How to have fun playing commander with your friends

My usual pod is me + 3 other guys and we are all in our late 20s. We also frequently play with a larger group of ~40 people that we have met through magic and invited to my discord server where we organize mtg days. That group is comprised of a variety of people at different stages in life, different ages, backgrounds, etc. we have folks ranging from being a teenager to 50+ year olds.

My pod has played magic most Thursday nights for ~4 years. In a year I would guess ~35 nights we have the 4 of us, and another ~15 we have 3/4 + a fill from that larger group mentioned above. We basically only take the week of christmas off, unless we have other life plans (vacation/time with our partners/events/etc.).

The usual pod plays almost exclusively what is now defined as B3 (although we do see the occasional blood moon or whatever). We have never had an issue like the reddit moments that shoot to the top of the subreddit, no-one threatening to quit, no-one winning the majority of the games (we do have a bit of a winrate disparity as one player is newer to magic, but it's correcting itself over time), no-one ever having a crashout over some interaction, no-one getting upset or bringing a deck that is way over our desired power level and causing issues. We have power-crept, then scaled back, then power-crept again over time. I would definitely say that our current power level is notably higher than 4 years ago, turn 7-9 wins to turn 6-8 wins, I think we average 7 when we were tracking this last year.

We don't really use the bracket system beyond a guideline, but our decks do adhere to the bracket system as well (almost like the bracket system is pretty well thought out). This is because we found that is how we have the most fun. We get dinner every week, and just enjoy 3-4 hours of commander, we tend to play 3-4 games a week.

I think there are two main things that keep us coming back and having fun. The first one is that obviously we like each other, I don't really have any advice there but I do find that the people you are playing with make a huge difference. For example we regularly play with someone whose favorite way to play commander is to be the honestly person playing commander, they love MLD, Stax, and heavy control playstyles that often don't have a wincon or use something like [[Diving Intervention]] to end the game. We LOVE playing with this person as they are just a great person to be around, despite the style of gameplay being not b3 friendly and would be frowned on generally at an LGS or whatever.

The second thing is we actually care about having fun together. If games are not good, we all generally try to figure out why. We collectively don't play cards that have caused unfun play patterns in our group, and have a small in-house banlist to increase variety in our games. We also don't get upset if people want to try new things. Ex. Our longest standing ban is sol ring, and last week someone cast a sol ring which was pretty funny because none of us were expecting to see a sol ring in our games basically ever again. They were not running sol ring to deliberately ignore the banlist, they were just trying to tune a weaker deck and figure out if more fast mana would fix the problems it was having and they added a bunch of stuff like sol ring to see if it would prop the deck up. Another similar situation was when I built a [[Lumra]] deck, but I wanted it to be mostly voltron and solidly B3 emulating the feel of my favorite modern deck Prime Time, a few turns into the game I realized that [[Sunscorched Desert]] would be too powerful, as the deck was running a bit faster than I thought it would, and it would be able to win games a bit too early and also in a way I did not really appreciate. So I simply cut the card for a forest mid-game. This has also happened similarly with [[Goblin Recruiter]] that got cut mid-game for a different goblin although in hindsight this one I could see coming, I just wanted to see how I felt resolving the card once before deciding.

We break down our decks into two "brackets" within b3, and we just refer to them as high and low power. We try not to play the high and low power decks into eachother but it happens and never causes any issues as someone is making the choice to be the problem, or someone is choosing to play a deck that is a bit weak for the table.

Our "high power" in house banlist is:

[[Sol Ring]]
[[Fierce Guardianship]]
[[Deflecting Swat]]
[[Etali, Primal Conqueror]]

I know it may seem a bit odd to include etali in there, but it's not that it's too strong, it's that it warps the game around itself making it about who can copy clone reanimate etc. it, similar to the logic that [[Primeval Titan]] was banned for. We just found it's more fun to not have etali in decks as we have a fairly high amount of reanimator/stompy decks that could run it. As for the other bans, Swat was never really an issue in our group, it did not see a ton of play, but when we got rid of Fierce Guardianship, we decided swat should just go with it. Also these assessments/bans comes from a place where we all had a copy or even multiple of those cards, including blinged versions.

In our "low power" decks, we don't have a formal banlist, but we tend to just not include cards that would be game warping for the type of game we want to have with them.

Nothing else is banned, but out of notable cards, [[Rhystic Study]] and [[Smothering Tithe]] do not see any play in our pod, no-one has ever really addressed it, and tithe has been in a few decks historically, but we collectively have not found a reason to jam these cards into our decks.

This is our example of the kind of discussion and assessment that keeps playing EDH every week with your friends fun in my/our opinion(s). We all recognize that part of the fun of commander is being able to do degenerate and broken things in a way that is more akin to D&D than it is 60 card magic. Commander is sort of a power fantasy game, as long as everyone has a level playing field. Video games get dynamically balanced through patches, and I highly recommend trying the same thing in your pod. Find people you like who are as invested in having fun as they are in the rest of the group having fun. Make changes to accommodate fun and balance your games dynamically, even if it has to be mid-game. Ultimately your games will get better if your pod is willing to talk about it and discuss what should and should not be included in your meta.

Tl;dr: Talk to your pod about the type of games you want to have and how to make that happen, don't get salty and make a reddit post instead. Bracket system is a guideline, not a rule, use it to tailor your games to having fun.

Links to some decks that see play in our pod, no particular organization here, if you have any questions about specific decks please do ask, this is only a portion of the decks we see regularly, I will self-report by saying that Kreat->Braids are mine, I have been on a mono-color kick for about a year now, and took apart all of my multicolor decks for no particular reason. I don't have as many lists because I did not want to bug my friends to update moxfield lists, but it has 3 decks of each of theirs that are fairly updated

General Kreat
Thada Adel
Zo-Zu
Chiss-Goria
Lumra
Braids, Arisen Nightmare
Slimefoot and Squee
Baba Lysaga
Frodo and Sam
Faldorn
Nathan Drake
Aloy
Jin Sakai (formerly Kamiz)
Ashling, Rekindled
Shiko and Narset (from our 50$ league with upgrades over time, arguably the winner of this league)

And if any of you have any advice for how to keep games fun long-term please do drop it here! I see so many posts from people complaining about their friends/pod/games and not enough about people appreciating having fun games!