I have a question for the EDH community here, if this is posted in the wrong spot please move it. I feel that enchantments in edh are in a broken position. With green and white having the only reasonable removal the only color that can stop them from sticking to the field is blue. What would be the problem with giving Red, Black, or colorless reasonable enchantment removal? Currently the only options are Karn Liberated, Ugin, the Spirit Dragon, Scour from Existence, Spine of Ish Sah, Chaos Warp, Annihilator Eldrazi, and All is Dust.
The Walkers and eldrazi cost a lot of mana, get targeted, and usually only hit one object. Spine, Scour, and All is dust cost a lot and are inefficient.
I'm not proposing something that would be useful for Legacy, Modern, or Standard but something I feel is needed in EDH.
Black example 2BB Enchantment: Sacrifice a creature, Pay 1 life; Destroy Target Enchantment
Red example 3RR Enchantment: Whenever a creature dealt damage by a red source dies you may destroy target enchantment
Colorless 6 Artifact: 5 ; Destroy Target Enchantment OR Sacrifice a Permanent, ; Destroy Target Enchantment
Why am I proposing this? Salt, basically salt. There are decks that win simply by playing enchantments and being un-attackable until they get infinite life/combo off/swing with big shroud unblockable indestructible creatures, and that doesn't seem fair when every other deck can be hosed in many ways.
Preemptive strike: "Play green or white then"/"Don't play with people using broken enchantments"/"You came up with answers, use them"/"Quit whining and just play". I get it, imagine those are impossible for a second and add something constructive.
EDIT:
My suggestions are bad as they break the color pie; Read my other comments to see better options.
I'm a big fan of every color having at least one utility card that breaks rank with the color pie. I think your idea for them to be reusable permanents is a bit much though.
Try this.
Black: Sorcery (2)BB "Spiteful Will" Destroy target enchantment. Multikicker: Sacrifice 2 creatures. Destroy an additional enchantment for each time Spiteful Will was kicked.
Red: Sorcery (1)RRR "Dispelling Flames" Target opponent sacrifices an enchantment. Then, if that opponent controls two or more enchantments, he or she sacrifices an additional enchantment. Dispelling Flames does 5 damage to you.
While I appreciate pillowfort (the biggest abuser of multiple Enchantment effects) can be daunting for the Rakdos player solutions do exist, and I don't see wizards ever printing the sort of colour breaking spells you've suggested (that said Chaos Warp was reasonably recent), so you'll probably have to make do.
What enchantments are you having trouble with in particular? What kinds of decks are you playing? If you're at a multiplayer table, are you the only one being affected by these things? I rarely see enchantments stick for longer than a few turns in EDH and I see the kinds of unbreakable forts implied in the OP even more rarely than that.
I would not expect anything based on cards from Antiquities and Mirage. The color pie and design principles have changed a lot from what they were 20 years ago.
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Red has Aura Barbs, which tackles enchantments in a very red way. Aside from that corner case, though, it is a bad card (useful for looting, I suppose). Red also has Capricious Efreet, which can stop enchantments with effort.
Black currently takes an indirect route through discard and exiling from the library; Praetor's Grasp and Sadistic Sacrament used preemptively can do some work. You can even play your own enchantments: Contamination and Infernal Darkness - it is difficult to pillowfort when you've no mana. Black can even kill artifacts in a pinch to shut off colored mana sources.
All told, I rather like colors not having easy answers; I also prefer shroud over hexproof, so my opinion is biased.
Cheers!
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I think this argument has some merit, however. That's an advantage those colors have - black and red have their own advantages as well. It just happens that in EDH (or at least in your playgroup) the green and white advantage is a little more useful than discard/removal or burn/aggression. In other formats or playgroups that may not be the case. I just don't think it's a very good idea to circumvent the weaknesses of colors too much. I'm sure there are many a blue/green mage that wished they had more removal or a red/white mage that longed for draw. If the enchantment deck is consistently overwhelming you, you have the colorless options listed above, or you adapt to the meta.
The decks I'm playing are in my sig. I don't have a list up for my superfriends deck yet but it's white and is irrelevant.
Every color does have it's weakness but they all have cards outside their pie for basically everything, white has Land Tax and a couple others that shatter card advantage and mana consistency in half, green has some really good card draw options. So giving all colors reasonable enchant destruction in one or 2 cards doesn't seem game breaking.
Colorless options are single use and very costly, I've already covered that in the OP. Red does have options but those options are very scary for the table in that they can take out any permanent and usually require a hard to hold combo ex. Liquimetal Coating + Hoard-Smelter Dragon
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If you're playing edh just to win, why are you playing edh?
EDH Decks: BMilling UnblockableURWSuperfriendsU
GIVE RED AND BLACK ENCHANTMENT ANSWERS!
Well, there are various ways to handle them. Red can just blow up their manabase in all sorts of ways, or stop the lifegain with cards like sulfuric vortex or the appropriate red leyline. It even has anarchy, which is something you seem to need to consider given that almost every enchantment mentioned is white. Black can handle the grave recursion better than any color save white, and it still has more ways to do it. If you're talking a combined color combination here, then the best answer is...rain of gore. Drop that turn two and watch oloro squirm....
Black and Red do not need to destroy enchantments. What they do need are effective punishments for people using enchantments.
The more I think about it this seems like the correct way to go. Gelf's post covers those very nicely. I just feel that something that seems unfun to play against (pillow-forting) has no reactive options short of high cost or color specific options.
EDIT: Pillowforting isn't the only issue. What about Mirari's Wake and Doubling Season type effects. Your opponent is getting huge advantage from these effects every turn and there is nothing you, as a black player, can do about it.
White has terrible card draw. Green has very inefficient means of killing creatures.
Red and black may not have the best options against pillowfort, but there are still enough options without just breaking the color pie. It is important. If your red deck can deal with any type of threat, then why would people ever play other colors. If I play Abzan, it is largely because it lets me deal with every kind of threat. Should I not be rewarded for playing more colors?
Also, if you know your deck is weak to pillowfort, then have ways of getting around it. If I can lose to Krenko, Mob Boss with Crawlspace and a bunch of walls in play, then you can figure out how to win.
I play a monoblack deck. Doesn't remotely care about pillowfort cards. And, if there is ever an enchantment or artifact I absolutely need to deal with, there are colorless answers that get the job done.
I firmly believe that the color pie does a lot more good than bad. Allowing colors to circumvent their biggest drawbacks efficiently is a problem. Expensive, colorless answers are just fine.
Every color has options against every archetype of deck except strictly enchantment based decks. It doesn't have to break the color pie. As punishment goes each color has their own method of doing so to every permanent except enchantments; W, Exile/Lockdown // G, bigger badder things // R, Direct damage // B, edicts/self sacrifice // U, unsummon/counterspells. Why can't red and black have colorful (see what I did there) ways of dealing with enchantments.
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If you're playing edh just to win, why are you playing edh?
EDH Decks: BMilling UnblockableURWSuperfriendsU
GIVE RED AND BLACK ENCHANTMENT ANSWERS!
If your specific problem with enchantments is pillowfort, have you considered including cards in your decks that don't require combat? Exsanguinate is an excellent black card, and red can do plenty of burning without turning a single creature sideways. You could even try some alternate wincons like Mortal Combat
Black's house answer to enchantments and artifacts is normally discard. Something like Thoughtseize can remove the problem before it is a problem. The best ones are all 1cmc, but there are some good ones for 2 or so. Also, extract cards like Sadistic Sacrament and Praetor's Grasp can get it out of thier deck before they even see it.
I was brainstorming the other day how you could fairly put colorless removal onto a non-basic land, and I came up with this:
~
Land
: Add to your mana pool.
, exile ~ and four other untapped lands you control: Exile target permanent.
You can't use it before the fifth turn outside of ramp decks, you can't float mana in response to activating it to cast a Geddon, you can't abuse it with Crucible, the cost is pretty steep but you can use it earlier than a lot of colorless targeted removal. I dunno, maybe it's still broken to hell.
Every color has options against every archetype of deck except strictly enchantment based decks. It doesn't have to break the color pie. As punishment goes each color has their own method of doing so to every permanent except enchantments; W, Exile/Lockdown // G, bigger badder things // R, Direct damage // B, edicts/self sacrifice // U, unsummon/counterspells. Why can't red and black have colorful (see what I did there) ways of dealing with enchantments.
The act of giving red and black enchantment removal explicitly breaks the color pie, because a big part of the color pie is "red and black don't destroy enchantments"
They've already printed a bunch of ways answer enchantments with colorless spells, why not use those?
Every color has options against every archetype of deck except strictly enchantment based decks. It doesn't have to break the color pie. As punishment goes each color has their own method of doing so to every permanent except enchantments; W, Exile/Lockdown // G, bigger badder things // R, Direct damage // B, edicts/self sacrifice // U, unsummon/counterspells. Why can't red and black have colorful (see what I did there) ways of dealing with enchantments.
The act of giving red and black enchantment removal explicitly breaks the color pie, because a big part of the color pie is "red and black don't destroy enchantments"
They've already printed a bunch of ways answer enchantments with colorless spells, why not use those?
Black as a color is fine with Void support options. Red is the weakest color, mainly because of the high life totals for the format combined with several factors that red has issues with Magic in general. Recent attempts arranging from the Daretti deck last year to the Void Renaissance in Magic that is going on right now. We may see a push in better design space to filter and fix some of the glaring problems with the color pie by both fixing red as a color and better defining Void's identity as the central axis to the color wheel.
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Life is a beautiful engineer, yet a brutal scientist.
ANYWAY I don't think half the people responding to this thread are reading any comments but just blindly posting. I edited the OP saying that destruction based methods do break the color pie, however punishment based effects do not. For the sake of the argument lets take black+artifacts and quickly found card Artifact Possession. It doesn't destroy the artifact, but it does punish the owner of said artifact for using it. Irini Sengir is a card but is so specific that it's useless in EDH. Why can't there be a red card that says "Whenever an enchantment enters the battlefield its controller loses life equal to the amount of enchantment cards on the battlefield"? Or a black card saying "Whenever an enchantment enters the battlefield you may sacrifice a creature, if you do destroy target enchantment."?
The color pie says nothing about permanent types. It does say what the colors can do with those permanent types. Before you tell me I don't know about the color pie why don't you take a look at it.
EDIT: The preemptive part of a black card like that is actually having creatures you're willing to sacrifice to take care of enchantments.
You were asking for things not in the black/red pie. My white decks would love cabal coffers, any-card tutors, mind twist, etc
While there are options, especially for black because of the tutors, for colorless means of taking down problematic permanents...where would the other colors be if black got access to enchantment/artifact hate?
That's the whole thing with black, access to ramp, mass discard, tutors...but with a weakness to certain permanent types. That power has to come with a cost, even if it's kind of trivial what with the colorless cards mentioned earlier combined with tutors.
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The Walkers and eldrazi cost a lot of mana, get targeted, and usually only hit one object. Spine, Scour, and All is dust cost a lot and are inefficient.
I'm not proposing something that would be useful for Legacy, Modern, or Standard but something I feel is needed in EDH.
Black example 2BB Enchantment: Sacrifice a creature, Pay 1 life; Destroy Target Enchantment
Red example 3RR Enchantment: Whenever a creature dealt damage by a red source dies you may destroy target enchantment
Colorless 6 Artifact: 5 ; Destroy Target Enchantment OR Sacrifice a Permanent, ; Destroy Target Enchantment
Why am I proposing this? Salt, basically salt. There are decks that win simply by playing enchantments and being un-attackable until they get infinite life/combo off/swing with big shroud unblockable indestructible creatures, and that doesn't seem fair when every other deck can be hosed in many ways.
Preemptive strike: "Play green or white then"/"Don't play with people using broken enchantments"/"You came up with answers, use them"/"Quit whining and just play". I get it, imagine those are impossible for a second and add something constructive.
EDIT:
My suggestions are bad as they break the color pie; Read my other comments to see better options.
EDH Decks: BMilling UnblockableURWSuperfriendsU
GIVE RED AND BLACK ENCHANTMENT ANSWERS!
Try this.
Black: Sorcery (2)BB "Spiteful Will" Destroy target enchantment. Multikicker: Sacrifice 2 creatures. Destroy an additional enchantment for each time Spiteful Will was kicked.
Red: Sorcery (1)RRR "Dispelling Flames" Target opponent sacrifices an enchantment. Then, if that opponent controls two or more enchantments, he or she sacrifices an additional enchantment. Dispelling Flames does 5 damage to you.
Nicol Bolas Dragon Dick
Hanna, Ship's Navigator Heart-attack Stax
Oona, Queen of the Fae Fairy Dance
Vhati Il-Dal Tree of Woe
Scion of the Ur-Dragon Durgensturm
Jolrael, Empress of Beasts Jamuraa's Army
Liliana, Heretical Healer Rise from your Graves and Proliferate
Tariel, Reckoner of Souls Angelic Judgment [
Shu Yun, the Silent Tempest WUR Voltron Control
Temmet, Vizier of Naktamun WU Unblockable Mirror Trickery
Ra's al Ghul (Sidar Kondo) and Face-Down Ninjas
Brudiclad, Token Engineer
Vaevictis (VV2) the Dire Lantern
Rona, Disciple of Gix
Tiana the Auror
Hallar
Ulrich the Politician
Zur the Rebel
Scorpion, Locust, Scarab, Egyptian Gods
O-Kagachi, Mathas, Mairsil
"Non-Tribal" Tribal Generals, Eggs
oblivion stone
perilous vault
all is dust
nevinyrral's disk
ugin, the spirit dragon
I personally think that's enough, given that enchantment and artifact removal is meant to be a weakness of the colors.
In red's case, it makes the color very weak because it also lacks ramp, card draw, and tutors, but black has tons of strengths already.
Red can also make use of Mycosynth Lattice and Liquimetal Coating to change the type of other permanents to Artifact and then use their plentiful Smash effects. You could also take the enchantment (and sacrifice it with Claws of Gix maybe?) using Zealous Conscripts or Word of Seizing.
If you don't mind burning the whole world, why not try Warp World and/or Apocalypse?
Black can use discard (Thoughtseize, Duress, Inquisition of Kozilek, Mind Slash, Sadistic Hypnotist) and exile from library effects (Sadistic Sacrament, Bitter Ordeal, Nightmare Incursion, Earwig Squad, Praetor's Grasp) to preemptively remove Enchantments.
Another colourless answer that hasn't been mentioned is Unstable Obelisk.
While we're brainstorming hypothetical cards though, I think something like the following would be more likely to see print:
Burning the Pillowfort 2R
Enchantment
Damage can't be prevented.
At the beginning of each players upkeep, ~ deals damage to that player equal to twice the number of Enchantments he or she controls.
"How do you like Enchanted Evening now?" - Jaya Ballard, Task Mage
Beware the Accursed Pillows 3BB
Enchantment
Your opponents can't gain life.
Whenever an opponent casts an Enchantment spell, that player loses life equal to its converted mana cost unless he or she sacrifices an Enchantment.
"Something something dark side. Something something Nyx." - Erebos, God of the Dead.
I would not expect anything based on cards from Antiquities and Mirage. The color pie and design principles have changed a lot from what they were 20 years ago.
Black currently takes an indirect route through discard and exiling from the library; Praetor's Grasp and Sadistic Sacrament used preemptively can do some work. You can even play your own enchantments: Contamination and Infernal Darkness - it is difficult to pillowfort when you've no mana. Black can even kill artifacts in a pinch to shut off colored mana sources.
All told, I rather like colors not having easy answers; I also prefer shroud over hexproof, so my opinion is biased.
Cheers!
Krichaiushii on PucaTrade.
I think this argument has some merit, however. That's an advantage those colors have - black and red have their own advantages as well. It just happens that in EDH (or at least in your playgroup) the green and white advantage is a little more useful than discard/removal or burn/aggression. In other formats or playgroups that may not be the case. I just don't think it's a very good idea to circumvent the weaknesses of colors too much. I'm sure there are many a blue/green mage that wished they had more removal or a red/white mage that longed for draw. If the enchantment deck is consistently overwhelming you, you have the colorless options listed above, or you adapt to the meta.
I like these designs a lot. They feel more in color, especially that red one.
I think seeing Enchantment destruction in these colors is unlikely, but Enchantment punishing might be a better bend.
The decks I'm playing are in my sig. I don't have a list up for my superfriends deck yet but it's white and is irrelevant.
Every color does have it's weakness but they all have cards outside their pie for basically everything, white has Land Tax and a couple others that shatter card advantage and mana consistency in half, green has some really good card draw options. So giving all colors reasonable enchant destruction in one or 2 cards doesn't seem game breaking.
Colorless options are single use and very costly, I've already covered that in the OP. Red does have options but those options are very scary for the table in that they can take out any permanent and usually require a hard to hold combo ex. Liquimetal Coating + Hoard-Smelter Dragon
EDH Decks: BMilling UnblockableURWSuperfriendsU
GIVE RED AND BLACK ENCHANTMENT ANSWERS!
Also, colorless has plenty of ways to kill any permanent.
Credit to DolZero for this awesome sig!
The more I think about it this seems like the correct way to go. Gelf's post covers those very nicely. I just feel that something that seems unfun to play against (pillow-forting) has no reactive options short of high cost or color specific options.
EDIT: Pillowforting isn't the only issue. What about Mirari's Wake and Doubling Season type effects. Your opponent is getting huge advantage from these effects every turn and there is nothing you, as a black player, can do about it.
EDH Decks: BMilling UnblockableURWSuperfriendsU
GIVE RED AND BLACK ENCHANTMENT ANSWERS!
White has terrible card draw. Green has very inefficient means of killing creatures.
Red and black may not have the best options against pillowfort, but there are still enough options without just breaking the color pie. It is important. If your red deck can deal with any type of threat, then why would people ever play other colors. If I play Abzan, it is largely because it lets me deal with every kind of threat. Should I not be rewarded for playing more colors?
Also, if you know your deck is weak to pillowfort, then have ways of getting around it. If I can lose to Krenko, Mob Boss with Crawlspace and a bunch of walls in play, then you can figure out how to win.
I play a monoblack deck. Doesn't remotely care about pillowfort cards. And, if there is ever an enchantment or artifact I absolutely need to deal with, there are colorless answers that get the job done.
I firmly believe that the color pie does a lot more good than bad. Allowing colors to circumvent their biggest drawbacks efficiently is a problem. Expensive, colorless answers are just fine.
8.RG Green Devotion Ramp/Combo 9.UR Draw Triggers 10.WUR Group stalling 11.WUR Voltron Spellslinger 12.WB Sacrificial Shenanigans
13.BR Creatureless Panharmonicon 14.BR Pingers and Eldrazi 15.URG Untapped Cascading
16.Reyhan, last of the Abzan's WUBG +1/+1 Counter Craziness 17.WUBRG Dragons aka Why did I make this?
Building: The Gitrog Monster lands, Glissa the Traitor stax, Muldrotha, the Gravetide Planeswalker Combo, Kydele, Chosen of Kruphix + Sidar Kondo of Jamuraa Clues, and Tribal Scarecrow Planeswalkers
Ratchet Bomb
Lux Cannon
In addition to the cards other people listed.
EDH Decks: BMilling UnblockableURWSuperfriendsU
GIVE RED AND BLACK ENCHANTMENT ANSWERS!
Two Score, Minus Two or: A Stargate Tail
(Image by totallynotabrony)
UBRSedris, the Necromancer KingUBR
~
Land
: Add to your mana pool.
, exile ~ and four other untapped lands you control: Exile target permanent.
You can't use it before the fifth turn outside of ramp decks, you can't float mana in response to activating it to cast a Geddon, you can't abuse it with Crucible, the cost is pretty steep but you can use it earlier than a lot of colorless targeted removal. I dunno, maybe it's still broken to hell.
The act of giving red and black enchantment removal explicitly breaks the color pie, because a big part of the color pie is "red and black don't destroy enchantments"
They've already printed a bunch of ways answer enchantments with colorless spells, why not use those?
Black as a color is fine with Void support options. Red is the weakest color, mainly because of the high life totals for the format combined with several factors that red has issues with Magic in general. Recent attempts arranging from the Daretti deck last year to the Void Renaissance in Magic that is going on right now. We may see a push in better design space to filter and fix some of the glaring problems with the color pie by both fixing red as a color and better defining Void's identity as the central axis to the color wheel.
Modern
Commander
Cube
<a href="http://www.mtgsalvation.com/forums/the-game/the-cube-forum/cube-lists/588020-unpowered-themed-enchantment-an-enchanted-evening">An Enchanted Evening Cube </a>
The color pie says nothing about permanent types. It does say what the colors can do with those permanent types. Before you tell me I don't know about the color pie why don't you take a look at it.
EDIT: The preemptive part of a black card like that is actually having creatures you're willing to sacrifice to take care of enchantments.
EDH Decks: BMilling UnblockableURWSuperfriendsU
GIVE RED AND BLACK ENCHANTMENT ANSWERS!
While there are options, especially for black because of the tutors, for colorless means of taking down problematic permanents...where would the other colors be if black got access to enchantment/artifact hate?
That's the whole thing with black, access to ramp, mass discard, tutors...but with a weakness to certain permanent types. That power has to come with a cost, even if it's kind of trivial what with the colorless cards mentioned earlier combined with tutors.