MTG Salvation

How has Leovold's reputation held up? I haven't heard a lot of grousing about him lately, but I also don't want to be That Guy. His price is still absurd.

Quote from sH0opdAwoOp »

Bummer, that. I feel like that playgroup kind of singlehandedly spurred on an interest in stax decks on the forums (c.f. Phil's guide).

As an aside, having been away for a while, it feels like things are less active in the Commander forum than they were a few years ago. It seems like posts used to fall off the first page within a matter of hours, while now they seem to linger for a few days. I'm sure the holidays are slower than the rest of the year, but still... Has there been something of a decrease in the popularity of Commander in general after the hype in 2012, 2014, etc? Or is it just in my head?

It's cryogen's fault.

Quote from Weebos »

How has Leovold's reputation held up? I haven't heard a lot of grousing about him lately, but I also don't want to be That Guy. His price is still absurd.

He's still the best hardcore control BUG general available, and he is playable in Tiny Leaders. #MakeTinyLeadersGreatAgain

Quote from Donald »

It's cryogen's fault.

This logic works for most problems.

edit: I picked up a set of Jace, Vryn's Prodigy a couple weeks ago to screw around with in modern and legacy and list prices are roughly double what I paid right now. I'm glad I grabbed those when I did, even if the only thing I really want to do with them is Goryo's Vengeance back a walker.

Quote from Donald »

It's cryogen's fault.

It usually is.

I was honestly getting a bit bored with EDH, but holy crap, I love Saskia the Unyielding. I just need to stop being sick so I can go out and play more.

I'm not getting bored with EDH, I'm getting bored with the players. My league has been slowly warped by combo players to the point where people have decided not to continue playing.I'm also getting sick of every new release having some vomit-inducing card in it. Really Wizards, what were you thinking with Paradox Engine?

I want to play Paradox elves so much. It's way beyond my normal threshold for reasonable decks and I'll still subject my group to it at least once.

Quote from cryogen »

I'm not getting bored with EDH, I'm getting bored with the players. My league has been slowly warped by combo players to the point where people have decided not to continue playing.I'm also getting sick of every new release having some vomit-inducing card in it. Really Wizards, what were you thinking with Paradox Engine?

I hate people too.

What's been happening here? I haven't been on much. In fact, Monday was the first time I got a chance to even play Magic in more than a month.

On the positive side, taking time off meant everyone got tired of Leovold while I was away, so I didn't have a miserable time of things on Monday by going up against Leovold repeatedly like I did the previous three times I'd played. For awhile there, a bunch of people in the local group were playing essentially the same miserable Leovold deck, with the only real difference being how well-tuned each person's was.

I've versed the Leovold menace a couple times, but not multiple in one game so far. He seems pretty good, but I don't think he's a bigger boogey man then any number of other commanders running around in the format. A few of them at the same time though sounds like a linear, "unfun" game to me. Hopefully you keep having some better games

My apologies for lack of clarity. I never went up against more than one Leovold in a given game back when people were running him locally, but for a few weeks there it seemed like almost every game I played, someone was not only running a Leovold deck, but was running essentially the very same Leovold deck, which included every mass draw spell and Windfall variant in the game, resulting in the Leo player having a huge grip of cards while everyone else got one card and kept having to discard their hands repeatedly. That got old really quick. Not to say Leovold is any worse than a number of other ridiculously strong commanders (Derevi, Arcum, Zur, etc.), but that particular build doesn't lend itself to games that the typical group of Commander players finds very fun... which people figured out soon enough, apparently, based on the observed absence of Leovold during last Monday's session. I'm hoping that will be the case again when I play this Monday.

Quote from JWK »

My apologies for lack of clarity. I never went up against more than one Leovold in a given game back when people were running him locally, but for a few weeks there it seemed like almost every game I played, someone was not only running a Leovold deck, but was running essentially the very same Leovold deck, which included every mass draw spell and Windfall variant in the game, resulting in the Leo player having a huge grip of cards while everyone else got one card and kept having to discard their hands repeatedly. That got old really quick. Not to say Leovold is any worse than a number of other ridiculously strong commanders (Derevi, Arcum, Zur, etc.), but that particular build doesn't lend itself to games that the typical group of Commander players finds very fun... which people figured out soon enough, apparently, based on the observed absence of Leovold during last Monday's session. I'm hoping that will be the case again when I play this Monday.

Luckily that bug barely caught on in my group. One guy built the deck and retired it after the first game, and another one may still have the deck but doesn't play it. I picked up a copy of him, but it's going in my cube.

It's difficult when several people in a group pick up the same commander at the same time. We had a similar issue when Nekusar was released where literally every game for months would include a Nekusar and it came to a point where everyone started to adjust their decks accordingly. After a while this cooled off, but there was a very obvious skew caused by having a deck focused on wheels in every game.

We have a no duplicate commander rule which has only been broken once and that is with multiple people running Gaddock Teeg. My decks are very Teeg resistant as a result. There have been a number of decks I wanted to build but didn't because someone else has one. I've been pushing my friend with Circu, Dimir Lobotomist to change commanders for his mill deck for over a year now. My argument is that Circu sucks, which is a legitimate argument, but really I want to build a Lantern Control deck with him.

So what's everyone's outlook and ideas about a sliver commander?

Quote from lAzinl »

So what's everyone's outlook and ideas about a sliver commander?

From the opposing side of the table your boardstate is difficult to assess and you can go from potential threat to deadly with a couple of cards. So you will always be on my "kill on sight" hitlist, even if that just means keeping you from having a boardstate.

Quote from lAzinl »

So what's everyone's outlook and ideas about a sliver commander?

I think it's a very linear strategy and can get boring quickly.

I second cryo's statement, speaking of deck ideas, I'm going to go back to my Oloro, Ageless Ascetic life gain horsemanship solider token deck

Quote from sH0opdAwoOp »

Bummer, that. I feel like that playgroup kind of singlehandedly spurred on an interest in stax decks on the forums (c.f. Phil's guide).

As an aside, having been away for a while, it feels like things are less active in the Commander forum than they were a few years ago. It seems like posts used to fall off the first page within a matter of hours, while now they seem to linger for a few days. I'm sure the holidays are slower than the rest of the year, but still... Has there been something of a decrease in the popularity of Commander in general after the hype in 2012, 2014, etc? Or is it just in my head?

I'm not sure about general trends, but I've stopped posting/lurking here quite a bit recently and I can speak to why that is. On the one hand, the way I approach Commander has changed and I think my perspective is no longer particularly helpful to a good bit of the playerbase. So it's hard to participate in threads and give good, constructive advice. I've also seen a lot of discussion get very repetitive - the same kind of threads pop up like clockwork and I'm not really invested in paying attention to and posting in all of them. And, finally, I think a lot of posting that goes on is mostly people just listening to themselves talk, and not really having any kind of back-and-forth - the most popular threads I see are ones where players get to list their own decks and talk about themselves, and that's just kind of a natural human thing, but a "Name your three favourite Commanders!" thread can easily go on forever without anyone actually replying to one another or having any real purpose at all. It's not interesting to me. Whenever I log in, I can usually find one or two things to comment on, but that's about it. Besides thread, of course, but even that's slowed down. So maybe we just have less folks now. I don't think it says anything about Commander as a whole, though.

Quote from Weebo »

edit: I picked up a set of Jace, Vryn's Prodigy a couple weeks ago to screw around with in modern and legacy and list prices are roughly double what I paid right now. I'm glad I grabbed those when I did, even if the only thing I really want to do with them is Goryo's Vengeance back a walker.

Wow, I hadn't noticed. I got one really cheap because a buddy of mine got a foil and got rid of his old one. Actually using it as a Commander, it's a fun little deck. Glad I got it when I did, I guess. My friend is generous, but not that generous.

Quote from cryogen »

I'm not getting bored with EDH, I'm getting bored with the players. My league has been slowly warped by combo players to the point where people have decided not to continue playing. I'm also getting sick of every new release having some vomit-inducing card in it. Really Wizards, what were you thinking with Paradox Engine?

I'm kind of the opposite way. I've been playing with people who really like high-power decks and games for so long (and that's become the kind of game I enjoy, too) that I can't really sit down at a casual table any more. It's fine when I'm playing with my group, but it's hard to go anywhere else and enjoy a game. I need to build more decks for that purpose, but I'm not really motivated to.

Quote from Life1ess »

It's difficult when several people in a group pick up the same commander at the same time. We had a similar issue when Nekusar was released where literally every game for months would include a Nekusar and it came to a point where everyone started to adjust their decks accordingly. After a while this cooled off, but there was a very obvious skew caused by having a deck focused on wheels in every game.

Yeah, Nekusar was a big one. I think it was especially rough considering how Nekusar decks interact with one another. I remember everyone and their brother building Narset as well. I know there have been others, but I'm blanking right now.

Quote from Donald »

We have a no duplicate commander rule which has only been broken once and that is with multiple people running Gaddock Teeg. My decks are very Teeg resistant as a result. There have been a number of decks I wanted to build but didn't because someone else has one. I've been pushing my friend with Circu, Dimir Lobotomist to change commanders for his mill deck for over a year now. My argument is that Circu sucks, which is a legitimate argument, but really I want to build a Lantern Control deck with him.

I've played Lantern Circu and it's a blast. It's not good by any means, but porting a strategy like that over to Commander is awesome.

Quote from lAzinl »

So what's everyone's outlook and ideas about a sliver commander?

As above, Slivers are very linear, and I don't enjoy playing them very much. A lot of tribal decks are that way, but the downside to Slivers, I think, is that building five-color means you have to invest a lot more into your deck than if you were to play Elves or Goblins or what have you. It's also a deck that's very... you win or you lose. If you execute your gampeplan, you win very simply and easily, and if someone devotes their time to shutting you out, you lose and lose hard. Again, I don't find that particularly enjoyable, myself.

I'm currently playing a Daretti stax deck that durdles hard and wins eventually, but I'm trying to durdle less while staying mono red and remaining competitive with stronger, more expensive decks.

I was thinking Marton Stromgald or Lu Bu, Master-at-Arms. Or should I just stick with OP welder-walker while we're still in sunny, artifact-centric Kaladesh so I can reap the AER goodies?

Quote from Darcykun »

I remember everyone and their brother building Narset as well. I know there have been others, but I'm blanking right now.

We've had Meren of Clan Nel Roth season, same goes for Atraxa, Praetor's Voice, Oloro, Ageless Ascetic, Mizzix of the Izmagnus and as said Narset, Enlightened Master.
I'm really happy my paper playgroup doesn't reflect these trends as hard as online enviroments do, because it can be very annoying to play against the same 3-5 commanders over and over again.
I've always loved the format for its diversity. While its great that the C15 and C16 sets came with plenty of good commanders i feel like creativity suffered a bit. When i started with EDH there only were the original commanders and outside of them you had to build from scratch. It was fun what people came up with everytime you've seen a new deck. But as off late there's a +50% chance that the new deck at the table is one of the above, especially Atraxa, Praetor's Voice is heavily overplayed for my taste.

I'm somewhat pleasantly surprised that my playgroup isn't heavily playing the C16 commanders at the moment. One guy who plays pretty competitively has a Vial Smasher deck that looks more fun than his usual deck, another guy last time I played had a punisher deck that used two of the partner commanders mostly for diversity of color access and utility. I have an Atraxa deck, but I went the counters-matter and proliferate route rather than the tedious superfriends route (it runs only only one planeswalker), and people don't seem to hate it too much. I'm also working on a Saskia deck built around trample and trample enablers but avoiding obvious staples like Overrun, Craterhoof and Gisela.

Thank you, I do understand how boring they can get, and how much people target you from playing them. I had a 5 color sliver deck that I quite using because it was so boring. In my play group a lot of people play tribal such as elves, zombies, vampires, merefolk, etc. I already have most of the sliver cards from time spiral, stronghold, etc. I also have overlord, hivelord, and legion. So buying cards isn't really a burden.