Welcome everyone to the MTG Salvation competitive commander multiplayer tier list discussion thread. This is an attempt at a thoughtful discussion about competitive multiplayer EDH and the hierarchy of different generals and decklists when it comes to cutthroat commander. Please note that I have run this idea past the mods and have their blessing. Be forewarned though that I am fairly certain they will be watching this thread to assure that the discussion remains on topic and civil.
This thread is NOT, I repeat NOT, a tier list tread but a tier list discussion thread.
First I'll discuss the primary view opposing tier lists and competitiveness in EDH in general because I expect to see quite a bit of it in this thread if I don't head it off before hand.
I appreciate the "spirit" of EDH and understand that the things we will be discussing in this thread do not coincide with the views of a large portion of the EDH community but as the rules committee states on its official website: "Players should aim to interact both during the game and before it begins, discussing with other players what they expect/want from the game." What the competitive EDH community expect/want is a chance to prove what we brew is the best of the best and to have a place to prove it. "Greatness, at any cost." -Bob.
Now back to tier discussions.
At first I considered making a straight tier list but after some interactions with other members of these forums and members of my playgroup I decided on a different format.
Even before I put up a preliminary tier list created through a robust discussion with contributions from numerous members of the community, there has to be a discussion about the tier lists themselves.
Here are just a few lines of discussion just to start us off.
How do you define different tiers? Should the tiers be based on match-ups with theoretical odds assigned to them?
If you want to do actual playtests in what format and through what medium should the testing be done in? How large a pod should the playlist be tested in? 2, 4 or more maybe? Should the number of opponents and their effects on a deck factor into a decks ranking?
What format defining cards should a deck be able to play around?
The only thing that is set is that I will be using a general SS, S, A, B format when I eventual post a tier list. Currently the only deck whose placement has been predetermined by general consensus is 5c Hermit Druid at SS and even then the decklist is not nailed down. No one I talked to disagreed with the statement that if you are going to be playing competitive EDH you have to be able to interact with this thing if you are not playing it.
tl;dr: This thread is to discuss creating a tier list for competitive Commander/EDH.
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"Those who are skilled in combat do not become angered,
those who are skilled at winning do not become afraid.
Thus the wise win before the fight, while the ignorant fight to win."
Do yourself a favor and don't have more than 4 or 5 tiers. You could spend the rest of your life trying to define the difference between a D tier and an E tier deck and never make any progress.
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EDH playing competitive Magic cast away
Current Decks GTitania midrange RGThromok tokens/goodstuff | UB Grimgrin zombie tribal GW Sigarda enchantress | R Godo voltron U Braids aggro | WR Kalemne punisher RU Mizzix storm | BUG Mimeoplasm competitive reanimator | UG Ezuri infect
I wouldn't bother with any more than two tiers for competitive EDH frankly. There's "ridiculously busted," "pretty competitive," and the rest are just not worth thinking about. Maaaaybe if you stretch, a Tier 1/1.5/2.
Ain't nobody playing Tier 3 decks in Modern or Legacy (at least not for anything but funzies).
In a competitive context you have: Generals/decks who are universally awesome (Modern Junk), Generals/Decks who are almost as good but with different interactions (Modern Amulet Bloom), and Generals/Decks that are capable of preying on some or all of the top decks (Modern Hatebears, Soul Sisters, Martyr Proc). Mostly.
I think users will prefer the traditional "tier one," "tier two," et cetera.
Building upon what Pokken wrote, I believe there are three meaningful categories. The first are decks like Arcum Dagsson, Prossh, et cetera - they're good decks unless the meta works against them. These decks have active gameplans, often win games, and are key players within their meta and the community at large. The second are decks like Roon of the Hidden Realm, Zedruu, et cetera - they're bad decks unless the meta works for them. These decks often are built on a theme (Roon is blink, for example), and can meaningfully interact with a game and occasionally win games. The final category are decks like Rakdos, Lord of Riots and Jalira - they are bad decks even when the meta works for them. These decks often have little to do with the outcome of the game, outside of occasionally blowing one player out only to have another opponent win.
I do think we can have meaningful discussion about tiers 1, 2, and 3. I wouldn't agree that the tiers can be summed up by
There's "ridiculously busted," "pretty competitive," and the rest are just not worth thinking about
The problem is that a lot of competitive decks are "ridiculously busted" when compared to casual decks. If one were to play with a bunch of casual players and combo out on turn six every game, they would view that as "ridiculously busted." Turn six is actually fairly slow for a "fast combo deck," but compared to their decks, it would be very strong. They perceive turn six combo decks and turn five combo decks as equally unbeatable, but in fact the turn five deck is measurably better. You would have a similar thing happen if you took a vintage player and sat him down with a bunch of kitchen table magic players. Technically, his deck is legal in their format and vice versa, but they're really not playing the same format. Vintage has more nuance than "unbeatable" and "beatable," and so does EDH.
I guess I shorthanded a bit but I think the concept still applies if you assume we're talking about the context of a competitive metagame. I do like your concept of the tiers interacting with the meta.
When I think "ridiculously busted" I think - there are decks that will win or lock the board as fast as possible to do in the format even through some disruption (e.g. Arcum diskbo, Derevi lockdown, Zur lockdown, Hermit druid) and are going to be strong pretty much no matter what. These kinds of decks compare really well to where modern Junk is right now and where Melira Pod used to be. They have strong active gameplans that can beat any deck any given Sunday.
While I agree that a casual player might think my Turn 7 Skullbriar Melira-Primus-Viscera Seer combo is too strong, I think it's easy to see how crappy it is in a competitive context and that it is not in fact ridiculously busted
I guess I shorthanded a bit but I think the concept still applies if you assume we're talking about the context of a competitive metagame. I do like your concept of the tiers interacting with the meta.
When I think "ridiculously busted" I think - there are decks that will win as fast as possible to do in the format even through some disruption (e.g. Arcum diskbo, Derevi lockdown, Zur lockdown, Hermit druid) and are going to be strong pretty much no matter what. These kinds of decks compare really well to where modern Junk is right now and where Melira Pod used to be. They have strong active gameplans that can beat any deck any given Sunday.
While I agree that a casual player might think my Turn 7 Skullbriar Melira-Primus-Viscera Seer combo is too strong, I think it's easy to see how crappy it is in a competitive context and that it is not in fact ridiculously busted
The problem with this analysis is that a lot of the best decks in EDH don't win until later on. Zur enchantress, Tasigur control, and GAA4 Stax are common examples.
It's odd that you mention those examples specifically, as they've been falling out of favor in competitive circles. Arcum usually runs other combos that are more important than setting up a disk lock, Derevi is best played as a combo deck with an aggro plan b, and Hermit Druid just isn't resilient enough to compete with more traditional decks, nor fast enough to compete with Ad Nauseam.
Zur doesn't officially win until later but he's usually all but achieved victory early (and same with Derevi). Most decks that delay victory like that have basically achieved the lock long beforehand - they've made a board state where no one else can win and all that's left is counting to 21/40/executing a combo.
Same as Modern Junk - it hasn't "won" when it makes you discard everything, kills all your creatures, then flashes back Lingering Souls. But the game's basically over.
I'm very leery of "theoretical odds". In general, I don't like assigning numbers to things if those numbers aren't real. Magic players love assigning numbers to things that are more specific than the data warrants, and I think it's better to just not do that. Additionally, it's not clear what matchup numbers even mean in a multiplayer format. For example, consider a deck that has a medium-speed combo that it wants to pull off, but not much of a plan B. That deck, in an abstract sense, is pretty weak against a deck that packs a lot of disruption, because it's likely the combo will get disrupted. It's also, in an abstract sense, pretty weak against a deck with a slightly faster combo, since it'll usually get beat to the punch. But if you put all three of those decks in the same game, the medium-speed combo deck is suddenly in a much better position. A lot of competitive EDH plays out like this: Somebody tries to go off, people blow their disruption on that deck to avoid losing, and then someone else goes off and wins. The medium-speed combo deck is well-positioned to be the second deck to go off. It's wildly impractical to try to list odds for every combination of decks you might play against, but one-on-one matchup stats don't always translate well to multiplayer, depending on what other decks are present. Even looking at matchup results is tough when you're looking at multiplayer. If there are four decks that my friends and I play against each other (A, B, C and D) when we want to get competitive, and they all have around a 25% win rate, that doesn't necessarily mean that they're all equally good; one deck might be much stronger, but because everyone recognizes that, they spend more resources interfering with that player.
I think the key to everything in this thread is, if you're going to talk about competitive decks, to look through the lens of all the other formats and how they discuss what is competitive.
It's slightly different because of multiplayer and politics, but most of the same principles apply. It will eventually come down the gnat's ass of analyzing win rates. It's actually less complicated in some ways if we assume no sideboarding, but more complex also because of the sheer number of cards and variation. Because of the high variation you're going to need even more trials to have meaningful data.
If you want to have any really accurate competitive tiers, you're going to have to do some serious testing and not just talk about stuff in theory. This almost surely means MTGO or Cockatrice, as the anecdotal experiences of local playgroups is probably almost meaningless in this kind of discussion (unless your playgroup is one of the very few who are actually truly cutthroat).
The most difficult aspect of truly competitive EDH is that there is just no consistent tournament format from where to get your data. Other formats derive a lot of their data from MTGO results, but also from real tournament results.
In thinking on this a little more, I think I'd recommend taking a step back from a tier discussion and try to formulate a standard testing mechanism.
Frankly I think there are too many variables for this discussion to end up with a meaningful tier list no matter how much testing takes place.
At best this is going to end up providing a list of "more successful" and "less successful" decks based on already well known powerful cards and commanders.
IE title this "***** We Already Know".
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Current Decks GTitania midrange RGThromok tokens/goodstuff | UB Grimgrin zombie tribal GW Sigarda enchantress | R Godo voltron U Braids aggro | WR Kalemne punisher RU Mizzix storm | BUG Mimeoplasm competitive reanimator | UG Ezuri infect
I really dislike all of this "it depends on what your definition of 'is' is". Pokken has been hitting it right on the money when he says to assume everyone else is building and playing to win and are competent and competitive players. Starting there, proof is not impossible.
Suppose you have 2 weighted coins and you want to know which one will flip heads more. It may be plain to see just by sight inspection in which case no testing is needed. But if you can't tell by looking at it, a few coin flips might help but still fails the law of large numbers. If I flipped each coin a thousand times, I'd get a much clearer picture.
Now if we took everyone viewing the Commander thread at the time of this post, had them test a deck twice, we'd have our thousand flips and we would start to see a trend. So let's quit the pessimistic chatter and make some progress.
I've played the first two extensively and have just started testing Waste Not but it's been a powerhouse so far. I have been modifying these in private lists but hope to make them public in the near future. If anyone wants to see an example, PM me (I promise I won't charge! )
Calling the tiers SS, S, A, etc sounds weird to me. What do the S's even mean? Personally I'd go with tier 1, 2, 3, etc. The simplest way is often the best.
I'm curious to know how the decks would be ranked. Voting would be the easiest way, but not very accurate - people always vote for their pet decks or the ones they happen to have encountered through limited experience. And you can't go by speed because a slow stax deck will often crush much faster combo decks. All I can think of is a program that would somehow calculate how the best decks would do against each other after 1000 games or whatever, but that sounds like a programming nightmare.
I'm going to disagree that Hermit Druid is SS.
It's fast and consistent but honestly if anyone knows what the deck is doing then it's fairly easy to stop.
Any deck can be fairly optimized but it's hard to really give it a rank.
Sure there's a meta where some deck wins all the time, it moves to another and goes from S rank to B since the meta is more competitive.
I'm not sure how to really grade decks here
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Hey guys so I've actually moved on from commander on to 60 card decks so I don't have any commander decks.
Anyway I've started my own gameplay channel in which I play games (Magic also)
I'm very leery of "theoretical odds". In general, I don't like assigning numbers to things if those numbers aren't real. Magic players love assigning numbers to things that are more specific than the data warrants, and I think it's better to just not do that. Additionally, it's not clear what matchup numbers even mean in a multiplayer format. For example, consider a deck that has a medium-speed combo that it wants to pull off, but not much of a plan B. That deck, in an abstract sense, is pretty weak against a deck that packs a lot of disruption, because it's likely the combo will get disrupted. It's also, in an abstract sense, pretty weak against a deck with a slightly faster combo, since it'll usually get beat to the punch. But if you put all three of those decks in the same game, the medium-speed combo deck is suddenly in a much better position. A lot of competitive EDH plays out like this: Somebody tries to go off, people blow their disruption on that deck to avoid losing, and then someone else goes off and wins. The medium-speed combo deck is well-positioned to be the second deck to go off. It's wildly impractical to try to list odds for every combination of decks you might play against, but one-on-one matchup stats don't always translate well to multiplayer, depending on what other decks are present. Even looking at matchup results is tough when you're looking at multiplayer. If there are four decks that my friends and I play against each other (A, B, C and D) when we want to get competitive, and they all have around a 25% win rate, that doesn't necessarily mean that they're all equally good; one deck might be much stronger, but because everyone recognizes that, they spend more resources interfering with that player.
On the other hand, a "deck that has a medium-speed combo that it wants to pull off, but not much of a plan B" is pretty bad against anything. I think that it makes sense to talk about one-on-one stats - like how my Jarad deck generally faces opposing Sharuum decks - as long as you keep in mind that everything is context-dependent. What you're saying about interfering with other players is fallacious - decks should be built to win (in this setting) and if that means scaling your deck back to not get disrupted, that's fine. Fortunately, in an actual competitive setting that is rarely the case.
I think the key to everything in this thread is, if you're going to talk about competitive decks, to look through the lens of all the other formats and how they discuss what is competitive.
It's slightly different because of multiplayer and politics, but most of the same principles apply. It will eventually come down the gnat's ass of analyzing win rates. It's actually less complicated in some ways if we assume no sideboarding, but more complex also because of the sheer number of cards and variation. Because of the high variation you're going to need even more trials to have meaningful data.
If you want to have any really accurate competitive tiers, you're going to have to do some serious testing and not just talk about stuff in theory. This almost surely means MTGO or Cockatrice, as the anecdotal experiences of local playgroups is probably almost meaningless in this kind of discussion (unless your playgroup is one of the very few who are actually truly cutthroat).
The most difficult aspect of truly competitive EDH is that there is just no consistent tournament format from where to get your data. Other formats derive a lot of their data from MTGO results, but also from real tournament results.
In thinking on this a little more, I think I'd recommend taking a step back from a tier discussion and try to formulate a standard testing mechanism.
I agree, but that's one of the things I love about EDH. It's unsolved enough that new tier-one decks are still being discovered. I do wish there were lots of tournaments from which we could extract data (which is kind of being attempted, see this thread).
The problem is that a lot of competitive decks are "ridiculously busted" when compared to casual decks. If one were to play with a bunch of casual players and combo out on turn six every game, they would view that as "ridiculously busted." Turn six is actually fairly slow for a "fast combo deck," but compared to their decks, it would be very strong. They perceive turn six combo decks and turn five combo decks as equally unbeatable, but in fact the turn five deck is measurably better. You would have a similar thing happen if you took a vintage player and sat him down with a bunch of kitchen table magic players. Technically, his deck is legal in their format and vice versa, but they're really not playing the same format. Vintage has more nuance than "unbeatable" and "beatable," and so does EDH.
Agree entirely. This is something we have to keep in mind for the entirety of discussing anything tier-related in EDH. Tiering combo decks is the easiest to do in a vacuum, because there's a metric (average turn of success). It doesn't really take into account any sort of interaction, but it's a number. Furthermore, combo decks are perceived to be the most powerful because sans interaction, they'll steamroll a table very early, and most decks aren't equipped to handle that the first time around. EDH isn't played in matches, there isn't sideboarding... all of this adds to the power (and/or percieved power) of combo.
I wouldn't bother with any more than two tiers for competitive EDH frankly. There's "ridiculously busted," "pretty competitive," and the rest are just not worth thinking about. Maaaaybe if you stretch, a Tier 1/1.5/2.
Ain't nobody playing Tier 3 decks in Modern or Legacy (at least not for anything but funzies).
In a competitive context you have: Generals/decks who are universally awesome (Modern Junk), Generals/Decks who are almost as good but with different interactions (Modern Amulet Bloom), and Generals/Decks that are capable of preying on some or all of the top decks (Modern Hatebears, Soul Sisters, Martyr Proc). Mostly.
Nobody plays tier 3 decks in Modern, but tons of people do in EDH. I do agree that going from "SS" down seems silly. That's something you do in a game like Smash bros., which has a set number of characters and you can evaluate how they each rank in relation to one another and it's hard to put too many on the same level - that's the kind of game where you see SS - F tiers. Even then, you get a lot of relatively meaningless discussion about the difference between D and E tier. It's not overly productive.
Tempostorm does four tiers for competitive Hearthstone decks, I like that system for an EDH tier. I know it's a different game, but for reference, their method of tiering is this:
Tier 1: Decks that are clearly dominant, have access to "unfair" gameplans that other decks simply can't match.
Tier 2: Decks that can take games off of Tier 1 decks, but have more noticeable weaknesses - or something that metagames strongly against tier 1 decks but doesn't really stand on its own.
Tier 3: Decks that are average to good, but bad for the meta or strictly worse versions of the best decks. Former high-tier decks that haven't adapted to new metas or cards seem to end up falling here.
Tier 4: Quote, "unrefined, out-of-flavor, overly niche, or flat out retired." Stuff that we'd call "too cute," overly thematic, etc.
Now, a lot of this depends on the metagme, which is something that's a LOT harder to quantify in EDH. So, this is how I'd quantify about four tiers for EDH:
Tier 1: The fastest / most resilient combo decks in the game and the decks that have the best chance to interact with them in a meaningful way. So, for example, I would consider Hermit Druid Tier 1 for the sake of speed (and if we put it in tier two, honestly, what else would we put with it? "Good" but "Fair" decks would end up as far down as tier 4 that way). Something more resilient but a turn slower could also go in Tier 1. Lockdown decks that have a good chance of interacting with these decks probably go up here, so Derevi or whatever.
Tier 2: Combo decks that are noticably more fragile / take longer than tier 1, or the best decks in other archetypes. The very best Voltron and Control decks could sit at Tier 2, things like Purph or Rafiq or (what gets thrown around whenever good control decks are mentioned? Oloro?)
Tier 3: Optimized decks that are demonstrably worse than decks in the same archetype in Tier 2.
Tier 4: Unoptimized, deliberately thematic, or decks in archetypes that don't really function competitively (Group Hug, Pillowfort?)
I think the key to everything in this thread is, if you're going to talk about competitive decks, to look through the lens of all the other formats and how they discuss what is competitive.
It's slightly different because of multiplayer and politics, but most of the same principles apply. It will eventually come down the gnat's ass of analyzing win rates. It's actually less complicated in some ways if we assume no sideboarding, but more complex also because of the sheer number of cards and variation. Because of the high variation you're going to need even more trials to have meaningful data.
If you want to have any really accurate competitive tiers, you're going to have to do some serious testing and not just talk about stuff in theory. This almost surely means MTGO or Cockatrice, as the anecdotal experiences of local playgroups is probably almost meaningless in this kind of discussion (unless your playgroup is one of the very few who are actually truly cutthroat).
The most difficult aspect of truly competitive EDH is that there is just no consistent tournament format from where to get your data. Other formats derive a lot of their data from MTGO results, but also from real tournament results.
In thinking on this a little more, I think I'd recommend taking a step back from a tier discussion and try to formulate a standard testing mechanism.
Cockatrice and MTGO are good (i.e. better than paper), but you still get the problem of a very unrefined metagame. I think realistically a good deckbuilder could take an extremely tuned deck with any Commander onto 'trice and boast a 75% or greater win rate. Now, we could compare this to what winrate the truly BEST decks have (maybe one deck in the world would sit at 90%, I don't know) but I think the metric of winrate would still be entirely based on "how often do we steal games from an unprepared table?" which would make the top tiers almost entirely combo which in a "true" tier list I don't think would be the case.
What I think we need is a cohesive and numerous community who tests these lists solely against each other (yeah, real reasonable goal, I know), but it gives the chance for an actual "meta" to develop and would cut down on "stolen" wins. I guess this also depends on what you want the tier list to measure - if someone's looking for "the best deck to wreck my LGS with," the raw winrate model is best, but if the question is "what's the best deck in a competitive community" (which is the question we're trying to answer, I think), we need to develop some sort of back-and-forth. Basically, we need skilled players developing the decklists and then playing them against other skilled players. This is hard because we'd actually need to network with each other, but that's what it would take.
Darcykun, I agree with your reasoning in terms of tier lists, and you provide good definitions for the four tiers. However, I think you and rockondon both are seriously overestimating "fast combo" decks in a competitive meta. Not that combo is bad - almost every competitive deck runs infinite combos - but rather that the fast-combo decks like Hermit Druid and Ad Nauseam have actually been less than popular in competitive circles. The problem is that the combos require you to build the entire deck around one gameplan, at a great cost. The fact is that a Hermit Druid killing the table on turn four every game is a bit faster than a more traditional deck that has fast combos, but the traditional deck can eat disruption and still come back on turn 10 and win.
Darcykun, I agree with your reasoning in terms of tier lists, and you provide good definitions for the four tiers. However, I think you and rockondon both are seriously overestimating "fast combo" decks in a competitive meta. Not that combo is bad - almost every competitive deck runs infinite combos - but rather that the fast-combo decks like Hermit Druid and Ad Nauseam have actually been less than popular in competitive circles. The problem is that the combos require you to build the entire deck around one gameplan, at a great cost. The fact is that a Hermit Druid killing the table on turn four every game is a bit faster than a more traditional deck that has fast combos, but the traditional deck can eat disruption and still come back on turn 10 and win.
This is very true.
A competitive combo deck that wins on turn 2 will wreck a less competitive meta very often but when met with any disruption there isn't a plan B for them.
Countering Ad Nasum is usually GG against that kind of a deck and exiling hermit druid or stealing him may as well be.
I had a game where I countered a necrotic ooze that would have won that turn only to reanimate it on my own turn. While it's very strong there are a lot of things that can go wrong
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Hey guys so I've actually moved on from commander on to 60 card decks so I don't have any commander decks.
Anyway I've started my own gameplay channel in which I play games (Magic also)
The best way to compare them would be to repeatedly mash decks together on trice and decide which can and or cannot compete on the same level. Once you establish a few good decks you can compare new considerations against the existing established ones.
I think for something like this you are best off taking a handful of players and posting results as well as playtest videos / decklists of them playing and establishing why they are accepted as higher tier. It really takes multiple people going all out 100% testing in a way that can be shown and taken feedback from to establish something like this. New decks can challange to get on the list by challenging existing established decks to games. Obviously a highly competitive deck should still be able to take about 1/4 of a 4 player FFA game wins.
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I have officially moved to MTGNexus. I just wanted to let people know as my response time to salvation decks being bumped is very hit or miss.
Sure. If a deck can win on turn three, but loses to a Path to Exile, and most decks are playing Path to Exile, that deck probably isn't Tier 1. I don't have a lot of experience playing with or against Hermit Druid, so I don't really know how resilient (or not) it is.
Those decks have such a reputation though that they should at least begin somewhere on the tier list and be tested against. It's something like... if enough disruption makes Hermit Druid obsolete, but the existence of Hermit Druid makes some degree of disruption a requisite, then it has a place somewhere on the list. Maybe most decks just naturally pack enough disruption to deal with fast combo, but I'm not sure that's necessarily the case.
Just out of curiosity (call it a thought experiment), analyze with me your evaluation of Jarad as a tier one deck. I'm not trying to like, question your decision or anything, or imply that you're wrong, I just want to get a good thought process going about evaluating what "the best" really is. So, like,
What makes Necrotic Ooze combo a Tier One combo deck? Is it particularly fast, particularly resilient, etc.? Basically, what makes it better than other combos out there? I can see a few reasons why this setup would be considered particularly good, personally:
It has the potential to "just win" with Buried Alive with a reanimate spell or Ooze in hand. That's a turn 4 win, possibly a turn earlier with an accelerant. That potential, at least, is probably required of a combo deck in Tier 1.
It has another one-card win condition in Tooth and Nail.
It has other combos that work if everything in the original combo is disrupted (Mike+Primus)
It has another route to victory in Jarad + Lord of Extinction.
Alright, so Necrotic Ooze seems to pass the benchmark of being potentially very fast. We want it in a B/G shell because that gives the deck resiliency in terms of other paths to victory (access to T&N, Primus). It has lots of ways to fetch the combo (B/G is extremely tutor heavy for creatures). I'd like to hear your opinion on a couple of things (again, just trying to create some flavor of metric to evaluate combo):
Because graveyard-based and creature-based combos provide more opportunity to interact with them (spot removal, grave hate), are there better spell-based combos, or combos that don't use the graveyard?
What makes Jarad the best Commander for this strategy? This is something that would probably require a lot of legitimate testing, having players use the same combo shell and play it with Mimeo, Jarad, Damia, etc.
Another problem I see about possible tiers based on play tests is that the nature of competitive multiplayer makes win/loss stats difficult to judge. Yes Hermit Druid and Ad Nauseam are very likely to win if your opponents aren't aware of what you're running but to have any deck win repeatedly and consistently is rare in a competitive environment. The usual pattern is do something evil, playgroup adjusts, it becomes much more difficult to do the evil thing again. It's an arms race that can change dramatically any time there is a significant banning/unbanning, rule change or new competitive deck enters the group. Unfortunately the arms race doesn't always advance at a steady pace and a supposedly dominant deck can fall out of favor after the group adjusts.
I contacted one of the mods and they wrote that it would be preferred that no decklists be posted on this board but instead all decklists that individuals put out for whatever reason be posted on the Multiplayer Commander Decklists sub-forum and then linked to the thread.
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"Those who are skilled in combat do not become angered,
those who are skilled at winning do not become afraid.
Thus the wise win before the fight, while the ignorant fight to win."
Sure. If a deck can win on turn three, but loses to a Path to Exile, and most decks are playing Path to Exile, that deck probably isn't Tier 1. I don't have a lot of experience playing with or against Hermit Druid, so I don't really know how resilient (or not) it is.
Those decks have such a reputation though that they should at least begin somewhere on the tier list and be tested against. It's something like... if enough disruption makes Hermit Druid obsolete, but the existence of Hermit Druid makes some degree of disruption a requisite, then it has a place somewhere on the list. Maybe most decks just naturally pack enough disruption to deal with fast combo, but I'm not sure that's necessarily the case.
Just out of curiosity (call it a thought experiment), analyze with me your evaluation of Jarad as a tier one deck. I'm not trying to like, question your decision or anything, or imply that you're wrong, I just want to get a good thought process going about evaluating what "the best" really is. So, like,
What makes Necrotic Ooze combo a Tier One combo deck? Is it particularly fast, particularly resilient, etc.? Basically, what makes it better than other combos out there? I can see a few reasons why this setup would be considered particularly good, personally:
It has the potential to "just win" with Buried Alive with a reanimate spell or Ooze in hand. That's a turn 4 win, possibly a turn earlier with an accelerant. That potential, at least, is probably required of a combo deck in Tier 1.
It has another one-card win condition in Tooth and Nail.
It has other combos that work if everything in the original combo is disrupted (Mike+Primus)
It has another route to victory in Jarad + Lord of Extinction.
Alright, so Necrotic Ooze seems to pass the benchmark of being potentially very fast. We want it in a B/G shell because that gives the deck resiliency in terms of other paths to victory (access to T&N, Primus). It has lots of ways to fetch the combo (B/G is extremely tutor heavy for creatures). I'd like to hear your opinion on a couple of things (again, just trying to create some flavor of metric to evaluate combo):
Because graveyard-based and creature-based combos provide more opportunity to interact with them (spot removal, grave hate), are there better spell-based combos, or combos that don't use the graveyard?
What makes Jarad the best Commander for this strategy? This is something that would probably require a lot of legitimate testing, having players use the same combo shell and play it with Mimeo, Jarad, Damia, etc.
My argument is very long, and the best way to argue for Jarad as a tier one deck would be to read my primer, which is in my signature. Here's a sort of streamlined explanation.
The first is that, as you said, Jarad is fast. The fastest possible kill isn't a good indicator of how good a deck is, or even how fast it truly is. A better metric is the average goldfish kill. Jarad's is turn five, which is above average, but not insane - many 1CC (one-card combo, think Ad Nauseam or Hermit Druid) lists boast a turn or two faster. However, you have to keep in mind that my list is both playing disruption, and built to play around disruption. I actually have a few more one-card wincons outside of Buried Alive - you touched on Lord of Extinction, but there's also Survival of the Fittest, Phyrexian Devourer, etc etc etc.
Win-Conditions, however, aren't the only way to look at a deck. Because Jarad only plays a lot of overlapping combos with pieces in common, and also manages its extra-low land count, it has a lot of slots that can be dedicated to actually playing fair magic. And the deck has one common theme that can be seen throughout - the graveyard. Even spells that don't naturally interact with your graveyard work well with cards that do - Graveborn Muse, Greater Good, Fairie Macabre, and Pattern of Rebirth all make the cut because they all have natural synergy with the deck, not because they're necessarily the best goodstuff cards on their own.
The only truly good argument I can make, though, is playtesting results. While I can say in my experience Jarad is a successful tier one deck, that's ultimately a subjective measurement, and people (myself included) will be biased towards their own deck. That's why I believe for this thread to be truly interesting, we need regular playtesting among multiple people on the forum.
This thread is NOT, I repeat NOT, a tier list tread but a tier list discussion thread.
First I'll discuss the primary view opposing tier lists and competitiveness in EDH in general because I expect to see quite a bit of it in this thread if I don't head it off before hand.
I appreciate the "spirit" of EDH and understand that the things we will be discussing in this thread do not coincide with the views of a large portion of the EDH community but as the rules committee states on its official website: "Players should aim to interact both during the game and before it begins, discussing with other players what they expect/want from the game." What the competitive EDH community expect/want is a chance to prove what we brew is the best of the best and to have a place to prove it. "Greatness, at any cost." -Bob.
Now back to tier discussions.
At first I considered making a straight tier list but after some interactions with other members of these forums and members of my playgroup I decided on a different format.
Even before I put up a preliminary tier list created through a robust discussion with contributions from numerous members of the community, there has to be a discussion about the tier lists themselves.
Here are just a few lines of discussion just to start us off.
How do you define different tiers? Should the tiers be based on match-ups with theoretical odds assigned to them?
If you want to do actual playtests in what format and through what medium should the testing be done in? How large a pod should the playlist be tested in? 2, 4 or more maybe? Should the number of opponents and their effects on a deck factor into a decks ranking?
What format defining cards should a deck be able to play around?
The only thing that is set is that I will be using a general SS, S, A, B format when I eventual post a tier list. Currently the only deck whose placement has been predetermined by general consensus is 5c Hermit Druid at SS and even then the decklist is not nailed down. No one I talked to disagreed with the statement that if you are going to be playing competitive EDH you have to be able to interact with this thing if you are not playing it.
tl;dr: This thread is to discuss creating a tier list for competitive Commander/EDH.
those who are skilled at winning do not become afraid.
Thus the wise win before the fight, while the ignorant fight to win."
S
A
B
C
D
Or more
Who needs Colours?
My most played EDH deck:
X Kozilek, the Great Distortion
UBR Nekusar, the Mindrazer
Current Decks
GTitania midrange
RGThromok tokens/goodstuff | UB Grimgrin zombie tribal
GW Sigarda enchantress | R Godo voltron
U Braids aggro | WR Kalemne punisher
RU Mizzix storm | BUG Mimeoplasm competitive reanimator | UG Ezuri infect
Ain't nobody playing Tier 3 decks in Modern or Legacy (at least not for anything but funzies).
How do you distinguish between Mogis, God of Slaughter and Tajic, blade of the Legion and Seton, Krosan Protector when you're discussing generals like Zur the Enchanter? Not meaningfully. They're both so much worse than Zur as to be not even worth discussing in the same breath.
In a competitive context you have: Generals/decks who are universally awesome (Modern Junk), Generals/Decks who are almost as good but with different interactions (Modern Amulet Bloom), and Generals/Decks that are capable of preying on some or all of the top decks (Modern Hatebears, Soul Sisters, Martyr Proc). Mostly.
UW Ephara Hatebears [Primer], GB Gitrog Lands, BRU Inalla Combo-Control, URG Maelstrom Wanderer Landfall
Building upon what Pokken wrote, I believe there are three meaningful categories. The first are decks like Arcum Dagsson, Prossh, et cetera - they're good decks unless the meta works against them. These decks have active gameplans, often win games, and are key players within their meta and the community at large. The second are decks like Roon of the Hidden Realm, Zedruu, et cetera - they're bad decks unless the meta works for them. These decks often are built on a theme (Roon is blink, for example), and can meaningfully interact with a game and occasionally win games. The final category are decks like Rakdos, Lord of Riots and Jalira - they are bad decks even when the meta works for them. These decks often have little to do with the outcome of the game, outside of occasionally blowing one player out only to have another opponent win.
I do think we can have meaningful discussion about tiers 1, 2, and 3. I wouldn't agree that the tiers can be summed up by
The problem is that a lot of competitive decks are "ridiculously busted" when compared to casual decks. If one were to play with a bunch of casual players and combo out on turn six every game, they would view that as "ridiculously busted." Turn six is actually fairly slow for a "fast combo deck," but compared to their decks, it would be very strong. They perceive turn six combo decks and turn five combo decks as equally unbeatable, but in fact the turn five deck is measurably better. You would have a similar thing happen if you took a vintage player and sat him down with a bunch of kitchen table magic players. Technically, his deck is legal in their format and vice versa, but they're really not playing the same format. Vintage has more nuance than "unbeatable" and "beatable," and so does EDH.
Jarad Graveyard Combo[Primer]!
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When I think "ridiculously busted" I think - there are decks that will win or lock the board as fast as possible to do in the format even through some disruption (e.g. Arcum diskbo, Derevi lockdown, Zur lockdown, Hermit druid) and are going to be strong pretty much no matter what. These kinds of decks compare really well to where modern Junk is right now and where Melira Pod used to be. They have strong active gameplans that can beat any deck any given Sunday.
While I agree that a casual player might think my Turn 7 Skullbriar Melira-Primus-Viscera Seer combo is too strong, I think it's easy to see how crappy it is in a competitive context and that it is not in fact ridiculously busted
UW Ephara Hatebears [Primer], GB Gitrog Lands, BRU Inalla Combo-Control, URG Maelstrom Wanderer Landfall
The problem with this analysis is that a lot of the best decks in EDH don't win until later on. Zur enchantress, Tasigur control, and GAA4 Stax are common examples.
It's odd that you mention those examples specifically, as they've been falling out of favor in competitive circles. Arcum usually runs other combos that are more important than setting up a disk lock, Derevi is best played as a combo deck with an aggro plan b, and Hermit Druid just isn't resilient enough to compete with more traditional decks, nor fast enough to compete with Ad Nauseam.
Jarad Graveyard Combo[Primer]!
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Same as Modern Junk - it hasn't "won" when it makes you discard everything, kills all your creatures, then flashes back Lingering Souls. But the game's basically over.
UW Ephara Hatebears [Primer], GB Gitrog Lands, BRU Inalla Combo-Control, URG Maelstrom Wanderer Landfall
Jarad Graveyard Combo[Primer]!
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Playing Commander to Win - A guide on Competitive, 4-player EDH
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UW Ephara Hatebears [Primer], GB Gitrog Lands, BRU Inalla Combo-Control, URG Maelstrom Wanderer Landfall
It's slightly different because of multiplayer and politics, but most of the same principles apply. It will eventually come down the gnat's ass of analyzing win rates. It's actually less complicated in some ways if we assume no sideboarding, but more complex also because of the sheer number of cards and variation. Because of the high variation you're going to need even more trials to have meaningful data.
If you want to have any really accurate competitive tiers, you're going to have to do some serious testing and not just talk about stuff in theory. This almost surely means MTGO or Cockatrice, as the anecdotal experiences of local playgroups is probably almost meaningless in this kind of discussion (unless your playgroup is one of the very few who are actually truly cutthroat).
The most difficult aspect of truly competitive EDH is that there is just no consistent tournament format from where to get your data. Other formats derive a lot of their data from MTGO results, but also from real tournament results.
In thinking on this a little more, I think I'd recommend taking a step back from a tier discussion and try to formulate a standard testing mechanism.
UW Ephara Hatebears [Primer], GB Gitrog Lands, BRU Inalla Combo-Control, URG Maelstrom Wanderer Landfall
At best this is going to end up providing a list of "more successful" and "less successful" decks based on already well known powerful cards and commanders.
IE title this "***** We Already Know".
Current Decks
GTitania midrange
RGThromok tokens/goodstuff | UB Grimgrin zombie tribal
GW Sigarda enchantress | R Godo voltron
U Braids aggro | WR Kalemne punisher
RU Mizzix storm | BUG Mimeoplasm competitive reanimator | UG Ezuri infect
Suppose you have 2 weighted coins and you want to know which one will flip heads more. It may be plain to see just by sight inspection in which case no testing is needed. But if you can't tell by looking at it, a few coin flips might help but still fails the law of large numbers. If I flipped each coin a thousand times, I'd get a much clearer picture.
Now if we took everyone viewing the Commander thread at the time of this post, had them test a deck twice, we'd have our thousand flips and we would start to see a trend. So let's quit the pessimistic chatter and make some progress.
I will start by nominating:
cEDH: [G(U/R) Animar] - [(U/B)(G/W) Redless Wheels] - [(G/U)(W/B) Redless Pod] - [(B/G)W Ghave Metapod]
I'm curious to know how the decks would be ranked. Voting would be the easiest way, but not very accurate - people always vote for their pet decks or the ones they happen to have encountered through limited experience. And you can't go by speed because a slow stax deck will often crush much faster combo decks. All I can think of is a program that would somehow calculate how the best decks would do against each other after 1000 games or whatever, but that sounds like a programming nightmare.
My G Yisan, the Bard of Death G deck.
My BUGWR Hermit druid BUGWR deck.
It's fast and consistent but honestly if anyone knows what the deck is doing then it's fairly easy to stop.
Any deck can be fairly optimized but it's hard to really give it a rank.
Sure there's a meta where some deck wins all the time, it moves to another and goes from S rank to B since the meta is more competitive.
I'm not sure how to really grade decks here
Anyway I've started my own gameplay channel in which I play games (Magic also)
Twitch:
https://www.twitch.tv/dies_to_doom_blade
Youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/user/UpsidedownHandshake
On the other hand, a "deck that has a medium-speed combo that it wants to pull off, but not much of a plan B" is pretty bad against anything. I think that it makes sense to talk about one-on-one stats - like how my Jarad deck generally faces opposing Sharuum decks - as long as you keep in mind that everything is context-dependent. What you're saying about interfering with other players is fallacious - decks should be built to win (in this setting) and if that means scaling your deck back to not get disrupted, that's fine. Fortunately, in an actual competitive setting that is rarely the case.
I agree, but that's one of the things I love about EDH. It's unsolved enough that new tier-one decks are still being discovered. I do wish there were lots of tournaments from which we could extract data (which is kind of being attempted, see this thread).
Following DigitalFire's lead, I'd like to nominate the top decks in my meta. Jarad Ooze combo, Tasigur Control, and Momir Vig tempo-control are the first to spring to mind, and I believe them all to be tier-one.
Jarad Graveyard Combo[Primer]!
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Playing Commander to Win - A guide on Competitive, 4-player EDH
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In my opinion, voting is simply too subjective.
My G Yisan, the Bard of Death G deck.
My BUGWR Hermit druid BUGWR deck.
Agree entirely. This is something we have to keep in mind for the entirety of discussing anything tier-related in EDH. Tiering combo decks is the easiest to do in a vacuum, because there's a metric (average turn of success). It doesn't really take into account any sort of interaction, but it's a number. Furthermore, combo decks are perceived to be the most powerful because sans interaction, they'll steamroll a table very early, and most decks aren't equipped to handle that the first time around. EDH isn't played in matches, there isn't sideboarding... all of this adds to the power (and/or percieved power) of combo.
Nobody plays tier 3 decks in Modern, but tons of people do in EDH. I do agree that going from "SS" down seems silly. That's something you do in a game like Smash bros., which has a set number of characters and you can evaluate how they each rank in relation to one another and it's hard to put too many on the same level - that's the kind of game where you see SS - F tiers. Even then, you get a lot of relatively meaningless discussion about the difference between D and E tier. It's not overly productive.
Tempostorm does four tiers for competitive Hearthstone decks, I like that system for an EDH tier. I know it's a different game, but for reference, their method of tiering is this:
Tier 1: Decks that are clearly dominant, have access to "unfair" gameplans that other decks simply can't match.
Tier 2: Decks that can take games off of Tier 1 decks, but have more noticeable weaknesses - or something that metagames strongly against tier 1 decks but doesn't really stand on its own.
Tier 3: Decks that are average to good, but bad for the meta or strictly worse versions of the best decks. Former high-tier decks that haven't adapted to new metas or cards seem to end up falling here.
Tier 4: Quote, "unrefined, out-of-flavor, overly niche, or flat out retired." Stuff that we'd call "too cute," overly thematic, etc.
Now, a lot of this depends on the metagme, which is something that's a LOT harder to quantify in EDH. So, this is how I'd quantify about four tiers for EDH:
Tier 1: The fastest / most resilient combo decks in the game and the decks that have the best chance to interact with them in a meaningful way. So, for example, I would consider Hermit Druid Tier 1 for the sake of speed (and if we put it in tier two, honestly, what else would we put with it? "Good" but "Fair" decks would end up as far down as tier 4 that way). Something more resilient but a turn slower could also go in Tier 1. Lockdown decks that have a good chance of interacting with these decks probably go up here, so Derevi or whatever.
Tier 2: Combo decks that are noticably more fragile / take longer than tier 1, or the best decks in other archetypes. The very best Voltron and Control decks could sit at Tier 2, things like Purph or Rafiq or (what gets thrown around whenever good control decks are mentioned? Oloro?)
Tier 3: Optimized decks that are demonstrably worse than decks in the same archetype in Tier 2.
Tier 4: Unoptimized, deliberately thematic, or decks in archetypes that don't really function competitively (Group Hug, Pillowfort?)
Cockatrice and MTGO are good (i.e. better than paper), but you still get the problem of a very unrefined metagame. I think realistically a good deckbuilder could take an extremely tuned deck with any Commander onto 'trice and boast a 75% or greater win rate. Now, we could compare this to what winrate the truly BEST decks have (maybe one deck in the world would sit at 90%, I don't know) but I think the metric of winrate would still be entirely based on "how often do we steal games from an unprepared table?" which would make the top tiers almost entirely combo which in a "true" tier list I don't think would be the case.
What I think we need is a cohesive and numerous community who tests these lists solely against each other (yeah, real reasonable goal, I know), but it gives the chance for an actual "meta" to develop and would cut down on "stolen" wins. I guess this also depends on what you want the tier list to measure - if someone's looking for "the best deck to wreck my LGS with," the raw winrate model is best, but if the question is "what's the best deck in a competitive community" (which is the question we're trying to answer, I think), we need to develop some sort of back-and-forth. Basically, we need skilled players developing the decklists and then playing them against other skilled players. This is hard because we'd actually need to network with each other, but that's what it would take.
Draft my Peasant Cube.
Jarad Graveyard Combo[Primer]!
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Playing Commander to Win - A guide on Competitive, 4-player EDH
LandDestruction.com - An EDH blog
This is very true.
A competitive combo deck that wins on turn 2 will wreck a less competitive meta very often but when met with any disruption there isn't a plan B for them.
Countering Ad Nasum is usually GG against that kind of a deck and exiling hermit druid or stealing him may as well be.
I had a game where I countered a necrotic ooze that would have won that turn only to reanimate it on my own turn. While it's very strong there are a lot of things that can go wrong
Anyway I've started my own gameplay channel in which I play games (Magic also)
Twitch:
https://www.twitch.tv/dies_to_doom_blade
Youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/user/UpsidedownHandshake
I think for something like this you are best off taking a handful of players and posting results as well as playtest videos / decklists of them playing and establishing why they are accepted as higher tier. It really takes multiple people going all out 100% testing in a way that can be shown and taken feedback from to establish something like this. New decks can challange to get on the list by challenging existing established decks to games. Obviously a highly competitive deck should still be able to take about 1/4 of a 4 player FFA game wins.
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Those decks have such a reputation though that they should at least begin somewhere on the tier list and be tested against. It's something like... if enough disruption makes Hermit Druid obsolete, but the existence of Hermit Druid makes some degree of disruption a requisite, then it has a place somewhere on the list. Maybe most decks just naturally pack enough disruption to deal with fast combo, but I'm not sure that's necessarily the case.
Just out of curiosity (call it a thought experiment), analyze with me your evaluation of Jarad as a tier one deck. I'm not trying to like, question your decision or anything, or imply that you're wrong, I just want to get a good thought process going about evaluating what "the best" really is. So, like,
What makes Necrotic Ooze combo a Tier One combo deck? Is it particularly fast, particularly resilient, etc.? Basically, what makes it better than other combos out there? I can see a few reasons why this setup would be considered particularly good, personally:
Alright, so Necrotic Ooze seems to pass the benchmark of being potentially very fast. We want it in a B/G shell because that gives the deck resiliency in terms of other paths to victory (access to T&N, Primus). It has lots of ways to fetch the combo (B/G is extremely tutor heavy for creatures). I'd like to hear your opinion on a couple of things (again, just trying to create some flavor of metric to evaluate combo):
Because graveyard-based and creature-based combos provide more opportunity to interact with them (spot removal, grave hate), are there better spell-based combos, or combos that don't use the graveyard?
What makes Jarad the best Commander for this strategy? This is something that would probably require a lot of legitimate testing, having players use the same combo shell and play it with Mimeo, Jarad, Damia, etc.
Draft my Peasant Cube.
Another problem I see about possible tiers based on play tests is that the nature of competitive multiplayer makes win/loss stats difficult to judge. Yes Hermit Druid and Ad Nauseam are very likely to win if your opponents aren't aware of what you're running but to have any deck win repeatedly and consistently is rare in a competitive environment. The usual pattern is do something evil, playgroup adjusts, it becomes much more difficult to do the evil thing again. It's an arms race that can change dramatically any time there is a significant banning/unbanning, rule change or new competitive deck enters the group. Unfortunately the arms race doesn't always advance at a steady pace and a supposedly dominant deck can fall out of favor after the group adjusts.
I contacted one of the mods and they wrote that it would be preferred that no decklists be posted on this board but instead all decklists that individuals put out for whatever reason be posted on the Multiplayer Commander Decklists sub-forum and then linked to the thread.
those who are skilled at winning do not become afraid.
Thus the wise win before the fight, while the ignorant fight to win."
My argument is very long, and the best way to argue for Jarad as a tier one deck would be to read my primer, which is in my signature. Here's a sort of streamlined explanation.
The first is that, as you said, Jarad is fast. The fastest possible kill isn't a good indicator of how good a deck is, or even how fast it truly is. A better metric is the average goldfish kill. Jarad's is turn five, which is above average, but not insane - many 1CC (one-card combo, think Ad Nauseam or Hermit Druid) lists boast a turn or two faster. However, you have to keep in mind that my list is both playing disruption, and built to play around disruption. I actually have a few more one-card wincons outside of Buried Alive - you touched on Lord of Extinction, but there's also Survival of the Fittest, Phyrexian Devourer, etc etc etc.
Win-Conditions, however, aren't the only way to look at a deck. Because Jarad only plays a lot of overlapping combos with pieces in common, and also manages its extra-low land count, it has a lot of slots that can be dedicated to actually playing fair magic. And the deck has one common theme that can be seen throughout - the graveyard. Even spells that don't naturally interact with your graveyard work well with cards that do - Graveborn Muse, Greater Good, Fairie Macabre, and Pattern of Rebirth all make the cut because they all have natural synergy with the deck, not because they're necessarily the best goodstuff cards on their own.
The only truly good argument I can make, though, is playtesting results. While I can say in my experience Jarad is a successful tier one deck, that's ultimately a subjective measurement, and people (myself included) will be biased towards their own deck. That's why I believe for this thread to be truly interesting, we need regular playtesting among multiple people on the forum.
Jarad Graveyard Combo[Primer]!
Sidisi ANT!
Playing Commander to Win - A guide on Competitive, 4-player EDH
LandDestruction.com - An EDH blog