The last playgroup I had wasn’t conventional; we didn’t play commander, but we also weren’t heavily 1v1, we all played modern decks but our games were both group ffa games and 1v1 games, and we had to balance our decks for both.
One thing that helped our games stay balanced was that we very often played planechase on top of that — not with the standard rules, though, rather than each player bringing a deck of planes, we just used a full set of planes (we played proxy back then), and had one big plane deck which was “neutral” to any player, and existed to help weaken combos and strengthen general purpose strategies.
Also now that i’m trying to get into commander, commander feels like a fun place for the mechanic, whether under standard rules or the “neutral all planes shared deck” variation i played.
Is this an unpopular opinion?
My playgroup has done the “neutral all planes shared deck” thing; in fact, we’ve never played Planeschase the way it was intended, but I think a better method is to have everyone choose a set of planes (say, 5-10) and shuffle those together to create the shared plane deck, rather than using all of them.
If you use the full set, certain deck types are just left in the cold; for example, there are far more planes that support aggro strategies than pillow fort (which makes sense, because there are more aggro decks), but it just creates a situation where certain players are favored before the game even starts.