Your Favorite Commander is Boring

I'm in the camp of where I don't care if people play the really good commanders. My only problem is if they start making a fuss about their commander getting targeted. Like who in their right mind is going to look at you cast Gishath, and just not deal with it? "Oh I require set up and mana" my brother in christ, you and me both know you just need to hit to get your dinosaurs to get your deck going.

As much as the new Obeka is super interesting to me, I just KNOW every deck that people build with her is going to be taking 20 minute turns while they resolve 6 triggers per upkeep, 3 times per turn.

This is all true but you fail to consider that when I resolve a Honden of Seeing Winds to draw 11 the happy chemicals in my brain enter overdrive

I’m starting to get the feeling somebody here really likes Sunforger lol

It doesn't bother me at all. I play some popular commanders and I play some not so popular commanders. One person's "boring" is another person's "fun and exciting". So no I don't sigh when I see a super popular commander on the other side of the table and I don't find it boring and start railing at the sky about the good old days. I will say I don't get to play as much as I used to so I'm just happy when anybody wants to play, no matter who they have in the command zone.

To a degree, I like seeing commanders with "Expectations". I'm newer to the game, so if I see a deck I know well/vaguely know its gameplan, I can focus on finding the "winning plays" for OTHER more fringe decks at the table. Lets me focus on learning more "new" stuff. Then again, I have shown up to an LGS and, totally by chance, ALL THREE OTHER PLAYERS PULLED OUT AN ATRAXA DECK and looked at ME expectantly while laughing about it. THAT was a wild yet awkward moment. (And 2 were infect so it was a very quick game.)

Quintorius is "Budget Friendly" until you have to spend $183.99 on a copy of Elephant Graveyard just to Regenerate Target Elephant. How else am I meant to protect my Boy

While you bring up valid points, I believe they are being made from a selfish point of view. "I'm tired of seeing X commander because I know what they are going to do. They are to common and every build is the same." Its understandable to be frustrated at seeing common decks and "staples", but you're not the one running them. You're not the one playing them because you find it fun. I understand the frustration of seeing commander being streamlined due to WotC is focusing on it as a format and over make products for it. But that's not what I feel is being argued here. Gishath got a good friend of mine into Magic when Ixalan came out cause "dinosaur stompy is fun". Atrexa broke me out of my "I only do beat down" deck design when she first came out, and ultimately lead me to explore wincons outside of damage. If you're enjoyment comes from using unique commanders and cards, more power to you. But others find enjoyment through other means, which is equally as valid as yours.

One could argue that any commander that does a thing builds itself. Kalamax wants exactly three things, being tapped, casting instances, and getting extra copies of said instances. There is not a whole lot of leeway in what goes into a Kalamax deck. Kenrith on the other hand, can go in a whole slew of directions. Want to build a degenerative infinite combo factory? Go for it. Want to play group hug? Absolutely down for it. 5 color reanimator deck? Kenny's got you covered. Generically good commanders offer flexibility on what sort of archetypes they can cover.

It feels like this argument is a bit all over the place. You talk about generic value commanders and then in the next breath you talk about commanders that “build themselves” because they have a very specific niche. These are completely different. It feels like you are just saying “be hipster and don’t play the stuff that you see all over the place”. That’s a perfectly fine argument, but I feel like its mixed in with a potpourri of other arguments

No matter the commander you are fighting my 99.

Jokes on you, i use Grist to make bugs

I feel like every time someone argues a popular commander or "builds itself" commander is boring, i feel like the immediate question is whether the deck is boring to play with, boring to build, or boring to play against, or if the complaint is just the commander is popular. I feel like if we're arguing the commander is boring to play with, then I feel these sort of videos work. If the argument is it's boring to build, then I also think there's merit there, though I think there's a bit of expectations on what the watcher of the video actually finds enjoyable out of the build process (sometimes I want yo find interesting cards that fits the theme, sometimes I find an interesting commander that I want to build around. Not everyone wants to dig around looking for a commander just to find something different). If the argument is a commander is boring to play against, then I feel like suggesting a different commander is questionable most of the time (are we sure the problem isn't lack of interaction?) And if we say "it's too popular, it too well known how to deal with it", then I feel we're underestimating the other rarer commanders too much and we're making questionable personal arguments to people who disagree with the idea wholesale For the record, i played with a proxy friendly group a while back, and I don't feel we ever was bored of just generally "build themselves" commanders. Often, it was either the commanders that were crazy strong or the decks that struggled to do anything after being stopped once. My main struggle with building Go-Shintai wasn't that it built itself, but that it just didn't have enough room to be consistent if you built the generic shrine deck, compared to another deck that built itself like Ur-Dragon or Isshin (or my old Wulfgar deck). And Go-Shintai just doesn't give enough room to do anything else

My favorite deck is a 4th crusade themed Baird Argivian Recruiter deck, the highlight is a "quest for the holy relic" and no legal targets for it.

You got quintorius very wrong, he can also target planeswalkers, battles, artifacts or enchantments.

I feel so called out right now as I have a Gishath and a The Ur-Dragon Deck. They are my two most favourite decks and the decks where some of my most valued cards go into. I understand that Gishath and Ur-Dragon are some of the biggest examples of a "boring" commander, and I understand that going into it and building the deck. I understand that some games I will do nothing where I either die before I cast my Commander or I get out my Commander and snowball the rest of the table. But the reason why I play them is not because they are popular but because dinosaurs and dragons were a big part of my childhood. That part resonates with me, and seeing the cool art and striking designs resonates with me. I love the idea of a giant dinosaur calling forth an army of dinosaurs upon damage. I love the randomness of it and seeing how many times I can get the trigger of and what I hit. I see every game of Gishath as a sort of mini game that can make each game exciting as of itself. I love the Ur-Dragon as the thought of flooding the board with big beautiful fire-breathing beasts and swinging in for big numbers. While this video has great points, I don’t think it is so black and white. People play Commanders for different reasons, and I think that is a good thing and why Commander as a format is so great. Why some people can play these Commanders for being good, I believe there are others who play these Commanders for reasons that aren't so obvious. Sorry for the wall of text. It's like 2.30am for me right now and felt like putting my opinion in.

Don't worry i won't build a wilhelt zombie deck......instead I'll make a Atraxa zombie deck. 😁

The problem with build around commanders is similar to some of your initial examples; if they die too much then you just lose. A lot of people try to build decks that don’t necessarily need their commander to function.

I'm gonna be honest, Atraxa is a really bad example for what you're describing. Without a board that can take advantage of her trigger, she's a 4/4 with keyword soup. While slightly broad, proliferate slots her into leading a few specific deck archetypes rather than goodstuff piles, which increases diversity in terms of one Atraxa deck versus another. She can lead either +1/+1 counters or superfriends, without outright telling the pilot to do so in her rules text. Compare this to the infamous similarity between Go-Shintai decks, a textbook case of the commander telling you exactly how to build it. The more modern "setup and payoff" commanders like Korvold, Chulane, and Prosper are significantly more egregious due to how little they ask of their pilot and how wide of a net they cast in terms of things they synergize with.

My thoughts are this: I enjoy changing up my 99 cards often just for a different flow. So I aim for generic enough Commander strategies that allow me to swap cards on a regular basis without nerfing the power level of the deck. Recent Examples: Loot, the Key to Everything, Kellan the Kid, Jarad, Golgari Lich King.