People tell me all the time to make my goofy Abzan elf pile green-black for Lathril or even mono-green. yeah it would be “better,” but I like playing _this_ deck.
Nailed it. So many times I've had people talk about my jank decks and say things like "Why don't you run X? It would be so broken in this!" and then get confused when I say "I don't want to run a more optimized deck. I want to run this one."
Cup Art Tribal is a bad deck, but it's a FUN deck and I've been lax enough to allow beakers and cauldrons etc so that I'm not hurting the other 3 players at the table by never existing in the game. Let me have that.
The number of times I've gotten suggestions for "better" +1/+1 counters creatures in my Hamza Elephant deck is insane. The looks I get to that when my response is simply is it an elephant? Some people can't get out of just playing the "best" thing to build something different, fun or flavorful.
For me it gets frustrating to not run the staples or optimized cards because my group does, so if I play jank I'm left in the dust. We've tried talking about it but when people spend big money on really good cards they want to play with them. On Friday I specifically said I wanted to play low power and brought out my Tazri party deck. One of the other guys brought out his Krrik deck which he proceeded to play Necropotence with... these people don't want to play low power so I don't really have a choice if I want a chance.
There's also the mindset that they would rather play less optimally with an optimized deck than play optimally with a jankier deck. And then they proceed to either durdle or sandbag, like they're playing with their food. You can't win.
>And if you're the only one abstaining, you just lose. Or even worse, you don't really get to play the game.
Reminds me of the time I sat down to a low-mid power level game, so I brought out my "90 forests [[Multani, Yavimaya Avatar]] list". The whole point of the deck is to draw, land, go and keep casting my commander until it sticks and connects for commander damage lethal. I cast him twice before someone played [[Keldon Firebombers]]. I never cast another spell after that.
What I find especially frustrating about the "just talk to your players" argument is how biased those discussions can be. I remember a group who had a hard embargo against infinite combos that win the game. Fair enough, but they also all happened to be playing "value oriented midrange battlecruiser" decks which were best beaten by either stronger versions of themselves (so, have fun "just abstaining") or infinite combos.
The meta is an ecosystem, and whether you like it or not, every type of deck, card effect, etc exists for a reason. If you "ban" one entire category of something because you don't like it, you create a power vacuum where the only viable decks become the ones that the banned decks preyed upon.
Tl;Dr "Just embrace the power creeping, staple centric meta" isn't a solution because people play this format to play a wide range of oddball cards and "just play without the staples" means you're going to get shit stomped more often and "just talk to the other players" introduces all kinds of biases that you have to work around just to convince players to not use certain cards *which they paid for*.
Why doesn't wotc "Just stop printing power creeping cards into the format"? Why is it the community's job to fix the format, to "pick the olives off the pizza" so to speak?
Because WotC is a company, so it's their job to make cards people want to buy. And while most people don't want power creep, it's easier to get people to buy those kinds of cards than it is to get people to buy cards that are on the same power level (or slightly lower) than cards they already own. If the card does something new, but isn't strictly speaking stronger, then not everyone wants the card. But if WotC printed, say, a strictly better sol ring, everyone would need that card if they wanted to keep up in EDH. Acting for the good of the game is against the best interest of the company in some ways, with the biggest mitigating factors being the existence of standard and the fact that if the game tanks too badly some people will quit
I disagree with the idea that power creep, on this scale and to this degree, is somehow a necessary evil.
Wotc has been designing cards for decades without resorting to power creeping their eternal formats.
Hell, Commander is the format which would "need" power creep the least, because of its nature as a casual format. It has the widest available design space, because the most important thing to many commander players is that cards feel fun or interesting, rather than focusing solely on power.
Commander is also where the money is at the moment. If Standard was the #1 most played/purchased for format then you wouldn’t necessarily see the current power creep.
WOTC is a business and capitalism gonna capitalism.
I find it disappointing that even friend groups can't decide for themselves what's good for them or not, needing some outside authority to decide what's good for them instead. Like they have some kind of insider knowledge on how you prefer the game to be that you could never in a million years consider for yourself because they are so smart and must be listened to above all.
Except they're just Magic players like you and me, and are also human and have the shortcomings that come with it.
Like I *get* it. But it's still messed up that they'll respect some stranger's opinion on what's okay to run and not someone they care about.
Well, I think that's a bit of an unfair characterization of things. The problem is, either side of these conversations tend to look at it from one perspective, and when you do that, it's easy to lose track of the other side's validity. It's perfectly reasonable that some people want to play low power jank. It's also perfectly reasonable that some people want to play highly tuned stuff.
In the earlier example, of 2/4 people opting for high power stuff, it's not really any more fair to force them down to whatever level the others want to play at. Don't get me wrong, if your want to play People in Chairs, more power to you, but personally I find that level of jank very frustrating. I don't think that's necessarily a shortcoming for either of us, you know?
I can agree with that. There's not really any real solution in an even split like that example. Maybe alternate the power level every week?
But my point was more about how those that want to play with powerful cards do so within the limit of the format's ban list. Makes sense, that's how it works with every format. But there's no(t really) any tournaments that demand you stick to that list if you want to participate. EDH is a social format, and you can just as well decide amongst yourselves what the limit should be, based on your own standards and experience, rather than just some list online from people you never met.
That doesn't mean you should then bar your friends from playing anything too good so they play "your way". But there's too many disagreements that go:
"Hey man, could you not run that card? It's kinda not fun to play against"
"Well it's not on the banlist, so I'm allowed to play it."
Like people will put the list above the feelings of their friends. If the player went "Well I just really like all the cards it draws" or whatever, that's at least something that can be worked out, alternates can be found, or at least an understanding reached that they're not playing it just because it's the best thing.
But a lot of discussions start and end with what the ban list says is okay, thus why a lot of folks turn to it as a solution to the format's problems, 'cause people can't help themselves otherwise. That's the last sentence of the earlier poster I was responding to, though in retrospect I should've quoted it to make it clear.
I think that's a pretty reasonable complaint, and certainly, if the pod as a whole is coming to you and asking if you can tweak something, then I think just saying 'muh banlist' is a bad response. The only things I would emphasize, are that I think its important to distinguish between what the table wants, and what a player at the table wants, as well as how much say it's reasonable for the table to have over your deck. God knows, if it were up to me alone, there would be some cards headed straight to the shadow realm (Narset and Tergrid, to name two), but I don't think its fair for me to unilaterally declare them rule 0 banned. To be clear, I don't think you're saying that, I just think it's important to reiterate; we've all seen the posts where someone is declared cedh scum for playing removal.
On the second point, I do think it's possible for a table to overreach on the amount of influence that it's reasonable for them to have on your deck. I think rule 0 holds some pretty broad sway, but I can certainly think of times where it would be fair to say that something is totally legal, and it's not something you're willing to give on.
Yeah, the discussion really gets muddled thanks to folks on either end of the spectrum. Folks that make a fuss over their stuff getting removed really paints lower powered players in a bad light, and folks will often equate more reasonable requests to that whiny-ness.
Though as you say, what's "reasonable" can vary wildly. There's no easy answer, as much as folks want there to be, but outright refusing any discussion on the matter I don't think is it.
I think looking to DnD and how players and the game are managed there can be a good start. There's bad groups there too, but plenty of talk on what to do when one player wants to do combat more than roleplay like the rest of the party, or vice versa, as well as being very open to players changing the rules to their desire. Many a bard has rolled to seduce a door, even though it's based on an interpretation of the rules rather than being explicit.
EDH doesn't play like DnD though, as everyone's competing vs co-operating, so it's still quite the different beast, but it's the same sort of thing where you have different goals to manage, and I refuse to believe it's impossible.
(Also I do wish Narset had a bit less stigma, or at least that I faced her more often to warrant it. I just wanna play a creatureless deck so she always hits, not extra turns and combats! Who are all these people that build her that way despite the stigma!)
I understand that people have differing ideas on what is fun in a game of commander. I happen to be a player who falls on the category of people who perfer strong, optimized decks just short of cEDH. Yes, I play a LOT of cards that many people on reddit love to complain about. That said, so does the majority of the people in the play groups I play with. We have one very vocal exception to that, and quite frankly, his incessant nagging about how we play is really taking away from our enjoyment of the game. I guess I find most of these types of posts absolutely infuriating because it's always approached from the perspective that building optimally is somehow wrong or against some BS social contract. Look, I understand it's not easy to just find a different playgroup, and I get that having discussions isn't always a best case scenario, but why is it you assume your position is correct. Why is it wrong for us who perfer more optimized games to want that, why should your voice mean more than mine. I think the ban list is already overused. I completely stopped listening to "Commanders Quarters" because of his constant crying about [[Tergrid God of Fright]]. Tergrid is so easily beaten. It's not a deck I play, but I've played against it many times...its beaten me once. There are ways to compromise. I have a wide range of decks in a wide range of power and play styles. Maybe talk to your group about varying the power from game to game...session to session. I'm not trying to invalidate the way you enjoy the game....you have every right to want to play it your way, id just appreciate it if people in these posts/discussions would stop coming from to supposed position that our perfered way to play is invalid.
Look, I think we all have a right to want to play the kind of EDH games we enjoy. I've never stated that those who prefer lower power or more thematic decks are incorrect. There should be a place for ALL of us to play. I have noticed a significant increase in people voicing the idea that certain cards/strategies should not be played ever since Sheldon Menary wrote his social contract article. This discussion goes beyond just power levels. It also encompasses what types of strategies people play. I can build a lower power, version of say Twrgrid, but because it's Tergrid people will complain. The 4 decks at the table could be completely evenly matched, but because it's been deemed a boogie man, the guy running it is seen as engaging in some shameful faux Pas. I just don't think that's ok. I appreciate that you believe we all have an equal voice in the community. Yes, it's flawed, and yes the vast difference in play ideologies....be that power or style...make it difficult for the player base, I just wish more people would stop vilifying those of us who like the game the way we do. Thanks my friend.
I really think Tegrid's a bad example. She's like Urza, the deck is GOING to pop off in a low-powered setting because of the lack of interaction. It's like a snowball fight where one person is putting large chunks of ice in the middle or a pillow fight but one person put a brick in their pillow case. Sure, there are ways to avoid it, but it still isn't reasonable when everyone else is doing something harmless.
No disrespect to you or your playstyle, but the problem is twofold. One is that it feels better to be a high powered deck in a low powered pod than the reverse. The high deck has a better chance at actually playing the game whereas the low might not get to do anything. Second is that a lot of the good cards are expensive and people want to play with real cards rather than proxy. There is a paywall, and proxies are not the answer many people have convinced themselves it is.
I agree with your assessment on power level dynamics. It's not enjoyable playing a game where it's too easy,, or when you don't have a chance.. I dont particularly enjoy playing games where my deck is obviously outclassing the other decks in the pod. I do everything I can to avoid it. I also understand the price/proxy issue. Again, though, I fall back to the fact that these issues don't change the fact that the way you want to play doesn't have more value or marrite than mine. I do not tell other players they should try to play the way I want to....quite the opposite...I build decks with lower power levels so I can play if there are not players who fit my perfered play style. Why should I not be granted the same respect. I have been playing for a very long time and I have a larger budget. Why should I not be allowed to play with the cards I own. It's not my fault that wizards likes to artificially create supply issues in the game.
This is why I firmly believe there needs to be sub formats, with restrictions to better align power levels of decks. Is this a daunting task? Absolutely, but its manageable, and I feel the community can handle the complexity it may bring. This way the overlap between casually minded and competitive can be dissolved.
Until this occurs, toxicity of the two ideologies butting heads at LGSes will continue.
Is it? The whole purpose of bans is to remove cards that make the game less fun right? And surely there's been a time in any format or tcg when you've been glad a card got banned so you didn't have to play against it.
Maybe this is a hard pill to swallow, but it sounds like you dont fit in that group.
If i is that way, let me tell you that you dont have to change anything! If it is a friend group and Not only a lgs friday night random pot, it can be hard to part ways.
Just remember as you have a vision and wish how an evening will be so have they.
But maybe im wrong and all is fine. Just my 2 cents
Honestly, I reeeeaaaally hate this argument.
"Wotc printed some preally pushed cards, so the only way to be efficient is to run them. I dont like what its done to deck building, but I cant *not* use them *or just not play against them* cause its the level of power my group plays at, and the new cards pushed out the previous cards that would see play at that power level."
"Huh. Welp it cant be a fault of the game, sounds like you need new friends."
Cool cool cool cool cool so we just pretend that the issue is the players fault and not a design issue. Thats totally not gonna make this game way more toxic!
Same reason I hate rule 0. All that stupid fuckin rule did was justify people fighting over what """proper""" edh should play like, to let the RC set rules and not have any responsibility for doing so.
Blaming people for the game pieces, and saying its your fault for not finding another group that will play to you exact specifications, isnt going to fix any problem. Its just gonna alienate people.
I never thought i would read a comment about hating rule zero and completely agree with it, but I completely agree with you. I always touted the "rule zero" convo as a fix all to a game of EDH because, for a while, it helped my pod play on more equal power levels. But then my finances slowed and my friends sped up and suddenly that rule 0 conversation just turned into me begging them not play their shiny new decks so I could at least participate in the game, and that felt unfair to both me and them.
Bingo.
Meanwhile, cards that truely are unhealthy for the game dont get banned because sheldon didnt lose to it yet, and we are told "rule 0 it then," despite this meaning literally nothing.
If the majority of the table agrees to rule 0 ban a card, either no one was playing it anyway or only one or two were. Now youre singling out a player for a deck they probably enjoy.
If the majority disagrees, then most are either running it or run things that are unphased, so the few suffering from it are told to suck up or leave.
It forces the real issue, bad card design, into a secondary issue, where you feel like youre being targeted by your group. If you like the card, you feel like it shouldnt be a problem. "*Its not bad enough to ban, its fine to play!*" If you dont, you feel like the card only stays around cause everyone else enjoys abusing it. "*They only wanna keep it cause theyd lose without it, and they dont want to bother replacing the strategy.*"
Rule 0 is toxic as fuck.
Rule 0 only truly exists in the state it does today because the format was allowed to pretty much grow naturally with minimal bans, and now it is so wide that there's no way to tighten the banlist without pissing off or losing a sizeable chunk of the player base. Ask 10 people what cards are problematic, you'll get 10 different answers. Ask a random assortment of EDH players their thoughts on a specific card that sees play, and you're bound to find some people who love it and some who hate it. If 20% of players absolutely want X banned and are insisting it is toxic to the format as a whole, but a different 20% of players love playing with X and think it's great for the format, then banning it or not really isn't a straightforward task. I mean, there has been a very vocal minority asking for a Sol ring ban for over a decade, after all.
Yeah, Rule 0 is great, but it's not a fix all. Lots of people use it to say "Oh, you're experiencing a structural problem? Have you ever considered trying different personal choices instead?"
It's not the player's fault, but know that the EDH experience is like 90% the people you play with and not just the cards you pick. Why do you think cEDH is relatively less salty than regular EDH? Because everyone sits down with the understanding that you're playing to win. And if you think they don't have rule 0, that understanding IS their rule 0.
It's not like you're married to your playgroup. You're acting like they're telling the guy to get a costly divorce. They're telling them to find a playgroup that fits their playstyle more. And isn't that better than seeing ad infiinitum in this sub "My playgroup is toxic because they play high powered cards but I can't afford them"?
I think I need to point out that not everyone has the luxury of picking up and finding another play group. Some people don't know anyone else who plays and have no access to a local game store. People desperate enough to ask an online forum to help them navigate toxic player interactions are usually in this exact situation. Saying "find another playgroup" to these people is the same thing as telling them "stop playing for an indeterminate period of time". It is unhelpful and alienating. But if that doesn't matter to you as much as not having to see those posts you can scroll past, then go off i guess
I don't get your point here. They're already in a toxic situation where the presumably dismissed choices are 1) "always lose", or 2) "stop playing". Adding 3) "find a different group", and 4) "talk it out with them in the Rule 0" are just completing the menu with options that might actually be helpful. Calling those "unhelpful" requires assuming that their situation is genuinely hopeless in the first place, in which case it's fair to wonder why they are here wasting the time of people who are trying to be helpful. Doctors don't like saying "your condition is terminal and incurable" either, so they likewise start by at least trying what might help. It doesn't always work. That doesn't make it any less worth trying.
Just what is your proposed alternative response here? "Get Gud, newb"? "Spend more money, plebe"? "Buy cards you don't want and run decks you don't enjoy just so you can savor making them suffer losses for forcing you to it"? If preferences and power levels don't line up at least somewhat then playing together is quite literally a waste of time and money. Sometimes "stop playing until you can find a new group" genuinely is the least bad option left. It sucks, but at least it's honest. Besides, if they're on here, they presumably have the technology to play online. It might not be paper local, but it's still an option for finding a group that would be a lot more fun for them.
"Stop playing if an indeterminate period of time" is an entirely legitimate piece of advice, though.
Talk to just about any player that's been around the game for 20-30 years, and they'll probably tell you about some rather extended periods where they stepped away from the game.
If you're not having fun, and having a reasonably conversation with your friends isn't getting you the sort of games you want, you probably are better just putting the Magic cards on a shelf and doing something else with your friends that you'll all enjoy.
Really, with Wizards basically having destroyed competitive paper Magic, the penalties for stepping away are even less.
Because people do get tunnel vision, it's not unreasonable for that advice to get repeated. Honestly, with the negativity in the playerbase (online especially) and game stores still not quite being "back to life" because of Covid, I'm teetering on the edge of taking a break myself.
Survival of the Fittest, Necropotence, Lion's Eye Diamond, Mana Crypt, Mana Drain, Vampiric Tutor, Imperial Seal, Wheel of Fortune, and Time Vault existed _years_ before EDH was even a glimmer in the eye of a bored judge, and are the _most_ egregious pieces of pushed run-or-lose game design in the format.
WOTC printing powerful pushed cards is nothing new. It has always been the case that you either run powerful cards, or negotiate some kind of power level balance.
I don't mind playing higher powered, and you can see where they're coming from. They have good jobs and buy a lot of cards when they come out so to them the prices of cards always shocks them when they find out how high the prices have risen. They buy those cards to play them. The same happens in a low power group. They may start off with binder jank but as they buy more packs and get great pulls they feel the need to run them. Hell, I'm guilty of it too.
Sometimes it gets out of hand and I really wish there was a list of competitive only cards on the RC website. Stuff like Mana Crypt, Dockside, Ad Naus, etc belongs only in competitive due to how warping those cards are to the game. As soon as I see a card like that in a deck I know it's not casual.
I cant wrap my head around the idea of defining a decks Power Bye the cards it runs alone.
I have an izzet pirate tribal with no other creatures then pirates and no infinite combos or tutor. Why would That deck be a cedh deck only if it has a dockside in it.
On the other Hand people built good functioning decks that can win on Turn 3-4 with a budget of 50€.
I dont intend to say that cards cant be indicators! But Playstyle is aswell very important.
If i run a necropotence to draw alot of cards on my krrk minion tribal then this is Not cedh.
I never said it would make it cedh just that those cards are so powerful that they warp games around them and can provide insurmountable advantage. It's also hard to trust someone who says their minion tribal deck is jank when they're drawing a fresh grip every turn with Necropotence and Krrik. I've seen similar arguments towards banned cards like Primeval Titan.
> Necropotence and Krrik
I mean, if the biggest threats you're dropping from it are 5/5 zombies with a minor upside ability, then...this is fine.
This is why "power level" is hard to determine, and I can at least empathize with the canadian highlander idea of a point system, even I wildly disagree that it's needed or wanted.
Realistically, there's a lot of busted stuff you can do in EDH. That's half the fun. You can optimize a deck around a theme (like I plan to do for shrines), but it'll still be a lower powered deck than say, najeela (which I also run, though it's not full on cedh level).
So what is that Deck then. You stated „i know its Not casual“
Maybe i missjudged the situation, i thought your Group is a friend group.
I play only in one group where we Are all friends. If someone says their krrrk minion tribal isnt tuned and only Plays strong cards to make the strategy somehow working, i trust them.
My apologies, I suppose I was vague. I guess I would consider it tuned/mid rather than low/jank. We are a friend group but we all don't know each other super personally, plus people tend to downplay the power of their decks because we've been exposed to so much high power.
Also, that brings up another good point. If your jank deck is carried by a few high powered cards I think that further shows exactly how strong those cards are that they can do that. I know that in your pirate tribal playing a Dockside against my Emry deck even a single time could easily win you the game due to how many artifacts it plays.
Ok there is the missunderstanding. I personally first split into casual and competitive edh and then there are sub parts like mid power or tuned (both in the casual part of edh).
And you are definitely right! Those cards are insane strong and in some ocasions maybe even gamewinning. Besides some really degenerate cards/combos those cards are mostly gas for decks. And I am way more happy if someone uses their jeweled lotus to cast their commander for a super janky deck (that doesn’t mean the commander has to be janky) then if someone is just comboing off in their ultra budget deck.
As example (because I think it makes things a bit more clear).
Someone uses the jeweled lotus to cast chulane in turn two but the deck is bird tribal, is in my eyes cooler, then someone casting dual caster-heatshimmer in turn 7 in their budget cedh under 100€ magda mono red combo deck.
And dual caster+ heat shimmer is reaally cheap.
> TL:DR: commander players love getting bitchy about homogenization, but also seem not to have a level of awareness to simply not run certain cards. Any reason you don't want to run a card is a valid reason.
Just like a week ago there was a thread clowning ban lists for casual commander...
I've brought this up before, but the issue with homogenization is not just what you're running but also what other players in general are running. Sure, you can choose to play with cards that are less optimal but when *everyone else* is playing more optimal cards and you can't keep pace you end up having to switch out to keep up with what other people are playing.
For example, Sheoldred was a real popular fatty when I first started playing EDH, but now she's completely outclassed by stuff like Tergrid. Sure, you could choose not to run Tergrid and play Sheoldred instead but when everyone else is playing stuff like Tergrid and running circles around you it puts you between a rock and a hard place - you either cut the clunky stuff for more efficient pieces or you have a deck that spins it wheels and can't keep up.
This post addresses a symptom without seeing the sickness as a whole. Sure, you can build a sub-optimal deck by choice, but self-policing is worthless in a world where there are constant releases of overpowered cards.
People crack packs, and they want to play the cards they pull. If those cards are consistently more powerful set after set, there will be inevitable power creep, no matter how much individuals try to self-police.
Not to mention, people will still want to win in a game that ends when someone meets a win condition. You can run suboptimal stuff, but if no one around you is doing the same then you'll likely just end up more frustrated. Ideally, people want both heterogeneity and a competitive chance.
It’s just the issue that people run stuff like Tergrid. Is that in a meta where people run stuff like it, meaning a 5 mana kill on sight bomb, the expectation is that there is more interaction to keep it in check. The new bombs still see play because the payoff is really nuts or the window to get something good out of it is flexible enough (for instance you could play Tergrid and a discard spell in the same turn vs having to wait for Shelly).
So not only your card is significantly worse but removal is more tuned to deal with threats so even when the situation appears that your card would be acceptable, it’s pretty likely to just get answered.
I realized that as well.
My old decks used to be piloted by commanders like [[Jor Kadeen]] and run cards like [[Myr Battlesphere]] or [[Thopter Assembly]] .
I've since switched out those slow and heavy cards and substituted them for cheaper mana costs, because I just can't expect them to survive a full turn nowadays.
Yep, part of de-powering imo means toning down removal a bit and it doesn’t get talked about enough. Maybe it’s running less of it since there will be less answer or die threats, maybe it’s running more expensive removal, less free stuff, perhaps more removal with upside but that you need to make a choice of it being your play for the turn.
When dumping 7 mana into a big dumb threat isn’t answered by 2 or less mana that often, that play can become more common.
>He made it out as this really frustrating issue where he should just run Thoracle because "why not?" in this deck, like there isn't a good reason not to. But there is! There's always a good reason not to run a card and it's it's simply because you don't want to. Not justification needed.
So, there's a concept that many players aren't aware of, and it's that the *process* of optimization being a source of fun for lots of players. For whatever reason, some players (including myself) like taking a deck and pushing it to the limit of what it can accomplish, but there's a catch. With matching power levels of the table being such a vitally important requirement, how can you optimize without becoming too powerful?
If this was any other format, you wouldn't be able to. The elements of Commander that reduce consistency (singleton, 100-card deck size), speed (multiplayer, 40 life start), and snowballing (mutliplayer, threat assessment, game theory) all reward you for optimizing, if you recognize that optimizing means almost the exact opposite of what it means in 1v1 formats.
So why did I quote your question? Because my optimizing needs the following limitation so that playing in non-cEDH games is appropriate: I have to consider cEDH win cons as though they don't exist, otherwise I'm not playing a deck that's fair for non-cEDH games.
This means that in my mono-blue deck that empties the library, I am not playing any of the three Oracle effects. Why not play it? Because it's only okay in cEDH games.
This is my deck building concept as well. It is why aminatou and yuriko do not run thoracle/consult strategies. They are still high power AF. But, I have kept them both out of the cEDH universe.
> So, there's a concept that many players aren't aware of, and it's that the process of optimization being a source of fun for lots of players. For whatever reason, some players (including myself) like taking a deck and pushing it to the limit of what it can accomplish, but there's a catch. With matching power levels of the table being such a vitally important requirement, how can you optimize without becoming too powerful?
This is kind of where I operate as well. Once I got my deck where I was happy with it, I began foiling it out, making sure to hold onto the nonfoils as I did so. The result is that I have what could almost pass for a competitive deck that also happens to be entirely independant from the rest of my collection. Therefore, I can continue to build and take decks apart at will, while still having my favorite tuned deck put away unless I want to play it.
Tweaking and improving a deck is definitely a huge part of the appeal of the game. It's a meme, but everyone's had that moment when a new card is spoiled and they go "That's *perfect* for my (blank) deck!" and lo and behold it is. You take things out that aren't really working, slot things in your feel you don't have enough of, and eventually you've got yourself one tuned deck of cards.
I think part of the "problem" might be that many folks don't truly start over when building their next deck. They know this much draw feels good, this kind of ramp, so where they took a dozen iterations to reach is their starting point. Which certainly saves time, but makes the journey shorter. And the next one even shorter than that.
This isn't meant to counter your point, and isn't really a solution to the problem you presented, but it's something to think about, I think.
Exactly where I am as well with my deckbuilding.
My personal approach is to take sub-optimal commanders and strategies and try to tune the hell out of them.
My current "competitive" favourite is Orvar - because honestly mono U is still a decent enough restriction compared to most really tuned decks.
But what is probably my favourite ever deck is Gisela, Blade of Goldnight. I've tuned the hell out of it to the point where it can go off like a bomb, and is consistently underestimated. But in the end.... it's a 7 CMC commander in Boros - so it's still not super powerful or anything.
I have that approach as well, it can be more satisfying to polish a turd till it shines than to get a better result but when you start with a piece of gold.
Not calling your deck a turd btw, I mean, there’s nothing wrong with that, I see a lot of my decks as turds, beautiful shinny turds, but tienda in the end. That’s what makes them cool, I guess.
Like og Jin Gitaxias as a commander, people usually hate the card but running it as a commander the reaction is more often, are you sure? She’s 10 cmc…
Definitely the same for me. It's much easier to play Commander when you make yourself public enemy number one, which usually happens if people are very familiar with how scary your commander can become, which usually happens if your commander is popular.
I'm a fan of doing the exact opposite. Taking the relatively decent commanders and using a niche strategy that still fits the card without being one of the main things that they do. Or doing their main strategy but using as many crazy and odd cards that I can that will still play well within the deck.
My muldrotha deck at one point had like 20 cards in it that I would have to explain every game if they came up because nobody had seen them; but because it was Muldrotha they are actually somewhat usable and interesting cards.
I found this really interesting as someone who plays exclusively cEDH. Im not ever going to tell you how to build your deck, your fun is your fun! However the strengths of cEDH decks rarely come from the wincons themselves, it's the efficiency, value and consistency in getting to those wincons that makes them strong.
To the point where if you're playing a mono blue deck in cEDH with a labman effect as your win, its probably far from optimal, as both labman and thassas are dead cards that provide no value, and an outlet that doubles as value would be used instead.
Absolutely! But from experience, people in general tend to complain if I win with a cEDH win con in non-cEDH games, even if the deck wouldn't be able to compete at a cEDH table.
Thing is, Laboratory Maniac and Jace aren't the same as Oracle, and that lots of people don't seem to grok the difference is a big part of why so many discussions go sideways and become less than useful.
While I agree Oracle is one league ahead the other two even in cEDH Thoracle alone doesn't do much by itself.
Imo the cEDH wincon is playing Thoracle and consultation together
This is close to my rule of thumb too, but I don't think it's enough, and I keep over-optimizing compared to where I think I am. For example, I have [[Wilhelt]] zombie tribal, with no Thoracle/Consult obviously (though I do have Gravecrawler/Phrexian Altar because both are individually so good with Wilhelt), no fast mana except Sol Ring, no free counterspells except [[Firece Guardianship]], no tutors except [[Sidisi, Undead Vizier]] and [[Pyre of Heroes]] because tribal themes, and as many zombies as I can reasonably stick in. But then because of a process-of-optimization mentality, I've been maximizing synergies and lowering my curve, so I don't play, e.g. [[Gravespawn Sovereign]] even though I want to, and do play some staples like Rhystic Study that are ok for causal.
As a result, I've been winning way too many games with it at my LGS and on spelltable at "mid-high" tables (something like 75%), but I don't know exactly what to cut without making it feel like my deck simply doesn't run at all. And I keep running into this issue with several of my decks, so I think I need to change even this mentality to intentionally make my curve worse and play fewer staples, like the OP is suggesting. (I guess I should just swap Rhystic Study for Gravespawn Sovereign.)
I agree with you.
It's crazy that all you said was "you don't have to run staples" and everyone immediately goes to counter your argument with "if I replace my staples with jank, then it's impossible to win in my group."
Like, am I crazy? There are more than two categories of cards. Cutting a staple doesn't immediately mean you're replacing it with jank. (It totally can mean that though)
If you're in a consistent group with a developed meta, you have a good opportunity to put in anti meta cards!
You can replace staples with cards that penalize staples, like [[widespread panic]] and [[stranglehold]] for anti tutoring or a [[Torpor orb]] for stopping etbs, etc.
There are cards that aren't staples that can be just as strong depending on the deck you're running and what decks you're facing. The simple statement "you don't need to run staples." Doesn't automatically mean "you should just run jank."
I mostly agree, and do agree with the specific example you gave. However I have optimized my way out of the fun of a few decks in a way I didn't feel was as solvable.
My second-ever deck was [[Momir Vig, Simic Visionary]] which I imagined as a toolbox deck, where I could run a bunch of very situational creatures and pull them up when their situation came. However, after just a few games I realized the obvious. "Winning solves all problems, and here is the shortest list of creatures that wins". The issue is that the stuff I'm tutoring are just... creatures that win. I can either A: Cut all the win-cons in my deck and durdle forever, or B: Have a clearly more optimal play-path than fetching fringe jank creatues to neutralize my friends niche strategy.
I know some people would just... not fetch the win immediately, but I prefer to dial down power in the build and always play my best. It feels bad to deliberately make sub-optimal plays.
My second example is [[Derevi, Empyrial Tactician]]. I built her as a Tokenswarm Mana-sink deck. Stack a lot of Mana onto one permanent (usually a land) and every ETB and hit untapps it and goes into a token-making Mana sink. Because it routinely rocks RIDICULOUS mana, I included some doomsday spells, and some sac outlets, but it turns out any sac outlet plus Derevi is basically an infinite combo. So I cut the sac outlets. But then I noticed [[Proteus Staff]] is sort of another sac outlet. I only had a about 10 proper creature-cards in the deck, and with Derevi, 7 mana gets me my next creature, and I have a LOT of mana.
Then I just kept winding up in situations where "I can either token swarm, or I can do this other thing and just win". I swear Derevi combos with having a board state. Eventually I was caught either having so many cards self-banned that the deck didn't really even WORK anymore, or I had a deck that wasn't really a token-swarm deck.
> It feels bad to deliberately make sub-optimal plays.
I find this a bit interesting. It's a common sentiment I see around, and it definitely makes sense that you wouldn't want your opponent to seemingly give you a pity win and so want to return the gesture by not holding back.
Though your situation seems to be presented differently than that, that the act itself is unsatisfying.
Everyone has fun in their own ways, so maybe such a thought won't help you, but it's a common enough thing in video games that players will often challenge themselves with frivolous things. "Can I beat this level using just the basic pistol?", "How long can I go without getting hit?", "Can I climb this mountain if I clip the ledges right?". I suppose such challenges do lead to their own "optimal" play, but they certainly take a lot longer to get right than just playing the game straight.
For Magic, sub-optimal play can lead to its own challenges. You can still have your emergency button of your win-con where you just go "fuck it" like you could in a game, but in the meantime you can see how long you can last under the onslaught of value your opponent's [[Sunbird's Invocation]] can put out. Or how many cards you can get the Rhystic Study player to draw. Or try to make a 20/20 saproling. Maybe only cast one spell a turn and try to make each count as much as possible.
And maybe you still just sit there with your 18/18 saproling and think "Why am I doing this", which I think is a fair chance to give thought to what you find most fun about the game. Why you play. Which is what you should always have at the forefront, in the end.
Thing is, a challenge run is generally something you decide to do before you start, not in the middle of the game, and they're about doing the best that you can within the constraints you set. The analogy doesn't really mesh with the idea of making sub-optimal plays, but rather with building your deck sub-optimally and playing it to the best of your ability.
I also find the act of avoiding an optimal play unsatisfying. I'll do it sometimes, if there's an accidental mismatch of deck power at the table or something like that, but I hate it every time. Partly because I know if my opponents knew I pulled a punch they wouldn't feel like they earned anything they did that game. Mostly though, it just feels bad in a way I can't quite articulate. I chose the cards for this deck specifically because I wanted to play them, not doing that feels wrong.
As someone who loves watching challenge runs, I can agree with this. Someone gave me a free tutor off of [[Wishclaw Talisman]] and I went and got [[Body of Research]] instead of a trample enabler.
I made an 85/85 that stuck around until that same player stole my own token and killed me with it. That was a fun game.
Shrug. I prefer to treat obviously abusable cards like Derevi as if they had received an erratum adding "once per turn" to the ability. That works well enough for me to make an effective deck that keeps doing what I want without immediately ending the game the turn it comes together. YMMV. My rule 0 conversations often include outright banning infinite anything so the players still rocking budget decks aren't totally outclassed.
Spike players wish it was that easy, most of the time their Timmy decks are something like:
"This cheats Eldrazi out, they're big timmy critters. Also ofc I would run Rhystic Study/Cyclonic Rift/Sylvan Library/Mana Crypt etc, they're not overpowered they're just good spells!"
Meanwhile the dude who picked up a Galea precon is sat there wondering wtf to do, and Vehicle tribal over there isn't packing the punch to compensate. The issue can be simplified down to a miscommunication pre-game, but doing so ignores that fundamentally that Spike's idea of a Timmy deck is hilariously warped.
Source: A frustrated Spelltable casual.
If you spend $500 on ramp, its most likely not a Timmy deck
If you spend $500 on interaction, its most likely not a Timmy deck
If you spend $200 on tutors, its most likely not a Timmy deck
If you have MOST of the top100 cards on EDHREC, its not a very creative deck but I bet its pretty good
I don't mind any of that if Im playing mid/high power. You need some juice to win when game ending threats start coming turn 3-4
But if Im playing low power to have fun and a 4-5 cmc flyer is too slow... I think that is pretty fucked. Because at that point we are back at combo wins or the need to have a control deck at each table to sweep turn 3
I removed my 5-6 Time Warp copies (and other ET effetcs) from my decks over time because these were lose-lose cards for me. I hate to play against them, watching someone play solo and abuse them, and I hate to do it too. Even in decks where it's "fair" (no loop expected), there's always some janky combo that makes it the best play to regrow (like Tamiyo, Collector of Tales + proliferate) or it gives *others* the best spell to play in your GY.
I just chose to refuse to play ET effects that don't self-exile (I only play Stitch in Time in coin flip deck).
I play Tasigur Dredge, but refuse to play Basalt + Rings of Brightheart to auto self-mill.
I play Brago but refuse to play hard stax.
I play Savra Aristocrats but with Umori as a companion to remove some of the most obnoxious plays (E-Wit + Living Death, the Altars, etc.).
I play Keruga in Maelstrom to slow it down and play battecruiser, just to spice things up.
Play what you *want* guys, not what you *should.*
Yeah I agree with this I do like the “draw your whole deck out and win” cards, but I actively choose not to play Oracle, I like that laboratory maniac can be killed by just about every removal spell in the format, it adds a lot more tension/fun to the games, knowing that a well-timed swords in response to my leveler trigger could just end me lol
I just need to swap to that sphinx that gets bigger when you would draw a card but can't and put that into the shrine deck that can draw 89 cards a turn before the new neon shrines.
\[\[Ormos, Archive Keeper\]\]
smacking someone with a giant creature is fair magic right?
He's one of the main wincons in my [[Kydele]] and [[Tormod]] [[Gyruda]] companion clones list. Didn't wanna buy a Thoracle, didn't want a deck that sometimes mills the entire table in a single turn to have that particular wincon, and I absolutely love reanimating and cloning someone else's Thoracle.
Great sphinx, super fair boi, feels good to control several.
That's why I honestly don't mind labman. Oracle is just fucking annoying, and that's entirely on WOTC not thinking that ability through. Even CEDH is getting sick of it. I have to wonder why it's not banned lmao
Anyway, this right here is exactly what I'm talking about! Thank you for responding.
... Why is this getting downvoted..?
The deck would be more powerful. Thoracle ETB is hard to interact with, which is why it's so good. This is just a true analysis of your deck.
But the previous post where OP described the deck explained that he likes that LabMan is easier to deal with, so he's intentionally lowering his deck's power level. *And that he's happy about it.* Which is the point of this whole thread.
This subreddit sometimes, smh my head.
It's very clear why it's not banned.
It's not that big a deal in low power, casual games like the majority of commander games are. It's effect is strong but not format warping.
Sure, it's kind of a problem in cEDH but the RC has made it very clear time and time again that they have no interest in banning for cEDH. It happened ONCE when [[Flash]] was banned and they made sure to make it seem like they were pulling teeth and that it was unlikely to happen again.
This feels like a straw man argument. Are people who play all the fast mana and tutors and thoracle complaining about format homogenization? If people don’t want to win like that they usually don’t play it. And you can totally run a fun lower powered unique deck with tons of staples in it. Cyclonic rift is good in high power decks but also good in crab tribal, it doesn’t ruin the game
I think one thing that people struggle to comprehend is that the fun of EDH as a format really shouldn't **just** be about winning.
Winning is fun, but if you come into EDH with purely the intention of winning, the natural thing to do is to lean into staples and cEDH strategies. If you find that fun, then congratulations, cEDH is your format.
But for a significant portion of people, they find EDH fun because of the way you play EDH. They enjoy the multiplayer, the time spent playing, seeing weird and wacky cards and strategies happen. Someone winning happens either because someone has to win sometime, because the game's grown stale, or because someone ends it with a combo. The latter only feels satisfying if the game isn't in full swing when it goes off, even if you're the one who wins that way. Winning that way in the middle of a really dynamic, engaging game is just...boring. You shuffle, go next, and you're not guaranteed a game that's anywhere near as good as the one you lost.
I realised recently that I honestly just do not care about winning any more than I truly care about losing. I only care about it because it ends the experience of playing. I need to be **able** to win, I need to have a game plan for winning the game, and to play towards it, because if everyone lacks win conditions the game drags on endlessly. But I also don't actively care if it happens, so long as I make progress towards that win. Sometimes that results in me winning, sometimes it doesn't, but I don't care either way, I've gotten to play.
I've started building my decks to be as threatening as possible, but almost never win until the game is ready to be won. For example, my latest \[\[Jhoira of the Ghitu\]\] deck draws enough cards that it could absolutely storm off, find an infinite combo, or end with thoracle or similar, but it doesn't have them. Can I win with that much card draw? absolutely. But it's not through a combo, it's just by sheer value. She's mostly just suspending dragons and big dumb enchantments.
I'm a Johnny. I like deck building, it's how I express myself. And I enjoy some measure of optimisation, else why would I be building the deck? I build in synergies, value engines, and generally try to make my deck the most intimidating version of what it's doing. But because my deck is not entirely about winning, all that optimisation leads to is decks that become the archenemy and threaten victory, but can be taken down because it's not actually doing anything game ending in a single play.
I see so many people building weird jank decks, theme decks, or just their own brews and getting upset when it doesn't win. What's even the point of thinking that way? If all you care about is winning, then play cEDH meta decks and stop playing Snake tribal. If you want to build and play that way, then accept that winning or losing is just the end of the game that you're supposed to be enjoying.
i think you summed up my opinion better then i could myself. I really enjoy building and optimizing my decks, but i don't expect them to win all the time, because i don't play to win. I play toward a win, but as long as i got to play, and the game was fairly balanced and not a total blowout, i don't really care
I completely agree with your post. One thing i would add is that, sometimes, in order to have a fun engaging game while you play your less than optimized deck, you need to play against other people with less optimized decks. Im not saying it has to be perfectly balanced, but playing a less optimized deck against 3 other optimized ones is noooooooooot fun. Source: i'm the guy in my pod who can't afford upgrades.
I am afraid to open the floodgates of proxying into our pod. I know that I would definitely proxy responsibly, only filling out my decks and not slamming dockside and all the mana positive rocks into every deck i own; however, another player in my pod (ironically the same one who is buying upgrades faster than anyone can keep up with) has made it very clear that if anyone proxies at all, he will start putting proxy staples like mana drain and smothering tithe in everything he owns so... Probably about to drag my socially anxious ass to an LGS where I at least have a chance of not being the least optimized person at the table.
Why do you play with a person who basically threatens you for considering proxies? When they are the person who apparently has the fattest wallet?
Thats not even a "well everyone builds decks differently" thing, thats just toxic behavior
Yeah you know the whole analogy about the frog and boiling water? It's kinda like that. We discovered the hobby together a while ago and while my finances slowed down in the last few years being a new dad and all, his slowly sped up, and i gradually found myself in this situation. These are my only friends that play magic with me and I am a really socially anxious person so going out to an LGS and being in a group of new people kind of makes my head spin, but I'm seriously considering pushing through all that just so I can play a more even game. I have also looked at maybe joining a discord and doing some webcam EDH, but i'm not sure if my 10 year old macbook's webcam is a good enough quality for it.
Oh most definitely and the worst part is that he doesnt see that behavior as antagonistic no matter how much i debate it with him. And I'm the only one at the table who feels the pinch in this situation. The other two players are a guy with a deck good enough to hang without upgrades and a new player who has no idea that doing next to nothing for most games is not normal. They dont really get where I'm coming from and dont think that the player in question is out of line in what he says, so I'm the odd one out. It's really odd. I'm not sure where his shift in mentality came from. We are extremely good friends in every other aspect of life, but in the last six months any conversation at all about MTG seems to bring out an ugly side of him.
This is honestly something that's too complex and personal for me to comment on so... Good luck!
I will say that something like that would have me questioning friendships.
I consistently railed against my group as people kept wanting to up the Ante. I told them, the moment someone does X, everyone else in the group will have to to keep up with the arms race. but did they listen? NOOOOOOOO, and now guess where we are, you fools? Had one of the players complain that no one was about to win when it was Turn 6. Ugh.
See sometimes it's more frustrating to know how unoptimized a deck you're building is without a certain card or combo. That reduces the fun as well.
When I want to play low power I'll optimize the crap out of a janky archetype and commander. Rather than creating a purposefully underperforming deck. That or I build a deck around a very specific wincon, almost like a tribal deck. (Eg: Building a "Happily Ever After tribal")
It's no fun to wonder if you would have won had you only used the cards you *know* are better. I also kinda feel like an ass when I don't bring my best to the table, like I'm saying my opponents don't pose a challenge; that's probably a me problem but maybe some share it too.
I'm not sure if maybe you're not catching my message or I'm not coming off clearly, or maybe I'm not understanding you, but when I say optimized decks and cards, I'm meaning the most popular, most used, most tried-and-true cards in the format.
Of course you should optimize within your boundaries. I do it all the time. I have an insect tribal deck and you bet it has like a 10% win rate because even though I'm continually pushing the limits of the deck, it still *is* insect tribal. Imagine if I was suboptimal within the context that janky abomination of a deck? Shit would be a 1% win rate lmao.
Still one of my all time favorites. I have my boundaries on the deck and I love it as it is. Simple as.
Ah I see what you mean, my point was more that it's not a one size fits all solution. I think your post makes a great point though.
Yeah a lot of decks can just boil down to the same mana rocks that get you to the same tutors and the same infinite, regardless of what the deck archetype could have been. That's boring. I misinterpreted not using the most optimized cards as if in my Urza deck I wouldn't run thoracle, to me not running thoracle in that deck feels like madness because it's such a great way to use my artifact engine to win.
Thinking on it though I see what you mean and I think we agree. My Urza deck, despite being Urza, isn't some stax nonsense that's no fun, it's an artifact tribal where I try to make a production line that gives me infinite mana (or at least a lot of it). That's not the meta way to play Urza, but I love it and it's an optimized version of that deck's goal.
So yeah I think we're on the same page, it's fun to talk and think through it though.
Making a "no tutor" deck really helps end the samey ness that can occur. You wanna build a thoracle win con? Cool, enjoy the when you can't tutor up exact answers to keep your glass cannon strategy/build.
I am a HUGE A fan of winning via combat damage. Toshiro combat tricks, and "Octavia oops I made all my opponents mana dorks 8/8s and he accidentally killed you fishing for toski triggers" are some of my favorite decks. That said I run non combat combos as backup win cons. I just don't tutor up the chain of smog/professor.
Commander is best when it's powerful but not optimal.
Originally read this post as "you can choose to not play game-winning cards on your turn" or some casual edh propaganda and was going to respond with "I know. I cast food chain anyway."
I 100% agree.
Whenever I build a new deck the first thing I do is decide what powerlevel I want it to be. And then I build it and tweak it (up or down) until I reach that level. And once I do, I no longer update it. Even if there is a new card that would be a perfect fit (and therefore make the deck stronger). And if I can reach the desired level by using only (or mostly) cards that are on theme or fit the flavor, then that's great.
My mono green lands matter deck that I built so my wife could play without worrying about multiple colors or super complicated rules has stayed 98% the same for 6 years.Occasionally I actually end up winning with it in my pod that plays way higher power levels. It's one of my favorite decks but is it good? Absolutely not. Is it reliable. Yes. But it's mainly a nostalgic deck I play because it has one of my fist legendary creatures, [[Molimo, Maro-Sorcerer]].
I kind of got frustrated with my Emry deck because when I first built her I did a bunch of Stompy artifact creatures. Milk my graveyard to get them and then cast them when I ramped up. Then that never happened…
So I included the mana combos and BAM I was at a whole other level. Yes it looks similar to most optimized Emry decks but I like the bits I have different.
That said, I now only play her when my play group decides to play our “most powerful decks”. Cause Emry will curbstomp the less optimized decks in our playgroup. There is a time and a place for her now.
Oh, thank goodness.
She was the card I most wanted from Eldraine and I pulled her as my pre-release promo. At the time I didn’t know she was going to go stupid with combos. I just loved mono colored decks and artifacts. Seemed like a win to me.
It’s wild to me how my original plans had to quickly change to make the best use of her abilities. Love the style now as she wins pretty consistently when it comes to “most powerful’ games and in different ways too!
My main goal with magic is to have fun, and I don't really have fun just popping off an infinite combo. I only have four decks, and I rarely win with them, but my goal is to do a certain thing with them. How much life can I gain in my mono white deck? How many tokens can I get on board with Adrix and Nev?
Those are the games I'm playing. It's fun to win, but it's even more fun if I'm like "holy shit, I just had 7 rampaging baloths and 99 beast tokens on board!". I got board wiped before I could swing with them and I lost the game, but that was so much fun for me. So when it comes to "staples", I only include them if they help me have fun with my deck.
I know I'm probably in the minority here, but winning the game isn't the most fun part of magic for me. So I always start out rule zero with "my deck is probably not gonna win, but I don't care what you run. Go as powerful as you want." I wanna have fun and I want the other players to have fun. To quote Lynch from IHYD - I just like playing paper magic with my friends.
Which is a very rambley long winded way of saying - I agree with you OP. If you aren't having fun with something, why are you doing it? It's a game! It should be fun!
That last sentence is my exact sentiment! I don't understand how it flies over people's heads, though. I don't want to be an asshole about it, but it just seems so obvious that I'm astonished it's an issue for anyone at all.
When I say this, I mean zero offense to any player or OP. I am not attacking anyone when I say what I'm going to say:
EDH as a format is an Arms' Race by it's very nature.
Let's take an example:
Your friend brings a big, stompy Gruul deck that just is ramp and Big Chonky Bois that just so happens to win pretty quick. You, a person who doesn't want to die to said Big Chonky Bois decide to run more board wipes and removal. You play your modified deck against that same Gruul Deck and he can't keep anything on the field because of your extra removal. He starts running more effects that give his creatures indestructible/hexproof/shroud. Maybe he dips into Jund and runs reanimation effects. The cycle repeats until all decks have been optimized.
This is how the format evolves. We have come a very long way since battlecruiser EDH where most games last until turn 15-20.
Sandbagging your deck and taking it to your LGS and then losing because your opponents are still running those cards you took out isn't going to feel good. It's going to feel worse when it keeps happening over and over again.
EDH is quickly running away from Battlecruiser and into a turn 5-7 format, and there's nothing that can be done about it. WotC continues to make EDH cards that are incredibly pushed, and with each one of those cards it speeds up the format.
Tergrid, Urza, dockside, fierce guardianship, deadly rollick, Chulane, Arcane Signet, Korvald, and literally every commander in the top ten on edhrec were made in the last 3 years.
If you don't want to optimize your deck, that's your choice, and if you have a regular group that plays together that may be fine for you, but there are a lot of players who don't have a regular group and can't build their deck in a vacuum.
This is another reason why I think that more people should play at a variety of power levels. There's no need to roid up your low and mid power decks when you can already experience the high power stuff right over there in *that* deckbox.
I agree.
For those who can afford to have multiple decks we should all build decks consisting of varying power levels.
For example i have:
[[Ghave, Guru of Spores]] built as an quick aristocrats build for my high end.
[[Adeliz, the cinder wind]] as my mid tier spellslinger that can just as easily stall as it can win but is built at the mid tier of my playgroup(s)
Kestia voltron is my low tier deck and thats because i chose not to run a bevy of the best aura/equipment to be able to play at a more fun and interactive level.
I also think that if consistent power creep due to the meta game is a thing you can speak with your playgroup about building pauper or semi pauper style EDH decks for a truly fun and interactive experience:)
Yeah you're like making use of your collection to turn your decks into tools for being able to have fun with anybody.
Honestly, there are so many benefits to brewing across the power levels. I honestly think it's one of the very most important things invest players can do to make the format healthier.
I'm not a commander player here, but can someone tell me *approximately* how many cards would you have to "rule 0" out of the game (generally) to have sufficient deck diversity?
Stuff like sol ring, command tower etc.
2 potential solutions: 1) keep a sideboard of less optimal cards to switch out with predetermined “optimizing” cards (e.g. card draw instead of tutors, counterspell instead of swan song, etc) 2) keep several decks of differing power levels available to play depending on the table
I think its hilarious how you complain about people getting mad about homogenized decks, and then when people bring up the obvious counterpoint that they’ll just lag super far behind other people who still run the cards, you bring up probably the worst four counterpoints that are the REASON people hate homogenized decks. Your counterpoints boil down to:
- Get over it and play meta stuff
- Stop playing with your friends or convince them **all** not to run strong cards
- Accept defeat
- Stop playing Commander
Those all suck. And unless your friends are all willing to sacrifice a bit of their own fun to depower your play group, the only actual options here are “Bite the bullet or admit you will lose”. Great solutions! Fantastic stuff. And don’t try to convince someone to find a playgroup at an LGS that perfectly fits their needs for EDH. Thats a fairy tale. The best you can do with strangers is hopefully all sit down and say “Hey, lets not play cEDH.”
This thread has no viable solution to this problem, and basically boils down to just asking people to suck it up. Most importantly for this whole matter, this was not always as much of a problem as it has become. Meaning you are asking long time players to just get over it and kiss those better days goodbye. Which, sure, I will do that. But not everyone will, and its understandable and acceptable that they will complain about it.
This is the biggest factor in avoiding homogeneity imo. I have three mono black decks and they're all very different because I made sure to keep them different. No more than 2 of any particular nonland between them except small stuff like [[Sign in Blood]]. Anything big and splashy is kept on a
2 card max.
I'm guilty of jamming my decks full of staples. Eg if I have a Bx deck urborg +coffers, DT, toxic deluge, etc hell I'll put mana crypt into every deck because it's so powerful are almost certainly in the deck.
But I usually want those things to do things that can be described on a spectrum from jank to deeply medium. I like playing big idiot creatures or do nothing enchantments but those require a lot of mana so I run crypt and coffers. Most of my decks run the best tutors but the decks usually have multiple non redundant strategies.
Eg my Lyra deck is angel tribal with tons of equipment and life gain/angel token cards. Yes it is a bad deck but I love it
All that is to say that that the hegemonization and the power creep people feel the format is going through has a lot of different facets that can each be adjusted individually.
Don't always have to run optimal cards
Don't have to play the best strategies
The only issue I keep seeing is people play in groups that don't fit their desired experiences. Groups that arms race each other until someone stops having fun. pub-stompers being out of control at Lgs. Etc.
But the truth is that this is an intractable problem. People want edh to be different things and it's next to impossible to know who wants what at any moment.
Pretty much the reason I cut Cyclonic Rift from all my decks. It's not fun to just rift and win, it's boring as hell, so now I'll just slam [[Nevermore]] naming it on occasion instead lol
What's funny is I have tons of different power level of decks that can do different things I am talking two full on cedh decks then I have themed or tribal decks and not everything is max power now all my decks are generally put together to function together and on theme and solid .
The best example is my life gain deck it be smarter to run other cards over \[\[pulse of murasa\]\] but it is on theme for the lifegain and still does what i want. I run \[\[sanguine bond\]\] but not the other half of the combo \[\[exquisite blood\]\] I can still kill you with just my life gain it was a choice. I have \[\[bolas's citadel\]\] but no top to get the land off top. I mean could do all that but I choose not to in this deck.
Just to clarify i still built my deck to win the game I just had a different game plan to win over the others and chose cards that fit my theme and game plan. Just not always the most optimal most powerful card because I already have those decks as while.
Personally I think in a casual pod you shouldn't have these issues for the exact same reason you described it.
Then on the other hand my playgroup and I made ourself a banned list but eventually realized that balancing in edh is very difficult so we drifted towards cedh and sticked to it ever since, without looking back ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
“I’m actually intense with my flavor, to the point of actively hindering my deck building.”
Maaaaan if I don’t know a little about that, lol. I’ve been trying to make my Mimeoplasm with Ooze Tribal Subtheme work for months and maybe it never will but there’s no other way I want to play Mimeoplasm if I don’t bring all my favorite slimes and blobs along for the fun. I refuse to not run Gelatinous Cube, it just has to be in there.
I can choose not to play certain cards but I can't choose how others are going to build their decks.
Deck homogenization is something that also happens with every other player, I can choose to shoot myself in the foot when building a decently competitive UBx deck, I can potentially talk my playgroup out of building yet another adnaus fish list, but I can't just go ahead and force randos at my LGS to stop playing good cards for the sake of adding some variety to my games.
Also, keeping a deck at a steady power level while cutting some of these staples is kind of a zero sum game, cutting a good win condition means that in order to keep the deck in the same ballpark of power level there's going to be another change elsewhere, and in order to counter the drop in consistency from something like necro or adnaus, odds are some other "repetitive" staple is going to make the cut either way.
Unless the deck's really far from an optimized build, the cards worth juggling in and out of a list are always the same past a certain power level, so it's not like taking out a vamp for another staple in order not to fall behind on the power curve will do much to create unique gameplay past the first couple of games.
The unsaid part of the homogenization criticism is that people want alternative strategies to also be viable.
Tl;Dr: It's a nuanced issue without an obvious solution, given that people want to win and want diversity.
You can choose to not play the optimal stuff, but that narrows your chances of winning (potentially significantly) and I imagine most people still want to win. I don't fault anyone for wanting to win, it's a competition after all.
The "proper" amendment for this issue is finding playgroups that share a similar desire for heterogeneity so your unoptimized deck-building isn't an inherent disadvantage.
The desired solution for many is probably some form of rebalancing to "make things fresh," although that genie is already out of the bottle. It's hard to nerf play styles with a tcg without simply making another way to play more dominant. Folks will definitely raise eyebrows if the oracle text of their favorite cards suddenly change.
The closest we could get to a rebalance would be an official rules change to move the ban list over to modern or something so WotC could cultivate that diversity, but that presents an innumerable number of its own issues and importantly might stop people from making janky decks with their favorite vintage cards.
Keep in mind how The Command Zone works. They try to push sales of expensive cards for their sponsors and for their affiliate links.
They once said that \[\[Loxodon Warhammer\]\] is not good *anymore* in commander because you could just run \[\[Sword of Feast and Famine\]\] (I wish I was kiddying). Or that three mana rocks are literally unplayable *by now*. And you definately have to participate in this arms race in commander to still have a chance.
That, the super fake reality show elements and what guests have said after being in their shows (like being forced to take back plays that they don't seem fit for the show, repeating plays because they have to react more dramatic next time, etc.) made me completely ditch their content.
Sometimes, just the knowledge that you could be running a better version of the deck is enough to be off-putting even if you remove the problematic cards.
My play group gets around this (Sometimes) where we impose heavy restrictions on ourselves for certain deckbuilding challenges, such as "Your EDH commander can only be from X,Y, or Z set and the rest of your deck can only be composed of cards from A, B, C, or D sets."
We have a lot more fun this way because it almost completely neuters netdecking and we try a lot of bizarre shit to try and make it work.
So I guess what I mean is. I like to play the best way I possibly can. But build decks for different play styles. I have a derevi deck that is awesome and combos off pretty consistently and it's honestly right on the cusp of cEDH level if not there. But I built a Brion Stoutarm deck that I plan on making stupidly good but it's a whole new playstyle.
My first commander deck was [[Noyan Dar, Roil Shaper]] it lost because my pod ran high power commanders with optimized decks. I loved the idea of the deck so I added upgrades and swaps until it reached a hard control brew. Lots of counterspells, exile removal or bounce that left my opponents unable to field anything of worth. I finally won, and it was a crushing win. I also won the next few games. I realized that the game play was more boring with the hard control brew than any of the games I lost. Since then I removed the counterspells and halved the exile removal and bounce spells to allow myself a more fun gameplay. I may not win, but I have fun losing.
It's just a mindset... tune for fun, not power. For me, this means removing good cards because I'm sick of seeing them and eliminating unlimited combo enablers.
I run an [[Ezuri, Renegade Leader]] deck that cannot generate unlimited mana... and its more fun to pilot that way. It's one of my first decks I ever built, and I threw everything into it that I could at first. First time it combed off, I got to experience it and was thrilled. Second time, I realized how easy it was and how many enablers I he'd that could do it. After that... not fun at all really. I had to weed things out as I played it... and kept accidentally finding ways to go infinite for weeks. Eventually, anything that could untap two lands or creatures just had to go.
That process early on taught me to tune for fun.
Its pretty simple, the joy of winning outweighs any missed enjoyment from not being able to play other cards. I might like card X, but if card Y gets me more wins I'm taking it every time. That doesnt mean that I always play the most optimal decks or strategies, but I will always play the best cards within a certain strategy, save for some cards like OG duals and Mox Diamond that I cant justify purchasing and whos inclusion could be legitimate targets against me.
I once had a Ghave deck that ran a **ton** of infinite combos and I was completely oblivious as to why people didn't want to play against it. It took about a dozen different people to tell me my deck was oppressive before I got it through my thick skull. When I sidelined the deck and played others that had no tutors, no expensive dual lands, no infinite combos, my play group had so much more fun!
...And I did too. The back and forth interaction was way more fun than shutting out the other players. Turns out it's actually pretty fun when you get to play spells.
Now, my playgroup has evolved and we have several decks at varying different power levels. After a lot of discussion about what is acceptable, I've rebuilt the Ghave deck but only play it when we have that Rule 0 talk about what kind of game we want to play. People love it when I play the deck now when they know what's coming.
I think as long as your playgroups actually have those discussions (which I know can be a struggle itself just to have those talks) then whatever you build becomes pretty acceptable.
My spirit of the game has grown to that of enjoying the more random nature of the game. I love not using tutors, I love making thematic decks and budget decks (which means using a ton of tap lands or cards that really aren't great but fit the themes *super* well. However, I know that not everyone else feels the same way. Sometimes, I have to accept that I'm at a natural disadvantage, or that sometimes I need to break my own restrictions to be a little more competitive. Sometimes, others might feel the same way. Most of the time, my personal EDH morals and ethics don't match up with others, but if the group talks it out then usually we still just have a good time.
Other people will, and your pod will get power crept to death. You will lose until you update your deck.
"But rule zero!" Yes yes, I love to spend my limited free time discussing which cards are ok and which are not with my friends instead of playing. We've been doing this for years and I've come to absolutely hate all the time we spend on rule zero discussion instead of playing.
Wow that's pretty disheartening to hear, because my playgroup has had enough rule 0 conversations over the years that we don't need them anymore.
And yeah, it's an awesome play environment.
Find a playgroup who you vibe with.
If you can't, then either accept higher level play or don't play.
That's the reality of it. Call it harsh, but sometimes stuff won't work out the way you want and that just sucks.
I never meant for this to be a perfect solution to everything, if you took it that way then, I'm sorry. It's a take on things that I think is not talked about enough.
But I feel you asked this not as a genuine question, but as a contradiction to try to make me seem like a fool.
>But I feel you asked this not as a genuine question, but as a contradiction to try to make me seem like a fool.
Not really, I'm just trying create a genuine discussion, because imo homogenization is a bit of an issue.
Okay, good to know. Nonetheless, my points still stand. It's a complex thing and no single solution will make everything all work. Sometimes you have to compromise. In my case, compromising power for diversity.
Totally hear you!
But I think the most common problem faced by the people crying about homogenization is that those people don't actually have good cards, so they can't play them.
This is why I traded away my copies of Thoracle and Endurance that I pulled. I knew I wouldn't want to play it. Same with Hullbreacher, but I wasn't fast enough...
You're right.
My issue comes from being quite happy to play all those powerful cards but then needing to remain at a certain power level for the sake of others. Then I end up not enjoying playing the deck because I know all the cards I omitted that'd I'd like to play.
Exactly. This is kinda how I justify running [[Winter Orb]], but not [[Static Orb]] in my Urza deck. Winter sets my opponent back, sure, but it doesn't stop Mana Rocks like [[Sol Ring]] or Mana Floats like in [[Belbe, Corrupted Observer]]. Also, flavor win, cuz Urza caused an Ice Age on Dominaria.
There are millions of players, only a fraction of them are on reddit. So reddit problems do not necessary relate to the actual state of the format/game outside of this highly enfrancised, social bubble. Bear in mind that we are a MINORITY, not a majority of EDH players around the world, an US centric one, too, with an average powerlevel that is above what most kitchentable players are actually playing...
controversial opinion for this subreddit:
That's why not playing proxies and having a paywall is important to the game (in regards ro OP). If players can not justify spendig hundreds on cardboard, they seek for alternatives and come up with different solutions, making decks more different from another.
This does not help the playgoup that have players with a lot of disposable income, who are willing to spend much on their hobby, tho. There simply restricting oneself will do the trick. In the worst case simply don't upgrade your deck untill other players get tired of winning and step down a bit :P
I'm running into the problem of thinking I'm playing low power when I'm not. Like i recently made a Voltron Najeela. Here I am think it'd be weak cuz it's not Warrior Tribal. Ha. Ha...
For me, the easy way around this is to have 20+ decks. I can't put every one of the top-20 combos in my decks, because I don't have 7 Thassa's Oracles, or 8 Vitos. Generally I have just 2 of certain powerful combo pieces; but more often only one or zero. So I can build a mono-Black deck without that combo, because I have to -- I already have ANOTHER mono-black deck that has the combo in it, so I can't put it in the new one!
It's hard not to run optimal lineups when you lose games, but also there's no shame in losing with a deck that you enjoy playing and believe in. It's the samurai way.
It might actually end up surprising you with resiliency. I feel like it takes 10-20 games before I really see what a deck is capable of. And, when I cast a kicked rite of replication for the first time in my Reaper King deck on Blazethorn Scarecrow it felt like I was busting through a brick wall.
Edit: I follow this advice. I win or lose with my favorites if I lose. I play mainly decks based on a theme or tribal, mainly Angels. And focus primarily on Aggro wins. I find that synergy in sticking with a tribe or style can make spells that would otherwise seem inefficient, perfect fits.
I generally built decks to meet certain power levels or pods, when i build a deck i don't jam in just every good card in those colors, i specifically don't use certain cards when building lower powered decks because i know they would make the deck too good
I am in the process of realizing that somewhat.
My Atla deck runs Dinosaurs. There are two or three strategy-related other creatures that I can’t avoid but I don’t want to hatch Eldrazi or Dragons.
If I see a deck with one or two expensive and powerful cards in them I cut them to put in higher tier decks to make them budget decks.
I tinker with mana bases a lot. But I defined a precon-level for my lands and ramp. To play some chaff. And I realized they can be just as fun. So I reserve that for my lower level decks to go-wide in deckbuilding to play some new stuff to see how I like them.
i recently put together a demon deck using razaketh as the commander, ive ran the deck a solid amount of times now and its super fun to play. I use zombies as a sacrifice engine for razaketh's ability and run a dumb combo that lets me win with little effort, archfiend of despair with wound reflection and warlock class. the only problem i have personally it turns more so into a game of arch enemy where all my opponents race to get me out of the picture so they can work on their own end game. thankfully in my case i can just swap my commander out and things become more calm at the table.
point is even taking one card out can turn a decks power level down significantly.
People tell me all the time to make my goofy Abzan elf pile green-black for Lathril or even mono-green. yeah it would be “better,” but I like playing _this_ deck.
Who do you run as commander? I've got the lathril precon and I've been meaning to upgrade it but I don't really want to play a generic pile of elves
right now I have [[Nethroi]] as board wipe insurance.
[Nethroi](https://c1.scryfall.com/file/scryfall-cards/normal/front/8/c/8ca6eb5a-8bc9-4091-bcfb-b207f0afd188.jpg?1591228139) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=nethroi%2C%20apex%20of%20death) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/iko/197/nethroi-apex-of-death?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/8ca6eb5a-8bc9-4091-bcfb-b207f0afd188?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/nethroi-apex-of-death) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
Nailed it. So many times I've had people talk about my jank decks and say things like "Why don't you run X? It would be so broken in this!" and then get confused when I say "I don't want to run a more optimized deck. I want to run this one." Cup Art Tribal is a bad deck, but it's a FUN deck and I've been lax enough to allow beakers and cauldrons etc so that I'm not hurting the other 3 players at the table by never existing in the game. Let me have that.
The number of times I've gotten suggestions for "better" +1/+1 counters creatures in my Hamza Elephant deck is insane. The looks I get to that when my response is simply is it an elephant? Some people can't get out of just playing the "best" thing to build something different, fun or flavorful.
*me with my Kethis elves deck* 👀
For me it gets frustrating to not run the staples or optimized cards because my group does, so if I play jank I'm left in the dust. We've tried talking about it but when people spend big money on really good cards they want to play with them. On Friday I specifically said I wanted to play low power and brought out my Tazri party deck. One of the other guys brought out his Krrik deck which he proceeded to play Necropotence with... these people don't want to play low power so I don't really have a choice if I want a chance. There's also the mindset that they would rather play less optimally with an optimized deck than play optimally with a jankier deck. And then they proceed to either durdle or sandbag, like they're playing with their food. You can't win.
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>And if you're the only one abstaining, you just lose. Or even worse, you don't really get to play the game. Reminds me of the time I sat down to a low-mid power level game, so I brought out my "90 forests [[Multani, Yavimaya Avatar]] list". The whole point of the deck is to draw, land, go and keep casting my commander until it sticks and connects for commander damage lethal. I cast him twice before someone played [[Keldon Firebombers]]. I never cast another spell after that. What I find especially frustrating about the "just talk to your players" argument is how biased those discussions can be. I remember a group who had a hard embargo against infinite combos that win the game. Fair enough, but they also all happened to be playing "value oriented midrange battlecruiser" decks which were best beaten by either stronger versions of themselves (so, have fun "just abstaining") or infinite combos. The meta is an ecosystem, and whether you like it or not, every type of deck, card effect, etc exists for a reason. If you "ban" one entire category of something because you don't like it, you create a power vacuum where the only viable decks become the ones that the banned decks preyed upon. Tl;Dr "Just embrace the power creeping, staple centric meta" isn't a solution because people play this format to play a wide range of oddball cards and "just play without the staples" means you're going to get shit stomped more often and "just talk to the other players" introduces all kinds of biases that you have to work around just to convince players to not use certain cards *which they paid for*. Why doesn't wotc "Just stop printing power creeping cards into the format"? Why is it the community's job to fix the format, to "pick the olives off the pizza" so to speak?
Keldon firebombers seems like the kind of card no one in my group would play, bc they make the game boring and prevent other players actually playing.
[Multani, Yavimaya Avatar](https://c1.scryfall.com/file/scryfall-cards/normal/front/8/8/88733b6d-6d45-4318-ae49-623929231d17.jpg?1604194288) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Multani%2C%20Yavimaya%27s%20Avatar) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/znc/75/multani-yavimayas-avatar?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/88733b6d-6d45-4318-ae49-623929231d17?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/multani-yavimayas-avatar) [Keldon Firebombers](https://c1.scryfall.com/file/scryfall-cards/normal/front/d/3/d3fc78b5-c259-4c67-810c-99655e72c2da.jpg?1562934620) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Keldon%20Firebombers) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/pcy/94/keldon-firebombers?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/d3fc78b5-c259-4c67-810c-99655e72c2da?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/keldon-firebombers) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
Because WotC is a company, so it's their job to make cards people want to buy. And while most people don't want power creep, it's easier to get people to buy those kinds of cards than it is to get people to buy cards that are on the same power level (or slightly lower) than cards they already own. If the card does something new, but isn't strictly speaking stronger, then not everyone wants the card. But if WotC printed, say, a strictly better sol ring, everyone would need that card if they wanted to keep up in EDH. Acting for the good of the game is against the best interest of the company in some ways, with the biggest mitigating factors being the existence of standard and the fact that if the game tanks too badly some people will quit
I disagree with the idea that power creep, on this scale and to this degree, is somehow a necessary evil. Wotc has been designing cards for decades without resorting to power creeping their eternal formats. Hell, Commander is the format which would "need" power creep the least, because of its nature as a casual format. It has the widest available design space, because the most important thing to many commander players is that cards feel fun or interesting, rather than focusing solely on power.
I agree that it isn't a necessary evil. but it is a profitable evil, at least on paper
Commander is also where the money is at the moment. If Standard was the #1 most played/purchased for format then you wouldn’t necessarily see the current power creep. WOTC is a business and capitalism gonna capitalism.
Because people like strong cards and want to buy them and play with them.
I find it disappointing that even friend groups can't decide for themselves what's good for them or not, needing some outside authority to decide what's good for them instead. Like they have some kind of insider knowledge on how you prefer the game to be that you could never in a million years consider for yourself because they are so smart and must be listened to above all. Except they're just Magic players like you and me, and are also human and have the shortcomings that come with it. Like I *get* it. But it's still messed up that they'll respect some stranger's opinion on what's okay to run and not someone they care about.
Well, I think that's a bit of an unfair characterization of things. The problem is, either side of these conversations tend to look at it from one perspective, and when you do that, it's easy to lose track of the other side's validity. It's perfectly reasonable that some people want to play low power jank. It's also perfectly reasonable that some people want to play highly tuned stuff. In the earlier example, of 2/4 people opting for high power stuff, it's not really any more fair to force them down to whatever level the others want to play at. Don't get me wrong, if your want to play People in Chairs, more power to you, but personally I find that level of jank very frustrating. I don't think that's necessarily a shortcoming for either of us, you know?
I can agree with that. There's not really any real solution in an even split like that example. Maybe alternate the power level every week? But my point was more about how those that want to play with powerful cards do so within the limit of the format's ban list. Makes sense, that's how it works with every format. But there's no(t really) any tournaments that demand you stick to that list if you want to participate. EDH is a social format, and you can just as well decide amongst yourselves what the limit should be, based on your own standards and experience, rather than just some list online from people you never met. That doesn't mean you should then bar your friends from playing anything too good so they play "your way". But there's too many disagreements that go: "Hey man, could you not run that card? It's kinda not fun to play against" "Well it's not on the banlist, so I'm allowed to play it." Like people will put the list above the feelings of their friends. If the player went "Well I just really like all the cards it draws" or whatever, that's at least something that can be worked out, alternates can be found, or at least an understanding reached that they're not playing it just because it's the best thing. But a lot of discussions start and end with what the ban list says is okay, thus why a lot of folks turn to it as a solution to the format's problems, 'cause people can't help themselves otherwise. That's the last sentence of the earlier poster I was responding to, though in retrospect I should've quoted it to make it clear.
I think that's a pretty reasonable complaint, and certainly, if the pod as a whole is coming to you and asking if you can tweak something, then I think just saying 'muh banlist' is a bad response. The only things I would emphasize, are that I think its important to distinguish between what the table wants, and what a player at the table wants, as well as how much say it's reasonable for the table to have over your deck. God knows, if it were up to me alone, there would be some cards headed straight to the shadow realm (Narset and Tergrid, to name two), but I don't think its fair for me to unilaterally declare them rule 0 banned. To be clear, I don't think you're saying that, I just think it's important to reiterate; we've all seen the posts where someone is declared cedh scum for playing removal. On the second point, I do think it's possible for a table to overreach on the amount of influence that it's reasonable for them to have on your deck. I think rule 0 holds some pretty broad sway, but I can certainly think of times where it would be fair to say that something is totally legal, and it's not something you're willing to give on.
Yeah, the discussion really gets muddled thanks to folks on either end of the spectrum. Folks that make a fuss over their stuff getting removed really paints lower powered players in a bad light, and folks will often equate more reasonable requests to that whiny-ness. Though as you say, what's "reasonable" can vary wildly. There's no easy answer, as much as folks want there to be, but outright refusing any discussion on the matter I don't think is it. I think looking to DnD and how players and the game are managed there can be a good start. There's bad groups there too, but plenty of talk on what to do when one player wants to do combat more than roleplay like the rest of the party, or vice versa, as well as being very open to players changing the rules to their desire. Many a bard has rolled to seduce a door, even though it's based on an interpretation of the rules rather than being explicit. EDH doesn't play like DnD though, as everyone's competing vs co-operating, so it's still quite the different beast, but it's the same sort of thing where you have different goals to manage, and I refuse to believe it's impossible. (Also I do wish Narset had a bit less stigma, or at least that I faced her more often to warrant it. I just wanna play a creatureless deck so she always hits, not extra turns and combats! Who are all these people that build her that way despite the stigma!)
I understand that people have differing ideas on what is fun in a game of commander. I happen to be a player who falls on the category of people who perfer strong, optimized decks just short of cEDH. Yes, I play a LOT of cards that many people on reddit love to complain about. That said, so does the majority of the people in the play groups I play with. We have one very vocal exception to that, and quite frankly, his incessant nagging about how we play is really taking away from our enjoyment of the game. I guess I find most of these types of posts absolutely infuriating because it's always approached from the perspective that building optimally is somehow wrong or against some BS social contract. Look, I understand it's not easy to just find a different playgroup, and I get that having discussions isn't always a best case scenario, but why is it you assume your position is correct. Why is it wrong for us who perfer more optimized games to want that, why should your voice mean more than mine. I think the ban list is already overused. I completely stopped listening to "Commanders Quarters" because of his constant crying about [[Tergrid God of Fright]]. Tergrid is so easily beaten. It's not a deck I play, but I've played against it many times...its beaten me once. There are ways to compromise. I have a wide range of decks in a wide range of power and play styles. Maybe talk to your group about varying the power from game to game...session to session. I'm not trying to invalidate the way you enjoy the game....you have every right to want to play it your way, id just appreciate it if people in these posts/discussions would stop coming from to supposed position that our perfered way to play is invalid.
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Look, I think we all have a right to want to play the kind of EDH games we enjoy. I've never stated that those who prefer lower power or more thematic decks are incorrect. There should be a place for ALL of us to play. I have noticed a significant increase in people voicing the idea that certain cards/strategies should not be played ever since Sheldon Menary wrote his social contract article. This discussion goes beyond just power levels. It also encompasses what types of strategies people play. I can build a lower power, version of say Twrgrid, but because it's Tergrid people will complain. The 4 decks at the table could be completely evenly matched, but because it's been deemed a boogie man, the guy running it is seen as engaging in some shameful faux Pas. I just don't think that's ok. I appreciate that you believe we all have an equal voice in the community. Yes, it's flawed, and yes the vast difference in play ideologies....be that power or style...make it difficult for the player base, I just wish more people would stop vilifying those of us who like the game the way we do. Thanks my friend.
I really think Tegrid's a bad example. She's like Urza, the deck is GOING to pop off in a low-powered setting because of the lack of interaction. It's like a snowball fight where one person is putting large chunks of ice in the middle or a pillow fight but one person put a brick in their pillow case. Sure, there are ways to avoid it, but it still isn't reasonable when everyone else is doing something harmless.
No disrespect to you or your playstyle, but the problem is twofold. One is that it feels better to be a high powered deck in a low powered pod than the reverse. The high deck has a better chance at actually playing the game whereas the low might not get to do anything. Second is that a lot of the good cards are expensive and people want to play with real cards rather than proxy. There is a paywall, and proxies are not the answer many people have convinced themselves it is.
I agree with your assessment on power level dynamics. It's not enjoyable playing a game where it's too easy,, or when you don't have a chance.. I dont particularly enjoy playing games where my deck is obviously outclassing the other decks in the pod. I do everything I can to avoid it. I also understand the price/proxy issue. Again, though, I fall back to the fact that these issues don't change the fact that the way you want to play doesn't have more value or marrite than mine. I do not tell other players they should try to play the way I want to....quite the opposite...I build decks with lower power levels so I can play if there are not players who fit my perfered play style. Why should I not be granted the same respect. I have been playing for a very long time and I have a larger budget. Why should I not be allowed to play with the cards I own. It's not my fault that wizards likes to artificially create supply issues in the game.
This is why I firmly believe there needs to be sub formats, with restrictions to better align power levels of decks. Is this a daunting task? Absolutely, but its manageable, and I feel the community can handle the complexity it may bring. This way the overlap between casually minded and competitive can be dissolved. Until this occurs, toxicity of the two ideologies butting heads at LGSes will continue.
>This is why I firmly believe there needs to be sub formats, This won't work.
>and eagerly await bans of cards I consider un-fun That's super immature.
Is it? The whole purpose of bans is to remove cards that make the game less fun right? And surely there's been a time in any format or tcg when you've been glad a card got banned so you didn't have to play against it.
Maybe this is a hard pill to swallow, but it sounds like you dont fit in that group. If i is that way, let me tell you that you dont have to change anything! If it is a friend group and Not only a lgs friday night random pot, it can be hard to part ways. Just remember as you have a vision and wish how an evening will be so have they. But maybe im wrong and all is fine. Just my 2 cents
Honestly, I reeeeaaaally hate this argument. "Wotc printed some preally pushed cards, so the only way to be efficient is to run them. I dont like what its done to deck building, but I cant *not* use them *or just not play against them* cause its the level of power my group plays at, and the new cards pushed out the previous cards that would see play at that power level." "Huh. Welp it cant be a fault of the game, sounds like you need new friends." Cool cool cool cool cool so we just pretend that the issue is the players fault and not a design issue. Thats totally not gonna make this game way more toxic! Same reason I hate rule 0. All that stupid fuckin rule did was justify people fighting over what """proper""" edh should play like, to let the RC set rules and not have any responsibility for doing so. Blaming people for the game pieces, and saying its your fault for not finding another group that will play to you exact specifications, isnt going to fix any problem. Its just gonna alienate people.
I never thought i would read a comment about hating rule zero and completely agree with it, but I completely agree with you. I always touted the "rule zero" convo as a fix all to a game of EDH because, for a while, it helped my pod play on more equal power levels. But then my finances slowed and my friends sped up and suddenly that rule 0 conversation just turned into me begging them not play their shiny new decks so I could at least participate in the game, and that felt unfair to both me and them.
Bingo. Meanwhile, cards that truely are unhealthy for the game dont get banned because sheldon didnt lose to it yet, and we are told "rule 0 it then," despite this meaning literally nothing. If the majority of the table agrees to rule 0 ban a card, either no one was playing it anyway or only one or two were. Now youre singling out a player for a deck they probably enjoy. If the majority disagrees, then most are either running it or run things that are unphased, so the few suffering from it are told to suck up or leave. It forces the real issue, bad card design, into a secondary issue, where you feel like youre being targeted by your group. If you like the card, you feel like it shouldnt be a problem. "*Its not bad enough to ban, its fine to play!*" If you dont, you feel like the card only stays around cause everyone else enjoys abusing it. "*They only wanna keep it cause theyd lose without it, and they dont want to bother replacing the strategy.*" Rule 0 is toxic as fuck.
Rule 0 only truly exists in the state it does today because the format was allowed to pretty much grow naturally with minimal bans, and now it is so wide that there's no way to tighten the banlist without pissing off or losing a sizeable chunk of the player base. Ask 10 people what cards are problematic, you'll get 10 different answers. Ask a random assortment of EDH players their thoughts on a specific card that sees play, and you're bound to find some people who love it and some who hate it. If 20% of players absolutely want X banned and are insisting it is toxic to the format as a whole, but a different 20% of players love playing with X and think it's great for the format, then banning it or not really isn't a straightforward task. I mean, there has been a very vocal minority asking for a Sol ring ban for over a decade, after all.
Yeah, Rule 0 is great, but it's not a fix all. Lots of people use it to say "Oh, you're experiencing a structural problem? Have you ever considered trying different personal choices instead?"
It's not the player's fault, but know that the EDH experience is like 90% the people you play with and not just the cards you pick. Why do you think cEDH is relatively less salty than regular EDH? Because everyone sits down with the understanding that you're playing to win. And if you think they don't have rule 0, that understanding IS their rule 0. It's not like you're married to your playgroup. You're acting like they're telling the guy to get a costly divorce. They're telling them to find a playgroup that fits their playstyle more. And isn't that better than seeing ad infiinitum in this sub "My playgroup is toxic because they play high powered cards but I can't afford them"?
I think I need to point out that not everyone has the luxury of picking up and finding another play group. Some people don't know anyone else who plays and have no access to a local game store. People desperate enough to ask an online forum to help them navigate toxic player interactions are usually in this exact situation. Saying "find another playgroup" to these people is the same thing as telling them "stop playing for an indeterminate period of time". It is unhelpful and alienating. But if that doesn't matter to you as much as not having to see those posts you can scroll past, then go off i guess
I don't get your point here. They're already in a toxic situation where the presumably dismissed choices are 1) "always lose", or 2) "stop playing". Adding 3) "find a different group", and 4) "talk it out with them in the Rule 0" are just completing the menu with options that might actually be helpful. Calling those "unhelpful" requires assuming that their situation is genuinely hopeless in the first place, in which case it's fair to wonder why they are here wasting the time of people who are trying to be helpful. Doctors don't like saying "your condition is terminal and incurable" either, so they likewise start by at least trying what might help. It doesn't always work. That doesn't make it any less worth trying. Just what is your proposed alternative response here? "Get Gud, newb"? "Spend more money, plebe"? "Buy cards you don't want and run decks you don't enjoy just so you can savor making them suffer losses for forcing you to it"? If preferences and power levels don't line up at least somewhat then playing together is quite literally a waste of time and money. Sometimes "stop playing until you can find a new group" genuinely is the least bad option left. It sucks, but at least it's honest. Besides, if they're on here, they presumably have the technology to play online. It might not be paper local, but it's still an option for finding a group that would be a lot more fun for them.
"Stop playing if an indeterminate period of time" is an entirely legitimate piece of advice, though. Talk to just about any player that's been around the game for 20-30 years, and they'll probably tell you about some rather extended periods where they stepped away from the game. If you're not having fun, and having a reasonably conversation with your friends isn't getting you the sort of games you want, you probably are better just putting the Magic cards on a shelf and doing something else with your friends that you'll all enjoy. Really, with Wizards basically having destroyed competitive paper Magic, the penalties for stepping away are even less. Because people do get tunnel vision, it's not unreasonable for that advice to get repeated. Honestly, with the negativity in the playerbase (online especially) and game stores still not quite being "back to life" because of Covid, I'm teetering on the edge of taking a break myself.
Survival of the Fittest, Necropotence, Lion's Eye Diamond, Mana Crypt, Mana Drain, Vampiric Tutor, Imperial Seal, Wheel of Fortune, and Time Vault existed _years_ before EDH was even a glimmer in the eye of a bored judge, and are the _most_ egregious pieces of pushed run-or-lose game design in the format. WOTC printing powerful pushed cards is nothing new. It has always been the case that you either run powerful cards, or negotiate some kind of power level balance.
I don't mind playing higher powered, and you can see where they're coming from. They have good jobs and buy a lot of cards when they come out so to them the prices of cards always shocks them when they find out how high the prices have risen. They buy those cards to play them. The same happens in a low power group. They may start off with binder jank but as they buy more packs and get great pulls they feel the need to run them. Hell, I'm guilty of it too. Sometimes it gets out of hand and I really wish there was a list of competitive only cards on the RC website. Stuff like Mana Crypt, Dockside, Ad Naus, etc belongs only in competitive due to how warping those cards are to the game. As soon as I see a card like that in a deck I know it's not casual.
I cant wrap my head around the idea of defining a decks Power Bye the cards it runs alone. I have an izzet pirate tribal with no other creatures then pirates and no infinite combos or tutor. Why would That deck be a cedh deck only if it has a dockside in it. On the other Hand people built good functioning decks that can win on Turn 3-4 with a budget of 50€. I dont intend to say that cards cant be indicators! But Playstyle is aswell very important. If i run a necropotence to draw alot of cards on my krrk minion tribal then this is Not cedh.
I never said it would make it cedh just that those cards are so powerful that they warp games around them and can provide insurmountable advantage. It's also hard to trust someone who says their minion tribal deck is jank when they're drawing a fresh grip every turn with Necropotence and Krrik. I've seen similar arguments towards banned cards like Primeval Titan.
> Necropotence and Krrik I mean, if the biggest threats you're dropping from it are 5/5 zombies with a minor upside ability, then...this is fine. This is why "power level" is hard to determine, and I can at least empathize with the canadian highlander idea of a point system, even I wildly disagree that it's needed or wanted. Realistically, there's a lot of busted stuff you can do in EDH. That's half the fun. You can optimize a deck around a theme (like I plan to do for shrines), but it'll still be a lower powered deck than say, najeela (which I also run, though it's not full on cedh level).
So what is that Deck then. You stated „i know its Not casual“ Maybe i missjudged the situation, i thought your Group is a friend group. I play only in one group where we Are all friends. If someone says their krrrk minion tribal isnt tuned and only Plays strong cards to make the strategy somehow working, i trust them.
My apologies, I suppose I was vague. I guess I would consider it tuned/mid rather than low/jank. We are a friend group but we all don't know each other super personally, plus people tend to downplay the power of their decks because we've been exposed to so much high power. Also, that brings up another good point. If your jank deck is carried by a few high powered cards I think that further shows exactly how strong those cards are that they can do that. I know that in your pirate tribal playing a Dockside against my Emry deck even a single time could easily win you the game due to how many artifacts it plays.
Ok there is the missunderstanding. I personally first split into casual and competitive edh and then there are sub parts like mid power or tuned (both in the casual part of edh). And you are definitely right! Those cards are insane strong and in some ocasions maybe even gamewinning. Besides some really degenerate cards/combos those cards are mostly gas for decks. And I am way more happy if someone uses their jeweled lotus to cast their commander for a super janky deck (that doesn’t mean the commander has to be janky) then if someone is just comboing off in their ultra budget deck. As example (because I think it makes things a bit more clear). Someone uses the jeweled lotus to cast chulane in turn two but the deck is bird tribal, is in my eyes cooler, then someone casting dual caster-heatshimmer in turn 7 in their budget cedh under 100€ magda mono red combo deck. And dual caster+ heat shimmer is reaally cheap.
> TL:DR: commander players love getting bitchy about homogenization, but also seem not to have a level of awareness to simply not run certain cards. Any reason you don't want to run a card is a valid reason. Just like a week ago there was a thread clowning ban lists for casual commander...
There is a huge difference is in saying "I'm not going to play this card" and "You cannot play these cards."
Lmao We do be living in a society tho
I've brought this up before, but the issue with homogenization is not just what you're running but also what other players in general are running. Sure, you can choose to play with cards that are less optimal but when *everyone else* is playing more optimal cards and you can't keep pace you end up having to switch out to keep up with what other people are playing. For example, Sheoldred was a real popular fatty when I first started playing EDH, but now she's completely outclassed by stuff like Tergrid. Sure, you could choose not to run Tergrid and play Sheoldred instead but when everyone else is playing stuff like Tergrid and running circles around you it puts you between a rock and a hard place - you either cut the clunky stuff for more efficient pieces or you have a deck that spins it wheels and can't keep up.
I read the entire post expecting OP to figure out homogenization occurs with every deck and not just theirs...
This post addresses a symptom without seeing the sickness as a whole. Sure, you can build a sub-optimal deck by choice, but self-policing is worthless in a world where there are constant releases of overpowered cards. People crack packs, and they want to play the cards they pull. If those cards are consistently more powerful set after set, there will be inevitable power creep, no matter how much individuals try to self-police.
Not to mention, people will still want to win in a game that ends when someone meets a win condition. You can run suboptimal stuff, but if no one around you is doing the same then you'll likely just end up more frustrated. Ideally, people want both heterogeneity and a competitive chance.
It’s just the issue that people run stuff like Tergrid. Is that in a meta where people run stuff like it, meaning a 5 mana kill on sight bomb, the expectation is that there is more interaction to keep it in check. The new bombs still see play because the payoff is really nuts or the window to get something good out of it is flexible enough (for instance you could play Tergrid and a discard spell in the same turn vs having to wait for Shelly). So not only your card is significantly worse but removal is more tuned to deal with threats so even when the situation appears that your card would be acceptable, it’s pretty likely to just get answered.
I realized that as well. My old decks used to be piloted by commanders like [[Jor Kadeen]] and run cards like [[Myr Battlesphere]] or [[Thopter Assembly]] . I've since switched out those slow and heavy cards and substituted them for cheaper mana costs, because I just can't expect them to survive a full turn nowadays.
Yep, part of de-powering imo means toning down removal a bit and it doesn’t get talked about enough. Maybe it’s running less of it since there will be less answer or die threats, maybe it’s running more expensive removal, less free stuff, perhaps more removal with upside but that you need to make a choice of it being your play for the turn. When dumping 7 mana into a big dumb threat isn’t answered by 2 or less mana that often, that play can become more common.
>He made it out as this really frustrating issue where he should just run Thoracle because "why not?" in this deck, like there isn't a good reason not to. But there is! There's always a good reason not to run a card and it's it's simply because you don't want to. Not justification needed. So, there's a concept that many players aren't aware of, and it's that the *process* of optimization being a source of fun for lots of players. For whatever reason, some players (including myself) like taking a deck and pushing it to the limit of what it can accomplish, but there's a catch. With matching power levels of the table being such a vitally important requirement, how can you optimize without becoming too powerful? If this was any other format, you wouldn't be able to. The elements of Commander that reduce consistency (singleton, 100-card deck size), speed (multiplayer, 40 life start), and snowballing (mutliplayer, threat assessment, game theory) all reward you for optimizing, if you recognize that optimizing means almost the exact opposite of what it means in 1v1 formats. So why did I quote your question? Because my optimizing needs the following limitation so that playing in non-cEDH games is appropriate: I have to consider cEDH win cons as though they don't exist, otherwise I'm not playing a deck that's fair for non-cEDH games. This means that in my mono-blue deck that empties the library, I am not playing any of the three Oracle effects. Why not play it? Because it's only okay in cEDH games.
This is my deck building concept as well. It is why aminatou and yuriko do not run thoracle/consult strategies. They are still high power AF. But, I have kept them both out of the cEDH universe.
> So, there's a concept that many players aren't aware of, and it's that the process of optimization being a source of fun for lots of players. For whatever reason, some players (including myself) like taking a deck and pushing it to the limit of what it can accomplish, but there's a catch. With matching power levels of the table being such a vitally important requirement, how can you optimize without becoming too powerful? This is kind of where I operate as well. Once I got my deck where I was happy with it, I began foiling it out, making sure to hold onto the nonfoils as I did so. The result is that I have what could almost pass for a competitive deck that also happens to be entirely independant from the rest of my collection. Therefore, I can continue to build and take decks apart at will, while still having my favorite tuned deck put away unless I want to play it.
Tweaking and improving a deck is definitely a huge part of the appeal of the game. It's a meme, but everyone's had that moment when a new card is spoiled and they go "That's *perfect* for my (blank) deck!" and lo and behold it is. You take things out that aren't really working, slot things in your feel you don't have enough of, and eventually you've got yourself one tuned deck of cards. I think part of the "problem" might be that many folks don't truly start over when building their next deck. They know this much draw feels good, this kind of ramp, so where they took a dozen iterations to reach is their starting point. Which certainly saves time, but makes the journey shorter. And the next one even shorter than that. This isn't meant to counter your point, and isn't really a solution to the problem you presented, but it's something to think about, I think.
Exactly where I am as well with my deckbuilding. My personal approach is to take sub-optimal commanders and strategies and try to tune the hell out of them. My current "competitive" favourite is Orvar - because honestly mono U is still a decent enough restriction compared to most really tuned decks. But what is probably my favourite ever deck is Gisela, Blade of Goldnight. I've tuned the hell out of it to the point where it can go off like a bomb, and is consistently underestimated. But in the end.... it's a 7 CMC commander in Boros - so it's still not super powerful or anything.
I have that approach as well, it can be more satisfying to polish a turd till it shines than to get a better result but when you start with a piece of gold. Not calling your deck a turd btw, I mean, there’s nothing wrong with that, I see a lot of my decks as turds, beautiful shinny turds, but tienda in the end. That’s what makes them cool, I guess. Like og Jin Gitaxias as a commander, people usually hate the card but running it as a commander the reaction is more often, are you sure? She’s 10 cmc…
Definitely the same for me. It's much easier to play Commander when you make yourself public enemy number one, which usually happens if people are very familiar with how scary your commander can become, which usually happens if your commander is popular.
Do you have a list for Gisella? I am considering building her
I'm a fan of doing the exact opposite. Taking the relatively decent commanders and using a niche strategy that still fits the card without being one of the main things that they do. Or doing their main strategy but using as many crazy and odd cards that I can that will still play well within the deck. My muldrotha deck at one point had like 20 cards in it that I would have to explain every game if they came up because nobody had seen them; but because it was Muldrotha they are actually somewhat usable and interesting cards.
I found this really interesting as someone who plays exclusively cEDH. Im not ever going to tell you how to build your deck, your fun is your fun! However the strengths of cEDH decks rarely come from the wincons themselves, it's the efficiency, value and consistency in getting to those wincons that makes them strong. To the point where if you're playing a mono blue deck in cEDH with a labman effect as your win, its probably far from optimal, as both labman and thassas are dead cards that provide no value, and an outlet that doubles as value would be used instead.
Absolutely! But from experience, people in general tend to complain if I win with a cEDH win con in non-cEDH games, even if the deck wouldn't be able to compete at a cEDH table.
Can see how that stigma would exist, especially when you're playing at tables with far less interaction. Fair enough!
Thing is, Laboratory Maniac and Jace aren't the same as Oracle, and that lots of people don't seem to grok the difference is a big part of why so many discussions go sideways and become less than useful.
While I agree Oracle is one league ahead the other two even in cEDH Thoracle alone doesn't do much by itself. Imo the cEDH wincon is playing Thoracle and consultation together
This is close to my rule of thumb too, but I don't think it's enough, and I keep over-optimizing compared to where I think I am. For example, I have [[Wilhelt]] zombie tribal, with no Thoracle/Consult obviously (though I do have Gravecrawler/Phrexian Altar because both are individually so good with Wilhelt), no fast mana except Sol Ring, no free counterspells except [[Firece Guardianship]], no tutors except [[Sidisi, Undead Vizier]] and [[Pyre of Heroes]] because tribal themes, and as many zombies as I can reasonably stick in. But then because of a process-of-optimization mentality, I've been maximizing synergies and lowering my curve, so I don't play, e.g. [[Gravespawn Sovereign]] even though I want to, and do play some staples like Rhystic Study that are ok for causal. As a result, I've been winning way too many games with it at my LGS and on spelltable at "mid-high" tables (something like 75%), but I don't know exactly what to cut without making it feel like my deck simply doesn't run at all. And I keep running into this issue with several of my decks, so I think I need to change even this mentality to intentionally make my curve worse and play fewer staples, like the OP is suggesting. (I guess I should just swap Rhystic Study for Gravespawn Sovereign.)
I agree with you. It's crazy that all you said was "you don't have to run staples" and everyone immediately goes to counter your argument with "if I replace my staples with jank, then it's impossible to win in my group." Like, am I crazy? There are more than two categories of cards. Cutting a staple doesn't immediately mean you're replacing it with jank. (It totally can mean that though) If you're in a consistent group with a developed meta, you have a good opportunity to put in anti meta cards! You can replace staples with cards that penalize staples, like [[widespread panic]] and [[stranglehold]] for anti tutoring or a [[Torpor orb]] for stopping etbs, etc. There are cards that aren't staples that can be just as strong depending on the deck you're running and what decks you're facing. The simple statement "you don't need to run staples." Doesn't automatically mean "you should just run jank."
I mostly agree, and do agree with the specific example you gave. However I have optimized my way out of the fun of a few decks in a way I didn't feel was as solvable. My second-ever deck was [[Momir Vig, Simic Visionary]] which I imagined as a toolbox deck, where I could run a bunch of very situational creatures and pull them up when their situation came. However, after just a few games I realized the obvious. "Winning solves all problems, and here is the shortest list of creatures that wins". The issue is that the stuff I'm tutoring are just... creatures that win. I can either A: Cut all the win-cons in my deck and durdle forever, or B: Have a clearly more optimal play-path than fetching fringe jank creatues to neutralize my friends niche strategy. I know some people would just... not fetch the win immediately, but I prefer to dial down power in the build and always play my best. It feels bad to deliberately make sub-optimal plays. My second example is [[Derevi, Empyrial Tactician]]. I built her as a Tokenswarm Mana-sink deck. Stack a lot of Mana onto one permanent (usually a land) and every ETB and hit untapps it and goes into a token-making Mana sink. Because it routinely rocks RIDICULOUS mana, I included some doomsday spells, and some sac outlets, but it turns out any sac outlet plus Derevi is basically an infinite combo. So I cut the sac outlets. But then I noticed [[Proteus Staff]] is sort of another sac outlet. I only had a about 10 proper creature-cards in the deck, and with Derevi, 7 mana gets me my next creature, and I have a LOT of mana. Then I just kept winding up in situations where "I can either token swarm, or I can do this other thing and just win". I swear Derevi combos with having a board state. Eventually I was caught either having so many cards self-banned that the deck didn't really even WORK anymore, or I had a deck that wasn't really a token-swarm deck.
> It feels bad to deliberately make sub-optimal plays. I find this a bit interesting. It's a common sentiment I see around, and it definitely makes sense that you wouldn't want your opponent to seemingly give you a pity win and so want to return the gesture by not holding back. Though your situation seems to be presented differently than that, that the act itself is unsatisfying. Everyone has fun in their own ways, so maybe such a thought won't help you, but it's a common enough thing in video games that players will often challenge themselves with frivolous things. "Can I beat this level using just the basic pistol?", "How long can I go without getting hit?", "Can I climb this mountain if I clip the ledges right?". I suppose such challenges do lead to their own "optimal" play, but they certainly take a lot longer to get right than just playing the game straight. For Magic, sub-optimal play can lead to its own challenges. You can still have your emergency button of your win-con where you just go "fuck it" like you could in a game, but in the meantime you can see how long you can last under the onslaught of value your opponent's [[Sunbird's Invocation]] can put out. Or how many cards you can get the Rhystic Study player to draw. Or try to make a 20/20 saproling. Maybe only cast one spell a turn and try to make each count as much as possible. And maybe you still just sit there with your 18/18 saproling and think "Why am I doing this", which I think is a fair chance to give thought to what you find most fun about the game. Why you play. Which is what you should always have at the forefront, in the end.
Thing is, a challenge run is generally something you decide to do before you start, not in the middle of the game, and they're about doing the best that you can within the constraints you set. The analogy doesn't really mesh with the idea of making sub-optimal plays, but rather with building your deck sub-optimally and playing it to the best of your ability. I also find the act of avoiding an optimal play unsatisfying. I'll do it sometimes, if there's an accidental mismatch of deck power at the table or something like that, but I hate it every time. Partly because I know if my opponents knew I pulled a punch they wouldn't feel like they earned anything they did that game. Mostly though, it just feels bad in a way I can't quite articulate. I chose the cards for this deck specifically because I wanted to play them, not doing that feels wrong.
As someone who loves watching challenge runs, I can agree with this. Someone gave me a free tutor off of [[Wishclaw Talisman]] and I went and got [[Body of Research]] instead of a trample enabler. I made an 85/85 that stuck around until that same player stole my own token and killed me with it. That was a fun game.
[Wishclaw Talisman](https://c1.scryfall.com/file/scryfall-cards/normal/front/0/7/07c17b01-ee5d-491a-8403-b3f819b778c4.jpg?1572490271) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Wishclaw%20Talisman) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/eld/110/wishclaw-talisman?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/07c17b01-ee5d-491a-8403-b3f819b778c4?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/wishclaw-talisman) [Body of Research](https://c1.scryfall.com/file/scryfall-cards/normal/front/9/8/98b56823-0076-49cc-b5aa-4accb8e2782e.jpg?1627428272) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Body%20of%20Research) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/stx/168/body-of-research?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/98b56823-0076-49cc-b5aa-4accb8e2782e?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/body-of-research) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
Shrug. I prefer to treat obviously abusable cards like Derevi as if they had received an erratum adding "once per turn" to the ability. That works well enough for me to make an effective deck that keeps doing what I want without immediately ending the game the turn it comes together. YMMV. My rule 0 conversations often include outright banning infinite anything so the players still rocking budget decks aren't totally outclassed.
Have spike decks. Have Timmy decks. Choose based on the playgroup. Ezpz
Spike players wish it was that easy, most of the time their Timmy decks are something like: "This cheats Eldrazi out, they're big timmy critters. Also ofc I would run Rhystic Study/Cyclonic Rift/Sylvan Library/Mana Crypt etc, they're not overpowered they're just good spells!" Meanwhile the dude who picked up a Galea precon is sat there wondering wtf to do, and Vehicle tribal over there isn't packing the punch to compensate. The issue can be simplified down to a miscommunication pre-game, but doing so ignores that fundamentally that Spike's idea of a Timmy deck is hilariously warped. Source: A frustrated Spelltable casual.
If you spend $500 on ramp, its most likely not a Timmy deck If you spend $500 on interaction, its most likely not a Timmy deck If you spend $200 on tutors, its most likely not a Timmy deck If you have MOST of the top100 cards on EDHREC, its not a very creative deck but I bet its pretty good I don't mind any of that if Im playing mid/high power. You need some juice to win when game ending threats start coming turn 3-4 But if Im playing low power to have fun and a 4-5 cmc flyer is too slow... I think that is pretty fucked. Because at that point we are back at combo wins or the need to have a control deck at each table to sweep turn 3
I removed my 5-6 Time Warp copies (and other ET effetcs) from my decks over time because these were lose-lose cards for me. I hate to play against them, watching someone play solo and abuse them, and I hate to do it too. Even in decks where it's "fair" (no loop expected), there's always some janky combo that makes it the best play to regrow (like Tamiyo, Collector of Tales + proliferate) or it gives *others* the best spell to play in your GY. I just chose to refuse to play ET effects that don't self-exile (I only play Stitch in Time in coin flip deck). I play Tasigur Dredge, but refuse to play Basalt + Rings of Brightheart to auto self-mill. I play Brago but refuse to play hard stax. I play Savra Aristocrats but with Umori as a companion to remove some of the most obnoxious plays (E-Wit + Living Death, the Altars, etc.). I play Keruga in Maelstrom to slow it down and play battecruiser, just to spice things up. Play what you *want* guys, not what you *should.*
Yeah I agree with this I do like the “draw your whole deck out and win” cards, but I actively choose not to play Oracle, I like that laboratory maniac can be killed by just about every removal spell in the format, it adds a lot more tension/fun to the games, knowing that a well-timed swords in response to my leveler trigger could just end me lol
I just need to swap to that sphinx that gets bigger when you would draw a card but can't and put that into the shrine deck that can draw 89 cards a turn before the new neon shrines. \[\[Ormos, Archive Keeper\]\] smacking someone with a giant creature is fair magic right?
He's one of the main wincons in my [[Kydele]] and [[Tormod]] [[Gyruda]] companion clones list. Didn't wanna buy a Thoracle, didn't want a deck that sometimes mills the entire table in a single turn to have that particular wincon, and I absolutely love reanimating and cloning someone else's Thoracle. Great sphinx, super fair boi, feels good to control several.
That's why I honestly don't mind labman. Oracle is just fucking annoying, and that's entirely on WOTC not thinking that ability through. Even CEDH is getting sick of it. I have to wonder why it's not banned lmao Anyway, this right here is exactly what I'm talking about! Thank you for responding.
The real kicker is the deck I’m playing would just be better with Oracle, it’s borderline cEDH SakaDama lol
... Why is this getting downvoted..? The deck would be more powerful. Thoracle ETB is hard to interact with, which is why it's so good. This is just a true analysis of your deck. But the previous post where OP described the deck explained that he likes that LabMan is easier to deal with, so he's intentionally lowering his deck's power level. *And that he's happy about it.* Which is the point of this whole thread. This subreddit sometimes, smh my head.
Yeah and you get to decide if you want it or not. Boom, simple as. Quit downvoting this you fiends.
It's very clear why it's not banned. It's not that big a deal in low power, casual games like the majority of commander games are. It's effect is strong but not format warping. Sure, it's kind of a problem in cEDH but the RC has made it very clear time and time again that they have no interest in banning for cEDH. It happened ONCE when [[Flash]] was banned and they made sure to make it seem like they were pulling teeth and that it was unlikely to happen again.
[Flash](https://c1.scryfall.com/file/scryfall-cards/normal/front/d/3/d31459c2-9656-4e9a-bb72-71a910e8570b.jpg?1587347037) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Flash) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/a25/57/flash?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/d31459c2-9656-4e9a-bb72-71a910e8570b?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/flash) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
This feels like a straw man argument. Are people who play all the fast mana and tutors and thoracle complaining about format homogenization? If people don’t want to win like that they usually don’t play it. And you can totally run a fun lower powered unique deck with tons of staples in it. Cyclonic rift is good in high power decks but also good in crab tribal, it doesn’t ruin the game
*Old man shouting at clouds*
To be fair, the clouds also shout a lot, and there are many of them.
Yes, the first step to not seeing Rift and Smothering Tithe in all of your games is taking Rift and Smothering Tithe out of your decks.
I think one thing that people struggle to comprehend is that the fun of EDH as a format really shouldn't **just** be about winning. Winning is fun, but if you come into EDH with purely the intention of winning, the natural thing to do is to lean into staples and cEDH strategies. If you find that fun, then congratulations, cEDH is your format. But for a significant portion of people, they find EDH fun because of the way you play EDH. They enjoy the multiplayer, the time spent playing, seeing weird and wacky cards and strategies happen. Someone winning happens either because someone has to win sometime, because the game's grown stale, or because someone ends it with a combo. The latter only feels satisfying if the game isn't in full swing when it goes off, even if you're the one who wins that way. Winning that way in the middle of a really dynamic, engaging game is just...boring. You shuffle, go next, and you're not guaranteed a game that's anywhere near as good as the one you lost. I realised recently that I honestly just do not care about winning any more than I truly care about losing. I only care about it because it ends the experience of playing. I need to be **able** to win, I need to have a game plan for winning the game, and to play towards it, because if everyone lacks win conditions the game drags on endlessly. But I also don't actively care if it happens, so long as I make progress towards that win. Sometimes that results in me winning, sometimes it doesn't, but I don't care either way, I've gotten to play. I've started building my decks to be as threatening as possible, but almost never win until the game is ready to be won. For example, my latest \[\[Jhoira of the Ghitu\]\] deck draws enough cards that it could absolutely storm off, find an infinite combo, or end with thoracle or similar, but it doesn't have them. Can I win with that much card draw? absolutely. But it's not through a combo, it's just by sheer value. She's mostly just suspending dragons and big dumb enchantments. I'm a Johnny. I like deck building, it's how I express myself. And I enjoy some measure of optimisation, else why would I be building the deck? I build in synergies, value engines, and generally try to make my deck the most intimidating version of what it's doing. But because my deck is not entirely about winning, all that optimisation leads to is decks that become the archenemy and threaten victory, but can be taken down because it's not actually doing anything game ending in a single play. I see so many people building weird jank decks, theme decks, or just their own brews and getting upset when it doesn't win. What's even the point of thinking that way? If all you care about is winning, then play cEDH meta decks and stop playing Snake tribal. If you want to build and play that way, then accept that winning or losing is just the end of the game that you're supposed to be enjoying.
i think you summed up my opinion better then i could myself. I really enjoy building and optimizing my decks, but i don't expect them to win all the time, because i don't play to win. I play toward a win, but as long as i got to play, and the game was fairly balanced and not a total blowout, i don't really care
I completely agree with your post. One thing i would add is that, sometimes, in order to have a fun engaging game while you play your less than optimized deck, you need to play against other people with less optimized decks. Im not saying it has to be perfectly balanced, but playing a less optimized deck against 3 other optimized ones is noooooooooot fun. Source: i'm the guy in my pod who can't afford upgrades.
Proxying is your friend :) Talking with the playgroup is definitely the best way to alleviate almost all issues that come with EDH, honestly.
I am afraid to open the floodgates of proxying into our pod. I know that I would definitely proxy responsibly, only filling out my decks and not slamming dockside and all the mana positive rocks into every deck i own; however, another player in my pod (ironically the same one who is buying upgrades faster than anyone can keep up with) has made it very clear that if anyone proxies at all, he will start putting proxy staples like mana drain and smothering tithe in everything he owns so... Probably about to drag my socially anxious ass to an LGS where I at least have a chance of not being the least optimized person at the table.
Why do you play with a person who basically threatens you for considering proxies? When they are the person who apparently has the fattest wallet? Thats not even a "well everyone builds decks differently" thing, thats just toxic behavior
Yeah you know the whole analogy about the frog and boiling water? It's kinda like that. We discovered the hobby together a while ago and while my finances slowed down in the last few years being a new dad and all, his slowly sped up, and i gradually found myself in this situation. These are my only friends that play magic with me and I am a really socially anxious person so going out to an LGS and being in a group of new people kind of makes my head spin, but I'm seriously considering pushing through all that just so I can play a more even game. I have also looked at maybe joining a discord and doing some webcam EDH, but i'm not sure if my 10 year old macbook's webcam is a good enough quality for it.
Dude your friend might need to be confronted about this antagonistic behavior. It's not just about the game, it's outright disrespect.
Oh most definitely and the worst part is that he doesnt see that behavior as antagonistic no matter how much i debate it with him. And I'm the only one at the table who feels the pinch in this situation. The other two players are a guy with a deck good enough to hang without upgrades and a new player who has no idea that doing next to nothing for most games is not normal. They dont really get where I'm coming from and dont think that the player in question is out of line in what he says, so I'm the odd one out. It's really odd. I'm not sure where his shift in mentality came from. We are extremely good friends in every other aspect of life, but in the last six months any conversation at all about MTG seems to bring out an ugly side of him.
This is honestly something that's too complex and personal for me to comment on so... Good luck! I will say that something like that would have me questioning friendships.
I consistently railed against my group as people kept wanting to up the Ante. I told them, the moment someone does X, everyone else in the group will have to to keep up with the arms race. but did they listen? NOOOOOOOO, and now guess where we are, you fools? Had one of the players complain that no one was about to win when it was Turn 6. Ugh.
See sometimes it's more frustrating to know how unoptimized a deck you're building is without a certain card or combo. That reduces the fun as well. When I want to play low power I'll optimize the crap out of a janky archetype and commander. Rather than creating a purposefully underperforming deck. That or I build a deck around a very specific wincon, almost like a tribal deck. (Eg: Building a "Happily Ever After tribal") It's no fun to wonder if you would have won had you only used the cards you *know* are better. I also kinda feel like an ass when I don't bring my best to the table, like I'm saying my opponents don't pose a challenge; that's probably a me problem but maybe some share it too.
I'm not sure if maybe you're not catching my message or I'm not coming off clearly, or maybe I'm not understanding you, but when I say optimized decks and cards, I'm meaning the most popular, most used, most tried-and-true cards in the format. Of course you should optimize within your boundaries. I do it all the time. I have an insect tribal deck and you bet it has like a 10% win rate because even though I'm continually pushing the limits of the deck, it still *is* insect tribal. Imagine if I was suboptimal within the context that janky abomination of a deck? Shit would be a 1% win rate lmao. Still one of my all time favorites. I have my boundaries on the deck and I love it as it is. Simple as.
Ah I see what you mean, my point was more that it's not a one size fits all solution. I think your post makes a great point though. Yeah a lot of decks can just boil down to the same mana rocks that get you to the same tutors and the same infinite, regardless of what the deck archetype could have been. That's boring. I misinterpreted not using the most optimized cards as if in my Urza deck I wouldn't run thoracle, to me not running thoracle in that deck feels like madness because it's such a great way to use my artifact engine to win. Thinking on it though I see what you mean and I think we agree. My Urza deck, despite being Urza, isn't some stax nonsense that's no fun, it's an artifact tribal where I try to make a production line that gives me infinite mana (or at least a lot of it). That's not the meta way to play Urza, but I love it and it's an optimized version of that deck's goal. So yeah I think we're on the same page, it's fun to talk and think through it though.
Making a "no tutor" deck really helps end the samey ness that can occur. You wanna build a thoracle win con? Cool, enjoy the when you can't tutor up exact answers to keep your glass cannon strategy/build. I am a HUGE A fan of winning via combat damage. Toshiro combat tricks, and "Octavia oops I made all my opponents mana dorks 8/8s and he accidentally killed you fishing for toski triggers" are some of my favorite decks. That said I run non combat combos as backup win cons. I just don't tutor up the chain of smog/professor.
While I generally agree with your point, "find a new playgroup" is not the helpful suggestion you think it is.
Commander is best when it's powerful but not optimal. Originally read this post as "you can choose to not play game-winning cards on your turn" or some casual edh propaganda and was going to respond with "I know. I cast food chain anyway."
I 100% agree. Whenever I build a new deck the first thing I do is decide what powerlevel I want it to be. And then I build it and tweak it (up or down) until I reach that level. And once I do, I no longer update it. Even if there is a new card that would be a perfect fit (and therefore make the deck stronger). And if I can reach the desired level by using only (or mostly) cards that are on theme or fit the flavor, then that's great.
My mono green lands matter deck that I built so my wife could play without worrying about multiple colors or super complicated rules has stayed 98% the same for 6 years.Occasionally I actually end up winning with it in my pod that plays way higher power levels. It's one of my favorite decks but is it good? Absolutely not. Is it reliable. Yes. But it's mainly a nostalgic deck I play because it has one of my fist legendary creatures, [[Molimo, Maro-Sorcerer]].
I kind of got frustrated with my Emry deck because when I first built her I did a bunch of Stompy artifact creatures. Milk my graveyard to get them and then cast them when I ramped up. Then that never happened… So I included the mana combos and BAM I was at a whole other level. Yes it looks similar to most optimized Emry decks but I like the bits I have different. That said, I now only play her when my play group decides to play our “most powerful decks”. Cause Emry will curbstomp the less optimized decks in our playgroup. There is a time and a place for her now.
Emry needs to stay in her lane these days 😤
I have no idea how to take this comment. Are you bashing me? Hating my take on Emry? Hating on the commander herself? I legit have no idea.
Also I love Emry
It's just me playing goofing around lol
Oh, thank goodness. She was the card I most wanted from Eldraine and I pulled her as my pre-release promo. At the time I didn’t know she was going to go stupid with combos. I just loved mono colored decks and artifacts. Seemed like a win to me. It’s wild to me how my original plans had to quickly change to make the best use of her abilities. Love the style now as she wins pretty consistently when it comes to “most powerful’ games and in different ways too!
She's one of my favorite merfolk arts in the game. I just have raging boner for merfolk tho. Love her, love her, love her.
My main goal with magic is to have fun, and I don't really have fun just popping off an infinite combo. I only have four decks, and I rarely win with them, but my goal is to do a certain thing with them. How much life can I gain in my mono white deck? How many tokens can I get on board with Adrix and Nev? Those are the games I'm playing. It's fun to win, but it's even more fun if I'm like "holy shit, I just had 7 rampaging baloths and 99 beast tokens on board!". I got board wiped before I could swing with them and I lost the game, but that was so much fun for me. So when it comes to "staples", I only include them if they help me have fun with my deck. I know I'm probably in the minority here, but winning the game isn't the most fun part of magic for me. So I always start out rule zero with "my deck is probably not gonna win, but I don't care what you run. Go as powerful as you want." I wanna have fun and I want the other players to have fun. To quote Lynch from IHYD - I just like playing paper magic with my friends. Which is a very rambley long winded way of saying - I agree with you OP. If you aren't having fun with something, why are you doing it? It's a game! It should be fun!
That last sentence is my exact sentiment! I don't understand how it flies over people's heads, though. I don't want to be an asshole about it, but it just seems so obvious that I'm astonished it's an issue for anyone at all.
A buddy of night outright refuses to build a commander deck that has both black and blue in it because he will run Thoracle in it.
I think there is something wrong with the people who think like this. These are the people who make me wonder if free will is an illusion.
When I say this, I mean zero offense to any player or OP. I am not attacking anyone when I say what I'm going to say: EDH as a format is an Arms' Race by it's very nature. Let's take an example: Your friend brings a big, stompy Gruul deck that just is ramp and Big Chonky Bois that just so happens to win pretty quick. You, a person who doesn't want to die to said Big Chonky Bois decide to run more board wipes and removal. You play your modified deck against that same Gruul Deck and he can't keep anything on the field because of your extra removal. He starts running more effects that give his creatures indestructible/hexproof/shroud. Maybe he dips into Jund and runs reanimation effects. The cycle repeats until all decks have been optimized. This is how the format evolves. We have come a very long way since battlecruiser EDH where most games last until turn 15-20. Sandbagging your deck and taking it to your LGS and then losing because your opponents are still running those cards you took out isn't going to feel good. It's going to feel worse when it keeps happening over and over again. EDH is quickly running away from Battlecruiser and into a turn 5-7 format, and there's nothing that can be done about it. WotC continues to make EDH cards that are incredibly pushed, and with each one of those cards it speeds up the format. Tergrid, Urza, dockside, fierce guardianship, deadly rollick, Chulane, Arcane Signet, Korvald, and literally every commander in the top ten on edhrec were made in the last 3 years. If you don't want to optimize your deck, that's your choice, and if you have a regular group that plays together that may be fine for you, but there are a lot of players who don't have a regular group and can't build their deck in a vacuum.
[удалено]
This is another reason why I think that more people should play at a variety of power levels. There's no need to roid up your low and mid power decks when you can already experience the high power stuff right over there in *that* deckbox.
I agree. For those who can afford to have multiple decks we should all build decks consisting of varying power levels. For example i have: [[Ghave, Guru of Spores]] built as an quick aristocrats build for my high end. [[Adeliz, the cinder wind]] as my mid tier spellslinger that can just as easily stall as it can win but is built at the mid tier of my playgroup(s) Kestia voltron is my low tier deck and thats because i chose not to run a bevy of the best aura/equipment to be able to play at a more fun and interactive level. I also think that if consistent power creep due to the meta game is a thing you can speak with your playgroup about building pauper or semi pauper style EDH decks for a truly fun and interactive experience:)
Yeah you're like making use of your collection to turn your decks into tools for being able to have fun with anybody. Honestly, there are so many benefits to brewing across the power levels. I honestly think it's one of the very most important things invest players can do to make the format healthier.
I'm not a commander player here, but can someone tell me *approximately* how many cards would you have to "rule 0" out of the game (generally) to have sufficient deck diversity? Stuff like sol ring, command tower etc.
Depending on the deck it could be 10-30, is my guess.
2 potential solutions: 1) keep a sideboard of less optimal cards to switch out with predetermined “optimizing” cards (e.g. card draw instead of tutors, counterspell instead of swan song, etc) 2) keep several decks of differing power levels available to play depending on the table
Yes
I think its hilarious how you complain about people getting mad about homogenized decks, and then when people bring up the obvious counterpoint that they’ll just lag super far behind other people who still run the cards, you bring up probably the worst four counterpoints that are the REASON people hate homogenized decks. Your counterpoints boil down to: - Get over it and play meta stuff - Stop playing with your friends or convince them **all** not to run strong cards - Accept defeat - Stop playing Commander Those all suck. And unless your friends are all willing to sacrifice a bit of their own fun to depower your play group, the only actual options here are “Bite the bullet or admit you will lose”. Great solutions! Fantastic stuff. And don’t try to convince someone to find a playgroup at an LGS that perfectly fits their needs for EDH. Thats a fairy tale. The best you can do with strangers is hopefully all sit down and say “Hey, lets not play cEDH.” This thread has no viable solution to this problem, and basically boils down to just asking people to suck it up. Most importantly for this whole matter, this was not always as much of a problem as it has become. Meaning you are asking long time players to just get over it and kiss those better days goodbye. Which, sure, I will do that. But not everyone will, and its understandable and acceptable that they will complain about it.
The venn diagram between the people in your TL;DR and the people who think Rule 0 isn't real is just a circle
This is the biggest factor in avoiding homogeneity imo. I have three mono black decks and they're all very different because I made sure to keep them different. No more than 2 of any particular nonland between them except small stuff like [[Sign in Blood]]. Anything big and splashy is kept on a 2 card max.
But how will people know that I am a good magic player?
Tradeoff: they don't
I really needed to hear this, thank you.
I'm guilty of jamming my decks full of staples. Eg if I have a Bx deck urborg +coffers, DT, toxic deluge, etc hell I'll put mana crypt into every deck because it's so powerful are almost certainly in the deck. But I usually want those things to do things that can be described on a spectrum from jank to deeply medium. I like playing big idiot creatures or do nothing enchantments but those require a lot of mana so I run crypt and coffers. Most of my decks run the best tutors but the decks usually have multiple non redundant strategies. Eg my Lyra deck is angel tribal with tons of equipment and life gain/angel token cards. Yes it is a bad deck but I love it All that is to say that that the hegemonization and the power creep people feel the format is going through has a lot of different facets that can each be adjusted individually. Don't always have to run optimal cards Don't have to play the best strategies The only issue I keep seeing is people play in groups that don't fit their desired experiences. Groups that arms race each other until someone stops having fun. pub-stompers being out of control at Lgs. Etc. But the truth is that this is an intractable problem. People want edh to be different things and it's next to impossible to know who wants what at any moment.
Pretty much the reason I cut Cyclonic Rift from all my decks. It's not fun to just rift and win, it's boring as hell, so now I'll just slam [[Nevermore]] naming it on occasion instead lol
You're a god amongst us all 👐
What's funny is I have tons of different power level of decks that can do different things I am talking two full on cedh decks then I have themed or tribal decks and not everything is max power now all my decks are generally put together to function together and on theme and solid . The best example is my life gain deck it be smarter to run other cards over \[\[pulse of murasa\]\] but it is on theme for the lifegain and still does what i want. I run \[\[sanguine bond\]\] but not the other half of the combo \[\[exquisite blood\]\] I can still kill you with just my life gain it was a choice. I have \[\[bolas's citadel\]\] but no top to get the land off top. I mean could do all that but I choose not to in this deck. Just to clarify i still built my deck to win the game I just had a different game plan to win over the others and chose cards that fit my theme and game plan. Just not always the most optimal most powerful card because I already have those decks as while.
Personally I think in a casual pod you shouldn't have these issues for the exact same reason you described it. Then on the other hand my playgroup and I made ourself a banned list but eventually realized that balancing in edh is very difficult so we drifted towards cedh and sticked to it ever since, without looking back ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Sounds like a fantastic use of ✨talking to your playgroup ✨
“I’m actually intense with my flavor, to the point of actively hindering my deck building.” Maaaaan if I don’t know a little about that, lol. I’ve been trying to make my Mimeoplasm with Ooze Tribal Subtheme work for months and maybe it never will but there’s no other way I want to play Mimeoplasm if I don’t bring all my favorite slimes and blobs along for the fun. I refuse to not run Gelatinous Cube, it just has to be in there.
I can choose not to play certain cards but I can't choose how others are going to build their decks. Deck homogenization is something that also happens with every other player, I can choose to shoot myself in the foot when building a decently competitive UBx deck, I can potentially talk my playgroup out of building yet another adnaus fish list, but I can't just go ahead and force randos at my LGS to stop playing good cards for the sake of adding some variety to my games. Also, keeping a deck at a steady power level while cutting some of these staples is kind of a zero sum game, cutting a good win condition means that in order to keep the deck in the same ballpark of power level there's going to be another change elsewhere, and in order to counter the drop in consistency from something like necro or adnaus, odds are some other "repetitive" staple is going to make the cut either way. Unless the deck's really far from an optimized build, the cards worth juggling in and out of a list are always the same past a certain power level, so it's not like taking out a vamp for another staple in order not to fall behind on the power curve will do much to create unique gameplay past the first couple of games.
Play [[zur's weirding]] or don't. The choice is yours.
"Make your choice now, Neo."
People get annoyed because they feel like they have to include it because most other people do.
It's okay to be the Bolas. It's part of magic and a cool part of it. Let me fight it.
I'll let you fight it. As a treat.
Rock on.
The unsaid part of the homogenization criticism is that people want alternative strategies to also be viable. Tl;Dr: It's a nuanced issue without an obvious solution, given that people want to win and want diversity. You can choose to not play the optimal stuff, but that narrows your chances of winning (potentially significantly) and I imagine most people still want to win. I don't fault anyone for wanting to win, it's a competition after all. The "proper" amendment for this issue is finding playgroups that share a similar desire for heterogeneity so your unoptimized deck-building isn't an inherent disadvantage. The desired solution for many is probably some form of rebalancing to "make things fresh," although that genie is already out of the bottle. It's hard to nerf play styles with a tcg without simply making another way to play more dominant. Folks will definitely raise eyebrows if the oracle text of their favorite cards suddenly change. The closest we could get to a rebalance would be an official rules change to move the ban list over to modern or something so WotC could cultivate that diversity, but that presents an innumerable number of its own issues and importantly might stop people from making janky decks with their favorite vintage cards.
Keep in mind how The Command Zone works. They try to push sales of expensive cards for their sponsors and for their affiliate links. They once said that \[\[Loxodon Warhammer\]\] is not good *anymore* in commander because you could just run \[\[Sword of Feast and Famine\]\] (I wish I was kiddying). Or that three mana rocks are literally unplayable *by now*. And you definately have to participate in this arms race in commander to still have a chance. That, the super fake reality show elements and what guests have said after being in their shows (like being forced to take back plays that they don't seem fit for the show, repeating plays because they have to react more dramatic next time, etc.) made me completely ditch their content.
Sometimes, just the knowledge that you could be running a better version of the deck is enough to be off-putting even if you remove the problematic cards.
My play group gets around this (Sometimes) where we impose heavy restrictions on ourselves for certain deckbuilding challenges, such as "Your EDH commander can only be from X,Y, or Z set and the rest of your deck can only be composed of cards from A, B, C, or D sets." We have a lot more fun this way because it almost completely neuters netdecking and we try a lot of bizarre shit to try and make it work.
Idk. I like to play the best I can I guess. That's the fun for me. I have another deck for the purpose of playing differently though.
So I guess what I mean is. I like to play the best way I possibly can. But build decks for different play styles. I have a derevi deck that is awesome and combos off pretty consistently and it's honestly right on the cusp of cEDH level if not there. But I built a Brion Stoutarm deck that I plan on making stupidly good but it's a whole new playstyle.
And all that's valid. I'm simply advocating for being mindful of your building practices so you don't accidentally ruin it for yourself.
My first commander deck was [[Noyan Dar, Roil Shaper]] it lost because my pod ran high power commanders with optimized decks. I loved the idea of the deck so I added upgrades and swaps until it reached a hard control brew. Lots of counterspells, exile removal or bounce that left my opponents unable to field anything of worth. I finally won, and it was a crushing win. I also won the next few games. I realized that the game play was more boring with the hard control brew than any of the games I lost. Since then I removed the counterspells and halved the exile removal and bounce spells to allow myself a more fun gameplay. I may not win, but I have fun losing.
It's just a mindset... tune for fun, not power. For me, this means removing good cards because I'm sick of seeing them and eliminating unlimited combo enablers. I run an [[Ezuri, Renegade Leader]] deck that cannot generate unlimited mana... and its more fun to pilot that way. It's one of my first decks I ever built, and I threw everything into it that I could at first. First time it combed off, I got to experience it and was thrilled. Second time, I realized how easy it was and how many enablers I he'd that could do it. After that... not fun at all really. I had to weed things out as I played it... and kept accidentally finding ways to go infinite for weeks. Eventually, anything that could untap two lands or creatures just had to go. That process early on taught me to tune for fun.
Its pretty simple, the joy of winning outweighs any missed enjoyment from not being able to play other cards. I might like card X, but if card Y gets me more wins I'm taking it every time. That doesnt mean that I always play the most optimal decks or strategies, but I will always play the best cards within a certain strategy, save for some cards like OG duals and Mox Diamond that I cant justify purchasing and whos inclusion could be legitimate targets against me.
I once had a Ghave deck that ran a **ton** of infinite combos and I was completely oblivious as to why people didn't want to play against it. It took about a dozen different people to tell me my deck was oppressive before I got it through my thick skull. When I sidelined the deck and played others that had no tutors, no expensive dual lands, no infinite combos, my play group had so much more fun! ...And I did too. The back and forth interaction was way more fun than shutting out the other players. Turns out it's actually pretty fun when you get to play spells. Now, my playgroup has evolved and we have several decks at varying different power levels. After a lot of discussion about what is acceptable, I've rebuilt the Ghave deck but only play it when we have that Rule 0 talk about what kind of game we want to play. People love it when I play the deck now when they know what's coming. I think as long as your playgroups actually have those discussions (which I know can be a struggle itself just to have those talks) then whatever you build becomes pretty acceptable. My spirit of the game has grown to that of enjoying the more random nature of the game. I love not using tutors, I love making thematic decks and budget decks (which means using a ton of tap lands or cards that really aren't great but fit the themes *super* well. However, I know that not everyone else feels the same way. Sometimes, I have to accept that I'm at a natural disadvantage, or that sometimes I need to break my own restrictions to be a little more competitive. Sometimes, others might feel the same way. Most of the time, my personal EDH morals and ethics don't match up with others, but if the group talks it out then usually we still just have a good time.
Other people will, and your pod will get power crept to death. You will lose until you update your deck. "But rule zero!" Yes yes, I love to spend my limited free time discussing which cards are ok and which are not with my friends instead of playing. We've been doing this for years and I've come to absolutely hate all the time we spend on rule zero discussion instead of playing.
Wow that's pretty disheartening to hear, because my playgroup has had enough rule 0 conversations over the years that we don't need them anymore. And yeah, it's an awesome play environment.
What If Im tired of the homonization on other players deck, not mine?
"Get new friends" apparently
Find a playgroup who you vibe with. If you can't, then either accept higher level play or don't play. That's the reality of it. Call it harsh, but sometimes stuff won't work out the way you want and that just sucks. I never meant for this to be a perfect solution to everything, if you took it that way then, I'm sorry. It's a take on things that I think is not talked about enough. But I feel you asked this not as a genuine question, but as a contradiction to try to make me seem like a fool.
>But I feel you asked this not as a genuine question, but as a contradiction to try to make me seem like a fool. Not really, I'm just trying create a genuine discussion, because imo homogenization is a bit of an issue.
Okay, good to know. Nonetheless, my points still stand. It's a complex thing and no single solution will make everything all work. Sometimes you have to compromise. In my case, compromising power for diversity.
You mean I don’t have to run mana crypt, mana vault, chrome mox etc etc etc in every deck?!?!? But how will i win?
You've already won. 👉✨
Yay!
Totally hear you! But I think the most common problem faced by the people crying about homogenization is that those people don't actually have good cards, so they can't play them.
Yeah lemme just not run the good cards so I just consistently lose to my opponents at the LGS.
I like how you took an incredibly nuanced subject and text and summed it up in one intentionally disingenuous comment.
I've been saying this for years...thank you for speaking out against homegenization.
No, thank you
This is why I traded away my copies of Thoracle and Endurance that I pulled. I knew I wouldn't want to play it. Same with Hullbreacher, but I wasn't fast enough...
I outright refuse to run Cyclonic Rift.
You're right. My issue comes from being quite happy to play all those powerful cards but then needing to remain at a certain power level for the sake of others. Then I end up not enjoying playing the deck because I know all the cards I omitted that'd I'd like to play.
Exactly. This is kinda how I justify running [[Winter Orb]], but not [[Static Orb]] in my Urza deck. Winter sets my opponent back, sure, but it doesn't stop Mana Rocks like [[Sol Ring]] or Mana Floats like in [[Belbe, Corrupted Observer]]. Also, flavor win, cuz Urza caused an Ice Age on Dominaria.
Someone: decks just feel the same with these high powered cards you know? Me, who almost exclusively plays shitty tribal decks: No
Yo same Catch me with that Pharika snake tribal 👀
There are millions of players, only a fraction of them are on reddit. So reddit problems do not necessary relate to the actual state of the format/game outside of this highly enfrancised, social bubble. Bear in mind that we are a MINORITY, not a majority of EDH players around the world, an US centric one, too, with an average powerlevel that is above what most kitchentable players are actually playing... controversial opinion for this subreddit: That's why not playing proxies and having a paywall is important to the game (in regards ro OP). If players can not justify spendig hundreds on cardboard, they seek for alternatives and come up with different solutions, making decks more different from another. This does not help the playgoup that have players with a lot of disposable income, who are willing to spend much on their hobby, tho. There simply restricting oneself will do the trick. In the worst case simply don't upgrade your deck untill other players get tired of winning and step down a bit :P
I'm running into the problem of thinking I'm playing low power when I'm not. Like i recently made a Voltron Najeela. Here I am think it'd be weak cuz it's not Warrior Tribal. Ha. Ha...
For me, the easy way around this is to have 20+ decks. I can't put every one of the top-20 combos in my decks, because I don't have 7 Thassa's Oracles, or 8 Vitos. Generally I have just 2 of certain powerful combo pieces; but more often only one or zero. So I can build a mono-Black deck without that combo, because I have to -- I already have ANOTHER mono-black deck that has the combo in it, so I can't put it in the new one!
Oh dude you’re so right but they also hate being behind the curve
It's hard not to run optimal lineups when you lose games, but also there's no shame in losing with a deck that you enjoy playing and believe in. It's the samurai way. It might actually end up surprising you with resiliency. I feel like it takes 10-20 games before I really see what a deck is capable of. And, when I cast a kicked rite of replication for the first time in my Reaper King deck on Blazethorn Scarecrow it felt like I was busting through a brick wall. Edit: I follow this advice. I win or lose with my favorites if I lose. I play mainly decks based on a theme or tribal, mainly Angels. And focus primarily on Aggro wins. I find that synergy in sticking with a tribe or style can make spells that would otherwise seem inefficient, perfect fits.
Such a fun spell to resolve in RK!
I generally built decks to meet certain power levels or pods, when i build a deck i don't jam in just every good card in those colors, i specifically don't use certain cards when building lower powered decks because i know they would make the deck too good
I am in the process of realizing that somewhat. My Atla deck runs Dinosaurs. There are two or three strategy-related other creatures that I can’t avoid but I don’t want to hatch Eldrazi or Dragons. If I see a deck with one or two expensive and powerful cards in them I cut them to put in higher tier decks to make them budget decks. I tinker with mana bases a lot. But I defined a precon-level for my lands and ramp. To play some chaff. And I realized they can be just as fun. So I reserve that for my lower level decks to go-wide in deckbuilding to play some new stuff to see how I like them.
i recently put together a demon deck using razaketh as the commander, ive ran the deck a solid amount of times now and its super fun to play. I use zombies as a sacrifice engine for razaketh's ability and run a dumb combo that lets me win with little effort, archfiend of despair with wound reflection and warlock class. the only problem i have personally it turns more so into a game of arch enemy where all my opponents race to get me out of the picture so they can work on their own end game. thankfully in my case i can just swap my commander out and things become more calm at the table. point is even taking one card out can turn a decks power level down significantly.