The state of cEDH (as always, this is intended to provide info on the format, not to advertise/sell it to people who don’t play):

The tournament meta has reached a point where when one player probably can’t be stopped on their next turn, the other players will play to be able to throw the game to someone else to force the player who would win to agree to a draw.

This made Nadu, the deck I played, a worse choice because it usually needs a setup turn and then wins through everything on the following turn.

I’ve spoken with topdeck, and the expectation is that soon draws will be worth 0 points. This is a great change given how tournament behavior has evolved. It didn’t happen previously because it makes byes too strong.

Fortunately, this will be addressed by prioritizing assigning 3 player pods rather than awarding byes, so no byes will exist. I heard a claim that a round 1 nye used to lead to a 60% chance to make the cut, so this change is great.

Unfortunately, I learned that I’d been wrong about the rules surrounding collusion in the format. I haven’t experienced any obvious collusion in my games and I believed most players didn’t do it because it was illegal. This is incorrect.

In the invitational, a player with an empty library cast mnemonic betrayal, and another player responded by casting entomb for Thassa’s Oracle to give him the win. The judges and policy writer confirmed that there is absolutely no rule against this.

It’s considered too hard to write/enforce. I believe that natural result of players understanding this is for groups of friends to arrange splits before events and approach it as a team game and for new players to correctly feel like the format is unapproachable w/o a network.

I see this as the next major struggle for the format, and while I don’t know that there’s a clear solution in sight, I did speak with judges, TOs, and policy writers about the importance of attempting to fix this.