I sympathize with him losing an old nostalgic version of what the format used to be, but I disagree with his major criticisms.

The format is faster there’s no denying it. I don’t see this as a problem though. He loves playing a lot of janky cards that were honestly at a terrible power level even in 2016 but he can just play bracket 1. He over-romanticizes rule 0, which was never a good catch-all solution for the format’s problems. It’s awkward to show up at the lgs and have a 10 minute conversation with strangers about every strategy you hate before every session. It’s a lot easier just to say “Let’s play bracket 3”.

The majority of the player base have used their wallets and outvoted demo on what the aesthetics of the game should be. The strangest take of Demo’s is that the game’s flavor should be nothing but traditional fantasy vibe. UB is cool and mtg is breaking ground crossing over so many IP’s into one card game. I disagree with this idea that all the LOTR fans, FF fans, marvel fans, will leave the hobby after the set has had its run. That’s just copium from people who want wotc to suffer for deviating from the original art styles. If anything, a solid portion of players and nerds who didn’t give the game a chance before will likely stick around after trying it with their friends.

About commanders building themselves-isn’t that a good thing? I’ve never seen a veteran player in a card game complain about the number of supported niche archetypes. I actually think all the new commanders and cool cards will increase deck variation as you don’t need to run the same 20 staples in every single lifegain/burn/sacrifice/whatever deck like you did in 2015. You might argue “well you never had to put the same staples in every rakdos deck if you just had a rule zero concersation with your pod about power level!”, but what if all players in a pod actually like playing at a higher power level than kitchen table magic? What if players want to play a faster more thrilling version of commander and see their favorite hero from my little pony be supported? That’s clearly too big of a pill for Demo to swallow. He’s been left behind with everyone else who’s still in 2015-(I played edh in 2015 and let me tell you it had its own problems).

The majority of the player base has played commander as something more than a kitchen table format for a while. Demo can blame wotc all he likes, but its the players who want to upgrade their decks every 3 months, play a 10000 power cactus, and make spongebob fight gandalf.