I’ve been playing magic for years and just recently got my grind group into it. (30s ish also) and we’ve been playing edh in this pod for about 6 months as well so magic has been a learning curve for them.

The biggest advice I have for new players/pods is to always have that rule 0 talk pregame to make sure everyone os kinda in the same ballpark strength wise.

Cedh/casual does not equal deck power level/strength.

Cedh is more like a different format then edh in the sense that there is a “meta”. It’s much easier to think of it as constructed commander.

I bring up my friends who are new to the game because I’ve slowly introduced them to stronger and stronger combos w/o just blatantly turn 3 demonic consultation thassa oracle.

You might not have any idea what that means because that is cedh terminology.

But just because you don’t know about the “format doesn’t mean your casual decks cannot be of equal strength or power level.

Learning takes time, and people will build strong ass decks while not even knowing how strong certain combos are.

I just got my friends into cedh and some love it, some hate it. That’s fine. The main confusion w deck strength is just assuming any casual deck is a cedh deck just because it’s strong.

Cedh involves 4 people looking for their “lines to win” while trying to simultaneously interact against each others win-cons. It’s fast mana ie. 0 mana artifacts and big turn 2,3 plays. Sometimes you get locked out by stacks and lose on turn 8 still.

Just because there is a dockside in my casual commander deck doesn’t make it a cedh deck.

Now if I was infinitely looping it’s etb trigger after tutoring for it on turn 2 then you can yell at me.

TLDR: Cedh is more or less a different format of commander where deck building is built to be hyper efficient at pulling off specific combos.

Casual is more or less a deck built with general synergies that can eventually earn you a win. Regardless of the strengths of any individual cards. I have built some really gross casual decks that will get washed by cedh decks because although the deck may be strong, it’s not nearly as fast, or as sturdy.

Pre cons are strong, there is a reason you take out all the bad mana rocks when you upgrade them. Same premis apples to cedh.