Here are some questions and doubts that haven been presented in online discussions in the past, and my answer or perspective on them. If after reading them you have any other question or criticism, feel free to share it in the comments.
"What’s wrong with just talking to your playgroup?"
I sometimes see the argument of "just talk to your playgroup" when first reacting to systems like this. As hopefully has become apparent by now, I agree that this is the best approach. However, that approach does imply that you know what to talk about. This can be difficult for many people, especially newcomers. Regardless of your personality traits and communication skills, if you don’t have a rough understanding of the EDH landscape, and if you don't know good pre-game talk questions or what are good strategies to solve mismatches in expectations, then “just talk to your playgroup” can be a difficult ask. These guides can be a useful starting point for those people. Not for them to show to the other players, but to help them build a varied deck suite, to help them express what kind of game they prefer, to help them ask and answer useful questions, and to know how they can adapt to the needs of the table after gauging the expectations.
"Isn’t this all a bit too complicated?"
For massive adoption, it totally is. My guides are definitely not the most accessible or easiest to parse (maybe apart from the Quick Scan variant). Users need to digest them first before they can wield them for their intended uses. However, that is the approach I advocate for: to think about this stuff a little bit more beyond numbers and labels so that people can explain themselves and align on games using universally understood expressions of gameplay only.
Once you do, the pregame talk can actually be very fast when using this approach, as you only need to cover the 2 questions that the 2 axes represent to properly set the expectations:
- How far do we want to go to win? e.g. "What game speed or crucial turn range are we aiming for?" or "What's the earliest turn where we all don't mind the game ending?"
- How far can we go to keep others from winning? e.g. "How much resistance can we handle?" or "Is there any level of interaction, be it low or high, that we want to avoid?"
That will give you all the information you need to have a mental model of the preferred gameplay experience of the group and to select the deck that best matches that experience. It also has the major upside of not requiring anyone else at the table to know about the guides.
“Why would I ever use this over WOTC's Bracket system?"
If you are in an environment where the Commander Brackets are the adopted system, then you are probably already in a good spot. This system could then still be helpful for informing your own behavior: you can get a deeper understanding of how you can diversify your deck suite, what other questions you can ask or answer in a pre-game talk, and how you yourself can navigate situations where not everyone is on the same page.
If you are in a situation where no such adoption is present, for example because most people don’t want to engage with any system at all, my guides can become more valuable as they can still work without them being a shared reference.
I’ve also seen groups come forward who have been using my guides for a while and have said they will keep doing so. Because for them they can set expectations more accurately and quickly than with the brackets. Brackets are a more accessible system, but they also tend to be less precise and less nuanced.
“If you advise against using power levels in a pre-game talk, why bother making a power level guide?”
Like many others in the community I think using power level numbers to align expectations in a pregame talk is not useful (unless everyone at the table knows and uses the same system). However, when using any of the alternatives we have (such as win turn range, infinite combos, tutors, fast mana, stax pieces, and so forth) you are in fact still talking about power level, just by using more universally understood expressions of power rather than unit-less numbers.
Although we won’t always need numbers, we will always need to align on power level in some way or another because the EDH format is played at all possible levels of play. And if we’re sitting down and we know we are not going to play at the maximum power of the format, then the logical thing to do is to first agree on how much restraint we all prefer going into this game to increase our odds of an enjoyable time.
"Isn’t Interaction Impact just a stand-in for some common pet peeves?"
I've seen a few people react to the concept of Interaction Impact by saying that they have their doubts if it fits on the same tier as Power Levels. And they wonder if it isn't just a stand-in for people's distaste for things like Stax and MLD. I don't fully disagree with this. I just don't agree that it would be a bad thing and that it would make it very different from the Power Level scale. I could use the same reasoning to say that the Power Level scale is just a stand-in for people's distaste for high power or low power EDH, depending who you ask. In the end, both concepts serve the purpose of helping people to express what they prefer. They just cover a different aspect of the game experience.
"Isn’t Interaction Impact an arbitrary thing to add to power level for assessing decks?"
Related to that response, some have also wondered why you would add interaction as a dimension to gauge the power of decks, but not other things like resilience, efficiency, consistency or pilot competence. The answer to that question is that this is a desired game experience assessment tool first, and a deck power assessment tool second. With that end in mind I added Interaction Impact: because mismatches in exception about how far people want to go to win and how far they can go to stop others from winning seem to be the most common reasons for feelbads in EDH. These two aspects also work well to both describe the power of decks and the resulting gameplay experience, while many other aspects only work well for either one. And their proximity to the two fundamental drivers in the game makes them accessible and relatively easy to understand for most players.
"Isn’t a power level guide useless if it requires subjective assessment?"
This greatly depends on your views on what a power level tool is and what it should do. If your presumption is that it should serve as some sort of universally applicable standard that allows the user to attribute some objective truth about the power of their deck through a number, then probably yes. I personally don't believe this is feasible for our context. I think that being able to assign a power level number to your deck and have it be understood everywhere you go without further explanation is an unrealistic dream scenario, and definitely not the goal of this project (and even if you would be able to achieve that, just communicating those numbers would likely still not be enough to align the expectations of the game).
Alternatively, if you assume that a power level tool merely exist to help people align on their (subjective) expectations about a game so that it can increase their odds of having a good time, then facilitating subjective assessment becomes its main purpose. Then the subjective expectations are the primary facts that the tool should help expose. And the power level tool becomes a means to make it easier for players to share and align on their subjective expectations of the game. At least enough for them to commit to that game experience upfront. In that use case it's still valuable that the metrics used are unambiguous, and you still also need to assess your decks to a degree, but it doesn't have to be free of subjective interpretation in my experience. It just has to be clear enough for people to be able to, within a limited amount of time, get into the same ballpark.
"Shouldn't cEDH be removed as they have a well defined meta / their own power level definitions? And why would you include any power lever that's lower than a precon"?
As described in the beginning of the primer, a main goal was to create a neutral description of the EDH landscape. Both cEDH and stuff below precon level (if there is such a thing - power levels of precons vary greatly) are very much part of the format and thus need to be included given that goal. Imagine you're a new player wanting to get an overview of the format and both cEDH and complete Jank decks like "Ladies Looking Left" weren't represented. You would then not get an actual overview of the format's options.
Also, I disagree with excluding anything below precon level for another reason, as this suggestion implies that precons produced by WOTC should function as the power floor of the format. While EDH is the one format where people get to decide themselves what power they are going to play at. Simply because that's what they prefer. If people want to play their Total Jank deck, their Vorthos deck, their Suicide deck or their Achievement deck, in EDH they definitely can and should.
"Shouldn’t the boxes in the middle be changed?"
You are probably right about that if the boxes were meant to standardize levels of play. However, they’re not: they are just four example ballparks that a table might settle on. A representation of the combined expectations the players at the table have about the game. My intent is you use the two questions of the two axes to gauge what ballbark the table prefers in the game you’re about to play (which most likely is different from the four examples included).
Even then I agree there could probably be better configurations of ballparks as a starting point, but many of the options I tried were sacrificing too much in terms of legibility or aesthetics (the model is already quite complex for many, so I did not want to go into venn-diagram territory for example). In the end I settled on these four example boxes.
"Nice try, but I still don't like this"
Of course there are people who don't agree with the perspective presented in these models, or who prefer to use other perspectives or guides over this one. Models are inherently limited, and EDH is such a complex game that attracts so many people that I doubt any one tool is going to satisfy all players. My aim with this primer is to at least explain the reasoning behind this one so you can make up your own mind about it.