Basically, the author doesn't know how to play EDH. And he's welcome to play the crappy format he plays where sol ring is a problem, and ban sol ring at his kitchen table. But don't try and impose your will on the rest of the world.
Essentially.
This article basically was an attack on, not an explanation of or appeal to, the banning of Sol Ring. After reading the article twice, I felt more and more against the author because of the writing style and less and less felt he got his point across.
EDH/Commander is a social format, right? So why don't people use their social skills to discuss what they like and don't like, instead of adopting a list with 60+ banned cards?
Seriously? You're going to do a whole bunch of math and write a whole article about how stupid Sol Ring is? We all know Sol Ring is stupid. There's a reason it's banned in every format but Vintage, and it's ubiquitously played as a 1-of (all that's allowed) there. On the other hand, I'm reasonably confident that if the P9 didn't run $500+ per card, they would not be banned in EDH either. The EDH committee at large is not concerned with "fairness". As you said, individual playgroups will create their own banned lists, and besides which the "official EDH banned list", if you read the fine print, is not in fact a "banned list" but is actually a "we really rather wish you didn't play these cards, but you can if you really want to" list anyway. They found other such cards to be actively detrimental towards the fun of the format, but all fast mana does is enable those plays that were going to happen anyway because EDH games last a zillion turns. Instead of preventing the inevitable, as banning fast mana does in "regular" Magic, it simply delays it in EDH, and delaying isn't "good enough" if you want a "fun" format.
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In retrospect, some of the comments I made were harsh. OP's parent's might have been murdered by a Sol Ring, and we should take that into account.
ROFLCOPTER
I went back and read his other article about changing the game of magic, and now the pieces all fall together. He has zero clue about playing magic as it was intended. I think his name sums up his knowledge (pokemon...where everything is banned) about the things (even the little things) that make magic what it is for the majority of us, particularly those of us that are of the old, old school generation.
As I was writing this, an answer for the Author was given to him on the spoiler for Innistrad.
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Artifact abilities cannot be activated
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Perhaps a better wording in my introduction would have been, "The aim of my article will be to dispel common arguments against the banning of Sol Ring, with particular emphasis on the first few turns of the game." My intention was not to write an article full of math, but rather to write an article not full of the anecdotal evidence (and personal attacks) that tends to dominate such discussions.
To that end, I'd like to discourage inflammatory posts which demonstrate neither an interest in discussion nor even that the poster has read the article. For example, hadoukkened and audiox.
At no point did I write off Mana Crypt. It's obviously powerful, and in competitive decks it is perhaps just as strong as Sol Ring. However, Commander is a largely casual format. It's common for casual games of Commander to go long enough that the life loss on Mana Crypt is relevant, so the discussion of banning Mana Crypt does not fall strictly within the argument to ban Sol Ring. That's why I mentioned it in passing rather than tacking it awkwardly onto my article about Sol Ring.
I wrote about Sol Ring because it's overpowered and goes in every deck, unbalancing the format for newbies and experienced players alike. Mana Crypt, as a card which is much more expensive and typically appears only in competitive decks, is of secondary concern to me.
One interesting point that has been raised is that Sol Ring adds a level of unpredictability to the format. It decreases the skill of the format while increasing randomness, sometimes allowing a newbie to steal a win against stronger opponents.
You know what? Thinking about it more, I'm not even sure I care if Sol Ring is allowed in my circle, for several reasons:
1. I play EDH to play the cool 1 of's I can't play anywhere else. Even if my opponent plays turn 1 ring, it IS fun to try to regain the upper hand and actually still win. Even if I don't win, I still get to play deathbringer liege or some cool dragon thing on my way out! I think my previous post was more aimed at mind twist 1v1, because not only does getting mind twisted for 5 2nd turn probably lose you the game, but you can't even play those cool cards for which you made an EDH deck in the first place! That's lame.
2.If the sol ring single-handedly wins the game, big deal. Get that one over with quickly, crack another beer, and start the next game.
3. I don't think people mulligan much in EDH, period, let alone to specifically get a sol ring. If I'm not completely mana screwed, I usually keep, because who the hell cares? It's not to win anything. Not to mention we usually just allow one redraw of 7 cards anyway, screw it.
I do agree with the idea of having a centralized banned list though, so in case ever want to play with any kind of serious competition, the list is standardized. Otherwise, that's why they call it casual
I think that the arguments for banning sol ring are counteracted by the rules that dictate good play in commander- that is, when one player is obviously "the threat" of the table, the other players will remove the offending player from the game. Sol Ring gives a lot of value for one mana, but a four drop on turn two isn't going to allow one player to be far ahead enough of three other players to win the game. If they use the sol ring for anything too powerful then the other players will recognize that they are the threat and will punish that player accordingly. If three players aren't able to do this, well, maybe they need to think a little bit more about how they constructed their decks. I would even go so far as to say that moxen/lotus should be unbanned in elder and the only thing keeping them banned is availability.
You never once gave us a clear reason why Sol Ring should be banned. You just showed that it was unbalanced based on the current criteria for design space. You do realize why cards are on the Banned List, don't you? It's because they force you to build decks around them or against them, warping the meta game.
To say that Mana Crypt is of secondary concern to you is wrong. It is a more unbalanced card in this format. Just because less people have the opportunity to utilize it based on availability should not be a factor in it's survival of the format.
Your article is bad. You didn't give the reader an overall conclusion to your madness. You made points that were convoluted to prove fairly unimportant details. Never once did you accurately explain a situation where Sol Ring even presented itself in a broken manner.
This was an over all fail. Go back to the drawing board. Use points based off of fact and not opinion. If you do use opinion, then formulate some reasoning behind it that can be checked with facts at least. Not just some math that shows under extreme circumstances that you can play a Harmonize turn 2.
Just like Sol Ring, Harmonize has never won a game on it's own. When you ban something, you ban it because it ruins the overall format. Prove to us very clearly that Sol Ring is the culprit behind extreme unbalance. Prove to us that is not fun to a majority of players.
Prove to us that you know how EDH and Magic the Gathering is played. Based on many of your points, I would argue that you don't know enough about game play to really tell when a card has broken a format. What are your credentials anyway? Why do you think you are the voice of reason in this situation?
"It helps players catch up when they fall behind."
- I see no problems with that. This isn't a cutthroat kill everyone on turn 5 type of game. Same reasoning with Mana Crypt, Mana Vault, Consecrated Sphinx, Prime Time, etc. etc. When I was had no threats/answers for 8 turns, Sphinx gave me 6 new cards to actually get back into the game.
"It's only a problem in 1v1, and it's already banned there."
Not everyone runs mana denial. Instead of land destruction, someone runs Creeping Corrosion/Shatterstorm so the person with fewer lands/most artifacts gets screwed. If everyone drops a Sol Ring on turn 1 in 3v1 game, then so what?
"It doesn't belong in every deck... my deck doesn't want it."
. This is true. I don't run it in all my decks since color-fixing is more important with 3-5 colors.
"It's not a good topdeck late in the game."
- Better than a land? Is that the only point? I can Ember Shot is better late game than a land since it cantrips and deals damage.
To that end, I'd like to discourage inflammatory posts which demonstrate neither an interest in discussion nor even that the poster has read the article. For example, hadoukkened and audiox.
I read your article. I even put in my 2 cents a couple of pages back before I started making fun of you. The problem is that you completely missed the point of EDH, which is to make ridiculous, unbalanced plays. We all know Sol Ring is overpowered. That's the point. The format exists so people can play ridiculous things. If you can't deal with those things, I highly suggest you build a better deck.
If, on the other hand, someone is griefing your playgroup with fast combo and is using Sol Ring to accomplish that end, the problem is with that player, not with Sol Ring. EDH is a social format, but it is a broken format. If you set out with the intention of breaking it wide open, you can easily do it, but there is generally no incentive to do so, since there's nothing at stake. Your playgroup should actively discourage such behavior and ban that player if need be. It's called a social contract, and it's a huge part of EDH.
At no point did I write off Mana Crypt. It's obviously powerful, and in competitive decks it is perhaps just as strong as Sol Ring. However, Commander is a largely casual format. It's common for casual games of Commander to go long enough that the life loss on Mana Crypt is relevant, so the discussion of banning Mana Crypt does not fall strictly within the argument to ban Sol Ring. That's why I mentioned it in passing rather than tacking it awkwardly onto my article about Sol Ring.
I honestly have no words for how bad at this game you are. Mana Crypt is 100% better than Sol Ring. It is the difference between a turn 1 Signet and a turn 1 Coalition Relic. It is +2 mana immediately and permanently, and the life loss is nowhere near as relevant as you seem to think.
I wrote about Sol Ring because it's overpowered and goes in every deck, unbalancing the format for newbies and experienced players alike. Mana Crypt, as a card which is much more expensive and typically appears only in competitive decks, is of secondary concern to me.
The format is supposed to be unbalanced. You're missing the entire point of the format's existence.
One interesting point that has been raised is that Sol Ring adds a level of unpredictability to the format. It decreases the skill of the format while increasing randomness, sometimes allowing a newbie to steal a win against stronger opponents.
EDH/Commander is a social format, right? So why don't people use their social skills to discuss what they like and don't like, instead of adopting a list with 60+ banned cards?
I am a dedicated EDH player, and after reading this article decided to see how many sol rings I play with. Out of my 6 decks, 3 have sol rings. My mono green molimo has way too much ramp and doesn't need ring (I also run mirri's guile and sylvan library instead of top). My mono white Soldier deck has better things that reduce the cmc of all my soldiers (ballyrush banneret, urzas incubator), I even cheat 'em into play with other soldiers. My mono black zombies runs thawing glaciers, cabal coffers, urborg and crypt of agadeem......those can get pretty stupid without sol ring.
I do run sol ring in my B/U mill to power out my general oona, but that rarely happens. My monoblue and red both run sol rings, but they also run three caged sun effects, so it isn't usually the artifact that gets hated on the most =). And I don't believe I have ever worried about it so much that I blew up a sol ring right away. I did have my T1 sol ring get Comandeered once...I thought it was awesome!
It won't kill me if it gets banned, but why kill a funfactor? Sol ring is not that big of a threat, honestly its what spell gets powere out. Just adapt and overcome.
I mean if you think its that broken, just play 1v1 more, we have already addmited to it there.
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Isn't EDH about having fun anyway? I played a Sol ring into Signet on turn one, and then Riku on turn two, I got punished. Thats how its supposed to work. If I couldn't take off and get that lead, then I shouldn't. When you play Sol ring on turn one, you say that you are willing to face down the rest of the table if they don't like what you do with that mana. Sometimes someone just plays a Disk on turn 2, maybe that should be banned because they control the whole game? ....just stop your whining. If it doesn't warp the format then we shouldn't ban it. It doesn't.
I play A LOT of multi-player EDH and nearly all of my decks are crushingly competitive and ALLL of them run sol ring. With that said, I will attempt to illustrate why sol ring has no place on the banned list.
When i am shuffling up my deck i hope for nothing more than a sol ring in my opening hand. When i grab my opening hand and SEE a sol ring i immediately feel fear. Sol ring allows you to power out many crazy things quickly, this is true, but very few of these are gamebreaking and unanswerable by almost ALL EDH decks people make. So i feel fear, because if the other cards in my hand arent condusive to me being able to recover well AFTER i have done my sol ring shenanigans, then sol ring is just a bullseye on my face.
Ask yourself this....how many games have you played turn 1 sol ring, turn 2 and 3 strong plays (generally permanent based) only to have all of your non land permanents wiped, had 3 cards removed from your already depleted hand (you are powering out things quicker than you are drawing them after all) and also had 2 land destroyed, and are now the LEAST powerful player at the table. I would say this is the outcome 9/10 times if you dont play politically when you go T1 sol ring. and if you are playing politically (read : not doing insane things with your sol ring) then what exactly is it providing you? you are either using all your resources at a faster rate in which case you get blown out by the rest of the table, or you are powering your resources out at a decent rate like everyone else at the table in which case sol ring really isnt a threat.
You listed a lot of points but, staggeringly in my opinion, you completely overlooked the most important one:
...What other format, precisely, can one PLAY Sol Rings in?
Vintage: restricted. does anyone even play this format any more? My mental picture of Vintage is a couple guys sitting around with binders and wondering why there's no one else who can afford to play with them. That, and the sound of crickets.
Legacy, Modern, Extended, Standard, Pauper, Peasant, basically you name it other than EDH: Banned.
So really you're just saying you want to turn a mostly-useless piece of cardboard into an entirely-useless piece of cardboard. Just because some people get whiney about someone going t1 sol ring, signet, go.
That happens occasionally in my playgroup. Know what the response is? It's called politics. If one person jumps out to too fast a lead, you gang up on him and beat him down until he either starts to play less provocatively, or loses enough permanents that he's no longer the front-runner. This is why EDH pods of 4-5 are best, as they allow coalitions of all opponents to be so strong when combined that if you get really douchey, you can generally be reined in. There's no call to ban a format staple over this. Especially when it's the only format where we can put the damned thing to any use.
By this logic, we should unban black lotus and the moxen in EDH. I'm all for that.
An easy solution to those of you belly aching about fast combo decks is this, let him/her go off and win then say okay you win the rest of us are going to continue playing as if you weren't part of the game. I despise fast combo kills (I love combos though that I can build up to) and those that play them only care about winning not the fun of the game, so let them have their win and keep having fun without them.
This is the main beef I have with multiplayer Magic - needing to figure out what other people are going to consider "not fun" is, itself, not fun. Whether we're talking about the plays fueled by the acceleration provided by Sol Ring in EDH in 2011 or the many and various decks that my playgroup told me I couldn't play in Emperor back in 1995, it's frustrating to be told that the deck you spent a lot of time building - which complies to the agreed-upon rules for construction - isn't acceptable based on the opinion of the other players.
I believe that's the point the author was attempting to make. His opinion, which he's attempting to defend, is that a card which has too much impact on the politics of the opening turns of the game is detrimental to the enjoyment of the format. You put those in your deck with the hope of playing them on Turn 1 so you can play more powerful cards at the start of the game than you could otherwise. However, the potential threat it represents puts a damper on the politicking of the situation as everyone attempts to curtail the degenerate early plays it enables. Since much of the fun of multiplayer is having an extended game where allegiances are made and broken, any cards which excessively influence those decisions take away from the atmosphere it's trying to create.
Let us have our Sol Rings. Quit whining about losing to an explosive start, shut up, shuffle up, and play again. I'm seriously tired of the arguments to ban things because people lose to them. You lose sometimes in Magic, ****ing face it.
Here's a solution: Go make your own format where Sol Ring is banned, and stop trying to impose your will on the other thousands of players who like playing with it.
By the above logic, no card should ever be banned. To be perfectly honest sol ring is more powerful than many of the cards on the ban list. The Moxen and Black Lotus. Only because Sol Ring someone became the Marquee card for the format do people not think it should be banned.
"Other people will just do busted stuff later". Congrats, i get to do my busted stuff two turns earlier. The card is seriously a Time Stretch for 1.
Lets put it this way. Take any opening hand of Seven from any deck in edh. Now randomly remove one of those cards and replace it with sol Ring. Almost universely if the card you removed wasn't the only land in the hand, you just improved your hand by a significant quantity.
You can take almost any argument about why Sol Ring shouldn't be banned and replace sol ring with Black Lotus. And it really shows how ridiculous those arguments are. It is honestly a $6 Black Lotus. And since we don't make bannings based off of Monetary reasons (if we do, we need to ban Mishra's Workshop, Bazaar of Baghdad, Mana Drain, and Imperial Seal) I can't see a good reason why Sol Ring remain unbanned.
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I honestly have to agree on the side of Not-Banning the card.
You said that it allows early game interactions well this by far is not a joke or myth, it does. However your statement about mulligan to get a sol ring, I find this a bit hard to take in. Seeing as how you are then at 1-6 cards now, and if your seriously risking that, then your also forcing yourself to a jank hand. Unless your running artifacts alot and mana doesn't matter, then sure let it be a strategy. But your statement is saying ( well to me anyways ) that players get god hands everytime they have sol ring. I find this hard to believe seeing as how I've seen games where turn 1 sol ring went off then the next 5 turns only 1 land would come out. Its so situational. It can be the bread and butter and then it can also just be the slap in the face.
Personally I've had my General ( Omnath ) out by turn 5 becoming somewhere in the big ranks of an 80/80 + and that was all thanks to 0 sol rings. I don't even run it in that deck. My other General is ( Skullbriar ) and though I do run it in that ( currently as place holding ) I could take everyone very quickly with just him on the board. But that's in good favors. So, again I think the statement on sol ring is a 2 sided coin. Its either the bread and butter, or jank. If it were a card that constantly shows up in every game in several peoples decks that allowed them to win instantly then sure I'd say mabey it should be banned, but through all the games I've played, I've never seen it be a constant threat, Because dropping it late game 6+ turn , someone will just blow it to hell, and call it a day.
Not splitting hairs here, but Auto-include is a very relative term. Maybe the term you were looking for is "Efforless-include?" There are, in my opinion, 35-41 auto-includes in EDH. General and 34-40 lands.
You know what I mean. Unless they somehow don't work in your deck, you include them. Are you playing creatures? Than Skullclamp is worth inclusion.
Example of an include due to synergy:
G/W token swarm deck. Weakness of G/W when compared to other color combinations: card draw; what does Skullclamp do there? Turns your tokens into disposable card draw.
So you argue that Skullclamp is so degenerate, it allows deck types?
Black and red have no enchantment removal. Green and white don't draw cards like blue does (they have plenty though). It's how the colours are supposed to work.
This is a format of threats and answers, just like every other format.
So Sol Ring is broken here, just like every other format... If one player is playing threats/answers that are two mana more than your threats/answers, that person is going to win.
This is the main beef I have with multiplayer Magic - needing to figure out what other people are going to consider "not fun" is, itself, not fun. Whether we're talking about the plays fueled by the acceleration provided by Sol Ring in EDH in 2011 or the many and various decks that my playgroup told me I couldn't play in Emperor back in 1995, it's frustrating to be told that the deck you spent a lot of time building - which complies to the agreed-upon rules for construction - isn't acceptable based on the opinion of the other players.
I believe that's the point the author was attempting to make. His opinion, which he's attempting to defend, is that a card which has too much impact on the politics of the opening turns of the game is detrimental to the enjoyment of the format. You put those in your deck with the hope of playing them on Turn 1 so you can play more powerful cards at the start of the game than you could otherwise. However, the potential threat it represents puts a damper on the politicking of the situation as everyone attempts to curtail the degenerate early plays it enables. Since much of the fun of multiplayer is having an extended game where allegiances are made and broken, any cards which excessively influence those decisions take away from the atmosphere it's trying to create.
The EDH/Commander format is all about the politics, and most playgroups act as a democracy. Each individual group has its threshold of what is acceptable play and what isn't. A card should not be banned from a format because of one particular playgroup (or one person of a playgroup) has a problem with degenerate decks. A card or more specifically a Deck Type will be removed from a playgroup if the general consenus is that it is not fun. One player should not decide on what is fun a group should.
This is what the format is about, if Wizards decides to sanction EDH/Commander and run a GrandPrix, well then I would say the gloves are off, but until then it is Kitchen Table Magic, nothing more.
Let's say each deck has three cards which can answer Sol Ring before it becomes a problem ... In that case, there is still less than a ten percent chance that anyone can answer the Sol Ring before it untaps.
Your math is apparently off, or conveniently mis-stated.
Please explain how there is a 28% chance for at least one of four players to play a Sol Ring, but there is less than 10% chance, in your example, of any of those same players drawing one of the three cards that hate on Sol Ring?
Percentage of drawing 1 in 100 is not greater than percentage of drawing 1 of 3 in 100. If the math was part of your argument, you have undermined it completely.
There are far uglier things to worry about in EDH before even approaching Sol Ring.
Sol Ring is arguably more powerful than the moxes, but not more than Black Lotus. Lotus fuels combo decks like nobody's business by adding colored mana. It's the same reason LED is banned.
The moxes are banned due to scarcity. They would be auto-includes, and their price would be driven even higher than they already are, but I can almost guarantee they would be legal if they were easily affordable.
The reason things like Workshop, Imperial Seal, Bazaar, and Mana Drain aren't banned is because they are not auto-includes. Your deck isn't suddenly better by including them with the exception of Workshop (not even Mana Drain makes that big of a difference in this format a lot of the time), and even then you have severe design constraints, so it's fair. Price isn't a factor unless the card is ubiquitous to the point of warping the format.
What you people are failing to realize is that EDH as a format is supposed to be unbalanced. Broken plays are encouraged. Chaos is welcomed. But there's a social contract among each playgroup that determines what is acceptable. It's up to you to find a playgroup that thinks the same way you do. If you feel violated by Sol Ring but your playgroup likes it, either suck it up and play your own Sol Ring or find a more casual playgroup. On the other hand, if you like making super fast combo decks and your playgroup is casual, you can expect either to be shunned or gangbanged every single game until you play something less egregious.
So Sol Ring is broken here, just like every other format... If one player is playing threats/answers that are two mana more than your threats/answers, that person is going to win.
Protip: If your answers cost more than their threats, you're doing it wrong. Also, you have 40 life. What can Sol Ring enable so early that can possibly be an imminent threat to you, apart from some combo? Kill their ****. Wipe the board and keep playing. Jesus ****, you people are terrible.
EDH/Commander is a social format, right? So why don't people use their social skills to discuss what they like and don't like, instead of adopting a list with 60+ banned cards?
And since we don't make bannings based off of Monetary reasons (if we do, we need to ban Mishra's Workshop, Bazaar of Baghdad, Mana Drain, and Imperial Seal) I can't see a good reason why Sol Ring remain unbanned.
The moxes are banned due to scarcity. They would be auto-includes, and their price would be driven even higher than they already are, but I can almost guarantee they would be legal if they were easily affordable.
So which is it? Are cards banned in this format due to scarcity or aren't they?
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Sol Ring is arguably more powerful than the moxes, but not more than Black Lotus. Lotus fuels combo decks like nobody's business by adding colored mana. It's the same reason LED is banned.
The moxes are banned due to scarcity. They would be auto-includes, and their price would be driven even higher than they already are, but I can almost guarantee they would be legal if they were easily affordable.
The reason things like Workshop, Imperial Seal, Bazaar, and Mana Drain aren't banned is because they are not auto-includes. Your deck isn't suddenly better by including them with the exception of Workshop (not even Mana Drain makes that big of a difference in this format a lot of the time), and even then you have severe design constraints, so it's fair. Price isn't a factor unless the card is ubiquitous to the point of warping the format.
What you people are failing to realize is that EDH as a format is supposed to be unbalanced. Broken plays are encouraged. Chaos is welcomed. But there's a social contract among each playgroup that determines what is acceptable. It's up to you to find a playgroup that thinks the same way you do. If you feel violated by Sol Ring but your playgroup likes it, either suck it up and play your own Sol Ring or find a more casual playgroup. On the other hand, if you like making super fast combo decks and your playgroup is casual, you can expect either to be shunned or gangbanged every single game until you play something less egregious.
I know it's not the same format, but in the land of Cube the only card you consider taking over Sol Ring P1P1 is Library of Alexandria. In a later pack you might take a more archetype specific card, but in a vacuum Sol Ring is one of the, if not the, most powerful cards in magic.
In games that aren't one in one giant turn Sol Rings always +2 mana is more worth-wild than an 1 shot +3. Even if you disagree with this logic, I think you can agree that the cards are close enough in power that if one card is restricted/banned the other probably should be also.
Essentially.
This article basically was an attack on, not an explanation of or appeal to, the banning of Sol Ring. After reading the article twice, I felt more and more against the author because of the writing style and less and less felt he got his point across.
Sol Rings don't kill people. People kill people.
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I went back and read his other article about changing the game of magic, and now the pieces all fall together. He has zero clue about playing magic as it was intended. I think his name sums up his knowledge (pokemon...where everything is banned) about the things (even the little things) that make magic what it is for the majority of us, particularly those of us that are of the old, old school generation.
As I was writing this, an answer for the Author was given to him on the spoiler for Innistrad.
Silence of Stone
:1mana::symw:
Enchantment
Artifact abilities cannot be activated
.Illus. Wayne England #36/264
*Note mana abilities are not immune
Perfect Timing
To that end, I'd like to discourage inflammatory posts which demonstrate neither an interest in discussion nor even that the poster has read the article. For example, hadoukkened and audiox.
At no point did I write off Mana Crypt. It's obviously powerful, and in competitive decks it is perhaps just as strong as Sol Ring. However, Commander is a largely casual format. It's common for casual games of Commander to go long enough that the life loss on Mana Crypt is relevant, so the discussion of banning Mana Crypt does not fall strictly within the argument to ban Sol Ring. That's why I mentioned it in passing rather than tacking it awkwardly onto my article about Sol Ring.
I wrote about Sol Ring because it's overpowered and goes in every deck, unbalancing the format for newbies and experienced players alike. Mana Crypt, as a card which is much more expensive and typically appears only in competitive decks, is of secondary concern to me.
One interesting point that has been raised is that Sol Ring adds a level of unpredictability to the format. It decreases the skill of the format while increasing randomness, sometimes allowing a newbie to steal a win against stronger opponents.
1. I play EDH to play the cool 1 of's I can't play anywhere else. Even if my opponent plays turn 1 ring, it IS fun to try to regain the upper hand and actually still win. Even if I don't win, I still get to play deathbringer liege or some cool dragon thing on my way out! I think my previous post was more aimed at mind twist 1v1, because not only does getting mind twisted for 5 2nd turn probably lose you the game, but you can't even play those cool cards for which you made an EDH deck in the first place! That's lame.
2.If the sol ring single-handedly wins the game, big deal. Get that one over with quickly, crack another beer, and start the next game.
3. I don't think people mulligan much in EDH, period, let alone to specifically get a sol ring. If I'm not completely mana screwed, I usually keep, because who the hell cares? It's not to win anything. Not to mention we usually just allow one redraw of 7 cards anyway, screw it.
I do agree with the idea of having a centralized banned list though, so in case ever want to play with any kind of serious competition, the list is standardized. Otherwise, that's why they call it casual
To say that Mana Crypt is of secondary concern to you is wrong. It is a more unbalanced card in this format. Just because less people have the opportunity to utilize it based on availability should not be a factor in it's survival of the format.
Your article is bad. You didn't give the reader an overall conclusion to your madness. You made points that were convoluted to prove fairly unimportant details. Never once did you accurately explain a situation where Sol Ring even presented itself in a broken manner.
This was an over all fail. Go back to the drawing board. Use points based off of fact and not opinion. If you do use opinion, then formulate some reasoning behind it that can be checked with facts at least. Not just some math that shows under extreme circumstances that you can play a Harmonize turn 2.
Just like Sol Ring, Harmonize has never won a game on it's own. When you ban something, you ban it because it ruins the overall format. Prove to us very clearly that Sol Ring is the culprit behind extreme unbalance. Prove to us that is not fun to a majority of players.
Prove to us that you know how EDH and Magic the Gathering is played. Based on many of your points, I would argue that you don't know enough about game play to really tell when a card has broken a format. What are your credentials anyway? Why do you think you are the voice of reason in this situation?
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Not everyone runs mana denial. Instead of land destruction, someone runs Creeping Corrosion/Shatterstorm so the person with fewer lands/most artifacts gets screwed. If everyone drops a Sol Ring on turn 1 in 3v1 game, then so what?
. This is true. I don't run it in all my decks since color-fixing is more important with 3-5 colors.
- Better than a land? Is that the only point? I can Ember Shot is better late game than a land since it cantrips and deals damage.
I read your article. I even put in my 2 cents a couple of pages back before I started making fun of you. The problem is that you completely missed the point of EDH, which is to make ridiculous, unbalanced plays. We all know Sol Ring is overpowered. That's the point. The format exists so people can play ridiculous things. If you can't deal with those things, I highly suggest you build a better deck.
If, on the other hand, someone is griefing your playgroup with fast combo and is using Sol Ring to accomplish that end, the problem is with that player, not with Sol Ring. EDH is a social format, but it is a broken format. If you set out with the intention of breaking it wide open, you can easily do it, but there is generally no incentive to do so, since there's nothing at stake. Your playgroup should actively discourage such behavior and ban that player if need be. It's called a social contract, and it's a huge part of EDH.
I honestly have no words for how bad at this game you are. Mana Crypt is 100% better than Sol Ring. It is the difference between a turn 1 Signet and a turn 1 Coalition Relic. It is +2 mana immediately and permanently, and the life loss is nowhere near as relevant as you seem to think.
The format is supposed to be unbalanced. You're missing the entire point of the format's existence.
This is healthy for the format.
I do run sol ring in my B/U mill to power out my general oona, but that rarely happens. My monoblue and red both run sol rings, but they also run three caged sun effects, so it isn't usually the artifact that gets hated on the most =). And I don't believe I have ever worried about it so much that I blew up a sol ring right away. I did have my T1 sol ring get Comandeered once...I thought it was awesome!
It won't kill me if it gets banned, but why kill a funfactor? Sol ring is not that big of a threat, honestly its what spell gets powere out. Just adapt and overcome.
I mean if you think its that broken, just play 1v1 more, we have already addmited to it there.
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When i am shuffling up my deck i hope for nothing more than a sol ring in my opening hand. When i grab my opening hand and SEE a sol ring i immediately feel fear. Sol ring allows you to power out many crazy things quickly, this is true, but very few of these are gamebreaking and unanswerable by almost ALL EDH decks people make. So i feel fear, because if the other cards in my hand arent condusive to me being able to recover well AFTER i have done my sol ring shenanigans, then sol ring is just a bullseye on my face.
Ask yourself this....how many games have you played turn 1 sol ring, turn 2 and 3 strong plays (generally permanent based) only to have all of your non land permanents wiped, had 3 cards removed from your already depleted hand (you are powering out things quicker than you are drawing them after all) and also had 2 land destroyed, and are now the LEAST powerful player at the table. I would say this is the outcome 9/10 times if you dont play politically when you go T1 sol ring. and if you are playing politically (read : not doing insane things with your sol ring) then what exactly is it providing you? you are either using all your resources at a faster rate in which case you get blown out by the rest of the table, or you are powering your resources out at a decent rate like everyone else at the table in which case sol ring really isnt a threat.
By this logic, we should unban black lotus and the moxen in EDH. I'm all for that.
This is the main beef I have with multiplayer Magic - needing to figure out what other people are going to consider "not fun" is, itself, not fun. Whether we're talking about the plays fueled by the acceleration provided by Sol Ring in EDH in 2011 or the many and various decks that my playgroup told me I couldn't play in Emperor back in 1995, it's frustrating to be told that the deck you spent a lot of time building - which complies to the agreed-upon rules for construction - isn't acceptable based on the opinion of the other players.
I believe that's the point the author was attempting to make. His opinion, which he's attempting to defend, is that a card which has too much impact on the politics of the opening turns of the game is detrimental to the enjoyment of the format. You put those in your deck with the hope of playing them on Turn 1 so you can play more powerful cards at the start of the game than you could otherwise. However, the potential threat it represents puts a damper on the politicking of the situation as everyone attempts to curtail the degenerate early plays it enables. Since much of the fun of multiplayer is having an extended game where allegiances are made and broken, any cards which excessively influence those decisions take away from the atmosphere it's trying to create.
By the above logic, no card should ever be banned. To be perfectly honest sol ring is more powerful than many of the cards on the ban list. The Moxen and Black Lotus. Only because Sol Ring someone became the Marquee card for the format do people not think it should be banned.
"Other people will just do busted stuff later". Congrats, i get to do my busted stuff two turns earlier. The card is seriously a Time Stretch for 1.
Lets put it this way. Take any opening hand of Seven from any deck in edh. Now randomly remove one of those cards and replace it with sol Ring. Almost universely if the card you removed wasn't the only land in the hand, you just improved your hand by a significant quantity.
You can take almost any argument about why Sol Ring shouldn't be banned and replace sol ring with Black Lotus. And it really shows how ridiculous those arguments are. It is honestly a $6 Black Lotus. And since we don't make bannings based off of Monetary reasons (if we do, we need to ban Mishra's Workshop, Bazaar of Baghdad, Mana Drain, and Imperial Seal) I can't see a good reason why Sol Ring remain unbanned.
Calvin and Hobbes
Cube Tutor
You said that it allows early game interactions well this by far is not a joke or myth, it does. However your statement about mulligan to get a sol ring, I find this a bit hard to take in. Seeing as how you are then at 1-6 cards now, and if your seriously risking that, then your also forcing yourself to a jank hand. Unless your running artifacts alot and mana doesn't matter, then sure let it be a strategy. But your statement is saying ( well to me anyways ) that players get god hands everytime they have sol ring. I find this hard to believe seeing as how I've seen games where turn 1 sol ring went off then the next 5 turns only 1 land would come out. Its so situational. It can be the bread and butter and then it can also just be the slap in the face.
Personally I've had my General ( Omnath ) out by turn 5 becoming somewhere in the big ranks of an 80/80 + and that was all thanks to 0 sol rings. I don't even run it in that deck. My other General is ( Skullbriar ) and though I do run it in that ( currently as place holding ) I could take everyone very quickly with just him on the board. But that's in good favors. So, again I think the statement on sol ring is a 2 sided coin. Its either the bread and butter, or jank. If it were a card that constantly shows up in every game in several peoples decks that allowed them to win instantly then sure I'd say mabey it should be banned, but through all the games I've played, I've never seen it be a constant threat, Because dropping it late game 6+ turn , someone will just blow it to hell, and call it a day.
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You know what I mean. Unless they somehow don't work in your deck, you include them. Are you playing creatures? Than Skullclamp is worth inclusion.
So you argue that Skullclamp is so degenerate, it allows deck types?
Black and red have no enchantment removal. Green and white don't draw cards like blue does (they have plenty though). It's how the colours are supposed to work.
Read this, and see what I mean: Aaron Forsythe on banning Skullclamp
So Sol Ring is broken here, just like every other format... If one player is playing threats/answers that are two mana more than your threats/answers, that person is going to win.
The EDH/Commander format is all about the politics, and most playgroups act as a democracy. Each individual group has its threshold of what is acceptable play and what isn't. A card should not be banned from a format because of one particular playgroup (or one person of a playgroup) has a problem with degenerate decks. A card or more specifically a Deck Type will be removed from a playgroup if the general consenus is that it is not fun.
One player should not decide on what is fun a group should.
This is what the format is about, if Wizards decides to sanction EDH/Commander and run a GrandPrix, well then I would say the gloves are off, but until then it is Kitchen Table Magic, nothing more.
Your math is apparently off, or conveniently mis-stated.
Please explain how there is a 28% chance for at least one of four players to play a Sol Ring, but there is less than 10% chance, in your example, of any of those same players drawing one of the three cards that hate on Sol Ring?
Percentage of drawing 1 in 100 is not greater than percentage of drawing 1 of 3 in 100. If the math was part of your argument, you have undermined it completely.
There are far uglier things to worry about in EDH before even approaching Sol Ring.
The moxes are banned due to scarcity. They would be auto-includes, and their price would be driven even higher than they already are, but I can almost guarantee they would be legal if they were easily affordable.
The reason things like Workshop, Imperial Seal, Bazaar, and Mana Drain aren't banned is because they are not auto-includes. Your deck isn't suddenly better by including them with the exception of Workshop (not even Mana Drain makes that big of a difference in this format a lot of the time), and even then you have severe design constraints, so it's fair. Price isn't a factor unless the card is ubiquitous to the point of warping the format.
What you people are failing to realize is that EDH as a format is supposed to be unbalanced. Broken plays are encouraged. Chaos is welcomed. But there's a social contract among each playgroup that determines what is acceptable. It's up to you to find a playgroup that thinks the same way you do. If you feel violated by Sol Ring but your playgroup likes it, either suck it up and play your own Sol Ring or find a more casual playgroup. On the other hand, if you like making super fast combo decks and your playgroup is casual, you can expect either to be shunned or gangbanged every single game until you play something less egregious.
Protip: If your answers cost more than their threats, you're doing it wrong. Also, you have 40 life. What can Sol Ring enable so early that can possibly be an imminent threat to you, apart from some combo? Kill their ****. Wipe the board and keep playing. Jesus ****, you people are terrible.
So which is it? Are cards banned in this format due to scarcity or aren't they?
I know it's not the same format, but in the land of Cube the only card you consider taking over Sol Ring P1P1 is Library of Alexandria. In a later pack you might take a more archetype specific card, but in a vacuum Sol Ring is one of the, if not the, most powerful cards in magic.
In games that aren't one in one giant turn Sol Rings always +2 mana is more worth-wild than an 1 shot +3. Even if you disagree with this logic, I think you can agree that the cards are close enough in power that if one card is restricted/banned the other probably should be also.
They arent, Moat is legal and there were 18000 copies printed. Moxen are not and there were 22000 copies printed between alpha, beta, and unlimited.
Calvin and Hobbes
Cube Tutor