give a weak player every staple in the format and they will still lose games they should win.

Give a strong player a pile of bulk rares and they will routinely outperform expectations.

The community keeps attempting to solve a player problem with deck-building metrics.

The cards are measurable.

The player is not.

That distinction matters.

The Variable Nobody Wants to Measure

If player skill is the largest determinant of game outcomes, then why doesn’t Wizards of the Coast simply provide tools to measure it?

The answer is simple.

There is very little incentive to do so.

Commander is the most popular way to play Magic because it accommodates players of every skill level. A formalized skill-ranking system would inevitably create winners and losers outside of the game itself. Many players enjoy Magic without any desire to be ranked, measured, or compared.

More importantly, people generally do not enjoy being told they are worse at something than they believe themselves to be.

That isn’t unique to Magic.

It is human nature.

A company that sells game pieces benefits when players believe new game pieces will improve their experience. A company gains very little from publishing data that demonstrates a player’s losses stem primarily from pilot error rather than card selection.

Whether intentional or not, the result is the same.

The community has access to decklists.

The community does not have access to meaningful player-skill metrics.

Therefore every attempt to solve Commander balance inevitably focuses on the thing that can be measured: the deck.

Not the player.

The Market Already Solved Half the Problem

Ironically, Commander players already possess a universal deck-power metric.

Money.

Magic cards exist within a free market. Scarcity creates supply. Demand creates price.

A card that consistently wins games becomes desirable. Desirable cards become expensive. Expensive cards become signals.

Price is not a perfect measurement of power.

Nothing is.

But price is already a measurement that every player understands.

A brand-new player knows what they paid for their preconstructed deck.

A veteran player knows roughly what they paid for their collection.

Everyone understands the concept of budget.

Unlike a 1–10 scale, nobody needs a tutorial to understand the difference between a $50 deck and a $5,000 deck.

The market has already performed much of the evaluation for us.

The community simply refuses to acknowledge it because conversations about money occasionally create uncomfortable feelings.

Unfortunately, uncomfortable does not mean inaccurate.

A Simpler Bracket System

Instead of attempting to evaluate deck power directly, players should identify two things:

1. What budget bracket their deck occupies.
2. What their intent is.

Bracket 1 – Budget

The floor price of Magic cards fluctuates over time, but bulk cards currently sell for roughly $0.05–$0.15.

Bracket 1 is defined as an average card value of five times the current bulk floor price or less.

Using today’s numbers:

$0.15 × 5 = $0.75

A deck qualifies for Bracket 1 if:

Total Deck Value ÷ 100 Cards ≤ $0.75

Example:

A $62 deck divided by 100 cards has an average card value of $0.62.

That deck is Bracket 1.

The purpose of using a multiple rather than a fixed dollar amount is to allow the system to adapt naturally to inflation and future market changes.

Players should use the cheapest non-premium printing of each card. Foils, showcase treatments, serialized cards, and other premium variants do not increase gameplay power and should not affect bracket placement. Card condition also does not impact in game power level.

Tools such as Moxfield already provide deck valuation using retailers such as TCGPlayer, Card Kingdom, and Star City Games. While prices vary slightly between vendors, competitive market forces keep those differences relatively small. Since each card represents approximately 1% of a Commander deck, minor pricing discrepancies rarely affect overall classification.

Bracket 3 – Competitive Commander

Bracket 3 consists of decks that either:

* Are part of the current cEDH metagame.
* Are specifically designed to compete against the current cEDH metagame.

For purposes of consistency, the metagame should be defined using the most recent results available from EDHTop16 and TopDeck.gg.

As of June 2026, the major archetypes defining the metagame include:

* Kraum / Tymna
* Kinnan
* Rograkh / Thrasios
* Rograkh / Silas
* Ishai / Rograkh
* Sisay
* Thrasios / Tymna
* Dargo / Tymna
* Ral
* Etali

As tournament results evolve, so too does Bracket 3.

Bracket 2 – Everything Else

If a deck is neither Bracket 1 nor Bracket 3, it belongs in Bracket 2.

This bracket encompasses the vast majority of Commander decks.

Intent Matters More Than Power

Once a player identifies their budget bracket, they identify their intent.

Intent is binary.

Either you are attempting to win the game using Magic’s victory conditions, or you are not.

Many Commander players optimize for goals that have nothing to do with winning.

Perhaps the deck is entirely foiled.

Perhaps it contains only cards featuring a particular artist.

Perhaps it is built around a theme, a joke, a story, or a personal challenge.

There is nothing wrong with any of these goals.

They are simply different goals.

The distinction is important because a player pursuing a theme deck and a player pursuing victory are playing fundamentally different games, even if both are sitting at the same table.

Combining budget and intent produces six categories:

1A – Budget Competitive

1B – Budget Casual

2A – Mid-Power Competitive

2B – Mid-Power Casual

3A – cEDH Competitive

3B – cEDH Casual

What About Pubstomping?

The most common criticism of any classification system is that players can lie.

That is true.

A player can misrepresent their intentions.

A player can sandbag their experience.

A player can deliberately seek weaker opponents.

No system completely eliminates bad actors.

The question is whether a system performs better than the alternatives.

At the low end, Bracket 1 naturally limits access to powerful cards through budget constraints.

At the high end, Bracket 3 naturally limits ambiguity because everyone is operating within a defined competitive metagame constantly pushed by powercreep.

Only Bracket 2 remains somewhat large but dispropotaneate bracket size is not a flaw unique to this system. Nor is it a large variable in power.

At worst, this system performs similarly to existing approaches.

At best, it removes ambiguity from both ends of the spectrum allowing players happy within bracket two to stay and others to migrate toward the extremes to suit.

Conclusion

Commander players have spent years attempting to create increasingly sophisticated ways to measure deck power.

The effort is understandable.

The goal is admirable.

The problem is that the thing being measured is not the thing causing most of the problems.

Player skill remains the strongest predictor of success in Commander.

Wizards of the Coast cannot—or will not—provide meaningful tools to measure that variable publicly.

So we are left with the variables we can observe.

The market already evaluates card power.

Intent already evaluates player goals.

Everything else is largely speculation.

Commander does not have a deck problem.

Commander has a player problem.

And until the community accepts that reality, it will continue having the same conversation over and over again.

Because the problem with Magic isn’t the Magic.

A final note on CEDH, this format needs to define itself without crossing the line into gatekeeping. The reality is that most communities don’t have the playerbase depth to support multiple brackets of play. Often the choice is compromise the line or don’t play the event. Your community needs the high power players to be aspirational. This is why the tier three definition is these decks and the decks designed to play with them. If you do not allow for innovation then your format will stagnate and cease to grow.

06/08/2026

The Problem With Magic: The Gathering Isn’t the Magic

There is a popular narrative in modern Magic: The Gathering that sounds so reasonable many people never stop to examine it.

Cards are just game pieces.

Game pieces should be cheap.

Expensive cards prevent people from playing.

Therefore expensive cards are bad for the game.

The argument feels compassionate. It feels fair. It feels inclusive.

The problem is that it does not align particularly well with the game that Richard Garfield actually created.

Magic was never designed as chess.

It was never designed as a game where every player had equal access to every tool and the experience began when two players shuffled up and determined who would go first.

Magic was designed as a collectible game.

That distinction matters because much of the modern conversation treats collectability as a flaw that happened to Magic. The historical record suggests something very different.

Collectability was part of the design.

The Game Begins Before the Match

One of the most revealing comments Richard Garfield made appeared in The Duelist #1 shortly after Magic’s release.

When discussing collectability, Garfield explained that if a player wanted a particular card they might need to trade for it. If they were not wealthy enough to simply acquire everything they wanted, they would need to negotiate. He described that process as an important part of the game.

Not a side effect.

Not an inconvenience.

Part of the game.

He even compared collection limitations to the limitations that define a roleplaying character. A player was not expected to possess everything.

This observation is more important than many modern players realize.

Today, many discussions assume the game begins when cards hit the table.

Garfield’s comments suggest the game began much earlier.

Opening packs.

Discovering cards.

Trading.

Collecting.

Building decks.

Pursuing upgrades.

The journey toward the deck was part of the experience.

Modern discourse often treats acquisition as friction and gameplay as the destination.

Early Magic treated acquisition itself as gameplay.

Scarcity Was Not an Accident

None of this happened by mistake.

Randomized boosters were intentional.

Rarity was intentional.

Trading was intentional.

Collecting was intentional.

Unequal ownership was intentional.

To be clear, this does not mean Richard Garfield wanted expensive cards.

That claim deserves to be rejected with the same seriousness as the opposite claim that he was somehow unaware of the consequences of rarity.

Garfield is a mathematician and game designer. Collectible markets existed long before Magic. The idea that a system combining scarcity, desirability, transferable ownership, and competition would eventually produce markets is not a surprising outcome. It is the expected outcome.

Garfield’s own comments suggest he wanted these forces moderated rather than eliminated. He later discussed the importance of commons remaining relevant so players would not need to be rich or lucky simply to build functional decks.

But moderation is not elimination.

And the game that actually launched tells an important story.

Black Lotus was rare.

The Moxen were rare.

Time Walk was rare.

Ancestral Recall was rare.

The original dual lands were rare.

Many of the most desirable cards in the game’s history were intentionally placed behind lower supply.

Whatever Garfield’s ideal balance may have been, the game that succeeded was not built around universal access.

It was built around collectability.

The Historical Record Cannot Be Clarified Away

A common response to this argument is to point toward Garfield’s more recent comments about accessibility, expensive cards, or proxies and claim they clarify what he really meant all along.

This is where the discussion often leaves history and enters mythology.

Clarification resolves ambiguity.

It does not erase evidence.

We possess the original game.

We possess the original rarity structure.

We possess Garfield’s early interviews discussing collectability, trading, negotiation, and unequal ownership.

These are not interpretations. They are historical artifacts.

Modern comments can reveal how Garfield’s priorities evolved.

They cannot retroactively transform the documented design of Magic into something it was not.

The Richard Garfield of 1993 was a founder, creator, and stakeholder building a collectible game.

The Richard Garfield of today is a financially independent designer whose legacy is already secure.

These are not identical incentive structures.

Recognizing this is not an accusation of dishonesty. It is an acknowledgment that people often emphasize different values when the constraints surrounding them change.

What matters is not which version of Garfield a reader prefers.

What matters is that contemporary narratives cannot overwrite the documentary record.

Ownership Matters

There is an irony at the center of many modern gaming conversations.

Players routinely complain that digital entertainment is moving toward subscriptions, licenses, and temporary access.

They want ownership.

They want permanence.

They want collectability.

They want the ability to trade, preserve, and control the things they buy.

Magic provides exactly that.

You own the card.

You can trade it.

You can sell it.

You can keep it forever.

You can hand it to your children.

The card is not merely a game piece.

It is property.

That reality is not separate from Magic’s success. It is one of the reasons Magic became culturally significant in the first place.

The same ownership model that creates value is also the model that created collections, trades, stories, memories, and thirty years of history.

Equality, Access, and Entitlement

This is where the modern conversation becomes most confused.

A player who cannot afford Vintage is often described as lacking access to Magic.

Historically, that claim is difficult to support.

The player lacks access to Vintage.

Those are not the same thing.

The language of equality and access often obscures what is fundamentally a claim about preference.

The player does not merely want to play Magic.

The player wants to play a particular version of Magic, with particular cards, at a particular power level.

That desire is understandable.

What is less understandable is the modern tendency to transform that desire into a moral claim.

The inability to access every experience within a collectible game is not the same thing as exclusion from the game itself.

Yet much of the modern argument derives its force from treating those ideas as equivalent.

The progression often looks like this:

I cannot participate in this experience.

Therefore I lack access.

Therefore I am excluded.

Therefore the system is unfair.

But the first statement does not automatically justify the last.

Collectible games have always contained aspirational experiences.

Not everyone owns a Black Lotus.

Not everyone owns an Alpha set.

Not everyone participates in the most prestigious or expensive versions of a hobby.

The existence of aspirational experiences is not evidence that a hobby has failed.

In a collectible game, it may be evidence that the system is functioning as designed.

Profit Created the Experiences Players Value

Perhaps the strangest assumption in modern Magic discourse is that profit exists in opposition to player experience.

Historically, profit created player experience.

Profit funded new sets.

Profit funded artists.

Profit sustained stores.

Profit sustained organized play.

Profit sustained distributors, vendors, events, conventions, and the broader infrastructure surrounding the game.

Players often speak as though community exists independently of economics.

It does not.

The spaces people gather in.

The events they attend.

The products they open.

The content they consume.

All of it exists because enough people valued the game enough to spend money on it.

Collectors helped build that ecosystem.

Stores helped build that ecosystem.

Players helped build that ecosystem.

The groups are not enemies.

They are interdependent.

The irony is that many of the same people arguing against card value are simultaneously enjoying experiences that only exist because cards possess value.

The Problem With Magic Isn’t the Magic

Magic was built on collectability.

Magic was built on ownership.

Magic was built on scarcity.

Magic was built on aspiration.

Not because Richard Garfield wanted players excluded from the game, but because those forces were part of the experience he was creating.

The modern “game pieces should be cheap” narrative often treats these characteristics as defects.

Historically they were features.

The problem with Magic is not that scarcity exists.

The problem is that many modern players want the benefits of a collectible game while rejecting the consequences of collectability.

They want rarity to create history but not barriers.

They want ownership when it benefits them and utility when it does not.

They want aspirational experiences without aspiration.

Most importantly, they increasingly conflate:

“I cannot play Magic.”

with

“I cannot play Magic exactly the way I want.”

Those statements are not equivalent.

And until the community acknowledges the difference, it will continue arguing over symptoms while misunderstanding one of the central design philosophies that made Magic successful in the first place.

05/29/2026

Fresh pulls, fan favorites, and hard-to-find hits just landed at Polyhedron Gamestore — our Pokémon collection just got a major refresh! Stop by and see what’s new before the best cards disappear into someone else’s collection.

04/26/2026

It’s a great afternoon to get some games in. We’ve got open seats if anyone wants to play commander!

04/20/2026

Another successful set champs! Thanks for joining us.

03/13/2026

Runners Wanted!

Step into the shadows with our beginner-friendly Shadowrun 6E campaign! Build your character, explore a gritty cyberpunk-fantasy world, and pull off daring jobs with fellow players. No prior experience needed—just bring your imagination and a taste for adventure. Gear up and join the run Sundays at 6pm!

Call or visit the store for details.

03/11/2026

We're looking for more players to join our beginner friendly campaign featuring "Waterdeep: Dungeon of the Mad Mage". Saturday nights from 7pm- 10pm.

Characters start at level 6 using 2014 rules. Bring your ideas or join us at 6pm to build a new character with our staff.

Call or visit the store for additional details!

03/06/2026

Remembering Gary Gygax – D&D Co-Creator 🎮
Gary Gygax, co-creator of the pioneering tabletop RPG Dungeons & Dragons (with Dave Arneson), passed away in 2008 at age 69. His work laid the foundation for modern role-playing games and directly inspired countless video game series.

02/27/2026