Casual Magic, Part 1: What the hell does that mean?

A couple of years ago I attempted to create a summer Magic league with some friends of mine. All of the involved players would compete against each other over the course of the summer playing a certain number of scheduled matches, and then their win-loss record would determine their seeding in a playoff, much like a normal sports season. I decided that the format would be casual constructed, my thinking being that I could finally take all of those casual decks I had built over the years and put them into a semi-competitive atmosphere where I could see how they would do against other decks of a similar caliber. Unfortunately this was a misconception on my part.

We determined that the card legality for the league would be Legacy, meaning that all but the most broken cards in the game could be used, which allowed me and some of my other friends who had been playing a long time to use our old cards. I thought everyone would bring in other decks they had just built with cards they already owned or had accumulated over time. But I was wrong. While I brought my highly touted white/black Pestilence deck and my other friends brought their big creature beat-down and old-school red sligh decks, our friends who were newer to the game brought the latest major Standard legal tournament decks: Izzetron, Locus Post Control, Blinking Snake, just to name a couple. Needless to say, they pretty much destroyed the rest of us, and we were forced to order cards and rework our decks to make them stronger in order to even compete.

And this, I think, is one of the biggest problems with “Casual Magic”. There's no real definition of what is and isn't a casual deck. Usually people will say it is a deck that “isn't good enough to be played in any competitive format.” But that's incredibly vague and still leads to massive discrepancies in power-levels between decks. For instance, a deck that is streamlined and runs 4 copies of every pertinent creature but just happens to be a little too slow to compete in the current meta-game, will still destroy a deck that is made up of 1-ofs from someone's collection.

This also is not everyone's working definition of casual. A friend of mine plays a deck that runs 4 Necropotence and 4 Ivory Tower both of which are restricted in Vintage, the most lenient of any competitive format (restricted means that you can only have 1 copy of the card in your deck as opposed to the usual 4). His argument is that since the deck is “casual” it doesn't need to abide by any format regulations; it's just for fun.

In the case of our league, this particular example was not an issue since we determined all decks had to be Legacy legal, but the decks still ran the gamut from current Standard competitors, to former Standard competitors, to modified pre-constructed decks, to homebrews, and things thrown together randomly from people's collections. I think it was fortunate that I didn't have to play against someone's competitive Legacy deck stacked full of Force of Will.

For various reasons the league ended up not working out, but I did walk away with some new knowledge. It became abundantly clear to me that no one involved had a shared concept of what “casual play” meant and that each of us was approaching it from a different perspective. And though there's nothing wrong with this, it can be very frustrating playing a game where the power-levels between decks are so very unbalanced.

Today, even years later, we still don't have a shared concept of what it means. I get in arguments with my friends about what it means to play casually, what sort of decks constitute casual decks, and what sort of mental approach is acceptable for a casual game.

Since there aren't any major tournament events any of us at Team DOTS are going to be competing in soon, I thought I would take the next few posts to write (or rant) on this subject. I warn you, these posts are born from the utter frustration I've felt over the years in trying to come to some sort of acceptable definition of the term “casual” that is satisfying to everyone, so at times they may come off as a bit harsh. But I wanted to state now, before I really begin, that I am not trying to tell you (whoever you are) how to play your casual games or that whatever concept you have of “Casual Magic” is wrong. I am simply conveying my opinions and ideas, which I have accumulated over some years of play and across many experiences. If these posts help you in any way to shape a working definition of “casual” between you and your Magical friends, I think that's great. If not, then I hope you're at least entertained.


Upcoming: Casual Magic, Part 2 -- Deck Construction


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