Well I definitely fail to see the "very basic" mathematics here. You stated three reasons why infect creatures would have diminished effectivity in multiplayer environment (which I don't completely agree with). Yes, they sure have diminished effectivity since probably the infect player won't get any help from other creatures on the table to knock down enemies so he has to do all the work by him self. This is why I maybe agree that that infect "kill limit" shouldn't be doubled but only increased by some degree. Maybe to 15. But I just don't understand why infect "kill limit" shouldn't be increased at all due the multiplayer environment where those normal damage dealers will have to face maybe 6 times (a pod of four) the life points they would face in 1v1-situation whereas the infect damage dealers face only 3 times the damage they should deal with in 1v1-situation.
The first point you made can be denied by replacing "poison/infect" with "combat damage": "First off, combat damage is worse in multiplayer than 1v1, because you don't win the game when you get someone to zero life points. You have to do that to each opponent to win."
Except, that a combat damage dealer doesn't have to do 6x the damage. Other people are in this game. Other people will be doing combat damage, or other damage, or life loss, or burning their own life totals for resources. The same is not necessarily true for poison counters. In general, if everyone is dealing damage to each other about equally, you'll only need to end up accounting for one opponent's amount of life.
This means that you'll need to do 2x 'regular' magic damage to win (barring lifelinky stuff that makes it go up, and those commander voltron decks, which makes it go down), while infecters need to do 3x.
Furthermore, the quality of non-infect damage is far greater than the quality of infect damage. My Heliod deck makes tons of 2/1 tokens, such that I can have 20-40 damage on the board, getting even half of that in infect damage is extremely difficult in raw creature power, short of triumph of the hordes, which, face it, isn't an infect win, it's an overrun style win. That investment in creature power in an infect deck requires a lot of commitment to boardstate, more so than my token deck, which makes you fragile.
Second point doesn't make sense to me either. The cost ratio is what it is because infect is just faster way to kill an enemy. I don't see what this has to do with multiplayer environment. Let's say we have 2-cmc beater with 3 power and a 2-cmc 1/1 with infect on an EDH-table. Which one is more frightening? I'd say the latter while in 1v1-game the 3 power dude actually threatens to kill the enemy faster than the infect guy (theoretically).
While this is a valid point to a race scenario, it means that your creatures do not trade effectively against opposing boardstates, and since there are now 3 opposing boardstates, it places you at a disadvantage of being the table's punching bag.
Third point; First, is there any particular reason why infect should be a viable strategy? There are quite many strategies which are not viable in commander.
Is there any reason why a rule should be created to specifically excise a strategy? If something ends up not being viable by coincidence, I have no issue with that, but purposefully creating a rule to excise a strategy for no purpose? That sounds odd...
Second, there still is a reason to go infect because doing 20 damage can be easier task with multiple creatures than with one creature. Gotta give it to you that at the moment building a 100 card singleton deck with enough infect beaters can be quite much impossible with current card pool.
Same can be said of regular combat damage... where you already have multiple creatures from multiple people.
My point is basically; all the damage dealing creatures are nerfed dramatically when we move to multiplayer environment. Yes, infect creatures usually don't get help from rest of the table so maybe they deserve some advantage. But atm the in a pod of four player they face only 3 x more life points whereas "normal beater" faces 6 x the usual 20 life points. So do they really deserve this much advantage? Another point, I think it's little bit against this spirit of EDH to be able to drop one player from the game so easily with only 10 poison counters.
And I still disagree with your math. If your playing infect, you're going uphill all on your own, everyone else is smashing regular lifetotals down, that you never need to do the full amount of regular damage in EDH. You're trying to set up a straight comparison between the two, but that simply does not logically apply in the situation. For the next few games you play, write down how much damage you do to other players, and how much damage other players do to each other, and find out what percent that it.
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Infect as a full on strategy is really not very powerful in EDH, otherwise there would be a lot more of them. What infect ends up doing is finishing of a hapless player or two via certain finisher cards like Inkmoth Nexus. I don't see it as being a very problematic strategy. Honestly, the top four are probably:
Skittles as Commander - Other commanders just as easily 1 or 2 shot players via Commander damage just as easily, or even more easily.
Triumph of the Hordes - This is an overrun win, not an infect win. There is a massive propensity of other overrun effects that would work equally well in any situation this card is in.
Inkmoth Nexus - Taking advantage of equipment/voltron aspects as an alt-win post-wrath. - probably the most 'feel-bad' situation, but really ends up adding more of an interesting dynamic/math to games and when to wrath
One shot spells to make a big creature a 1-hit wonder. - are we going to be upset at Berserk and Hatred next? Things make other things big and scary, sometimes at instant speed...
Frankly, I think everyone should have enough poison counters to survive one blightsteel attack and get a chance to find some answers. 15 is the poison counter number I usually think of as fair.
I think poison is far, far more powerful than people let on in EDH. Just doesn't get used much because it leaves a bad taste in people's mouths.
Frankly, I think everyone should have enough poison counters to survive one blightsteel attack and get a chance to find some answers. 15 is the poison counter number I usually think of as fair.
I think poison is far, far more powerful than people let on in EDH. Just doesn't get used much because it leaves a bad taste in people's mouths.
It's powerful, but the card selection is pretty piss poor.
I don't agree with changing infect at this time for edh, but since 21 points of commander damage ends a player, I think 12 would be perfect. It's a little more than half of lethal commander damage without neutering infect and it takes care of hasted blightsteels.
I agree. We should all only play g/x decks because they are the most objectively fun and anyone who disagrees does not know the truth about EDH. Everyone should just play their decks because interaction beyond high fiving about how many land are in play is unfun and equivalent to casting Stasis while kicking puppies. I for one will never play with anyone who casts tutors, removal spells, blue cards, things I arbitrarily decide I don't like but will probably cast myself later.
I feel one of the main problems with adjusting the poison counter limit is consistency. I think EDH is best served by having as few rules that deviate from normal Magic as possible. Making rules changes for individual mechanics and corner cases just makes Commander less accessible to other players. I mean, people already have to learn all of the rules regarding Commanders. We want to keep Commander as much like regular Magic as possible.
Lab Man is not an instant win unless you have a hardcore competitive player in a circle of players not ready for it. If a group is using a CEDH list then Lab Man won't be nearly the same problem that it is with normal EDH.
I didn't say it was instant win. I said it was a common wincon across various decks. Huge difference. So if you're trying to make a ban list that has the most impact with the fewest cards, you hit LabMan instead of Doomsday and Hermit Druid. If you're trying to be thorough you hit all three, but you're going to have a lousy format if go and ban everything out of the gate. Personally, I say let a couple of glass cannon cards remain when they only have one function. But what do I know? The entire premise is silly.
I've one-shotted people with 22+ commander damage with an unblockable Shu Yun more times in a single evening than I've seen a Blightsteel kill in my entire time playing EDH.
I play two infect decks, a Xenagos infect deck and my Jor Kadeen metalcraft infect deck. Jor can be blistering fast and has a fairly good win rate. Xenagos is much more variable. A couple of times I've killed off tables by turn 6, other times I accomplish virtually nothing in that time. More time than not, when I play that deck, I end up being the archenemy, and not doing so well. People recognize that infect + Xenagos' effect can be pretty dangerous, so they play accordingly.
I also used to play a Rafiq infect deck. Tons of ways to make stuff unblockable, lots of exalted, and Rafiq gives a single infect guy double strike on top of exalted bonuses. *THAT* was broken, and I broke it down pretty darn quickly, because it wasn't fun to play or to play against. If I was a more competitive player, or in a more competitive meta, it probably would have been fine, and in a truly competitive meta it wouldn't do anything, but it didn't end up being the sort of EDH I like to play or play against. The other two, they seem fine, and nobody I play against seems to regard them as overpowered.
Humility is wonderful for the format imho There's way too much reliance on ETB triggers for removal and utility creatures in general.
Give me like 3-4 more Hushwing Gryffs and I'll change the face of the format!
I mean, I won't disagree that people rely too much on ETBs for their removal, but in a format where people (at least hypothetically) build their decks around a central creature, humility says "yeah, you don't get to do that. And I hope you're packing consistent enchantment removal, or you're not doing anything soon. It's ok though, because I'm not doing anything either! Let's just sit on our hands for a while." Frankly, whatever argument got Karakas banned should apply straight to Humility. God, I hate it.
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I mean, I won't disagree that people rely too much on ETBs for their removal, but in a format where people (at least hypothetically) build their decks around a central creature, humility says "yeah, you don't get to do that. And I hope you're packing consistent enchantment removal, or you're not doing anything soon. It's ok though, because I'm not doing anything either! Let's just sit on our hands for a while." Frankly, whatever argument got Karakas banned should apply straight to Humility. God, I hate it.
Except Karakas has virtually no application beyond bouncing a commander, whereas Humility shuts down entire decks. So Karakas has a unique interaction that Humility doesn't have.
Frankly, I think everyone should have enough poison counters to survive one blightsteel attack and get a chance to find some answers. 15 is the poison counter number I usually think of as fair.
I think poison is far, far more powerful than people let on in EDH. Just doesn't get used much because it leaves a bad taste in people's mouths.
As poorly thought out as I think infect is, Blightsteel is just Phage the Untouchable but not terrible.
Frankly, I think everyone should have enough poison counters to survive one blightsteel attack and get a chance to find some answers. 15 is the poison counter number I usually think of as fair.
I think poison is far, far more powerful than people let on in EDH. Just doesn't get used much because it leaves a bad taste in people's mouths.
There are only a handful of playable cards which either have or grant infect. Skittles is a 3-turn clock (just like every power 7+ commander in the game), Blightsteel is a stupidly-high costed spell that basically ends people on its own (as do a number of other finishers), Triumph of the Hordes is an overrun (and the infect is often irrelevant), and all of the other playable infect cards either grant infect to a creature that's actually good, or just have evasion and rely on buffs from other sources to be threatening.
Honestly, my biggest beef with infect is that they didn't reprint Leeches in Scars block. While they printed Melira as an anti-poison card, the two serve different purposes fighting against poison counters and I would've liked to see both.
There are only a handful of playable cards which either have or grant infect. Skittles is a 3-turn clock (just like every power 7+ commander in the game), Blightsteel is a stupidly-high costed spell that basically ends people on its own (as do a number of other finishers), Triumph of the Hordes is an overrun (and the infect is often irrelevant), and all of the other playable infect cards either grant infect to a creature that's actually good, or just have evasion and rely on buffs from other sources to be threatening.
Honestly, my biggest beef with infect is that they didn't reprint Leeches in Scars block. While they printed Melira as an anti-poison card, the two serve different purposes fighting against poison counters and I would've liked to see both.
Isn't Leeches on the Reserve List?
Infect has BSC, Triumph, Skittles, Exoskeleton, and Tainted Strike as the only decent infect cards (that don't require hoops to jump through). You can add Inkmoth, Blighted Agent, and Spinebiter to the list also, but they require a bit more work to make viable.
Except Karakas has virtually no application beyond bouncing a commander, whereas Humility shuts down entire decks. So Karakas has a unique interaction that Humility doesn't have.
I really don't feel like doing MORE than perfectly negate the central focus of the format is a point in its favor. The ability to hate against a deck is fine. I don't think Choke is worth banning. But I might reconsider that if the format mandated that everyone play islands and suggested they build their decks around them.
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Blighted Agent is really really good in a UGx equipment deck, and Corrupted Conscience is riiiidonkulous on a hexproof general or Bruna. It's pretty straightforward to stick a strata scythe or runechanter's pike on a blighted agent or something and start swinging for wins.
Triumph of the Hordes also used to win me hilarious amounts of games with the Elf deck
Also: There are many, many ways to put a Blightsteel into play for free (or virtually free). Bribery is the one I see the most often though =P kind of a funny two player combo.
I really don't feel like doing MORE than perfectly negate the central focus of the format is a point in its favor. The ability to hate against a deck is fine. I don't think Choke is worth banning. But I might reconsider that if the format mandated that everyone play islands and suggested they build their decks around them.
But isn't the same thing true about ALL formats? People like to smash face with creatures in every format, and Humility stops that as well. The fact remains that Humility doesn't interact poorly with Commander any more than Torpor Orb or Doom Blade does. For it to be something worth considering in Commander, it has to have a negative interaction due to the unique rules that Commander does not share with other formats.
Blighted Agent is really really good in a UGx equipment deck, and Corrupted Conscience is riiiidonkulous on a hexproof general or Bruna. It's pretty straightforward to stick a strata scythe or runechanter's pike on a blighted agent or something and start swinging for wins.
Triumph of the Hordes also used to win me hilarious amounts of games with the Elf deck
Also: There are many, many ways to put a Blightsteel into play for free (or virtually free). Bribery is the one I see the most often though =P kind of a funny two player combo.
But isn't the same thing true about ALL formats? People like to smash face with creatures in every format, and Humility stops that as well. The fact remains that Humility doesn't interact poorly with Commander any more than Torpor Orb or Doom Blade does. For it to be something worth considering in Commander, it has to have a negative interaction due to the unique rules that Commander does not share with other formats.
It has an interaction in Commander unique to the rules of commander because the rules of commander encourage you to design decks around abilities of a single creature. Torpor Orb and Doom Blade do not shut creatures down anywhere near as completely. EDH centralizes around creatures like legacy centralizes around 1 drops. And they banned Mental Misstep.
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It has an interaction in Commander unique to the rules of commander because the rules of commander encourage you to design decks around abilities of a single creature. Torpor Orb and Doom Blade do not shut creatures down anywhere near as completely. EDH centralizes around creatures like legacy centralizes around 1 drops. And they banned Mental Misstep.
And I can think of 17 Commanders off the top of my head that either don't care or benefit from Humility being in play (10 enchantment gods, 5 planeswalkers, Oloro, Phage).
Just because the rules of the format encourage you to build your deck around a legendary creature, that doesn't mean you are required to run a creature-based deck.
And I can think of 17 Commanders off the top of my head that either don't care or benefit from Humility being in play (10 enchantment gods, 5 planeswalkers, Oloro, Phage).
Just because the rules of the format encourage you to build your deck around a legendary creature, that doesn't mean you are required to run a creature-based deck.
So about 3% of the possible generals don't care about humility, and less than half of those can even play it. And my favorite deck wins largely without creatures which is just fine. But a single card forcing people to adjust their deck construction to be able to play without a card type or encouraging people to build one of those small handful of decks to get around it is too much. A single card that says that everyone needs reliable counterspells, noncreature enchantment removal, or noncreature win conditions in every deck they build is too warping in deck construction.
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Zedruu: "This deck is not only able to go crazy - it also needs to do so."
So about 3% of the possible generals don't care about humility, and less than half of those can even play it. And my favorite deck wins largely without creatures which is just fine. But a single card forcing people to adjust their deck construction to be able to play without a card type or encouraging people to build one of those small handful of decks to get around it is too much. A single card that says that everyone needs reliable counterspells, noncreature enchantment removal, or noncreature win conditions in every deck they build is too warping in deck construction.
Ok, let me try a different approach. Humility is a global effect. There are only 12 combinations of decks that can run Humility. The percentage of those decks that can realistically function without being nerfed by Humility is significantly lower. (Case in point: do a search in the multiplayer forum for 'humility' and see how many hits you get - spoiler alert it's 5, and only 2 of them actually run the card.) So the bottom line is that the card doesn't see enough play to be banning criteria.
There are only a handful of playable cards which either have or grant infect. Skittles is a 3-turn clock (just like every power 7+ commander in the game), Blightsteel is a stupidly-high costed spell that basically ends people on its own (as do a number of other finishers), Triumph of the Hordes is an overrun (and the infect is often irrelevant), and all of the other playable infect cards either grant infect to a creature that's actually good, or just have evasion and rely on buffs from other sources to be threatening.
Honestly, my biggest beef with infect is that they didn't reprint Leeches in Scars block. While they printed Melira as an anti-poison card, the two serve different purposes fighting against poison counters and I would've liked to see both.
Isn't Leeches on the Reserve List?
Huh, you're right. Never even noticed. Still would've liked something like Leeches for Scars block. (Say, a near-functional reprint that doesn't do damage because the mindless hypothetical new player doesn't want to do damage to himself ever because life points are so precious.) Leeches really aren't in-theme for Mirrodin, anyway, so a different card would've probably been printed even if they could do a functional reprint.
Triumph of the Hordes is an overrun (and the infect is often irrelevant)
I think your definition of "often" differs greatly from mine.
I can count on one hand the number of times I've seen Triumph of the Hordes cast, the caster win the game that turn, and that combat not deal enough damage to where the infect part mattered more than the buff and trample.
Huh, you're right. Never even noticed. Still would've liked something like Leeches for Scars block. (Say, a near-functional reprint that doesn't do damage because the mindless hypothetical new player doesn't want to do damage to himself ever because life points are so precious.) Leeches really aren't in-theme for Mirrodin, anyway, so a different card would've probably been printed even if they could do a functional reprint.
I can count on one hand the number of times I've seen Triumph of the Hordes cast, the caster win the game that turn, and that combat not deal enough damage to where the infect part mattered more than the buff and trample.
Triumph of the Hordes is an overrun (and the infect is often irrelevant)
I think your definition of "often" differs greatly from mine.
I can count on one hand the number of times I've seen Triumph of the Hordes cast, the caster win the game that turn, and that combat not deal enough damage to where the infect part mattered more than the buff and trample.
I'll one up this and add that the number of times that triumph does squeak in with enough infect but not enough regular damage for the kill, that an overrun or Overwhelming Stampede would not have done just as well and made people just as equally dead.
Ok, let me try a different approach. Humility is a global effect. There are only 12 combinations of decks that can run Humility. The percentage of those decks that can realistically function without being nerfed by Humility is significantly lower. (Case in point: do a search in the multiplayer forum for 'humility' and see how many hits you get - spoiler alert it's 5, and only 2 of them actually run the card.) So the bottom line is that the card doesn't see enough play to be banning criteria.
That's a fair reason. If people aren't playing it in the first place, then I suppose there's no reason to be up in arms.
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(Case in point: do a search in the multiplayer forum for 'humility' and see how many hits you get - spoiler alert it's 5, and only 2 of them actually run the card.)
The search isn't working right. I've posted lists with Humility that don't show up in those results (see the Jasmine list from my sig, which is posted in that sub). There was just someone in the Elves thread over in modern saying they didn't get a single result when searching that thread for Chord of Calling, which shows up in almost every list.
You can argue (accurately) that Humility doesn't see widespread play, but this particular point is built on a technical issue with the forums.
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Except, that a combat damage dealer doesn't have to do 6x the damage. Other people are in this game. Other people will be doing combat damage, or other damage, or life loss, or burning their own life totals for resources. The same is not necessarily true for poison counters. In general, if everyone is dealing damage to each other about equally, you'll only need to end up accounting for one opponent's amount of life.
This means that you'll need to do 2x 'regular' magic damage to win (barring lifelinky stuff that makes it go up, and those commander voltron decks, which makes it go down), while infecters need to do 3x.
Furthermore, the quality of non-infect damage is far greater than the quality of infect damage. My Heliod deck makes tons of 2/1 tokens, such that I can have 20-40 damage on the board, getting even half of that in infect damage is extremely difficult in raw creature power, short of triumph of the hordes, which, face it, isn't an infect win, it's an overrun style win. That investment in creature power in an infect deck requires a lot of commitment to boardstate, more so than my token deck, which makes you fragile.
While this is a valid point to a race scenario, it means that your creatures do not trade effectively against opposing boardstates, and since there are now 3 opposing boardstates, it places you at a disadvantage of being the table's punching bag.
Is there any reason why a rule should be created to specifically excise a strategy? If something ends up not being viable by coincidence, I have no issue with that, but purposefully creating a rule to excise a strategy for no purpose? That sounds odd...
Same can be said of regular combat damage... where you already have multiple creatures from multiple people.
And I still disagree with your math. If your playing infect, you're going uphill all on your own, everyone else is smashing regular lifetotals down, that you never need to do the full amount of regular damage in EDH. You're trying to set up a straight comparison between the two, but that simply does not logically apply in the situation. For the next few games you play, write down how much damage you do to other players, and how much damage other players do to each other, and find out what percent that it.
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Infect as a full on strategy is really not very powerful in EDH, otherwise there would be a lot more of them. What infect ends up doing is finishing of a hapless player or two via certain finisher cards like Inkmoth Nexus. I don't see it as being a very problematic strategy. Honestly, the top four are probably:
Retired EDH - Tibor and Lumia | [PR]Nemata |Ramirez dePietro | [C]Edric | Riku | Jenara | Lazav | Heliod | Daxos | Roon | Kozilek
Frankly, I think everyone should have enough poison counters to survive one blightsteel attack and get a chance to find some answers. 15 is the poison counter number I usually think of as fair.
I think poison is far, far more powerful than people let on in EDH. Just doesn't get used much because it leaves a bad taste in people's mouths.
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It's powerful, but the card selection is pretty piss poor.
You have Blighted Agent, Blightsteel Colossus, Corrupted Conscience, Flesh-eater imp, Grafted Exoskeleton (arguably the best one), Inkmoth Nexus (probably the second best), Skithiryx, the blight dragon, Tainted Strike, and Triumph of the hordes. Those are the cards with infect that I actually think are really good for what they are where as the rest are kinda bad.
I don't agree with changing infect at this time for edh, but since 21 points of commander damage ends a player, I think 12 would be perfect. It's a little more than half of lethal commander damage without neutering infect and it takes care of hasted blightsteels.
I didn't say it was instant win. I said it was a common wincon across various decks. Huge difference. So if you're trying to make a ban list that has the most impact with the fewest cards, you hit LabMan instead of Doomsday and Hermit Druid. If you're trying to be thorough you hit all three, but you're going to have a lousy format if go and ban everything out of the gate. Personally, I say let a couple of glass cannon cards remain when they only have one function. But what do I know? The entire premise is silly.
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I've one-shotted people with 22+ commander damage with an unblockable Shu Yun more times in a single evening than I've seen a Blightsteel kill in my entire time playing EDH.
I play two infect decks, a Xenagos infect deck and my Jor Kadeen metalcraft infect deck. Jor can be blistering fast and has a fairly good win rate. Xenagos is much more variable. A couple of times I've killed off tables by turn 6, other times I accomplish virtually nothing in that time. More time than not, when I play that deck, I end up being the archenemy, and not doing so well. People recognize that infect + Xenagos' effect can be pretty dangerous, so they play accordingly.
I also used to play a Rafiq infect deck. Tons of ways to make stuff unblockable, lots of exalted, and Rafiq gives a single infect guy double strike on top of exalted bonuses. *THAT* was broken, and I broke it down pretty darn quickly, because it wasn't fun to play or to play against. If I was a more competitive player, or in a more competitive meta, it probably would have been fine, and in a truly competitive meta it wouldn't do anything, but it didn't end up being the sort of EDH I like to play or play against. The other two, they seem fine, and nobody I play against seems to regard them as overpowered.
I mean, I won't disagree that people rely too much on ETBs for their removal, but in a format where people (at least hypothetically) build their decks around a central creature, humility says "yeah, you don't get to do that. And I hope you're packing consistent enchantment removal, or you're not doing anything soon. It's ok though, because I'm not doing anything either! Let's just sit on our hands for a while." Frankly, whatever argument got Karakas banned should apply straight to Humility. God, I hate it.
Except Karakas has virtually no application beyond bouncing a commander, whereas Humility shuts down entire decks. So Karakas has a unique interaction that Humility doesn't have.
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As poorly thought out as I think infect is, Blightsteel is just Phage the Untouchable but not terrible.
Honestly, my biggest beef with infect is that they didn't reprint Leeches in Scars block. While they printed Melira as an anti-poison card, the two serve different purposes fighting against poison counters and I would've liked to see both.
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Isn't Leeches on the Reserve List?
Infect has BSC, Triumph, Skittles, Exoskeleton, and Tainted Strike as the only decent infect cards (that don't require hoops to jump through). You can add Inkmoth, Blighted Agent, and Spinebiter to the list also, but they require a bit more work to make viable.
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I really don't feel like doing MORE than perfectly negate the central focus of the format is a point in its favor. The ability to hate against a deck is fine. I don't think Choke is worth banning. But I might reconsider that if the format mandated that everyone play islands and suggested they build their decks around them.
I think your definition of "often" differs greatly from mine.
Current Decks
GTitania midrange
RGThromok tokens/goodstuff | UB Grimgrin zombie tribal
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Triumph of the Hordes also used to win me hilarious amounts of games with the Elf deck
Also: There are many, many ways to put a Blightsteel into play for free (or virtually free). Bribery is the one I see the most often though =P kind of a funny two player combo.
UW Ephara Hatebears [Primer], GB Gitrog Lands, BRU Inalla Combo-Control, URG Maelstrom Wanderer Landfall
But isn't the same thing true about ALL formats? People like to smash face with creatures in every format, and Humility stops that as well. The fact remains that Humility doesn't interact poorly with Commander any more than Torpor Orb or Doom Blade does. For it to be something worth considering in Commander, it has to have a negative interaction due to the unique rules that Commander does not share with other formats.
Oh yeah, I forgot Corrupted Conscience. Good call.
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It has an interaction in Commander unique to the rules of commander because the rules of commander encourage you to design decks around abilities of a single creature. Torpor Orb and Doom Blade do not shut creatures down anywhere near as completely. EDH centralizes around creatures like legacy centralizes around 1 drops. And they banned Mental Misstep.
And I can think of 17 Commanders off the top of my head that either don't care or benefit from Humility being in play (10 enchantment gods, 5 planeswalkers, Oloro, Phage).
Just because the rules of the format encourage you to build your deck around a legendary creature, that doesn't mean you are required to run a creature-based deck.
Misc. EDH Stuff: Commander Cube | Zombies (Horde)
Resources:Commander Rulings FAQ | Commander Deckbuilding Guide
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So about 3% of the possible generals don't care about humility, and less than half of those can even play it. And my favorite deck wins largely without creatures which is just fine. But a single card forcing people to adjust their deck construction to be able to play without a card type or encouraging people to build one of those small handful of decks to get around it is too much. A single card that says that everyone needs reliable counterspells, noncreature enchantment removal, or noncreature win conditions in every deck they build is too warping in deck construction.
Ok, let me try a different approach. Humility is a global effect. There are only 12 combinations of decks that can run Humility. The percentage of those decks that can realistically function without being nerfed by Humility is significantly lower. (Case in point: do a search in the multiplayer forum for 'humility' and see how many hits you get - spoiler alert it's 5, and only 2 of them actually run the card.) So the bottom line is that the card doesn't see enough play to be banning criteria.
Misc. EDH Stuff: Commander Cube | Zombies (Horde)
Resources:Commander Rulings FAQ | Commander Deckbuilding Guide
Follow me on Twitter! @cryogen_mtg
I can count on one hand the number of times I've seen Triumph of the Hordes cast, the caster win the game that turn, and that combat not deal enough damage to where the infect part mattered more than the buff and trample.
Two Score, Minus Two or: A Stargate Tail
(Image by totallynotabrony)
MaRo has said many times that he HATES Leeches and doesn't think it is good design or that anything like it should exist.
http://markrosewater.tumblr.com/post/116128418083/maro-what-if-just-hypothetically-leeches-did
http://markrosewater.tumblr.com/post/36295618059/just-to-nitpick-even-though-it-wasnt-in-the
http://markrosewater.tumblr.com/post/38101184992/do-you-get-mixed-feelings-about-the-reserved-list
Currently Playing:
Legacy: Something U/W Controlish
EDH Cube
Hypercube! A New EDH Deck Every Week(ish)!
Retired EDH - Tibor and Lumia | [PR]Nemata |Ramirez dePietro | [C]Edric | Riku | Jenara | Lazav | Heliod | Daxos | Roon | Kozilek
That's a fair reason. If people aren't playing it in the first place, then I suppose there's no reason to be up in arms.
UW Ephara Hatebears [Primer], GB Gitrog Lands, BRU Inalla Combo-Control, URG Maelstrom Wanderer Landfall
You can argue (accurately) that Humility doesn't see widespread play, but this particular point is built on a technical issue with the forums.