Magic is a complicated game. You can make it less complicated by not thinking about what cards do.

Panharmonicon? A neat card, does cool stuff, but it doesn't kill you.

Mentor of the Meek? Adds most of an Opt to all of your opponent's creatures, but it doesn't kill you.

Exquisite Blood? Part of an A+B combo with Sanguine Bond, but until then, it doesn't kill you.

A card that generates excessive value is a card that will kill you.

This is things that are generally going to statically two for one on a resource for you. Smothering Tithe, and Consecrated Sphinx are good examples of this. Rhystic Study is not. I have opinions on this, but that's for later.

Craterhoof Behemoth generates excessive value because you're making a dumb amount of power. Even then, it might not be enough to kill you.

It's okay to ignore cards that aren't going to kill you.

The common understanding in Commander is that 1 for 1 removal is bad, because it puts you down a card compared to your opponents. If you're killing cards that don't matter, that's true! However, we're only going to worry about cards that kill us.

It means we can leave up the one to three mana in the midgame for instant speed interaction, because we only care about cards that are going to kill us.

Sometimes, a card will get played that we know isn't going to kill us now, but will kill us later. That card is going to kill you. It's okay to think about it.

#MagicTheGathering #EDH #Commander

Like playing commander, but mad about power levels/fast mana/ramp/no more battlecruiser magic? I have the solution! It's Elder Goblin Highlander (#EGH)!

What is EGH?

EGH uses the same rules as commander, except that you can only include cards with mana value four or greater in your deck. This includes your commander! You also get two basic lands in your command zone, because I don't want to wait around for you to make good deckbuilding decisions and mulligan.

Why is EGH?

Basically all of the complaints about commander come from cards that cost three or less mana. Now, you don't have to worry about them!

Split Cards, Adventures, and cards with abilities that can be activated from hand for less than four mana

If you're trying to cast a spell for less than four mana, that's a no go, because then people start jamming all the split cards they can for advantage, and booooo on your house! This is easy for split cards, but harder for things like Adventures/MDFCs. Talk to your playgroup, but the idea is that you shouldn't be casting spells before turn four. A possible split difference is if you force Fuse casting on spells that have that option.

Activated abilities, like cycling, should be fine! We've done limited playtesting mostly around things like Krosan Tusker and Yidaro, and it played fine. If you run into problems let me know!

Banlist

In our playtesting and thought experiments, there wasn't much that arose as too problematic. Consider using the regular commander banlist, but also most of the cards there that are a pain are also less than four mana, big exceptions being Prophet of Kruphix and Primeval Titan.

A big exception to this are four and five mana smokestack effects. For this reason, the following cards are banned:

Smokestack Braids, Cabal Minion Descent Into Madness Keruga, the Macrosage is banned as a companion.

You should not play cards that look like these cards. They generate non games, and the only reason to play them is to make non-games. Braids, especially, if you go first you can just play 99 swamps and then your opponents never get to cast spells.

The biggest thing is don't be a jerk! Stax is fine (though difficult, a lot of stax pieces cost less than four mana), being a jerk about it is not.

#MagicTheGathering #CustomMagicFormats #CustomMagicRules