To be fair, these threads kind of always derail because they're usually easy to resolve. There are, for the most part, only so many cards that people want to HR as commanders, and most of the time it falls to the usual suspects (Nephilim, Genju, Elbrus, a 'walker or two). The answer is almost always "As long as your playgroup is cool with it," and the thread quickly disperses. That we've managed to evolve the discussion into this and carry it on this long is actually kind of impressive.
We're cool like that. As long as you aren't trying to do something like run a 4-color deck with
Smokestack as the commander, it's probably going to be alright.
WillNova does bring up a good point about doing other house rules though. My group plays pretty close to the base rules as we can get, though we did change the mulligan up a little. Essentially you throw the cards you mulliganed back on the bottom of your library instead of shuffling them in, so it saves you a shuffle. Though we did have to enforce the regular partial paris in any game where Grenzo showed up, but so far he's the only one that's been a problem with it.
DarksteelElephant wrote:
The thing about Jace is that most Magic players don't care about the story, so they basically liked him because he was the best card. The people who cared about the story disliked him for a long time, though now he is more popular, having IMO the best origin story.
I refute that. Garruk has the best origin story, and if you're willing to dig up the comics on the clunky buggy nightmare world of the Mothership's article archive, its definitely worth a read. Dude had the guy who killed his father devoured by a wurm. It was metal. I will give that Jace has the best origin story in Origins, but that's not really saying much for the others.
But yeah, there's a difference between being a popular character and being a popular card. Chandra, for example, is a pretty popular character. They haven't abandoned her yet like they did with the other two out of the Lorwyn 5, and hell, they tried to base M14 all around her. But ask a bunch of players who don't read the novels, skip all the cutscenes in DotP, and scroll to the bottom of Uncharted Realms just to see the spoiler card, and their opinion will probably vary from indifference to dislike, because she's never been a particularly powerful or influential card.
Sure, Nissa's a popular card now, because she's halfway decent. But watch her get a Liliana of the Dark Realms treatment and you'll see interest wane pretty quickly. Concerning the character, just about everyone at the LGS I work at, from our 30-something regular drafters to the random walk-in customers to our 15-and-under standard crowd, from our die-hard Spikes to our fervent lore-junkies, has either expressed a dislike in her reboot or has given me the "I only really care about the card" thing. And from a creative design perspective, disinterest in the flavor is just as bad as dislike. It's a sort of reverse
Gerrard Capashen syndrome, where instead of a weak card failing to hold up a strong character, you see the inverse of that.
Honestly, if you're going to redo a character's entire backstory, try to make your new vision of them a little deeper than "Make her the cute elf chick from Dragon Age 2."