UPDATE: An earlier edition of this article contained a quote suggesting Lerner was banned from the competitive EDH DIscord due to Nick Hammond’s cancel document, but Lerner says the two incidents were “ostensibly connected,” but separate. The transcript has been edited to reflect this information.
One of the most remarkable things about Richard Garfield’sMagic The Gatheringis the game’s versatility. The card game can be played in a variety of officially sanctioned formats, featuring their own rules and evolving lists of banned cards. Currently, the most popular permutation ofMagic the Gatheringis an unofficial format known as Commander, or Elder Dragon Highlander (EDH). This four-player, 100-card format is a favorite for casual play, but a competitive scene with tournaments and highly technical decks is steadily growing among players like Jacob “Bad Dog” Lerner.
Game Rant spoke with Lerner, a veteran theory crafter and serious tournament competitor, about his experiences in Southern California’s EDH/Commander community, his concerns about the format, and his hopes for its future. Interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
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Q: Briefly introduce yourself by telling us whichMagic: The Gatheringcolor you resonate with most strongly.
A: Oh boy. My real name is Jacob Lerner, I play by the gamertag Bad Dog, and I think the Magic Color I most identify with isRed: the color for freedom. I should probably warn you right off the bat, I don’t know if you could pick a more controversial player in the entire format to interview.
Q: When did you first get involved with competitive Elder Dragon Highlanderand Commander?
A: I’ve been playing EDH since before competitive EDH existed. I saw the format start, lurked it in its earliest stages, and I unofficially joined the community in about 2014 and officially joined in late-2015 to early-2016.
Q: What organizations and tournaments have you been affiliated with, and what are some of your other credentials in the community?
A: I have broken a few decks, and I currently lead a couple Commander-centric Discords. I was one of the founding members of the competitive EDH Games Discord, which was a big deal in its time. I ran the first-ever competitive EDH world championship in 2016, which was very controversial. I have zero regrets, but some people were unhappy with how I handled it.
I have two top-fours. One in Octoberfest 2020, which was, at the time, the largestcompetitive EDH tournamentever held. Like 120 people, maybe more. I also have a second-place in Summerbloon 2021. I placed in the top 16 in Marchesa back in 2019, but that’s kind of ancient. Playing competitive EDH was a thing, but people had not really figured it out yet.
I’m not sure how much it counts, but one of the most popular YouTubers at the time,The Laboratory Maniacs, went on a ten-minute rant about me and another player being “special snowflakes” for bringing off-meta decks, so I guess it mattered at the time? I held the only four-zero win-rate in a competitive EDH league, which are very competitive weekly tournaments. And that was not surpassed for two years.
Q: You mentioned the competitive EDH 2016 World Tournament was controversial. Can you get into why?
A: I play off-meta decks, and I never stopped doing it despite pressure from various high-ranking communities. And when I started winning with them, it built a lot of bad blood. It was through the competitive EDH Discord and we were sort of the rebels of the community. Our goal was turning EDH intoa competitive format, but there is a lot of gatekeeping, even at the level of theory crafting. At the time, people would not let you deviate from the “good decks,” even though we and a few other people were getting great scores, we were under a lot of pressure for deviating from the established meta. Some of us were banned form the larger EDH subreddits and Discords.
So when we organized the event, it immediately generated a lot of jealousy. And from the get go, people were out to sabotage us. People brigaded our tournament Discord every night. Nick Hammond, Joking 101, who currently runs the tournament organizer, Monarch, started fights on the floor of our server every night. His behavior bothered a lot of players, but I didn’t ban him at the time, because people were concerned it would create friction down the line, but looking back, I absolutely should have.
Q: What can you tell us about the very beginning of competitive EDH?
A: It’s tricky. If you go back to 2011 to 2012, EDH was becoming a popular casual format. Mostly on paper, though it saw some early online play. People weren’t really competing though. There were threads on MTG Salvation, but r/EDH didn’t exist back then, to say nothing of r/CompetitiveEDH. There wasn’ta subreddityet.
When Wizards of the Cost released its first official Commander product, it brought ina whole bunch of new players. It really appealed to millennials in college and zoomers in high school. We were coming out of an economic slump, and apart from a few older cards, prices were still pretty low. EDH in particular had a more accessible buy-in than other MTG formats, like Legacy, Vintage, or Modern. And the other nice thing about EDH was, it was a multiplayer format, so you could play with your friends. That’s how the ball started rolling.
At that time, there was no competitive EDH. There were a few deck builders, or “brewers,” who would attempt to break the format and make the best things that they could, but competitive EDH didn’t really exist. By 2013, 2014, with the next set of Commander products WOTC released, those early deck builders became a lot more militant. The ‘good’ brewers would mock the casual crowd,casual decks, and the casual crowd would get upset. So a split happened in r/EDH and r/competitiveEDH emerged. And those moderators were very tight.
At the time, I was playing this Commander, Kaalia of the Vast. Right off the bat, I got a lot of flack for just playing that commander in those early tournaments. Around 2015, 2016, I joined the competitive EDH Discord that the r/competitiveEDH mods had. And when I entered a tournament held on Cockatrice in early 2017, immediately, people were like “fucking Kaalia player.” Just because I showed up with an off-meta deck. I figured part of it was because I was new. So I kept playing in those tournaments and other offshoots. My win-rate never dipped below 30 percent, which is slightly above average, but my persistence with off-meta decks built some bad blood.
By the time we get to about 2019, I had been involved in brewing some pretty important decks for those eras. I’m one of the first people who pushed for a strategy called “main phase ad nauseum,” I developed the original “Red Shell” for Protean Hulk decks that dominated until late 2019 when the “Shuffle Hulk” combo was developed. I didn’t come up with these on my own, obviously. I had to study and work with a lot of very talentedMagicplayers. My Red Shell owes a lot to a guy called Cobblepot. He didn’t do the same things that I did, but I learned a lot from him.
I made a lot of friends as well as enemies during that period. But my use of the Kaalia deck always dragged me down, in a way. My whole shtick is that the casual/competitive divide is bad for everybody. In ‘real life,’ I’m an anthropologist and archaeologist, so I see how these silly divides lead to really bad conflicts. Those grudges just don’t help anybody. It just increases hostilities and make things worse.
The reason I stuck with Kaalia so long was because I wanted to prove anything was possible; that you can win with anything as long as you learn to be a good player. I wanted to bridge the gap between the competitive players and the casuals. The fight between the “good deck builders,” and “the casuals,” will always endure, but in 2018 and 2019 it started to relax a little.
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Q: What made the animosity subside?
A: Jim Lapage, of The Spike Feeders, has played both casual and competitive Commander, and has acted as an ambassador for the format.His efforts closely coincided with another important milestone in Commander history. Star City Games did a “Commander Versus” series, presenting a potential, entry-level competitive EDH deck. And another big name in the MTG creator space, Big Lupu, ruthlessly tore their deck apart and insulted their team. In response, Star City Games vowed to never play competitive EDH again in the comments of their video. In contrast, the Spike Feeders message is one of inclusivity and taking Commander to the next level, rather than pub-stomping. To me, Jim’s videos represent a major change in how these factions see and interact with each other. He is a major unsung hero in the community.
I also like to think that I played a part. I reached out to a guy; The Professor at Tolarian Community College—that’s his handle and the name of his channel—with the premise that we need to bridge the gap between competitive and casual players. I pitched him the idea of interviewing certain disenfranchised players, hearing their side of the story… and he loved it. That set up one of the first-ever interviews between casual players and the greaterMagic: The Gatheringworld. One of the guys from Playing With Power—I think it was Ryan—went on. Shaper was going to go on, but ended up not doing it. But those interviews moved the dialog in that direction.
Also, I put together an anthropological, data-driven study about a combo called “Flash Hulk.” It concerned many EDH players who felt it was broken, and that it was warping the game. I worked with a player who goes by I Sleep Too Late, or Sleep for short, who hosted a number of Cockatrice Tournaments over Discord. At the time, the tournament was just called Marchesa, but now we look back on it as Marchesa 2020. Prior to lockdown, these tournaments were relatively small, but COVID caused participation to skyrocket.
Anyway, the whole point of my study was to find out if the Flash Hulk combo was problematic, and the study itself ran into a number of hurdles. ADiscord usernamed FireRiff ended up posting the player roster—including some players’ real names—in the Discord, essentially doxing everybody in the tournament. My data collection team changed protocols repeatedly, and were generally uncooperative, disorganized, and unreliable.
Despite all of that, I managed to organize the data into a report after going three days without sleep. And the results determined that while Flash was a powerful effect, and a Flash Hulk deck did win the overall tournament, it was not a game-breaking.
I didn’t do the best in that Marchesa tournament. I had a game time out while I had a winning combo on the stack. If that win was factored in, I would have had a 50% win-rate. When the tournament ended though, I still had a 30 percent win rate; a higher win rate than many of these supposedly excellent and overpowered Flash Hulk decks. And my performance, paired with my report, for the first time, I had the data to challenge these theory crafters who were essentially dominating the conversation, and gatekeeping the game to a strict meta.
Q: Why were you eventually blacklisted?
A: Things were going pretty well into late 2019—early 2020. I had some issues with some people.
There was a famous competitive EDH content creator group called the Laboratory Maniacs; like I said before, they were the ones who went on a ten-minute rant about me and another player being “special snowflakes” because of our off-meta decks. There was a lot of humiliation from very powerful people.
I also had issues with Siggy, the guy who runs the PlayEDH Discord. While I was actually on anarcheologydig in Israel, he would keep me up until 2 or 3 in the morning, debating with me about some very foolish card choices. I ended up being massively vindicated, years later. But I had had enough of it. You have to be up at 4 a.m. doing hard physical labor to do this job. I’m not going out on two hours of sleep to appease an angry German guy. It’s just not worth my time.
So I had some issues with the gatekeeping. People told me to let it go, and I definitely tried. But things changed with the COVID lock-downs. The world went crazy, as I’m sure you know from your own experiences. But in the competitive EDH world, people would go to the competitive EDH Reddit, and just word vomit their hatred of casuals, for influencing the RC.
They also had this Ideology channel. It was supposed to be philosophy channel, but the name is a Marxist buzzword. And at the time, several of the mods on the team were showing “fellow traveler” memes in there. All sorts of shit.
What really started to make me go back on my original sense of goodwill, was when a few of the high ranking moderators in there—including Shaper—started going on about how the country of Israel shouldn’t exist. And one of them even started doing “From the River, to the Sea” crap, in there.And “From the River, to the Sea,” was an Arab army war chant from 1948, referencing ethnic cleansing from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. Now it’s been reappropriated into protest lingo for people who want to be pro-Palestine. And after living there for two years, and as a half-Jew myself, that’s pretty frankly antisemitic.
Stuff like that continued to pop up. People arguing the Uyghur genocide is a fake. All kinds of crazy stuff. And because I was locked down, with nothing else to do, I just started throwing the history back at them. And they couldn’t argue at that level. They just wanted to have this very extremist political circles in a gaming group.
The killing blow for that channel, was when a couple users started talking about the Gulag system used by the USSR, and trying to defend it as justified. And I was on the other side, arguing “it’s slave labor.” And they were going on about the technical definitions of “slavery” because there is no buying, selling, or bourgeois involved, because there is noclass system. Which is debatable. In the end, I ended up showing them some pictures of what an actual soviet prison camp looks like. While I was hiking in the Czech Republic, I stumbled across several soviet work camps. These massive box canyons that people had dug. And I asked them, “you think people volunteered to dig this?” And the Reddit mods closed the channel the next day.
That pissed off a lot of people. Because they wanted their space. But that’s simply not appropriate for a gaming Discord, at all.
In 2020, I was banned by the Competitive EDH subreddit and Discord.
The final straw was… amidst this Ideology drama, and the fallout of the Flash Hulk report, I made a sarcastic comment implying I would talk to the RC directly. Shaper, another high profile reddit moderator with a lot of clout, suggested I tell “Sheldon I broke Kaalia.” And I flippantly said I would. I was being a dick to other dicks even though I was in the right. After that, I was banned from the Competitive EDH Discord. And a couple days later, in an unprecedented move, they banned me from the r/competitiveEDH subreddit as well. Lots ofpeople were banned on the Discord, especially in that time period, but the mods they really wanted to make an example out of me.
In November 2020, Joking, or Nick Hammond, another player in the cEDH scene, rose through the ranks from initially a minor player and brewer to eventually coming to control the Marchesa tournament Discord server after its previous owner (and fellow moderator in CEDH Games) isleep2late suffered a mental breakdown which saw him quit the game entirely. Over the course of 2021, Joking turned the Marchesa tournaments into a business called “Monarch” and it was in the tournaments that they ran that the CEDH Games players continued to dominate. Joking’s reasoning for writing the cancel document was partially personal and pure business.
CEDH Games was considering putting on our own large tournament and we’d also hosted the Mean 16 tournament (the first ever attempt at a CEDH world championships, set in May 2021). Joking wanted to break the server, its legitimacy, and its players as a source of competition, and to do that he needed to eliminate me. It also bought him major street credit with groups like the r/competitiveedh subreddit and their moderators who’d long been looking for a way to de-platform me. After his cancel document was published I was banned from 30 discords or more associated with Competitive EDH, including the Commande RC Discord.
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Q: What is the RC?
A: The RC is the Commander rules committee. They are some of the highest-ranking judges in all ofMTGincluding Toby Elliott and Sheldon Menery, who was an early EDH pioneer. They control the ban list, and interface the most with Wizards of the Coast. They chiefly interact with people via their Discord, various Facebook pages, tweets, and Reddit, as well as a few magic-dedicated forums, like MTG Nexus. There are some very good people in the RC. Recently, they have taken on Jim, from The Spike Feeders, and a player named Rebel who was a collaborator and close friend of mine in the early days of EDH.
Q: What can you tell us about the controversies at the recent Frank and Sons Tournament?
A: I had to register for the even incognito, essentially. I didn’t list myself as ‘Bad Dog’ on the roster. By happenstance, I was paired with Mike Levine twice. He’s an amazing guy and a brilliant player. As soon as he saw my Kaalia, he asked if I was Bad Dog. I denied it, but he knew, and we chatted a bit between games. He told me that he wouldn’t give me up to Joking, which I really appreciated. Somebody at our table heard him call me Bad Dog though, and I think that’s how Joking found out I was at the tournament.
Still, I managed to play to the end of that first day. And there were lots of other problems throughout the tournament. Several notes about Judges being rude, and making controversial calls. We had this Discord bot determining the match-ups, so everybody had to be on their phone, checking for their match. And the bot eventually broke altogether, resulting in two-hour delays.
On day two, shortly after I arrived, two judges escorted me outside the tournament venue. Even event security was confused about what was going on. But the judges took me to an alleyway where Joking confronted me. He told me: “I have reason to suspect you are Bad Dog.” I say “I’m not,” because I know he has no way to prove it. He tells me I will not be playing in rounds 5 and 6. So we walk back in, and Joking goes into the back to ‘discuss the situation.’
I went alone, but I had several friends at the tournament who were texting me, either to give me updates or offer support. While these deliberations were taking place, there were about fifteen people who were interested in the situation, and one player actually proposed that everybody claim to be Bad Dog, like a real life “I’m Spartacus!” moment.
But Joking spoke withCassius Marsh. I think Cassius Marsh was taken advantage of in some respects. He doesn’t realize he is walking into a power grab. Cassius thought he was hiring a professional to run this Frank and Son tournament. But really, he’s being grifted.
Anyway, Joking claimed that I had been banned from playing by Wizards of the Coast, which is absolutely not true. After that, the manager, or proprietor told me that I am not banned from store, or future events held at the store, but I had been banned from the tournament and needed to leave immediately. They were very respectful, and admitted they didn’t understand the full details of the situation. In the end, they refunded my entry fee and I walked out.
Q: Any predictions regarding Monarch’s next big tournament?
A: It’s kind of hard to say. Many people, myself included, thought the Frank and Son’s tournament would be the Fyre Fest ofMTG, and that kind of ended up being true. A couple days after the tournament, onTwitter, Joking actually implied he might be stepping down from Monarch. If that happens, he will probably turn over the reins of the organization to Libby and Flowwer. Monarch’s Oktoberfest tournament is open for registration, but as a result of the fallout, it has been pushed back to November.
Q: Do you think there is a general bias against West Coast players in the current competitive EDH landscape?
A: I think there is a subconscious bias, for sure, but it’s not conscious and there are some reasons for that. West Coast—Northern California in particular—is represented pretty well, but Southern California is under-represented for a myriad of reasons.
I can’t speak for other formats, but the biggest reason why So-Cal specifically, and the West Coast more generally, is under-represented is that socially? Competitive EDH is basically an information cartel. A powerful group of moderators from Boston—high-ranking figures in the competitive EDH community—essentially run the conversation. Many of them are influencers trying to secure clout. So they stick together, and have a massive amount of influence in terms of East Coast representation.
There are some northern California moderators. Wedge, the guy who raged at me, was from Northern California. My interactions with him were very hit or miss. Had good conversations with him. He has also been known to fly off the handle and insult people, but he can be quite an eloquent speaker and good guy to be around. Depends on which day of the week you catch him on.
Some of these guys, like ASM, were located in Los Angeles. Sinestra was from Los Angeles, but he is from Boston and flew back there. Shake ‘N Shimmy, the guy who formerly owned the reddit competitive EDH discord, I’ve heard people say he’s from the Los Angeles region, but I don’t know if that’s true? I’ve heard it claimed, but nobody I know in the Los Angeles area has seen the guy, and we seem to be a pretty tight-knit group. And his team, his moderators, are all heavily East Coast based.
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Q: Are there any specific contestants in the Southern California scene that players should keep an eye on?
A: Yes! On the positive side, there are some absolutely fantastic players.
Next up, I think I would have to go with Shawna. I think she is the producer for game nights. She tends to rock a Niv-Mizzet Control deck. Competes inFinch’s long-running summer league session. Somewhere in second through fourth place… unless she bumped me down, and then she’s in first! She definitely has a better win-rate, period.
There’s a gentleman named Rodrigo rocking a Yeva deck. He is a kind, patient, calm player who loves to play instants and off-turn cards. He recently went five and zero in the last Finch and Sparrow Tournament.
There is also Jessie. He is one of the hosts of the Los Angeles YouTube creator group SpitePlays. He has a tremendous range across all sorts of different decks. He’s actually one of the players I fear facing off against, because he thinks two to three turns in advance, so he can easily walk you into a trap. And even if you keep objectively good hands, he is usually prepared for that.
TripleDare, or Alex is another good one; another SpitePlays host. He’s been piloting some very fast and brutal Storm decks. Unfortunately, he can’t go to a lot of Finch and Sparrow tournaments, because he’s very busy with work, but he plays a lot with us online. Very quick and solid player.
Colin is an absolute dark horse. He deserves the rep. He won the first three tournaments he showed up at Finch and Sparrow. And he just destroyed everybody. What’s so crazy about him, is that he plays a severely outdated deck: Rest-in-Peace-Helm-Zur. This is an old, old, old school competitive EDH deck. He’s such a calm and methodical player that he just destroys pods with this deck. It’s always surprising and awesome to watch him play to see what he gets away with.
And then finally, there is John. He is a longtime staple in the online metas. He actually found me, through a mutual friend on Cockatrice. He has been playing the Kraum Blue Farm deck, and has just been getting better, and better, and better. He has an outstanding record of seven first places in a row, across multiple stores in the Los Angeles area meta. He is so good that at this point, he is making money from prizing. Personally, in terms of Blue Farm players I have played against, I would rate John as the best Blue Farm deck player, with the possible exception of the guy who invented the deck, though now, I think John would take him in a heartbeat. He is that good.
These kids are smart. Very passionate about this game. Very serious about getting better. It’s such a breath of fresh air compared to the insanity of the online world.
Q: What changes would you like to see in the competitive EDH deckbuilding and theory crafting community?
A: The clout stuff, using it as a social media platform for self-promotion and fame has got to stop. It needs to become a true competitive format. Don’t get me wrong, I understand exactly why the rules community wants tokeep it casual. These are some of the best Judges in the game. And EDH was their chill, just drink beer, and hang with the guys and nerd out format. Then these dirty combo players came and invaded it.
But with no events, with no official representation, it just became this bizarre little internet kingdom. Where you are either in the king’s court, or you’re a peasant. Or an exile. I guess I had a little stint as the barbarian king, but….
Creativity has to go back into the hands of the players. AS things are now? It’s basically an information cartel. And the old guard’s gotta go. They don’t even really play or compete anymore. They just use it as a platform for clout. Things have got to go back into the hands of the players, and the only way I can think to do that is more regular events.
Because nobody is held accountable online. It’sa propaganda war. First person to sling mud wins. A lot of it is anonymity. If people tried the stuff they try online in person, they might be evicted from the store or end up in a fist fight in the parking lot.
Q: How has Commander impacted the economics ofMTGas a whole?
A: Commander is one of the most accessible formats for anybody, especially from a financial standpoint, since you don’t need to buy multiple copies of a card. This has triggereda tremendous interest in buying eternal cards; dual lands in particular, which are historically only used inMTG’s Legacy and Vintage formats. A study was done at the beginning of this year, and only about 40 percent of the price correlation of these cards can be attributed to Vintage and Legacy formats. Which means Commander accounts for nearly 60 percent of the spending in that card type. It is the number one seller of any Hasbro game.
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Q: Do you think Wizards of the Coast will eventually attempt to run official Commander events? If so, how will it affect or relate to competitive EDH organizers like Monarch and Eminence?
A: Definitely. Even before the lockdown,Wizards was looking into Commanderevents called CommandFests, which they ran through Channel Fireball, specifically Star City Games and TCG Player. These fests run the gamut from chaos to very clean, competitive EDH tournaments.
WOTC is definitely communicating with Monarch, but I am not sure about Eminence. I suspect they are trying to use Monarch and Eminence as either groundwork, or risk-free prototypes. If there are three wolves competing for a mate, one wolf will wait for his competitors to weaken each other, and then kill the victor of the first fight. In this situation, Wizards of the Coast is the Third Wolf. Monarch may be hoping to sell out and work for WOTC, and Eminence may want to work with them in tandem.
The biggest issue in organizing ‘official’ Commander tournaments comes down to proxies. Right now, competitive EDH is proxy friendly. But WOTC obviously hates proxies. So it is possible that Monarch and Eminence will still attempt to host proxy-friendly tournaments after WOTC releases their official Commander tournaments.
Q: Is there anything else you would like readers to know?
A: Play what you want and have fun. This is nota social media drama. This is your life. Your hobby. Bring what you think is fun to these events, and let it fly. Don’t listen to people going on and on about tier-lists, don’t buy into the hype. Most of the people going on and on about tournaments have never won a tournament. Find what you are good at and rock it.
[END]
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