the c in cEDH stands for "complain"

"What a strange bit of organizational inefficiency"  might be the most German thing you said in this entire video.

The problem with a "no collusion" rule is that most table politics meets the technical definition of collusion, so tournaments have to make up a different definition that adds "If you knew each other before the tournament and we can prove you agreed to help each other", which is quite toothless.

Who would've thought, putting thousands of dollars on the line for something that is meant to be fun would make people play like assholes.

"CEDH is where everyone expects everything"

Gets Strip Mined Once..."WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS TO ME???"

The player just putting his hand down is literally stalling, which is a DQ:able offence in comp REL. This is why judges hate cEDH tournaments.

Sounds like socially enforced gameplay norms, which ironically is the opposite of what I would expect a competitive format to be.

"This collusion doesn't count as collusion because they only decided to collude recently."

Faultless logic.

What I expected: interesting strategic games

What I got: intense psychological torture

the main thing stopping me from jumping into CEDH is all of these horror stories of every play turning into a bad parody of 12 Angry Men.

me when i cast the card called "gamble"

the amount of second hand cringe I felt

Your tournament issues are very much a judge and TO issue. If it’s not your priority who ever priority it is can tell them to stop talking. A good judge team will ask for actions after 45 seconds or so have passed without one after the first time they’ve been asked and then they forfeit priority

cedh players sometimes give the smug line of “no one’s salty in cedh because you should expect anything”. glad to hear that’s not true

You can take the player out of casual commander, but apparently you can’t take the casual commander out of the player lol

TEDH should allow one fist fight per round.  If someone is a problem you can just fight them instead, winner gets their way.

Multiplayer tournaments will never escape this problem.

wotc put out an announcement maybe 1yr ago on commander that the turn player can cut politics and force action.. idk why that wasn't taken into account

Stop waiting for a judge to call slow play. Call a judge and specifically point out the slow play. They aren’t going to do anything unless you say something.

This video sums up why I don’t think cEDH really works as a serious competitive tournament format.

The issue is not that cEDH is bad. Social cEDH can be great. The issue is that tournament cEDH rewards too much behaviour that is not really Magic: table management, social pressure, dragging decisions out, playing for draws, kingmaking, and bullying weaker speakers into “correct” decisions.

At that point the best player is not always the best technical player. Sometimes it is just the loudest or most socially forceful person at the table.

That is a massive problem for a competitive format. If timed rounds, seat order, intentional draws and politics create an incentive to talk people out of playing, argue the clock down, or help one player win so the table gets a better result, then the format is structurally encouraging miserable behaviour.

cEDH can be fun with the right people. But as a prize-supported tournament format, I think multiplayer Commander has a hard ceiling. The rules and judges can handle game actions. They are much worse at handling the social negotiation layer, and that layer is where so much of tournament cEDH seems to happen.