How do you define a "tier-1 deck," if not "a deck that can be competitive and win often"?
"Competitive and win often" is too vague of a definition. When I think about a competitive deck, I think about:
1. a deck which has a commander that fully supports the main plan (Yisan, PW Teferi, Derevi, JVP) or helps a lot if things go south (Zur, Jeleva),
2. a deck that has a 20%-50% shot at T3-T4 combo win *or* hard stax/lockdown and if it can't pull it off, it has a viable mid and late game plans,
3. a deck that contains answers to most of problematic plays comming from opponents,
4. a deck that isn't a so called "glass-cannon" deck, which people learn quickly to play against.
I am with razz at disliking specific attributes are required for tier-1, but these 4 points did apply to the top few decks I can rattle off in my head, so I'd consult that for a decent definition. More specific to me, "tier-1 decks" is a term I like to lead with when referencing any list that has an established win condition/method that is consistent (minus the effect of poor draw) and is established amongst users - pretty much the main decks discussed throughout this post. I understand this is a broad definition and can be nit-picked apart, but take a look at some established tier-1 decks referenced in this post and I believe my definition holds true - it isn't about the win percentage, it is more about the consistency of play to get the wins.
Deck choices and ingame decisions are a spectrum from "not at all competitive" to "extremely skilled player playing the perfect deck". In practise nobody ever reaches the end point. When people write that something is not competitive, or not playing to win, it technically means that the original example demonstrates less competitive quality on this spectrum than their counterexample. Its just easier to not have to write all that every time, rather use a shortcut.
Why I wrote a lot about tier 1 decks is that comparing our own decks to well known and extremely powerful decks allows us to rapidly advance towards the competitive end of spectrum by gaining a material advantage, if we deem that our current deck isn't really that good and select a better one. This might be changing the general, changing couple of cards, or changing the whole deck.
Playing a better deck might not do much for certain player's skill, but it should still bring them closer to winning more on average since MTG is about both player skill and their deck.
In the same vein, playing a deck or general that might on the internet be deemed less than optimal still allows the player's skill to grow, and they might adapt the deck by some portion to better handle their meta. But not testing this deck against other well known powerhouses leaves each instance separated, and lets us mostly consider player skill, which leaves a lot to be desired for this kind of generic conversation. It would be more like "How to make this certain deck better, my regular opponents are X, Y and Z". And there is nothing wrong with that, but those are all separate very specific matters.
I find The Gauntlet of Greatness series by Randy Buehler and friends where they play Standard decks from different eras against each other extremely relevant to this discussion, due to the wide open nature of EDH format. (Also it is clear that some of the decks in the videos are not piloted optimally, handling the non material part of this discussion...)
They seem to use exact decklists from tournaments of their respective eras, which would in the long run be just a starting point. In more populated format the sideboards and main boards too should be adapted to the expected competition.
I do not understand what your first paragraph is referencing. You use the term "Not Playing to Win" because an example someone presents is less competitive than yours? If so, maybe I am weird/different but just because something is not the best/better does not make it null/void of competitiveness/playing to win. I strongly disagree with the notion that the glass is half-empty if you don't have the best of the best cards or commanders, because than we could just change this thread to from "Playing to Win" to "Buying your way to Wins".
I agree with the notion that MTG is both player skill and decks, but let's take the conversation further: What is more important, the deck or the player? To me, it is the player (specifically their skill/mindset) and not the deck (card choices) when talking competitive in EDH because the diversity of the format vastly outweighs the amount of resources you have available in any game.
I also don't think you have to compare yourself to the best of the best (assuming anyone could honestly agree to an established top deck) to get better - getting better is more about experiencing all components of play and preparing for as much of it as possible. Jusstice was spot on when saying that "there is a strong leaning toward non-interaction, supported still by a gamut of games where a player or two at a table are totally unprepared" - non-interaction being disrupted by interaction, or decks designed to interact at their core, is an excellent counter to these decks, but am I "sub-optimal" or "inbreeding" by utilizing changing my tactics to the issues of non-interaction and comboing off? A lot of the conversation seems to indicate I would be because I am meta-gaming, but without addressing meta-gaming as a necessity is where we are doing an injustice to what a large part of "Playing to Win" is: the ability to make choices and game-time moves to get you the win.
Sure, you can "Play to Win" with a Timmy deck, but the fact that you're even using a Timmy deck flies in the face of the Play to Win philosophy. We are specifically in a metagaming discussion, and what I mean to say is that selecting Daretti or Aurelia isn't "metagaming" in that you didn't select them because they have good matchups against the decks that you expect. It's not like Aurelia is better against your meta than something typically considered tier one would be - maybe a specific tier one deck would perform poorly, but I suspect that there is a tier one deck that would perform exceptionally well. (Again, I am making assumptions about your meta and deck select choices and these assumptions may be incorrect.) I understand that, having chosen Aurelia, you can "Play to Win" from that point forward - find the best way to play Aurelia - and that is definitely a competitive things to do. As Jenesis mentioned, "honing suboptimal tactics" is still part of Playing to Win. It's just that, specifically in the context of metagaming, selecting a less-than-optimal deck doesn't become "playing to win" because it's a similar power level to your opponents.
How does using a Timmy deck fly in the face of Playing to Win? From your post, I think the incorrect assumption is that any deck that isn't in the list of tier-1 in this board is immediately a similar power level to my opponents, when in reality you should assume that every deck you select, even tier-1, in an established cEDH game is the same power level of your opponents. The best competitive games I've ever had are where people are pretty much equal and every decision is critical to your success - this is when skill outweighs anything else. A true competitive landscape/game should have moments when your on your turn and you realize you can not win, but still you keep the fight up and disrupt others, prolonging the inevitable but yet participating in an epic struggle. I've always had great pleasure in knowing I can completely stop the established leader in a game, but then will suffer the fate of other players because my efforts to kill will leave me completely vulnerable. As you may notice by my description, I don't play the infinite combo generic decks that just win, but I argue that just because I can't instantly win doesn't mean I don't Play to Win - I will Play to Win for as long as possible, but at some point you need to understand that you can't win, but can still effect the game and should continue to play it out. That is what competitive playing is.
I have quite a bit of experience with Rhys and since it’s being used as an example I feel I should give my 2 cents. This is not a competitive deck. You can only tune it to be less bad against a competitive field but in doing so would really be limiting your ability to win when you can and should switch to a more competitive deck (if you truly wish to win). I do agree with Raz this is not playing to win in the sense this thread is based on.
On the flipside you can still be playing to win with Rhys, as I do, if you play it in a field of similar decks. First some background. When my group started EDH (Shadowmoor block) we had no idea what we were doing. Rhys was one of my very first decks and I along with my friends tuned our decks to be better and fit our meta better. There was very limited information about the format at the time and some of the decks we chose to build (Zur, Azami, Sharuum, 5 color broken stuff) turned out to be much stronger than the other decks in our group just through the natural tuning process. An arms race started but before it got out of control we all agreed to shelve the problematic decks and make sure all our decks were at a level we were all comfortable against (Edric is the only current deck I don’t play in my group). This all happened many years ago and since then we’ve been playing in the same insular meta. In this very particular meta Rhys as I’ve built it can be “played to win” but this doesn’t mean experiences in my meta will apply to a broader field, especially a very competitive focused one which we are not. If I were to bring this same deck to a competitive Cockatrice game, no matter how much a tuned my deck for this specific field, I would not be playing to win.
Now I would like to note that part of the reason we broke down our more competitive decks was because they were getting beat up. Our “non-competitive” decks were far more numerous and these “better” decks weren’t handling archenemy very well (especially considering our normal game size is 5-6 players). They were actually hurting our win percentages. So I would actually go so far as to say that if you were to play a tier 1 deck in my specific meta you aren’t playing to win, which I have definitely learned through experience.
Approaching the subject from an online standpoint makes a lot of sense, nobody cares about my meta but the 10 people in it. I can’t draw much from your meta either. Online is more of a wild west situation, on MTGO I could be up against a pile of draft garbage or a budgetless tier one deck (possibly in the same game!). This environment is much better for teaching threat assessment on the fly and the stronger decks will enjoy a better win percentage so you can track the progress of your deck more easily. I need to get back to work, maybe post more later.
This is the kind of discussion I think this thread needs more of. What weaknesses do you perceive as attackable in the currently perceived "top tier"? "Getting bad draws", for example, is probably something that can't be helped considering the structure of the format - even some Vintage decks frequently get bad opening draws.
I guess what I mean are those bad draws that happen because your deck gives you non-land cards that are irrelevant in the game situation that you arrive in when you deck fails to give you the tutors, action pieces, that you need to be the preeminent threat at the table. Basically, non-optimal for cases where it's on a non-optimal draw. For example, including cards like Recurring Insight (extreme example here) because the only excuse you can fathom for why you haven't won yet is because you haven't drawn enough of your deck. What your deck does after it doesn't draw enough threat cards should be tailored to the situation where you're behind, not where you have all the time in the world to catch up and goldfish your deck. Bias toward goldfishing faster, not interacting.
For a few really good examples for building out the non-threat portion of your deck, I think the Karador Boonweaver primer is one that does a great job of finding what slots can be transformed into relevant hate cards. Building with a mentality that you're always the fastest goldfish maybe would have put some small draw cards in there instead, but there's a lot of interaction there, and also great plans for putting it into play.
Sure, you can "Play to Win" with a Timmy deck, but the fact that you're even using a Timmy deck flies in the face of the Play to Win philosophy. We are specifically in a metagaming discussion, and what I mean to say is that selecting Daretti or Aurelia isn't "metagaming" in that you didn't select them because they have good matchups against the decks that you expect. It's not like Aurelia is better against your meta than something typically considered tier one would be - maybe a specific tier one deck would perform poorly, but I suspect that there is a tier one deck that would perform exceptionally well. (Again, I am making assumptions about your meta and deck select choices and these assumptions may be incorrect.) I understand that, having chosen Aurelia, you can "Play to Win" from that point forward - find the best way to play Aurelia - and that is definitely a competitive things to do. As Jenesis mentioned, "honing suboptimal tactics" is still part of Playing to Win. It's just that, specifically in the context of metagaming, selecting a less-than-optimal deck doesn't become "playing to win" because it's a similar power level to your opponents.
How does using a Timmy deck fly in the face of Playing to Win? From your post, I think the incorrect assumption is that any deck that isn't in the list of tier-1 in this board is immediately a similar power level to my opponents, when in reality you should assume that every deck you select, even tier-1, in an established cEDH game is the same power level of your opponents. The best competitive games I've ever had are where people are pretty much equal and every decision is critical to your success - this is when skill outweighs anything else. A true competitive landscape/game should have moments when your on your turn and you realize you can not win, but still you keep the fight up and disrupt others, prolonging the inevitable but yet participating in an epic struggle. I've always had great pleasure in knowing I can completely stop the established leader in a game, but then will suffer the fate of other players because my efforts to kill will leave me completely vulnerable. As you may notice by my description, I don't play the infinite combo generic decks that just win, but I argue that just because I can't instantly win doesn't mean I don't Play to Win - I will Play to Win for as long as possible, but at some point you need to understand that you can't win, but can still effect the game and should continue to play it out. That is what competitive playing is.
Because it's a Timmy deck. It's not a Spike deck. That's why selecting that deck isn't playing to win (in the Deck Select "game"). However, I agree with you that you can still select a suboptimal or even bad deck and, from there, play to win. But, specifically in the context of metagaming as Playing to Win, selecting Daretti or Aurelia is not Playing to Win unless you select them specifically because you believe they will give you an edge. I think we're fundamentally in agreement here. My point was merely that in discussion we were having about playing "bad" decks (or decks typically not considered top-tier) because they do better in your meta than "good" decks (or decks typically considered top-tier) is still playing to win. Is the reason you selected these decks because they would perform better in your meta than something typically considered competitive? No? Then, specifically in the deck-select "game," you are not playing to win, though you may be playing to win in the deck-construction "game" and the actual game itself. Yes? Then my underlying assumption was incorrect.
Now I would like to note that part of the reason we broke down our more competitive decks was because they were getting beat up. Our “non-competitive” decks were far more numerous and these “better” decks weren’t handling archenemy very well (especially considering our normal game size is 5-6 players). They were actually hurting our win percentages. So I would actually go so far as to say that if you were to play a tier 1 deck in my specific meta you aren’t playing to win, which I have definitely learned through experience.
Approaching the subject from an online standpoint makes a lot of sense, nobody cares about my meta but the 10 people in it. I can’t draw much from your meta either. Online is more of a wild west situation, on MTGO I could be up against a pile of draft garbage or a budgetless tier one deck (possibly in the same game!). This environment is much better for teaching threat assessment on the fly and the stronger decks will enjoy a better win percentage so you can track the progress of your deck more easily. I need to get back to work, maybe post more later.
I think the first paragraph in this quote is pretty interesting and worthy of discussion. I go to a weekly tournament every Saturday night and usually play my Jarad. I win more frequently than any other player, in fact I would say that the only other player there that keeps up with me is my friend's Teferi list. Over 75% of the time I get to the top table (which isn't much considering it's usually a 2-round tournament so I only have to win my first game to get there). I definitely get hated out a lot of the time, but usually I can overcome the hate simply because my deck is better. In my experience, playing a bad deck so as to not get hated out leads to less wins than playing a good deck and just accepting the archenemy. Obviously in your meta it's different. Now there may be different variables - perhaps the difference in power level is less in my meta (doubtful, I'm not that far ahead of the higher power level decks there) so it's not so hard for them to keep up with me. Perhaps your meta reacts more severely to a difference in power level, to the point where your opponents are making "bad" plays (from their perspective) just to screw you or to try and get you to switch your strategy (which you apparently did). I'm interested in the experience of other people - in general, would you say you win when playing with worse players repeatedly (until they know to gang up on you)?
I agree with your analysis in the second paragraph. This is why the article at the beginning of this thread has a bias towards online play. It's much harder for me to give advice towards your specific meta, and even if I could, it wouldn't be interesting for anybody else. Those kinds of things have to be addressed one-on-one. That said, I think the future of cEDH is paper play. I notice more and more stores having EDH events as the format grows naturally, and as the cEDH format grows online. Maybe the online growth causes more tournaments. Maybe it's the inverse. Either way, I do believe that in the coming years we'll see more people with paper decks that are "established," especially the more respected ones in casual communities.
This is the kind of discussion I think this thread needs more of. What weaknesses do you perceive as attackable in the currently perceived "top tier"? "Getting bad draws", for example, is probably something that can't be helped considering the structure of the format - even some Vintage decks frequently get bad opening draws.
I guess what I mean are those bad draws that happen because your deck gives you non-land cards that are irrelevant in the game situation that you arrive in when you deck fails to give you the tutors, action pieces, that you need to be the preeminent threat at the table. Basically, non-optimal for cases where it's on a non-optimal draw. For example, including cards like Recurring Insight (extreme example here) because the only excuse you can fathom for why you haven't won yet is because you haven't drawn enough of your deck. What your deck does after it doesn't draw enough threat cards should be tailored to the situation where you're behind, not where you have all the time in the world to catch up and goldfish your deck. Bias toward goldfishing faster, not interacting.
For a few really good examples for building out the non-threat portion of your deck, I think the Karador Boonweaver primer is one that does a great job of finding what slots can be transformed into relevant hate cards. Building with a mentality that you're always the fastest goldfish maybe would have put some small draw cards in there instead, but there's a lot of interaction there, and also great plans for putting it into play.
Yep, I generally agree with all of this. Specifically I disagree with your example and tend to think that Recurring Insight is the Consecrated Sphinx of instant/sorcery decks, but I agree with the analysis you provide. Currently I would say that there are a few types of cards that are good against the top tier in terms of hate. The first is tax effects like Thalia, Guardian of Thraben. These decks are good against spellslinger and even "fast combo" like Prossh. The second is gravehate, especially repeatable gravehate like Scavenging Ooze or Deathrite Shaman. Obviously these are good against Reanimator, but they're also good against spellslinger since they use their graveyard a fair amount (Yawgmoth's Will is a good example) and many fast combo builds that use their yard like Hermit Druid or Sidisi Ad Naus. Finally, artifact hate like Bane of Progress, Null Rod, or Kataki, War's Wage is very good. Most decks play artifact mana and you can build your deck with these cards in mind, omitting artifact ramp (besides the very best like Mana Crypt).
Without making a long essay about my meta I do believe I know why we’re having different experiences. First we have larger games, typically 5-6 man. This means there is more hate headed at the archenemy and the “fair” decks are more likely to open with broken cards putting them in a better fighting position. Secondly due to the purposeful lack of combos and hard locks my meta tends to eliminate one player at a time. When you have a deck with a significantly higher power level than the rest of the table every random Trinket Mage is headed your way and these beats add up and especially in the case of black decks this can restrict your options and ability to draw cards. It puts all the other decks in a situation where stopping you is more important than their own board development, I don’t believe this is making bad plays in this instance, it’s playing smart to give yourself the best shot at winning. Lastly being that we are in a very closed meta it’s quite easy to metagame against specific decks.
Using an example of a deck I built a long time ago Zur did not enjoy a very good win rate. This was built a long time ago and while obviously not tuned to today’s standards it was quite a bit more powerful than our average deck. The problems I faced were exactly as I described, I got dogpiled, Zur died and my deck was simply not resilient enough to deal with this hate. I did not personally build Sharuum, that was my friend’s deck, but I do recall he did a little better since that is a much more resilient deck but ultimately ran into the same issues. To be fair one of the first decks I built was 5 color vintage restricted list.dec and that one did fairly well but mainly because this was very early in our development and I don’t feel it would do very well now (Beacon of Immortality had recently been unbanned and was considered a powerful card…we were noobs). Again I’m not sure how much information can be gathered from this but it’s certainly not theory crafting, this was simply my experience.
In an online meta I’m in agreeance that the most powerful deck will generally have the highest win percentage with some small exceptions. Generally you don’t want to “scare” the other players in the early game so I think decks like Storm with lesser know commander (Jeleva is a good example) are amazing and will probably do better than a known power commander like Zur even if the deck strength is similar. There is value in throwing off the threat assessment of the noobies.
Following what gma said, I also think a working definition of what's a "competitive" deck would be helpful. And I would define it like this. Any deck that is NOT strictly inferior across all matchups and metas under game-theory optimal play to another deck is a competitive deck.
That definition might sound strict, but I think it's actually pretty broad.
An aggro deck might fit the definition, because maybe it's something like Surrak and the only answers opponents run are counters. Not an actual situation, but it's not a strictly inferior deck.
On the other hand, homarid tribal can be shown to have a strictly inferior matchup against all known decks than some other deck. Maybe some of these matchups are even, but if it does as well against some things but worse than an alternative against others, then that's a non-competitive deck.
This is all in the player's best judgment, of course. They might be mistaken about matchup percentages across the board. They'll also probably be unaware of all possibke alternatives, or even entire strategies. But anyone who is not deliberately playing a deck known to them to be inferior to another known deck can be said to be playing competitively.
What do you think of the idea of playing archenemy in competitive EDH. How much of a disadvantage do you think decks like Momir, which play entirely to the board, face by demonstrating their threat level essentially face up. On the other hand, do you think there is an opposite effect from commanders like Zur or Sisay who pose a substantial, but not specifically quantifiable threat? What about "random" examples like Narset or something less competitive like Muzzio, who pose an unknown threat? I think there's an interesting discussion there.
With decks like Zur or Narset, which could be playing a non-optimal list, you still really have to assume they are the optimal list. Even if they are not playing an optimal list, the Commander itself is powerful enough that directing hate their way would not be incorrect.
When it comes to something "under the radar," that you can't quantify just by looking at it... first of all, it kind of depends on the situation you're playing in. If you don't know anything about the deck, but are working with the assumption that every deck at the table is built to be played competitively, you can still expect broken things from a deck regardless of whether they're running the optimal Commander or not. However, it's multiplayer, and we can't assume that we can deal with everything, so known threats probably always take priority over unknown threats, unless you know that you are strong against the known threat and have a good reason to believe the unknown is a strong counter to you.
I guess the logical next step is to ask if there is any benefit in playing something relatively unknown. I think we too quickly answer this question, "No!" from the competitive mindset that handicapping in any way automatically makes a deck not competitive. I think that's the conclusion the discussion will come to anyway, but maybe it's worth thinking about. I think there is undeniably some benefit to not being other players' priority #1, especially in a multiplayer situation, and certainly some benefit in not having your opponents know exactly how you are trying to win from the moment you turn your Commander over. I think that we've also come to the conclusion that there are good Commanders but there are also good archetypes, many of which don't need a specific Commander to function (even if some are better than others). So, some questions...
Are there any archetypes that rely on the Commander so little that the benefit of being an "unknown" threat might outweigh the benefit of playing the "strictly optimal" Commander?
Do people typically evaluate decks based on the Commander, or just the colors? If you saw, say, someone playing Thraximundar would you assume they were playing Grixis storm the same as if they were playing Jeleva? I think this is a big argument against unknown Commanders, because I will always see BUG or BG and think reanimator, and see Grixis and think storm. I guess if someone showed up with GW I might not know what to think, but...
To what extent are targets chosen at the beginning of a game? Do we have the luxury of going a turn cycle (or however long) to see who has the strongest start, or if you have a turn-one Thoughtseize will you always point it at the most obvious threat, based on the Commander? Things like targeted discard are proactive in this sense, and require some assumptions to be taken, but reactive cards like counterspells or spot removal more likely have their targets chosen based on in-the-moment threat assessment than prediction.
Is making threat assessment decisions based on Commanders correct? At some point, that's all the information you have, of course. But in a decidedly competitive situation, can you assume that all players are bringing roughly equivalent threats to the table? Do you target someone out of the gate because you feel their Commander is objectively the best at the table, because you have a hard time interacting with the archetype you assume they're playing, or are there other factors?
Following what gma said, I also think a working definition of what's a "competitive" deck would be helpful. And I would define it like this. Any deck that is NOT strictly inferior across all matchups and metas under game-theory optimal play to another deck is a competitive deck.
That definition might sound strict, but I think it's actually pretty broad.
An aggro deck might fit the definition, because maybe it's something like Surrak and the only answers opponents run are counters. Not an actual situation, but it's not a strictly inferior deck.
On the other hand, homarid tribal can be shown to have a strictly inferior matchup against all known decks than some other deck. Maybe some of these matchups are even, but if it does as well against some things but worse than an alternative against others, then that's a non-competitive deck.
This is all in the player's best judgment, of course. They might be mistaken about matchup percentages across the board. They'll also probably be unaware of all possibke alternatives, or even entire strategies. But anyone who is not deliberately playing a deck known to them to be inferior to another known deck can be said to be playing competitively.
The intention to play the best deck possible with the goal of winning.
I tend to think Tyrannon is on the right track. "Competitive" is not an attribute of a deck but rather an attribute of a player - it matches the intent of the deck rather than some characteristics inherent to a list. The Casual-Competitive divide can be thought of as a spectrum but in my view there are two distinct mindsets. The competitive mindset does not care at all about specific attributes of the game like flavor, speed, variance, etc. They care about one variable, the win percentage. Now, obviously this mindset can be applied at different stages. The majority of players we call "competitive" do not begin with the mindset - they choose an archetype or deck they think will be fun or interesting (possibly factoring in competitive viability - but still using other variables) and from there look to optimize it. You can also take a sub-par strategy and from there optimize it. But the fact remains that picking a sub-par strategy, even if there are no "strictly better" decks, is not a competitive decision. Optimizing that strategy is.
What do you think of the idea of playing archenemy in competitive EDH. How much of a disadvantage do you think decks like Momir, which play entirely to the board, face by demonstrating their threat level essentially face up. On the other hand, do you think there is an opposite effect from commanders like Zur or Sisay who pose a substantial, but not specifically quantifiable threat? What about "random" examples like Narset or something less competitive like Muzzio, who pose an unknown threat? I think there's an interesting discussion there.
I don't think your examples necessarily fit well. Zur is a pretty quantifiable threat, Sisay even more so since you generally know what she's going to grab. Better examples of decks that play openly might be something like Jarad, Sharuum, et cetera. But I agree with the message you are sending - decks that build up advantage over time have are slightly disincentivized by the four-player nature of the game. If a deck that requires a couple turns of setup like Azami is setting up, then I know to disrupt and have counterplay. On the other hand, a deck that wins out of nowhere like Prossh doesn't give me the warning - end of turn Vampiric Tutor, cast Food Chain, win the game.
With decks like Zur or Narset, which could be playing a non-optimal list, you still really have to assume they are the optimal list. Even if they are not playing an optimal list, the Commander itself is powerful enough that directing hate their way would not be incorrect.
When it comes to something "under the radar," that you can't quantify just by looking at it... first of all, it kind of depends on the situation you're playing in. If you don't know anything about the deck, but are working with the assumption that every deck at the table is built to be played competitively, you can still expect broken things from a deck regardless of whether they're running the optimal Commander or not. However, it's multiplayer, and we can't assume that we can deal with everything, so known threats probably always take priority over unknown threats, unless you know that you are strong against the known threat and have a good reason to believe the unknown is a strong counter to you.
I guess the logical next step is to ask if there is any benefit in playing something relatively unknown. I think we too quickly answer this question, "No!" from the competitive mindset that handicapping in any way automatically makes a deck not competitive. I think that's the conclusion the discussion will come to anyway, but maybe it's worth thinking about. I think there is undeniably some benefit to not being other players' priority #1, especially in a multiplayer situation, and certainly some benefit in not having your opponents know exactly how you are trying to win from the moment you turn your Commander over. I think that we've also come to the conclusion that there are good Commanders but there are also good archetypes, many of which don't need a specific Commander to function (even if some are better than others). So, some questions...
Are there any archetypes that rely on the Commander so little that the benefit of being an "unknown" threat might outweigh the benefit of playing the "strictly optimal" Commander?
Do people typically evaluate decks based on the Commander, or just the colors? If you saw, say, someone playing Thraximundar would you assume they were playing Grixis storm the same as if they were playing Jeleva? I think this is a big argument against unknown Commanders, because I will always see BUG or BG and think reanimator, and see Grixis and think storm. I guess if someone showed up with GW I might not know what to think, but...
To what extent are targets chosen at the beginning of a game? Do we have the luxury of going a turn cycle (or however long) to see who has the strongest start, or if you have a turn-one Thoughtseize will you always point it at the most obvious threat, based on the Commander? Things like targeted discard are proactive in this sense, and require some assumptions to be taken, but reactive cards like counterspells or spot removal more likely have their targets chosen based on in-the-moment threat assessment than prediction.
Is making threat assessment decisions based on Commanders correct? At some point, that's all the information you have, of course. But in a decidedly competitive situation, can you assume that all players are bringing roughly equivalent threats to the table? Do you target someone out of the gate because you feel their Commander is objectively the best at the table, because you have a hard time interacting with the archetype you assume they're playing, or are there other factors?
I will assume we are talking about tournaments against unknown foes and not playgroup play. There are a couple problems with this line of thought however. The first is that your target audience has to be other cEDH players. If I sit down at a table with Thraximundar vs Jeleva, the only people who would treat me differently would be people who know that Jeleva is often used for Storm decks, meaning people who read about EDH online, who are on average more committed than your typical opponent and more likely to be paying attention. If you're playing Thrax and your turn one is Mana Vault, I'm gonna keep an eye on you. If you always fetch blue, I'll know you're on High Tide. It's not hard to figure out and I will likely know by the time I have to keep up countermagic. Also, there isn't a terribly great advantage to my opponents not knowing that I'm doing a specific thing.
I recently posted an article on 5colorcombo.com about the ineffectiveness of points systems. I'm curious what the people in this thread think about the content.
I recently posted an article on 5colorcombo.com about the ineffectiveness of points systems. I'm curious what the people in this thread think about the content.
I think your assessment is correct but your conclusion is a little harsh. Nobody is forced to pick a side. My friends and I are decidedly filthy casuals to the point where I'd never invest in the cards for a real competitive deck, but that hasn't stopped us from proxying up a competitive game once in a while. You can be one person and play the game both ways, you just have to know what way you're playing when you sit down.
For an analogy, I think making extra rules to try and bridge casual and competitive gamers is like trying to hybridize the rules of scrabble and monopoly because you can't pick which to play. It's a dumb idea that leaves nobody happy. Just play one or the other, and picking one now doesn't mean you can't play the other later.
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Zedruu: "This deck is not only able to go crazy - it also needs to do so."
I'm fairly new to edh and magic in general (under a year) and have built probably 9 decks. They range from stax evil to combos of doom.
My favorite deck though? Pheldagriff group hug. Not having to worry about winning and making the game magical with unique and bizarre spells and effects (hence the game being called magic) is what makes the game for me. This deck and my new chaos deck has caused our edh table to laugh like maniacs countless times.
My competitive decks along with others just cause too much stress and negativity for the whole table. This on top of, well... as mean as it sounds... Some of the poor social skills found in a selection of players of the magic community have cause needless issues fast.
I will also say deck style and attitude styles cause a huge difference on how I view people. I have two friends who have much better decks and better magic skills. One I love playing with, and the other I can't stand. The one I like will dominate us, but by some silly combo that makes his monsters huge or some nonsense. My other friend... Always tries to lock people out and becomes a jerk when targeted or countered, stating he's being victimized.
Biggest pet peeve though is someone taking longer doing plays on MY turn then me on my actual turn... For every turn. Just obnoxious.
I recently posted an article on 5colorcombo.com about the ineffectiveness of points systems. I'm curious what the people in this thread think about the content.
I more or less agree with your conclusion that you should play with the same kind of player as you are. Still, I'm not sure I entirely agree with your argument to get there. I don't belive it's the result of some inexorable divide between two exhaustive groups, one player type who is addicted to winning and the other who can't find any point to winning at all. I presume that players of a game are trying to reach the game's objectives, and since variance in their willingness and ability to do that are handled perfectly well by most games, I don't accept the existence of differences as evidence that they can't be brided by a good rules set. It's just a question of how good the rules set is.
On whether point systems work, I think the challenge is just finding the right point system. It's extremely difficult to layer this "sub-game" onto another game with its own entirely different objectives. Still though, lots and lots of games do this to varying degrees of success. The example of Scrabble and Monopoly above doesn't seem like a good fit to me, because those games each seem to have a singular objective with more or less one way to win. But in contrast to that, there are complex games like Civilization where you have a culture sub-game, a war sub-game, science subgame, and so forth, with each being layered against one another in a way that makes sense. The challenge is just getting it right.
For the specific examples, the rule that you get 1 point for each time you cast an X spell for double digits is just a bad rule, in itself. It immediately opens itself up to exploits. For a point system like that, it seems to me that you should never reward something with points that can be completed more than one time per game. Otherwise, the rewards of that subgame will be out of 1 to 1 parity with the objective of the actual Magic. As one example, you could reward a player 1 point for being the first in a game to damage an opponent. Or award a point for only the first time an X spell in double digits is cast. Point is, the issue seems to be with the rules of the point system themselves, not the fact that it is a point system.
Likewise for awarding "negative" points. I'm not sure that there'd be any real playgroup who wouldn't be able to figure out immediately that penalizing actions that a player is forced to do as you describe is bad for the game, and then implement a rule that prevents that. It would not really matter that you might not be able to write the rule to be as robust as a legal statute in a court of law. It's enough that the rule exists, and players know when another player is being controlled or otherwise forced into taking an action that leads to negative points, then maybe to apply those points instead to the player actually taking the action. The example seems cherry-picked and flimsy.
To me, I think that the main failing of a points system is that it may be prone to rewarding a player other than the one who met the objective of Magic the Gathering, and that so doing, it might reqire tallying over multiple sessions in order to achieve its effect. The challenge is in relating the point system to the rest of the game in a cohesive way, where on the contrary, the premise for inventing this layer is more or less that you're unwilling to modify the actual game rules (ban list, etc) to achieve the desired "fun" aspect.
That goes likewise for the hypothetical "no infinites" rule. If you really wanted to get that effect, it would only require writing additional rules that were successful at doing that. For example suppose a rule, let's call it Rule 4, where if a spell or ability with the same name has resolved 4 times previously that turn, all further instances of it are countered (or can't be played, if you prefer). Then just ban out Lab Man, Doomsday, and so on, if you want to close those loopholes also. It just doens't seem to me that you're putting forward the best case.
Bottom line basically, I look at this idea of competition being incompatible with casual play to be a Sheldon'ism. Sure, he would probably phrase it as something more open-ended and interpretation-prone. Maybe something along the lines of "Commander is so many different things to so many different people that we can't possibly police them all". But really, it's just this idea that trying to win the game somehow destroys its casual aspect. I don't think there's any real divide between players trying to win the game and those not. On the contrary, I think it's impossible to actually have a "game" in the first place unless all parties are attempting on some level to reach the objective. Game Theory, if you look into it, actually states something explicitly to that effect, that participants must be presumed to be acting rationally within the game confines to achieve the objective. If someone doesn't want to try as hard as another player, that doesn't mean it's not their intent to participate in the game.
So if there is a disconnect between the rules of the game and the game being fun, then the most likely cause is the insufficiency of the rules. I'd argue that the examples of rules in that article just show this from another angle, that rules drawn with noticeable gaps are not good rules. And I'm not going to conclude on the basis of those rules (or actual EDH rules) being bad is an indication of some inexorable divide between player types that makes improvement on the game impossible. Just too easy of a cop out.
I think your assessment is correct but your conclusion is a little harsh. Nobody is forced to pick a side. My friends and I are decidedly filthy casuals to the point where I'd never invest in the cards for a real competitive deck, but that hasn't stopped us from proxying up a competitive game once in a while. You can be one person and play the game both ways, you just have to know what way you're playing when you sit down.
For an analogy, I think making extra rules to try and bridge casual and competitive gamers is like trying to hybridize the rules of scrabble and monopoly because you can't pick which to play. It's a dumb idea that leaves nobody happy. Just play one or the other, and picking one now doesn't mean you can't play the other later.
Players who can go either way on the competitive-casual spectrum aren't a problem of course. This article was specifically aimed at the attempt to reconcile players who don't want to play the game the same way. I like your analogy, though I think it's a little off - Scrabopoly might be a fun game, even if it's a bit dumb, if everyone's playing with the same kind of goal in mind.
For the specific examples, the rule that you get 1 point for each time you cast an X spell for double digits is just a bad rule, in itself. It immediately opens itself up to exploits. For a point system like that, it seems to me that you should never reward something with points that can be completed more than one time per game. Otherwise, the rewards of that subgame will be out of 1 to 1 parity with the objective of the actual Magic. As one example, you could reward a player 1 point for being the first in a game to damage an opponent. Or award a point for only the first time an X spell in double digits is cast. Point is, the issue seems to be with the rules of the point system themselves, not the fact that it is a point system.
I still think this kind of points system won't really solve the problem. Even if it's a bit more cleverly designed, the competitive players will still be playing the most efficient strategy they can to gain points, and a lot of the time that's stax. Your opponents can't resolve their spells, so you get as much time as you want to accomplish every achievement.
I still think this kind of points system won't really solve the problem. Even if it's a bit more cleverly designed, the competitive players will still be playing the most efficient strategy they can to gain points, and a lot of the time that's stax. Your opponents can't resolve their spells, so you get as much time as you want to accomplish every achievement.
Well, if that is seen as a problem, then it sounds like having a game with a wider variety of strategies was a goal of the rules set. A points system fails in that goal. But that only shows that this particular rules set just failed to do what it evidently set out to do, rather than the idea that a rules set is always doomed to fail.
As I said, I still more or less agree with the idea that you should play with the same kind of player that you are, and along with that, I agree that a point system is not an effective way to bridge the gap between skill levels and expectations. It just doesn't work at doing that. We're in agreement there, it's just an idea that's very poorly-grafted onto a complex game.
Where I think I differ, though, is the weight of consideration given to a points system in the first place. It seems to me that those considering one to begin with have bought into the idea that a better ban list wouldn't work. On the contrary, I place the blame for a particularly wide skill/expectations gap first on these very obvious failings in the ban list, as against community expectations. The points system is a bad idea, because its very intent is to make up for the ban list in solving these expectations issues.
I also don't lay the blame of this wide expectations gap on players being too "competitive". Every game ever made is competitive and has a skill gap between players, or it wouldn't be a game. In nowhere but EDH does that stop people from sitting down at a table to play, or at least sitting down with disparate levels of skill and expecting an even game. I wouldn't expect to win at Chess against Kasparov. But, I would expect to win a game or two of Yahtzee against one of the better Yahtzee players in the world. The social shame, confirmation bias, and backward doctrines of EDH have convinced an aspect of community that EDH is one type of game, when the rules set indicates that it's the other. So, it's either the rules set or these community doctrines that are a bad fit. It's not the bare fact of a player being "competitive", because on the contrary, that's a presumed constant in games.
I also don't lay the blame of this wide expectations gap on players being too "competitive". Every game ever made is competitive and has a skill gap between players, or it wouldn't be a game.
Skill gaps and different levels of competitiveness can be totally different quantities. It's my personal stance that the ultimate goal of casual deckbuilding should be to not only win but to have your opponents enjoy losing to you, which is an objectively more difficult task than just trying to win at all. This added challenge is what's most attractive to me in magic and leads me to play much, much less competitive decks than my opponents despite the skill gap in my favor.
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Zedruu: "This deck is not only able to go crazy - it also needs to do so."
Without any sort of tournament data, it's hard to tell what's over-represented in the format. I haven't heard anyone so far claiming that one deck is head and shoulders above others. With the info we have, it's more or less an opinion on "should fast mana be banned?" Personally, I don't think so (I think dork-based decks might stand to gain too much?) but I do really think it's just a matter of personal opinion.
I would love to test with Recurring Nightmare, Protean Hulk, and Gifts off the list. Other stuff like Worldfire could come off and nobody would care.
On further consideration, you may discuss the banlist here as long as the topic is restricted to the discussion of what a "Competitive" EDH banlist would look like, and not merely complaining about the official banlist.
From a pure power level standpoint, I believe these cards should definitely go...
- Sol ring
- Mana crypt
- Demonic tutor
These are cards that probably should go but you could make an argument that they're okay...
- Mana vault
- Grim monolith
- Ancient tomb
- vampiric tutor
- survival of the fittest
Basically, fast mana and hyperefficient tutors that appear off the top of my head. Other 1-mana tutors like enlightented tutor, or maybe even entomb, might be worth considering.
Then we have things like doomsday and necrotic ooze/hermit druid which are the main cards of pretty ridiculous combos, but as I don't play them (or have much experience against them) I have 0 knowledge in their actual power level and whether or not their speed and consistency cause issues in cutthroat circles.
As for what could be unbanned, no clue either. Most of the cards feel like you would be playing with fire, but certainly something like worldfire probably doesn't do anything meaningful in competitive circles.
I think we can preemptively start by striking off everything on the Vintage Restricted List. Not only are many of these cards ridiculously expensive, but they have proven to be exceptionally powerful in the most powerful format out there. In theory some of these (like Balance) could come off, but for now I believe it's a good starting point. Restricted List cards also disproportionately advantage combo at the expense of control and midrange.
The next card I would nix would be Karakas. It's true that a lot of cEDH decks don't care about the commander... but it's essentially the one thing separating the format from 99c Highlander. A lot of people are drawn to the format by the concept of having a commander that they can cast at any time and Karakas is prone to shut down that style of gameplay, especially since every Wx deck can have one on the table at once.
Limited Resources would be on my list due to the way it scales in multiplayer. A LR at a three-person table will behave quite differently from a LR at a five-person table, especially when dropped on the early turns, and I don't believe it helps the format to encourage out-of-game haggling about optimal table size.
The last card I would strike for multiplayer concerns would be the kingmaking/collude-o-fest that is Trade Secrets. I'm aware that a lot of people will use it responsibly, but the worst case scenario makes for essentially a non-game for all but two of the players present. There are plenty of other ways to encourage political play and/or draw a billion cards if that's your thing. I don't think the format is worse off for not having Trade Secrets.
This leaves the following cards "safe" to come off the list:
Of these, the only one I would be keeping an eye on is Griselbrand as a commander, given the SCG articles already written about it (albeit not featuring fully-cEDH playgroups), but if it proves to be oppressive we can just revive the "as a commander" banlist because 1 Gris is fine in the 99.
As far as bannings go, I might add Sol Ring, Mana Vault, Mana Crypt if they prove to be oppressive in games where one player gets them early and the rest do not. On the other hand, there are enough fast mana options that you might just be able to expect everyone to have access to more than 1 mana on turn 1 the way they often do in Vintage.
Jokes aside I would ban Ad Naus for sure. That card I think forces a lot of fairer archetypes out of the format simply because they have no good interaction for Ad Naus spell-based decks.
Without any sort of tournament data, it's hard to tell what's over-represented in the format. I haven't heard anyone so far claiming that one deck is head and shoulders above others. With the info we have, it's more or less an opinion on "should fast mana be banned?" Personally, I don't think so (I think dork-based decks might stand to gain too much?) but I do really think it's just a matter of personal opinion.
I would love to test with Recurring Nightmare, Protean Hulk, and Gifts off the list. Other stuff like Worldfire could come off and nobody would care.
Protean Hulk should stay banned. That gives any green/x deck access to boonweaver-like combo potential, and you don't even have to build your deck around it. In my Jarad I would only need to add Viscera Seer and getting Protean Hulk to die once wins the game with cards in my deck. That's pretty insane with Jarad as a sac outlet. Currently there's 5-color a deck struggling to be tier one that kills by putting an Omniscience into play off Flash + Academy Rector. Having Protean Hulk would make that deck insane.
if there could be a true "competitive banlist" it must contain only the cards that separate commander from vintage. (IMO)
everything else doesnt need to be banned. - read sirlin about gamebalance and you can understand why.
of course you can argue with other formats being "healthy" only because of bans.
you can see it that way but you can also see that it just keeps alot of decks playable.
that has nothing to do with balance itself. its just lots of pet decks that people want to play (and you need those people to have the game, but do you ever ban a queen in chess because its unhealthy?)
i'm unshure about tinker and balance as they are not THAT much defining vintage. or are they?
i guess they are only in the way as that is the only format left where you can play them but are they gamedefining in vintage itself?
also karakas is in a way strange in commander but on the other hand why limit white if intention is not to limit.
from there on just a handfull of playable BUT competitve strategies and decks would emerge and bring their antagonistic counterstrategies. a balance will be found by nature (just lots of people dont want to see that as balanced)
oppression is not an argument for bans in competition.
This idea would kill competitive commander. Commander is not Vintage and letting cards like Yawgmoth's Bargain, G-Brand, Tolarian Academy, Channel, etc are going to make the format one kind of deck - storm/fast comboi. Never mind cards that just fundamentally work differently in Commander like Trade Secrets. As someone who plays competitive chess, banning a queen is a terrible analogy because a queen actually provides balance; without her, top-level players could tie virtually every game against each other.
If you want to revisist the idea of a competitive banlist you've got to center the evaluation of a card around efficiency. Cards which are undercosted for their effect (primarily accelerants, draw, and tutors) and can result in huge shifts of tempo should be banned. Cards like LoA which are slow engine-type are fair in my eyes. Cards like Ad Nauseam and Necro not so. There's a lot of cards on the current banlist which are not broken enough to warrant inclusion in a competitive meta: Sundering Titan, Mirror, Painter's Servant, Coalition Victory to name a few. They just aren't efficient enough
I do not understand what your first paragraph is referencing. You use the term "Not Playing to Win" because an example someone presents is less competitive than yours? If so, maybe I am weird/different but just because something is not the best/better does not make it null/void of competitiveness/playing to win. I strongly disagree with the notion that the glass is half-empty if you don't have the best of the best cards or commanders, because than we could just change this thread to from "Playing to Win" to "Buying your way to Wins".
I agree with the notion that MTG is both player skill and decks, but let's take the conversation further: What is more important, the deck or the player? To me, it is the player (specifically their skill/mindset) and not the deck (card choices) when talking competitive in EDH because the diversity of the format vastly outweighs the amount of resources you have available in any game.
I also don't think you have to compare yourself to the best of the best (assuming anyone could honestly agree to an established top deck) to get better - getting better is more about experiencing all components of play and preparing for as much of it as possible. Jusstice was spot on when saying that "there is a strong leaning toward non-interaction, supported still by a gamut of games where a player or two at a table are totally unprepared" - non-interaction being disrupted by interaction, or decks designed to interact at their core, is an excellent counter to these decks, but am I "sub-optimal" or "inbreeding" by utilizing changing my tactics to the issues of non-interaction and comboing off? A lot of the conversation seems to indicate I would be because I am meta-gaming, but without addressing meta-gaming as a necessity is where we are doing an injustice to what a large part of "Playing to Win" is: the ability to make choices and game-time moves to get you the win.
How does using a Timmy deck fly in the face of Playing to Win? From your post, I think the incorrect assumption is that any deck that isn't in the list of tier-1 in this board is immediately a similar power level to my opponents, when in reality you should assume that every deck you select, even tier-1, in an established cEDH game is the same power level of your opponents. The best competitive games I've ever had are where people are pretty much equal and every decision is critical to your success - this is when skill outweighs anything else. A true competitive landscape/game should have moments when your on your turn and you realize you can not win, but still you keep the fight up and disrupt others, prolonging the inevitable but yet participating in an epic struggle. I've always had great pleasure in knowing I can completely stop the established leader in a game, but then will suffer the fate of other players because my efforts to kill will leave me completely vulnerable. As you may notice by my description, I don't play the infinite combo generic decks that just win, but I argue that just because I can't instantly win doesn't mean I don't Play to Win - I will Play to Win for as long as possible, but at some point you need to understand that you can't win, but can still effect the game and should continue to play it out. That is what competitive playing is.
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[RETIRED Primers]:
RW Aurelia, The Warleader --- R Daretti, Scrap Savant --- RUB Thraximundar
On the flipside you can still be playing to win with Rhys, as I do, if you play it in a field of similar decks. First some background. When my group started EDH (Shadowmoor block) we had no idea what we were doing. Rhys was one of my very first decks and I along with my friends tuned our decks to be better and fit our meta better. There was very limited information about the format at the time and some of the decks we chose to build (Zur, Azami, Sharuum, 5 color broken stuff) turned out to be much stronger than the other decks in our group just through the natural tuning process. An arms race started but before it got out of control we all agreed to shelve the problematic decks and make sure all our decks were at a level we were all comfortable against (Edric is the only current deck I don’t play in my group). This all happened many years ago and since then we’ve been playing in the same insular meta. In this very particular meta Rhys as I’ve built it can be “played to win” but this doesn’t mean experiences in my meta will apply to a broader field, especially a very competitive focused one which we are not. If I were to bring this same deck to a competitive Cockatrice game, no matter how much a tuned my deck for this specific field, I would not be playing to win.
Now I would like to note that part of the reason we broke down our more competitive decks was because they were getting beat up. Our “non-competitive” decks were far more numerous and these “better” decks weren’t handling archenemy very well (especially considering our normal game size is 5-6 players). They were actually hurting our win percentages. So I would actually go so far as to say that if you were to play a tier 1 deck in my specific meta you aren’t playing to win, which I have definitely learned through experience.
Approaching the subject from an online standpoint makes a lot of sense, nobody cares about my meta but the 10 people in it. I can’t draw much from your meta either. Online is more of a wild west situation, on MTGO I could be up against a pile of draft garbage or a budgetless tier one deck (possibly in the same game!). This environment is much better for teaching threat assessment on the fly and the stronger decks will enjoy a better win percentage so you can track the progress of your deck more easily. I need to get back to work, maybe post more later.
I guess what I mean are those bad draws that happen because your deck gives you non-land cards that are irrelevant in the game situation that you arrive in when you deck fails to give you the tutors, action pieces, that you need to be the preeminent threat at the table. Basically, non-optimal for cases where it's on a non-optimal draw. For example, including cards like Recurring Insight (extreme example here) because the only excuse you can fathom for why you haven't won yet is because you haven't drawn enough of your deck. What your deck does after it doesn't draw enough threat cards should be tailored to the situation where you're behind, not where you have all the time in the world to catch up and goldfish your deck. Bias toward goldfishing faster, not interacting.
For a few really good examples for building out the non-threat portion of your deck, I think the Karador Boonweaver primer is one that does a great job of finding what slots can be transformed into relevant hate cards. Building with a mentality that you're always the fastest goldfish maybe would have put some small draw cards in there instead, but there's a lot of interaction there, and also great plans for putting it into play.
Because it's a Timmy deck. It's not a Spike deck. That's why selecting that deck isn't playing to win (in the Deck Select "game"). However, I agree with you that you can still select a suboptimal or even bad deck and, from there, play to win. But, specifically in the context of metagaming as Playing to Win, selecting Daretti or Aurelia is not Playing to Win unless you select them specifically because you believe they will give you an edge. I think we're fundamentally in agreement here. My point was merely that in discussion we were having about playing "bad" decks (or decks typically not considered top-tier) because they do better in your meta than "good" decks (or decks typically considered top-tier) is still playing to win. Is the reason you selected these decks because they would perform better in your meta than something typically considered competitive? No? Then, specifically in the deck-select "game," you are not playing to win, though you may be playing to win in the deck-construction "game" and the actual game itself. Yes? Then my underlying assumption was incorrect.
I think the first paragraph in this quote is pretty interesting and worthy of discussion. I go to a weekly tournament every Saturday night and usually play my Jarad. I win more frequently than any other player, in fact I would say that the only other player there that keeps up with me is my friend's Teferi list. Over 75% of the time I get to the top table (which isn't much considering it's usually a 2-round tournament so I only have to win my first game to get there). I definitely get hated out a lot of the time, but usually I can overcome the hate simply because my deck is better. In my experience, playing a bad deck so as to not get hated out leads to less wins than playing a good deck and just accepting the archenemy. Obviously in your meta it's different. Now there may be different variables - perhaps the difference in power level is less in my meta (doubtful, I'm not that far ahead of the higher power level decks there) so it's not so hard for them to keep up with me. Perhaps your meta reacts more severely to a difference in power level, to the point where your opponents are making "bad" plays (from their perspective) just to screw you or to try and get you to switch your strategy (which you apparently did). I'm interested in the experience of other people - in general, would you say you win when playing with worse players repeatedly (until they know to gang up on you)?
I agree with your analysis in the second paragraph. This is why the article at the beginning of this thread has a bias towards online play. It's much harder for me to give advice towards your specific meta, and even if I could, it wouldn't be interesting for anybody else. Those kinds of things have to be addressed one-on-one. That said, I think the future of cEDH is paper play. I notice more and more stores having EDH events as the format grows naturally, and as the cEDH format grows online. Maybe the online growth causes more tournaments. Maybe it's the inverse. Either way, I do believe that in the coming years we'll see more people with paper decks that are "established," especially the more respected ones in casual communities.
Yep, I generally agree with all of this. Specifically I disagree with your example and tend to think that Recurring Insight is the Consecrated Sphinx of instant/sorcery decks, but I agree with the analysis you provide. Currently I would say that there are a few types of cards that are good against the top tier in terms of hate. The first is tax effects like Thalia, Guardian of Thraben. These decks are good against spellslinger and even "fast combo" like Prossh. The second is gravehate, especially repeatable gravehate like Scavenging Ooze or Deathrite Shaman. Obviously these are good against Reanimator, but they're also good against spellslinger since they use their graveyard a fair amount (Yawgmoth's Will is a good example) and many fast combo builds that use their yard like Hermit Druid or Sidisi Ad Naus. Finally, artifact hate like Bane of Progress, Null Rod, or Kataki, War's Wage is very good. Most decks play artifact mana and you can build your deck with these cards in mind, omitting artifact ramp (besides the very best like Mana Crypt).
Jarad Graveyard Combo[Primer]!
Sidisi ANT!
Playing Commander to Win - A guide on Competitive, 4-player EDH
LandDestruction.com - An EDH blog
Using an example of a deck I built a long time ago Zur did not enjoy a very good win rate. This was built a long time ago and while obviously not tuned to today’s standards it was quite a bit more powerful than our average deck. The problems I faced were exactly as I described, I got dogpiled, Zur died and my deck was simply not resilient enough to deal with this hate. I did not personally build Sharuum, that was my friend’s deck, but I do recall he did a little better since that is a much more resilient deck but ultimately ran into the same issues. To be fair one of the first decks I built was 5 color vintage restricted list.dec and that one did fairly well but mainly because this was very early in our development and I don’t feel it would do very well now (Beacon of Immortality had recently been unbanned and was considered a powerful card…we were noobs). Again I’m not sure how much information can be gathered from this but it’s certainly not theory crafting, this was simply my experience.
In an online meta I’m in agreeance that the most powerful deck will generally have the highest win percentage with some small exceptions. Generally you don’t want to “scare” the other players in the early game so I think decks like Storm with lesser know commander (Jeleva is a good example) are amazing and will probably do better than a known power commander like Zur even if the deck strength is similar. There is value in throwing off the threat assessment of the noobies.
That definition might sound strict, but I think it's actually pretty broad.
An aggro deck might fit the definition, because maybe it's something like Surrak and the only answers opponents run are counters. Not an actual situation, but it's not a strictly inferior deck.
On the other hand, homarid tribal can be shown to have a strictly inferior matchup against all known decks than some other deck. Maybe some of these matchups are even, but if it does as well against some things but worse than an alternative against others, then that's a non-competitive deck.
This is all in the player's best judgment, of course. They might be mistaken about matchup percentages across the board. They'll also probably be unaware of all possibke alternatives, or even entire strategies. But anyone who is not deliberately playing a deck known to them to be inferior to another known deck can be said to be playing competitively.
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When it comes to something "under the radar," that you can't quantify just by looking at it... first of all, it kind of depends on the situation you're playing in. If you don't know anything about the deck, but are working with the assumption that every deck at the table is built to be played competitively, you can still expect broken things from a deck regardless of whether they're running the optimal Commander or not. However, it's multiplayer, and we can't assume that we can deal with everything, so known threats probably always take priority over unknown threats, unless you know that you are strong against the known threat and have a good reason to believe the unknown is a strong counter to you.
I guess the logical next step is to ask if there is any benefit in playing something relatively unknown. I think we too quickly answer this question, "No!" from the competitive mindset that handicapping in any way automatically makes a deck not competitive. I think that's the conclusion the discussion will come to anyway, but maybe it's worth thinking about. I think there is undeniably some benefit to not being other players' priority #1, especially in a multiplayer situation, and certainly some benefit in not having your opponents know exactly how you are trying to win from the moment you turn your Commander over. I think that we've also come to the conclusion that there are good Commanders but there are also good archetypes, many of which don't need a specific Commander to function (even if some are better than others). So, some questions...
Are there any archetypes that rely on the Commander so little that the benefit of being an "unknown" threat might outweigh the benefit of playing the "strictly optimal" Commander?
Do people typically evaluate decks based on the Commander, or just the colors? If you saw, say, someone playing Thraximundar would you assume they were playing Grixis storm the same as if they were playing Jeleva? I think this is a big argument against unknown Commanders, because I will always see BUG or BG and think reanimator, and see Grixis and think storm. I guess if someone showed up with GW I might not know what to think, but...
To what extent are targets chosen at the beginning of a game? Do we have the luxury of going a turn cycle (or however long) to see who has the strongest start, or if you have a turn-one Thoughtseize will you always point it at the most obvious threat, based on the Commander? Things like targeted discard are proactive in this sense, and require some assumptions to be taken, but reactive cards like counterspells or spot removal more likely have their targets chosen based on in-the-moment threat assessment than prediction.
Is making threat assessment decisions based on Commanders correct? At some point, that's all the information you have, of course. But in a decidedly competitive situation, can you assume that all players are bringing roughly equivalent threats to the table? Do you target someone out of the gate because you feel their Commander is objectively the best at the table, because you have a hard time interacting with the archetype you assume they're playing, or are there other factors?
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I tend to think Tyrannon is on the right track. "Competitive" is not an attribute of a deck but rather an attribute of a player - it matches the intent of the deck rather than some characteristics inherent to a list. The Casual-Competitive divide can be thought of as a spectrum but in my view there are two distinct mindsets. The competitive mindset does not care at all about specific attributes of the game like flavor, speed, variance, etc. They care about one variable, the win percentage. Now, obviously this mindset can be applied at different stages. The majority of players we call "competitive" do not begin with the mindset - they choose an archetype or deck they think will be fun or interesting (possibly factoring in competitive viability - but still using other variables) and from there look to optimize it. You can also take a sub-par strategy and from there optimize it. But the fact remains that picking a sub-par strategy, even if there are no "strictly better" decks, is not a competitive decision. Optimizing that strategy is.
I don't think your examples necessarily fit well. Zur is a pretty quantifiable threat, Sisay even more so since you generally know what she's going to grab. Better examples of decks that play openly might be something like Jarad, Sharuum, et cetera. But I agree with the message you are sending - decks that build up advantage over time have are slightly disincentivized by the four-player nature of the game. If a deck that requires a couple turns of setup like Azami is setting up, then I know to disrupt and have counterplay. On the other hand, a deck that wins out of nowhere like Prossh doesn't give me the warning - end of turn Vampiric Tutor, cast Food Chain, win the game.
I will assume we are talking about tournaments against unknown foes and not playgroup play. There are a couple problems with this line of thought however. The first is that your target audience has to be other cEDH players. If I sit down at a table with Thraximundar vs Jeleva, the only people who would treat me differently would be people who know that Jeleva is often used for Storm decks, meaning people who read about EDH online, who are on average more committed than your typical opponent and more likely to be paying attention. If you're playing Thrax and your turn one is Mana Vault, I'm gonna keep an eye on you. If you always fetch blue, I'll know you're on High Tide. It's not hard to figure out and I will likely know by the time I have to keep up countermagic. Also, there isn't a terribly great advantage to my opponents not knowing that I'm doing a specific thing.
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I think your assessment is correct but your conclusion is a little harsh. Nobody is forced to pick a side. My friends and I are decidedly filthy casuals to the point where I'd never invest in the cards for a real competitive deck, but that hasn't stopped us from proxying up a competitive game once in a while. You can be one person and play the game both ways, you just have to know what way you're playing when you sit down.
For an analogy, I think making extra rules to try and bridge casual and competitive gamers is like trying to hybridize the rules of scrabble and monopoly because you can't pick which to play. It's a dumb idea that leaves nobody happy. Just play one or the other, and picking one now doesn't mean you can't play the other later.
My favorite deck though? Pheldagriff group hug. Not having to worry about winning and making the game magical with unique and bizarre spells and effects (hence the game being called magic) is what makes the game for me. This deck and my new chaos deck has caused our edh table to laugh like maniacs countless times.
My competitive decks along with others just cause too much stress and negativity for the whole table. This on top of, well... as mean as it sounds... Some of the poor social skills found in a selection of players of the magic community have cause needless issues fast.
I will also say deck style and attitude styles cause a huge difference on how I view people. I have two friends who have much better decks and better magic skills. One I love playing with, and the other I can't stand. The one I like will dominate us, but by some silly combo that makes his monsters huge or some nonsense. My other friend... Always tries to lock people out and becomes a jerk when targeted or countered, stating he's being victimized.
Biggest pet peeve though is someone taking longer doing plays on MY turn then me on my actual turn... For every turn. Just obnoxious.
I more or less agree with your conclusion that you should play with the same kind of player as you are. Still, I'm not sure I entirely agree with your argument to get there. I don't belive it's the result of some inexorable divide between two exhaustive groups, one player type who is addicted to winning and the other who can't find any point to winning at all. I presume that players of a game are trying to reach the game's objectives, and since variance in their willingness and ability to do that are handled perfectly well by most games, I don't accept the existence of differences as evidence that they can't be brided by a good rules set. It's just a question of how good the rules set is.
On whether point systems work, I think the challenge is just finding the right point system. It's extremely difficult to layer this "sub-game" onto another game with its own entirely different objectives. Still though, lots and lots of games do this to varying degrees of success. The example of Scrabble and Monopoly above doesn't seem like a good fit to me, because those games each seem to have a singular objective with more or less one way to win. But in contrast to that, there are complex games like Civilization where you have a culture sub-game, a war sub-game, science subgame, and so forth, with each being layered against one another in a way that makes sense. The challenge is just getting it right.
For the specific examples, the rule that you get 1 point for each time you cast an X spell for double digits is just a bad rule, in itself. It immediately opens itself up to exploits. For a point system like that, it seems to me that you should never reward something with points that can be completed more than one time per game. Otherwise, the rewards of that subgame will be out of 1 to 1 parity with the objective of the actual Magic. As one example, you could reward a player 1 point for being the first in a game to damage an opponent. Or award a point for only the first time an X spell in double digits is cast. Point is, the issue seems to be with the rules of the point system themselves, not the fact that it is a point system.
Likewise for awarding "negative" points. I'm not sure that there'd be any real playgroup who wouldn't be able to figure out immediately that penalizing actions that a player is forced to do as you describe is bad for the game, and then implement a rule that prevents that. It would not really matter that you might not be able to write the rule to be as robust as a legal statute in a court of law. It's enough that the rule exists, and players know when another player is being controlled or otherwise forced into taking an action that leads to negative points, then maybe to apply those points instead to the player actually taking the action. The example seems cherry-picked and flimsy.
To me, I think that the main failing of a points system is that it may be prone to rewarding a player other than the one who met the objective of Magic the Gathering, and that so doing, it might reqire tallying over multiple sessions in order to achieve its effect. The challenge is in relating the point system to the rest of the game in a cohesive way, where on the contrary, the premise for inventing this layer is more or less that you're unwilling to modify the actual game rules (ban list, etc) to achieve the desired "fun" aspect.
That goes likewise for the hypothetical "no infinites" rule. If you really wanted to get that effect, it would only require writing additional rules that were successful at doing that. For example suppose a rule, let's call it Rule 4, where if a spell or ability with the same name has resolved 4 times previously that turn, all further instances of it are countered (or can't be played, if you prefer). Then just ban out Lab Man, Doomsday, and so on, if you want to close those loopholes also. It just doens't seem to me that you're putting forward the best case.
Bottom line basically, I look at this idea of competition being incompatible with casual play to be a Sheldon'ism. Sure, he would probably phrase it as something more open-ended and interpretation-prone. Maybe something along the lines of "Commander is so many different things to so many different people that we can't possibly police them all". But really, it's just this idea that trying to win the game somehow destroys its casual aspect. I don't think there's any real divide between players trying to win the game and those not. On the contrary, I think it's impossible to actually have a "game" in the first place unless all parties are attempting on some level to reach the objective. Game Theory, if you look into it, actually states something explicitly to that effect, that participants must be presumed to be acting rationally within the game confines to achieve the objective. If someone doesn't want to try as hard as another player, that doesn't mean it's not their intent to participate in the game.
So if there is a disconnect between the rules of the game and the game being fun, then the most likely cause is the insufficiency of the rules. I'd argue that the examples of rules in that article just show this from another angle, that rules drawn with noticeable gaps are not good rules. And I'm not going to conclude on the basis of those rules (or actual EDH rules) being bad is an indication of some inexorable divide between player types that makes improvement on the game impossible. Just too easy of a cop out.
Players who can go either way on the competitive-casual spectrum aren't a problem of course. This article was specifically aimed at the attempt to reconcile players who don't want to play the game the same way. I like your analogy, though I think it's a little off - Scrabopoly might be a fun game, even if it's a bit dumb, if everyone's playing with the same kind of goal in mind.
I still think this kind of points system won't really solve the problem. Even if it's a bit more cleverly designed, the competitive players will still be playing the most efficient strategy they can to gain points, and a lot of the time that's stax. Your opponents can't resolve their spells, so you get as much time as you want to accomplish every achievement.
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Well, if that is seen as a problem, then it sounds like having a game with a wider variety of strategies was a goal of the rules set. A points system fails in that goal. But that only shows that this particular rules set just failed to do what it evidently set out to do, rather than the idea that a rules set is always doomed to fail.
As I said, I still more or less agree with the idea that you should play with the same kind of player that you are, and along with that, I agree that a point system is not an effective way to bridge the gap between skill levels and expectations. It just doesn't work at doing that. We're in agreement there, it's just an idea that's very poorly-grafted onto a complex game.
Where I think I differ, though, is the weight of consideration given to a points system in the first place. It seems to me that those considering one to begin with have bought into the idea that a better ban list wouldn't work. On the contrary, I place the blame for a particularly wide skill/expectations gap first on these very obvious failings in the ban list, as against community expectations. The points system is a bad idea, because its very intent is to make up for the ban list in solving these expectations issues.
I also don't lay the blame of this wide expectations gap on players being too "competitive". Every game ever made is competitive and has a skill gap between players, or it wouldn't be a game. In nowhere but EDH does that stop people from sitting down at a table to play, or at least sitting down with disparate levels of skill and expecting an even game. I wouldn't expect to win at Chess against Kasparov. But, I would expect to win a game or two of Yahtzee against one of the better Yahtzee players in the world. The social shame, confirmation bias, and backward doctrines of EDH have convinced an aspect of community that EDH is one type of game, when the rules set indicates that it's the other. So, it's either the rules set or these community doctrines that are a bad fit. It's not the bare fact of a player being "competitive", because on the contrary, that's a presumed constant in games.
Skill gaps and different levels of competitiveness can be totally different quantities. It's my personal stance that the ultimate goal of casual deckbuilding should be to not only win but to have your opponents enjoy losing to you, which is an objectively more difficult task than just trying to win at all. This added challenge is what's most attractive to me in magic and leads me to play much, much less competitive decks than my opponents despite the skill gap in my favor.
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I would love to test with Recurring Nightmare, Protean Hulk, and Gifts off the list. Other stuff like Worldfire could come off and nobody would care.
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These are cards that probably should go but you could make an argument that they're okay...
- Mana vault
- Grim monolith
- Ancient tomb
- vampiric tutor
- survival of the fittest
Basically, fast mana and hyperefficient tutors that appear off the top of my head. Other 1-mana tutors like enlightented tutor, or maybe even entomb, might be worth considering.
Then we have things like doomsday and necrotic ooze/hermit druid which are the main cards of pretty ridiculous combos, but as I don't play them (or have much experience against them) I have 0 knowledge in their actual power level and whether or not their speed and consistency cause issues in cutthroat circles.
As for what could be unbanned, no clue either. Most of the cards feel like you would be playing with fire, but certainly something like worldfire probably doesn't do anything meaningful in competitive circles.
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1 Balance
1 Biorhythm
1 Black Lotus
1 Braids, Cabal Minion
1 Coalition Victory
1 Channel
1 Emrakul, the Aeons Torn
1 Erayo, Soratami Ascendant
1 Fastbond
1 Gifts Ungiven
1 Griselbrand
1 Karakas
1 Library of Alexandria
1 Limited Resources
1 Mox Emerald, Jet, Pearl, Ruby, and Sapphire
1 Painter's Servant
1 Primeval Titan
1 Prophet of Kruphix
1 Protean Hulk
1 Recurring Nightmare
1 Rofellos, Llanowar Emissary
1 Sway of the Stars
1 Sundering Titan
1 Sylvan Primordial
1 Time Vault
1 Time Walk
1 Tinker
1 Tolarian Academy
1 Trade Secrets
1 Upheaval
1 Worldfire
1 Yawgmoth's Bargain
I think we can preemptively start by striking off everything on the Vintage Restricted List. Not only are many of these cards ridiculously expensive, but they have proven to be exceptionally powerful in the most powerful format out there. In theory some of these (like Balance) could come off, but for now I believe it's a good starting point. Restricted List cards also disproportionately advantage combo at the expense of control and midrange.
1 Braids, Cabal Minion
1 Coalition Victory
1 Emrakul, the Aeons Torn
1 Erayo, Soratami Ascendant
1 Gifts Ungiven
1 Griselbrand
1 Karakas
1 Limited Resources
1 Painter's Servant
1 Panoptic Mirror
1 Prophet of Kruphix
1 Protean Hulk
1 Recurring Nightmare
1 Rofellos, Llanowar Emissary
1 Sway of the Stars
1 Sundering Titan
1 Sylvan Primordial
1 Trade Secrets
1 Upheaval
1 Worldfire
The next card I would nix would be Karakas. It's true that a lot of cEDH decks don't care about the commander... but it's essentially the one thing separating the format from 99c Highlander. A lot of people are drawn to the format by the concept of having a commander that they can cast at any time and Karakas is prone to shut down that style of gameplay, especially since every Wx deck can have one on the table at once.
Limited Resources would be on my list due to the way it scales in multiplayer. A LR at a three-person table will behave quite differently from a LR at a five-person table, especially when dropped on the early turns, and I don't believe it helps the format to encourage out-of-game haggling about optimal table size.
The last card I would strike for multiplayer concerns would be the kingmaking/collude-o-fest that is Trade Secrets. I'm aware that a lot of people will use it responsibly, but the worst case scenario makes for essentially a non-game for all but two of the players present. There are plenty of other ways to encourage political play and/or draw a billion cards if that's your thing. I don't think the format is worse off for not having Trade Secrets.
This leaves the following cards "safe" to come off the list:
1 Braids, Cabal Minion
1 Coalition Victory
1 Emrakul, the Aeons Torn
1 Erayo, Soratami Ascendant
1 Gifts Ungiven
1 Griselbrand
1 Painter's Servant
1 Panoptic Mirror
1 Primeval Titan
1 Protean Hulk
1 Recurring Nightmare
1 Rofellos, Llanowar Emissary
1 Sway of the Stars
1 Sundering Titan
1 Sylvan Primordial
1 Upheaval
1 Worldfire
Of these, the only one I would be keeping an eye on is Griselbrand as a commander, given the SCG articles already written about it (albeit not featuring fully-cEDH playgroups), but if it proves to be oppressive we can just revive the "as a commander" banlist because 1 Gris is fine in the 99.
As far as bannings go, I might add Sol Ring, Mana Vault, Mana Crypt if they prove to be oppressive in games where one player gets them early and the rest do not. On the other hand, there are enough fast mana options that you might just be able to expect everyone to have access to more than 1 mana on turn 1 the way they often do in Vintage.
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I would remove Sylvan Primordial and Griselbrand.
Jokes aside I would ban Ad Naus for sure. That card I think forces a lot of fairer archetypes out of the format simply because they have no good interaction for Ad Naus spell-based decks.
Protean Hulk should stay banned. That gives any green/x deck access to boonweaver-like combo potential, and you don't even have to build your deck around it. In my Jarad I would only need to add Viscera Seer and getting Protean Hulk to die once wins the game with cards in my deck. That's pretty insane with Jarad as a sac outlet. Currently there's 5-color a deck struggling to be tier one that kills by putting an Omniscience into play off Flash + Academy Rector. Having Protean Hulk would make that deck insane.
This idea would kill competitive commander. Commander is not Vintage and letting cards like Yawgmoth's Bargain, G-Brand, Tolarian Academy, Channel, etc are going to make the format one kind of deck - storm/fast comboi. Never mind cards that just fundamentally work differently in Commander like Trade Secrets. As someone who plays competitive chess, banning a queen is a terrible analogy because a queen actually provides balance; without her, top-level players could tie virtually every game against each other.
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