Kicker and Horsemanship?

One thing my playgroup does is: Whoever draws first blood becomes the Monarch.

Bold of you guys to choose Dungeons and Energy mechanics

Monarch is pretty much the “using guns allows you to steal butter” you recently mentioned commander is missing. Wonder if it would be better or worse if it did something non-butter like giving you creature tokens

"Web-Slinging and Fire-bending", alternative "Putting--fries-in-the-bag and Mogging" from the upcoming McDonalds and Italian Brainrot UB sets

It's about time you guys made a video on Flanking and Banding.

Feels like goad myriad and vigilance are key elements at helping combat be more sustainable in multiplayer formats

Command Tower should make you the Monarch when you play it.

I think when evaluating these mechanics and thinking about whether their design does its job in Commander well, we should probably keep in mind that both were originally designed for Conspiracy 2, which was a multiplayer draft set that wasn’t (as far as I remember) really designed with Commander in mind.

Myriad is my favorite multiplayer mechanic.  It pushes you to attack which helps keep the game dynamic and shorter.

There's so much Goad at my LGS and it's great. From Kardur to Nelly to Rendmaw, it always makes for dynamic and fast games. Played 5 games in as many hours on Saturday, and at least one person was playing some form of Goad each game.

I always attack when I find it useful, like when trying to win a game. Largely keeping up creatures for defense doesn't matter past a certain point in my experience because either you're getting life loss, burn, or another effect applied directly to you or you're being attacked by ~100,000 Blightsteel Colossi (true story). Might as well swing regardless.

I love goad, when I first started playing games took forever like 2hours each (it didn't help that I was new), then after a few more months of playing and really learning the game I picked up the Nelly borca precon and since then I have made like 10+ decks with all different goad commanders current favorite is The Rani. But my first ever goad that made me really love it is Baeloth/Noble Heritage background pair Voltron.

Of note with Monarch and the Initiative especially. Is they both arose out of sets with multiplayer draft in mind where board stalls are going to happen even more than in normal Commander. Never mind being left open, you just might not have any kind of great attacks. And then those little Monarchs and such grant a boon to pursue.

My most recent commander deck was this exact flavor. Queen Marchesa Goad. It even included coveted jewel!

My friend used to have a goad deck at some point. It was sort of fun but a NIGHTMARE to track. We often would forget which creatures were goaded, for how long, and if they could attack or not. Mind, we've been playing for 15+ years. It's just really annoying that some cards goad a creature for a turn, others forever, others goad all creatures, others just some creatures... And all of this is really damn difficult to track with something like dice, or a coin and lots of attacks are missed.

In the end the deck got dismantles for different reasons but I wasn't sad to see it gone.

My goad/monarch deck is my #1 favorite deck in my collection. I don't get to play 4 player pods super often so it's always the first one I pull out when I get a chance.

Spot on. I like the house rule: the last player becomes the monarch at the start of their first turn.

My all-time favorite deck that I use has both of these mechanics lol no wonder why I love it.

“Players can decide for themselves what shapes the game best for them”

Well put! I agree that that’s the story of commander, this freedom to choose mechanics is certainly what enables me to curate the type of game experiences I enjoy