Edh: 0 To 60
15 Apr 2025 - Nate Hofmann
MTG is complicated. With thousands of cards and thousands more interactions between them (both growing every year) tracking what’s even possible in the game is a fool’s errand, there’s always something new to see. Oh, and you’ll only start to intuitively understand the top level rules after a few dozen of games and say ~100+ hours of gameplay.
That’s also only considering “typical” two player formats like Extended or Standard. EDH makes that same complexity exponential. With double the players (at minimum), higher turn counts, and almost twice the typical deck size (and 4x the unique card count) the playing curve becomes radically steeper.
All that complexity easily turns a normal EDH game night into a migraine of state tracking, numerous extraneous actions, and “I wish we had a judge right now”. The table waits as you shuffle for the 8th time that game, someone (again) asks to redirect their removal after they remember a game changer, and someone again asks what your token represents before entering combat. I think we can do better.
Below are some ideas to help reduce the complexity of your decks so you can increase your speed & ease of play:
1. Cut your tutors (including Farseek)
Shuffling sucks and tutors are a main cause of this, sorry! Not even counting how repetitive they makes decks & games, the 10-30 secs it takes to find a card gums up the game flow and adds to the cumulative “waiting for someone to finish” part of the game.
I’d say a deck should have no more then 2-4 non-land tutors per deck. At the extreme, I’d extend to gutting land tutors like fetchlands & even staples like Farseek and Cultivate. Though if you’re this point, you now have the relative luxury of the top card of your library being the only card in your deck you ever interact with!
2. The card you play is the card you get
Reduce play of cards that don’t introduce additional cards or other forms of state tracking. Meaning when you play a card - you don’t get any other counters, coins, tokens, dungeons, or similar. They’re are all extremely fun game elements, but I feel like so much time is wasted with someone fumbling to increment all their dice every other turn, or reminding everyone what that one dungeon from 5 years ago does for the third time.
I don’t think tokens offend as often so long as someone has proper representation for them - i.e. a 1/1 Soldier token has a 1/1 Soldier token card. My gripe here comes from experiences of someone using a random assortment of face down cards or other knick-knacks to represent multiple types of different tokens - whose exact types are inevitably forgotten.
3. Keep your play simple
What EDH player doesn’t love to see the complex interactions & nuances of their deck play out? Casting an intricate sequence of 17 spells per turn, layering 8 separate triggers in just the right way to get an extra 3 life, or finding a new combo from their board of 20 permanents. Unfortunately, this is durdling. All the time you spend playing your deck out on your turn is less time for the table as a whole.
Personally I know after a turn goes for >2-3 mins, my eyes start to glaze and my attention subconsciously shifts elsewhere, and before I know it I’ve completely lost track of the board. I love my deck popping off as much as the next player, but I’d (and most other players) would rather be at table of quicker, even outright simpler, decks with 1/3 the turn time & require significantly less attention to follow.
Not saying avoid a deck where every pieces synergies together, but maybe don’t always go right for your storm deck or your trigger happy aristocrats deck. At the very least, know your deck well enough you can clearly & quickly articulate what is happening to your opponents.
4. Let your opponents play out
I don’t see this one often because interaction-centric control decks are already stigmatize and the average EDH deck rarely features enough interaction to cause problem, but I feel like it is worth mentioning. If 2-3 players are slowing down their play because one player always “might have removal”, that one player should lower the amount of interaction their decks has or opt for a different completely different style of deck.
Interaction 100% has a place in EDH- I’ll happily Murder your commander anytime. Letting it grow to the point that no one is really MTG at all is a different story. In general, I’d rather see a powerful deck play out & play cleanup when needed then play grind to a halt as no one wants to suffer resource loss.
All though the real solution to this is more players need to learn how to navigate around interaction heavy decks.
In Brief
These are meant to be suggestions, not an attempt to demonize any specific playstyle or aspect of the game. There’s definitely a time & place for complex MTG! I’ve just observed that the enjoyment of my decks for myself & others improves the more I’ve followed these rules. My decks take less mental bandwidth to pilot, my turns are quicker so more players get more\ playtime, opponents can follow my actions more easily, and overall it keeps EDH feeling fun and not like a mental chore!