I just spent a couple hours building a brudiclad edh deck. Blue red, token theme.
Let's start with an assumption that we'll have something around 40 lands.
Alright so now we need our mana rocks, gotta accelerate to keep up with the rest of the table after all.
14 slots gone, filled with 2 mana accelerants, broken fast mana, some of the more recent edh specific ramp like dockside extortionist
Also need to draw cards, lots of cards preferably, ramp into card draw being one of the biggest edh tactics.
another 10 slots gone to card draw.
Now for interaction spells
Maybe 6 counterspells, 6 single target removal spells, 6 mass removal spells, 18 slots gone
Add in some cantrips and tutor spells...
4 tutors + 4 cantrips, another 8 slots gone
so we have 1 + 40 + 14 + 10 + 18 + 8 = 91 card slots gone before we've even gotten to the interesting part of the deck.
And all of these cards are staple powerhouses that outclass most synergy.
Maybe we cut 5 land, now we have...14 card slots to play with.
Any cut here is cutting an extremely high quality draw spell, interaction spell, ramp spell, tutor, or essential ramp.
Where is the fun in deciding what to include anymore? You have no slots to work with.
Looks perfectly reasonable to me. In fact it seems like a wonderful teaching aid for average players. As what you are describing in "interesting" deckbuilding can be consider "mold breakers". As this layout below can give a good guideline to a player on how to build their first few decks until they want to try and experiment more.
A person can build a more wild deck that does something unexpected and interesting if they have a better grasp of how it all works.
You're making a lot of assumptions about what you 'need' to do to keep up with the rest of the table. If your meta is indeed hyper-competitive, with everyone building the absolute best deck possible then you're right, but that's what magic is like, as most eternal formats congregate to a limited number of best decks.
However, not all meta's are like that. For example, in my local meta I wouldn't need to ru anywhere near that amount of mana acceleration, and 6 mass removal spells is decidedly overkill. We barely run any tutors in my Meta and I in particularly avoid playing tutors unless it does something particularly interesting (such as congregation at dawn in Gishath, or some non-basic land tutors in sisters of stone death because that deck really needs the massive amounts of mana to function).
All of this is to say that interesting deck building does not have to be dead. If your group values that aspect of EDH, all they have to do is agree on some global limits to their meta to avoid playing cEDH.
I would like to point out that Ramp spells like Rampant Growth are tutors. This is to illustrate that one card can cover multiple slots, freeing up more space.
There are also no shortage of removal spells. Even if every player followed these numbers rigidly there would still be a great variety in each section.
Other differences:
A token deck is s somewhat more likely to use Skullclamp as card draw compared with the pure spellslinger of Niv-Mizzet. The token deck might also use Spell Swindle as one of its counters due to the high synergy. Packing in a Ghired's Belligerence as one of the single-target kills also gives some nice synergy, as does using Crush of Tentacles as one of your board wipes. If your card draw selection (Timetwister, Wheel of Fate, Faithless Looting, Windfall, Brainstorm, Time Spiral, etc.) includes any long-term value engines, Tezzeret, Artifice Master or Karn, Scion of Urza may be usable as card draw engines that can also make tokens. It should also be noted that the Niv-Mizzet deck is more likely to use spell-based mana spikes (like Seething Song) whereas Brudiclad may want to lean a bit heavier on artifacts for incidental strategies. The mana base of Brudiclad is also likely to employ artifact lands, Inventors' Fair, Academy Ruins and 1-2 Lands that generate tokens (Kher Keep, Mirrorpool, Foundry of the Consuls, spawning bed, Springjack Pasture, Gargoyle Castle, etc.). While some of these changes are non-optimal, they allow you to play within the basic outline of what a good deck requires while adding additional customization.
With that said, the thought that two optimal decks of the same colors will rarely differ by more than 20% does kind of make me sad.
If your going for a purely optimal route of x= best mana rock, then sure you reduce possible inclusion spots for fun or thematic cards. But you yourself mentioned dockside, who while a mana effect is more along the lines of Bridiclad theme since it makes tokens.
Outside of focused competitive builds (where I feel brudiclad is), your various interaction cards and mana cards can become thematic and helpful to the build. Dockside, curse of opulence and brass's bounty can all fall in to your mana category. Rite of replication and clone legion are heavy hitters for brudi but also easly slotted into interaction, since they tend to force a response from the opponents even without brudi in play. Supplant form/fated infatuation/cackling counterpart can all be used reactively. Spell swindle is usually considered hyper casual compared to mana drain but in brudi that's counter + army in a can. For brudiclad specifically even cards like pirate's pillage become better.
Just because a card is intended to be used one way most of the time in most decks doesn't mean it has to be used that way in every deck. That's where the fun part of building variant non-tier commanders comes from.
My experience with brudi came from a semi-competitive but not cedh meta. I just focused on tutoring up solemn, then cloning solemn as much as possible to run away with advantage. Eventually I would just theft/bribery something to clone with one of the 3x cackling counterpart spells and then have a pile of treasure tokens to attack with. Brass's bounty is the actual threat for that deck - you don't actually need more than 5 strong enablers for brudi to make the deck very good.
A token deck is s somewhat more likely to use Skullclamp as card draw compared with the pure spellslinger of Niv-Mizzet. The token deck might also use Spell Swindle as one of its counters due to the high synergy. Packing in a Ghired's Belligerence as one of the single-target kills also gives some nice synergy, as does using Crush of Tentacles as one of your board wipes.
This is the path I've taken to keeping my decks interesting, along with keeping tutors to a minimum and absolutely refusing to run any fast mana (piss off Sol Ring!). The more innately powerful a commander, the more synergistic elements I put in instead of the strictly best cards. So my Boros combo deck, it ran everything near 100%, because even at full power Boros is relatively weak compared to the other combinations. But my Brudiclad deck is full of token-orientated answers and removal.
Another direction to go is to simply cut back on removal, which I say as a guy who used to run a mandatory 12-18 answers in every deck. Removal in that quantity is only strictly necessary if people are playing high powered explosive decks. My meta was removal heavy, leading to a lot of games where very little happened for a long time, a wrath every board rotation etc etc. Everyone slowly cut removal for more threats or value generators. Theres still removal in our decks but probably half as much. As a result, something will eventually stick instead of being insta-pathed.
Theres three outcomes to this. Firstly, that half a dozen answer spells become a bunch of unique picks for a deck. Secondly, games are faster, because threats end games and at this answer-density threats stick earlier than in the old meta. Finally, and most interestingly, games often turn into political battles of threats vs threats. If one player has a huge indestructible monster, and someone can path it, situation over. But what if he has a huge indy monster, I have a horde of small creatures and another player has a big flying monster. The interaction between these threats is much more interesting than the interaction between threats and removal.
The more consistent a deck is the less fun it is for opponents to interact with where as the less consistent a deck is the more fun it is to play and interact with. This seems to be an issue I keep seeing in EDH / Commander where a lot of times the lines are blurred between Casual EDH and cEDH. A lot of times when someone manages to Solitaire for a win everyone else seems to be tapped out to cast any sort of answer unless someone is running Force of Will / Force of Negation / Pact of Negation. Even If you have an answer in hand the combo player ALWAYS gets to resolve their abilities first on the stack so you're still screwed either way. Perhaps Play Design at Wizards of the Coast needs to start printing cards that punishes combo players by reversing the order of how the stack resolves in your favor which is actually pretty dirty but would be effective in prolonging games further.
Part of the reason why there's less interesting decks to build for EDH / Commander right now and I've noticed this with a lot of the newer Legendary Creatures printed in Throne of Eldraine is that Wizards of the Coast isn't willing to think outside the box far enough to where brewing decks don't feel as "cookie cutter" which actually used to be a phrase for netdecking in Yu-Gi-Oh! way back when. Auto includes are definitely a problem in this format to the point where 50% of the time you're seeing almost the exact same cards played in almost every game thanks to draw and tutoring. My Nissa, Vastwood Seer EDH deck has a similar problem where it consistently gets out both Avenger of Zendikar and Craterhoof Behemoth to close out games almost every time. Shadowborn Athreos had the same problem where you just literally play all your Shadowborn Apostles with Thrumming Stone. It's so dumb.
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America Bless Christ Jesus
"Restriction breeds creativity." - Sheldon Menery on EDH / Commander in Magic: The Gathering
"Cancel Culture is the real reason why everyone's not allowed to have nice things anymore." - Anonymous
"For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?" - Mark 8:36
"Most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution." - Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
"Every life decision is always a risk / reward proposition." - Sanjay Gupta
Challenge your playgroup to have one day a match where all decks are banned from any card that contains “search” and (not or; restriction is having both) “library” printed on them.
The point of Singleton is to push game variety. Searching for your cards is a crutch.
There, I said it.
Humans are afraid of the unknown and don’t like putting things up to chance, it is scary for them. Many people play Magic because it is something they understand and can control, granting them stability.
I have to keep my hands busy and have background noise else my focus greatly diminishes. I acknowledge MtG is an escape and probably the most controlled part of my life.
Having played of over 20 years I have learned winning isn’t everything, or rather, I define what it means to win. Maybe I win by killing my opponents, maybe I win by stealing someone’s creature and hitting them in the face with it, maybe I win by dealing at least 5 damage to all creatures on the board with a source that has lifelink, or block an all out effect with a Fog effect, or politic my way to second place.
I enjoy many decks, but my chaos deck was built for Chaos and only Chaos. The deck has three missions: don’t be the last one standing, creature as much chaos as possible, and don’t be the first eliminated. If I rules-win with that deck, I did something wrong, and if one card causes a win repeatedly (like Forced Fruition) it is cut from the deck.
I used to game to be the best and in one game I spent hours perfecting everything and four hours in to a typical six hour practice session, I realized I had wanted to throw my laptop across the room for the past few days. This “game” wasn’t fun for me, winning had become everything and ruined what little joy I had.
I’ve returned to that game, but only to play casually. Just like Magic. I could have quit my summer job and ran the GPs during Theros block. Spent my time traveling away from my S.O. and said summer job I wish I still had (but I needed to pay bills :/). I almost sacrificed the joy in my life to be the best... until rotation.
TL;DR = if your Meta is too competitive, try something more casual. Your soul will thank you.
or better yet, just challenge them to build a mono white deck and try to not run things like tutors or plains-fetchers, after all don't want to be too consistent now.
If you're choosing to ignore synergistic cards for your purely optimal template, even when possible synergistic cards fit in to spots within that template (like previously mentioned draw/interaction/mana), then this issue is more about you and not an issue with the format.
From your statements here (and from previous topics) it really sounds like you are choosing to make the format worse for yourself.
The more consistent a deck is the less fun it is for opponents to interact with where as the less consistent a deck is the more fun it is to play and interact with.
I strongly disagree with this. It's consistency that allows less effective, more junky strategies to be viable. People won't find interesting random pile of cardboard but if you pull off a win with a deck that is carefuly designed to execute some strategy then it is enjojable for everyone. Keep in mind that the strategy does not need to be most effective for your color combination/commander. It's consistency that actually opens up more deckbuilding options.
This seems to be an issue I keep seeing in EDH / Commander where a lot of times the lines are blurred between Casual EDH and cEDH. A lot of times when someone manages to Solitaire for a win everyone else seems to be tapped out to cast any sort of answer unless someone is running Force of Will / Force of Negation / Pact of Negation. Even If you have an answer in hand the combo player ALWAYS gets to resolve their abilities first on the stack so you're still screwed either way. Perhaps Play Design at Wizards of the Coast needs to start printing cards that punishes combo players by reversing the order of how the stack resolves in your favor which is actually pretty dirty but would be effective in prolonging games further.
I'm confused. Thats not how stack works. It always requires to pass priority to resolve anything so everyone has chance to interact. If everyone ends their turn without ability to interact then _this_ looks to me like everyone plays solitaire. Also prolonging games that on average each take more than an hour is not something that I'm looking forward to (this does not means that I would enjoy games where everyone races to their combo and game ends t3 after 10 minutes).
Part of the reason why there's less interesting decks to build for EDH / Commander right now and I've noticed this with a lot of the newer Legendary Creatures printed in Throne of Eldraine is that Wizards of the Coast isn't willing to think outside the box far enough to where brewing decks don't feel as "cookie cutter" which actually used to be a phrase for netdecking in Yu-Gi-Oh! way back when. Auto includes are definitely a problem in this format to the point where 50% of the time you're seeing almost the exact same cards played in almost every game thanks to draw and tutoring. My Nissa, Vastwood Seer EDH deck has a similar problem where it consistently gets out both Avenger of Zendikar and Craterhoof Behemoth to close out games almost every time. Shadowborn Athreos had the same problem where you just literally play all your Shadowborn Apostles with Thrumming Stone. It's so dumb.
I do agree that lately most potential commanders are very obvious what they are designed to do. Most also don't really allow "open" deckbuilding. On the other hand I found that a lot of the lower power legends (mostly uncommon) allows clever deckbuilding to make some niche strategy viable. The problem is that those decks end up being in lower areas of power spectrum and may not work if your meta is of higher power.
If you can consistently pull off Hoof and Apostle kills in the same playgroup then it seems that people you play with are not interested in adapting... or something? Anyway i would get bored quickly with winning in the same way over and over consistently and rebuild the decks to do something more interesting.
Having a template to apply to any deckbuilding means you have some sense of direction when making a new deck.
And interaction with other players is the far more interesting part of the multiplayer experience over solitairing your own cards.
The deckbuilding is(was) the interesting part of the game. If that's just a template now there is nothing left in this game for me to enjoy.
A template that is great for beginners to grasp better. Not every deck is going to follow this formula. For example a Tainted Pact deck that wants to draw their whole deck but the deck design itself means no dupes. There is a lot of actual nuance that goes into this. Some might run only 1 mass removal spell, a couple counterspells, but are primarily a combo deck such as a Laboratory Maniac deck. Some might be more creature centric and have little need of instants or sorceries like a Primal Surge deck.
I’m actually running into the opposite problem lately: there’s a guy in the group i play in regularly and his decks always seem to work like a charm. But as far as i can tell he often runs cards i wouldn’t even have on my radar. I talked to him about it and he doesn’t use a template (though he’s always packing interaction and a few wipes). So far I have been using a template, making my own tweaks to the 8x8 theory but i’m starting to realize more and more that if i want to take my deckbuilding to the next level, I need to use less templating and more something else.
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The secret to enjoyable Commander games is not winning first, but losing last.
If my post has no tags, then i posted from my phone.
Having a template to apply to any deckbuilding means you have some sense of direction when making a new deck.
And interaction with other players is the far more interesting part of the multiplayer experience over solitairing your own cards.
The deckbuilding is(was) the interesting part of the game. If that's just a template now there is nothing left in this game for me to enjoy.
A template that is great for beginners to grasp better. Not every deck is going to follow this formula. For example a Tainted Pact deck that wants to draw their whole deck but the deck design itself means no dupes. There is a lot of actual nuance that goes into this. Some might run only 1 mass removal spell, a couple counterspells, but are primarily a combo deck such as a Laboratory Maniac deck. Some might be more creature centric and have little need of instants or sorceries like a Primal Surge deck.
The combo decks run more interaction because combo kills take fewer card slots, and tend to be the most boring decks for me to build and play. You just take all the extra slots and run the slightly less good interaction/draw/tutor/ramp
The niche decks also tend to be very limited in what cards you can include. The restrictions tend to be so severe that card inclusions are too obvious instead of actual decisions. Decks like titania, protector of argoth are not at all interesting to me because it feels like the deck is already made for me.
Yes there are some niche commanders like that (Mostly due to direct and unique abilities as those usually build around that effect making it easier to theme stuff around it but also making lists more similar) but even there people don't play carbon copys either due to budgetary or powerlevel reasons. Go to EDH rec or any other site that shows you the percentage of decks that play any given card and you'll find that in most decks the count of cards with more than 50% inclusion is below 20/60 nonland cards leaving 40+ cards usually varying wven with the same commander. And even with most niche commanders that count rarely goes above 40 still leaving 20+ cards varying. And add to the fact that noone forces you to even play your lists like that just like following the templates. Both EDHrec and Templates are a good starting point especially for newer players but you can adjust those to your style of play, playgroup, budget etc.
And as others have stated with the exception of (maybe)mana rocks most slots of the template you used can be filled//are often filled with synergistic versions of such cards making it less staple more synergistic. Making finding those "the interesting part of the deck[building process]"
Decks like titania, protector of argoth are not at all interesting to me because it feels like the deck is already made for me.
I... I apologize but I'm not sure what you are expecting.
Do you not want this game to have a ratio of needed effects that best supports victory? Do you not want there to be a critical mass of generically good cards to shove into any skeleton after 25+ years? Do you not want there to be a large community contributing to forums and sources like EDHRec in a way that defeats the purpose of browsing your binders to find the best cards for yourself?
For that matter, what is it that you really want?
Do you want to make token decks with 40+ token producers that have decent chances of victory at competitive tables? Do you want to routinely search through your collection and find hidden gems that nobody else is talking about? Do you want the average commander to have multiple abilities that could each be potentially build around (Like Teysa Karlov), to create deckbuilding restrictions that cut off most common choices (such as Ruric Thar, The Unbowed), or to be built in ways that actively push these ratios (as a Neheb, the Worthy deck might run less card draw or a token-based deck may run fewer wraths)?
I can get the frustration. I remember brewing decks in Middle School and High School, matching my raw wits and ingenuity (and limited collection) against those of friends. Nowadays, though, getting all of that back doesn't really seam feasible. If they banned every staple overnight, commander would be "solved" (to the extent it can be solved) a month later. If you build your decks "free-hand", that won't remove your pre-existing knowledge of staples and deckbuilding strategies. Having a game with 50+ expansions and 25+ years of history to be consistently balanced to the point where several completely divergent paths to deckbuilding are equally viable without making it obvious (as with Titania, Edgar Markov, etc) would be incredibly unlikely.
Back on point, what do you want to happen now? Moving forward from how things are right now, how do you want things to change in a way that will make you happy? Do you see a way to move things closer to what we see in other formats, where there is notably larger variance in the amount of interaction/card advantage/threats?
I would like for the removal of the cards so staple they outclass synergy, not necessarily the removal but other categories.
You have your broken fast mana that I put in a deck before I even know what general it will be, and goodstuffs cards that are so stupid in their effects that any attempt to synergize with my general cannot hope to outperform what these cards do on their own.
Reiterating that it's your deck and your choice of what to run again seems like wasted words - are you actively ignoring the fact that you get to control what you play? Are your friends pressuring you into sleeving up dual lands, mana crypts, mana drains and demonic tutors for every deck you show up with?
If this is such an issue for you, have you talked to the people you play with about it? Chatting on forums is good for generic information but we have zero knowledge of your playgroup.
Comparing competitive cards to deck function is really just a weak topic. I feel like a relatable scenario for this entire thread would be someone playing their modern deck in a legacy tournament and then immediately complaining about an opponent suggesting force of will to them when they're playing logic knot.
If you feel like you're being expected to play more powerful cards, then do or don't. You can choose who and what you play.
Mana Crypt, Mana Vault, Sol Ring, Chrome Mox, Mox Diamond, arcane signet, The ten signets, the ten talismans, darksteel ingot, chromatic lantern, Trinket Mage, Seething Song, Caged Sun, Gauntlet of Might, Gauntlet of Power, Kodama’s Reach, Cultivate, Harrow, Circuitous Route, Explosive Vegetation, Sakura-Tribe Elder, Nature’s Lore, Farseek, Three Visita, Boreal Druid, Llanowar Elves, Elvish Mystic, Fyndhorn Elves, Birds of Paradise, Noble Hierarch, Land Tax, Tithe, High Tide, Bubbling Muck, Cabal Coffers, Nykthos, Ancient Tomb, City of Traitors, Expedition Map, Thaumatic Compass, Exploration, Mul Daya Oracle, Azusa, Coiling Oracle, Gitaxian Probe, Preordain, Ponder, Serum Visions, Brainstorm, Time Spiral, Timetwister, Wheel of Fate, Rhystic Study, Consecrated Sphinx, Sylvan Library, Smothering Tithe, Windfall, Necropotence, Phyrexian Arena, Yawgmoth’s Will, Toxic Deluge, Cyclonic Rift, Wrath of God, Damnation, Chaos Warp, Generous Gift, Beast Within, Harmonize, Blasphemous Act, Skullclamp, Grasp of Fate, Swan Song, Force of Will, Force of Negation, Cryptic Command, Pongify, Rapid Hybridization, dreamstone hedron, Hedron Archive, Brainstone, carpet of Flowers, Perilous Vault, Nevinyrral’s Disk, Sylvan Scrying, Crop Rotation, Enlightened Tutor, Idyllic Tutor, Sterling Grove, Open the Armory, Steelshaper’s Gift, Mystical Tutor, Merchant’s Scroll, Worldly Tutor, Tooth and Nail, Chord of Calling, Eldritch Evolution, bloom tender, Natural Order, Vampiric Tutor, Demonic Tutor, Beseech the Queen, Mastermind’s Acquisition, Diabolic Tutor, Increasing Ambition, Gamble, Imperial Recruiter, Curse of Swine, diabolic intern, Recruiter of the Guard...
That is over a hundred cards I just listed and that is likely the tip of the iceberg. While some of them aren’t competitive right now, you need to nuke almost everything to get rid of the auto-picks. Even if all of the top rate tutors in black were banned, for example, it would still be better to run Diabolic Tutor rather than running yet another token creator in your Endrik deck.
This is why I don’t get the complaint. You want to get those deck slots “back” but the simple fact is that you likely never had them to begin with. What most likely happened is that you (and/or your gaming group) gained more knowledge of the card game and got better cards. The game didn’t magically change overnight.
Beyond that, the request doesn’t make sense when you get down to it. When I’m crafting Toshiro Umezawa, he wants me to use kill spells. If any of those kill spells are decent, however, I will feel pressured to use them in my Endrek deck to interact and follow the template. If there are enough awesome token makers for Endrek that it’s worth not using that kill spell, however, then Toshiro is pressured to use those token spells. I don’t know what sort of artificial silos you want between commanders but that is fundamentally not how this game works.
I guess that I should ask what type of cards you actually want. It seems that you oppose generic good cards and cards that are so great for the archetype that they are obvious. When building an Orzhov Enchantment Deck, you would be against Land Tax and necropotence (which are generically powerful) along with cards like Enlightened Tutor (which is an auto-include for enchantment decks). That just seems to leave us with middle-ground cards like Extinguish Hope or Three Dreams. If you banned tutor/necro/tax, however, we would be having this exact same conversation about how cards like Extinguish Hopes, by being the best available tier of enchantment support, forces you to include it and robs you of your deck slots.
I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong. Could you give me an example of the sort of synergy cards you wish could be played that would not risk becoming autoincludes if all of the better cards were banned? That just seems like a problem of infinite regression from where I’m standing.
That is over a hundred cards I just listed and that is likely the tip of the iceberg. While some of them aren’t competitive right now, you need to nuke almost everything to get rid of the auto-picks. Even if all of the top rate tutors in black were banned, for example, it would still be better to run Diabolic Tutor rather than running yet another token creator in your Endrik deck.
Paying four extra mana for a spell is a huge cost. This statement is not true. Decks are not trying to find room for 4 mana tutors despite, as you claim here, being better than including another redundant spell. It's too slow. This generally would require spending one turn searching for the spell and one turn casting the spell you searched for. That is not strong.
Beyond that, the request doesn’t make sense when you get down to it. When I’m crafting Toshiro Umezawa, he wants me to use kill spells. If any of those kill spells are decent, however, I will feel pressured to use them in my Endrek deck to interact and follow the template. If there are enough awesome token makers for Endrek that it’s worth not using that kill spell, however, then Toshiro is pressured to use those token spells. I don’t know what sort of artificial silos you want between commanders but that is fundamentally not how this game works.
Different decks should want different cards. You want token synergy cards with endrek because you run other token synergy cards. You want kill spell cards in toshiro to synergize with your general. Those synergies should be more rewarding than just running standalone good cards that don't relate to your strategy, otherwise every deck just runs the same cards, which is what is happening to edh now. I can build a deck of any color really
I guess that I should ask what type of cards you actually want. It seems that you oppose generic good cards and cards that are so great for the archetype that they are obvious. When building an Orzhov Enchantment Deck, you would be against Land Tax and necropotence (which are generically powerful) along with cards like Enlightened Tutor (which is an auto-include for enchantment decks). That just seems to leave us with middle-ground cards like Extinguish Hope or Three Dreams. If you banned tutor/necro/tax, however, we would be having this exact same conversation about how cards like Extinguish Hopes, by being the best available tier of enchantment support, forces you to include it and robs you of your deck slots.
Cards like enlightened tutor aren't just auto include for enchantment decks. They are auto include for all decks that run white. Vampiric tutor, demonic tutor, mystical tutor, there are lots of em.
There is a point where spending extra mana for spells becomes a real choice in tutors, and I'd prefer they were like that. Keeps the variance higher and makes lines of play more diverse game to game.
A card like three dreams is a good example of a card that will almost certainly never be an auto include, but would likely be used by an aura based strategy. Most decks run very few auras to begin with and don't want it, and most decks aren't going want to pay 5 mana to find 3 of them, but there are generals that want auras and would probably be happy to pay 5 mana for 3 of them.
Part of this is a general desire to slow the game down. EDH mana, draw power, and tutors are completely out of control to the point of making alternate strategies irrelevant.
EDH mana, draw power, and tutors are completely out of control to the point of making alternate strategies irrelevant.
What other strategies are made irellevant?
Different decks should want different cards.
They do to a certain extend and always be what I want to know is where you would draw the line to what that extent should be and what that would accomplish.
And Rosy also raised a point I'd like to add to and that is if you remove the "Autoincludes" other cards will just take their spot leaving you exactly where you started.
Edit:
A card like three dreams is a good example of a card that will almost certainly never be an auto include, but would likely be used by an aura based strategy.
that sure sounds like an auto include for a given strategy and as I said before even most of the "template" slots are strategy based "autoincludes"
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Let's start with an assumption that we'll have something around 40 lands.
Alright so now we need our mana rocks, gotta accelerate to keep up with the rest of the table after all.
14 slots gone, filled with 2 mana accelerants, broken fast mana, some of the more recent edh specific ramp like dockside extortionist
Also need to draw cards, lots of cards preferably, ramp into card draw being one of the biggest edh tactics.
another 10 slots gone to card draw.
Now for interaction spells
Maybe 6 counterspells, 6 single target removal spells, 6 mass removal spells, 18 slots gone
Add in some cantrips and tutor spells...
4 tutors + 4 cantrips, another 8 slots gone
so we have 1 + 40 + 14 + 10 + 18 + 8 = 91 card slots gone before we've even gotten to the interesting part of the deck.
And all of these cards are staple powerhouses that outclass most synergy.
Maybe we cut 5 land, now we have...14 card slots to play with.
Any cut here is cutting an extremely high quality draw spell, interaction spell, ramp spell, tutor, or essential ramp.
Where is the fun in deciding what to include anymore? You have no slots to work with.
A person can build a more wild deck that does something unexpected and interesting if they have a better grasp of how it all works.
35 Lands
14 Mana rocks and/or ramp spells
10 Card draw spells
6 single target removal spells
6 mass removal spells
6 counterspells
4 Tutors
4 Cantrips
14 Freebie Slots
However, not all meta's are like that. For example, in my local meta I wouldn't need to ru anywhere near that amount of mana acceleration, and 6 mass removal spells is decidedly overkill. We barely run any tutors in my Meta and I in particularly avoid playing tutors unless it does something particularly interesting (such as congregation at dawn in Gishath, or some non-basic land tutors in sisters of stone death because that deck really needs the massive amounts of mana to function).
All of this is to say that interesting deck building does not have to be dead. If your group values that aspect of EDH, all they have to do is agree on some global limits to their meta to avoid playing cEDH.
There are also no shortage of removal spells. Even if every player followed these numbers rigidly there would still be a great variety in each section.
Let's consider the differences between a Niv-Mizzet deck and a Brudiclad deck, for example.
For a Brudiclad Deck, those 14 free cards may look like.
Myr Battlesphere
Mechanized Production
Saheeli, Sublime Artificer
Mimic Vat
Helm of the Host
Clone Legion
Rite of Replication
Wurmcoil Engine
Urza, Lord High Artificer
Feldon of the Third Path
The Locust God
Purphoros, God of the Forge
Faerie Artisans
Retrofitter Foundry
Other differences:
A token deck is s somewhat more likely to use Skullclamp as card draw compared with the pure spellslinger of Niv-Mizzet. The token deck might also use Spell Swindle as one of its counters due to the high synergy. Packing in a Ghired's Belligerence as one of the single-target kills also gives some nice synergy, as does using Crush of Tentacles as one of your board wipes. If your card draw selection (Timetwister, Wheel of Fate, Faithless Looting, Windfall, Brainstorm, Time Spiral, etc.) includes any long-term value engines, Tezzeret, Artifice Master or Karn, Scion of Urza may be usable as card draw engines that can also make tokens. It should also be noted that the Niv-Mizzet deck is more likely to use spell-based mana spikes (like Seething Song) whereas Brudiclad may want to lean a bit heavier on artifacts for incidental strategies. The mana base of Brudiclad is also likely to employ artifact lands, Inventors' Fair, Academy Ruins and 1-2 Lands that generate tokens (Kher Keep, Mirrorpool, Foundry of the Consuls, spawning bed, Springjack Pasture, Gargoyle Castle, etc.). While some of these changes are non-optimal, they allow you to play within the basic outline of what a good deck requires while adding additional customization.
With that said, the thought that two optimal decks of the same colors will rarely differ by more than 20% does kind of make me sad.
Outside of focused competitive builds (where I feel brudiclad is), your various interaction cards and mana cards can become thematic and helpful to the build. Dockside, curse of opulence and brass's bounty can all fall in to your mana category. Rite of replication and clone legion are heavy hitters for brudi but also easly slotted into interaction, since they tend to force a response from the opponents even without brudi in play. Supplant form/fated infatuation/cackling counterpart can all be used reactively. Spell swindle is usually considered hyper casual compared to mana drain but in brudi that's counter + army in a can. For brudiclad specifically even cards like pirate's pillage become better.
Just because a card is intended to be used one way most of the time in most decks doesn't mean it has to be used that way in every deck. That's where the fun part of building variant non-tier commanders comes from.
My experience with brudi came from a semi-competitive but not cedh meta. I just focused on tutoring up solemn, then cloning solemn as much as possible to run away with advantage. Eventually I would just theft/bribery something to clone with one of the 3x cackling counterpart spells and then have a pile of treasure tokens to attack with. Brass's bounty is the actual threat for that deck - you don't actually need more than 5 strong enablers for brudi to make the deck very good.
Links to my most current deck lists;
Primary EDH; Rakka Mar Token Perfection, Crosis Mnemonic Betrayal, Cromat Villainous, Judith Gravestorm, Rakdos Empty Storm, Exava Artifacts, Bant Trash, & Fumiko Voltron!
EDH kept at home; Ruzzian Isset & Rakdos LoR!
EDH (nostalgic/pimp/retired) in storage;
Latulla Burns, Akroma Smash, Jeska Voltron, Rakdos Storm, Bladewing Darghans, Lyzolda Worldgorger, Xantcha Steals your Heart, Jori Storm, Wydwen Permission, Gwendlyn Paradox, Jeleva Warps, & Sigarda Brick!
Legacy Showanimator and High Tide!
This is the path I've taken to keeping my decks interesting, along with keeping tutors to a minimum and absolutely refusing to run any fast mana (piss off Sol Ring!). The more innately powerful a commander, the more synergistic elements I put in instead of the strictly best cards. So my Boros combo deck, it ran everything near 100%, because even at full power Boros is relatively weak compared to the other combinations. But my Brudiclad deck is full of token-orientated answers and removal.
Another direction to go is to simply cut back on removal, which I say as a guy who used to run a mandatory 12-18 answers in every deck. Removal in that quantity is only strictly necessary if people are playing high powered explosive decks. My meta was removal heavy, leading to a lot of games where very little happened for a long time, a wrath every board rotation etc etc. Everyone slowly cut removal for more threats or value generators. Theres still removal in our decks but probably half as much. As a result, something will eventually stick instead of being insta-pathed.
Theres three outcomes to this. Firstly, that half a dozen answer spells become a bunch of unique picks for a deck. Secondly, games are faster, because threats end games and at this answer-density threats stick earlier than in the old meta. Finally, and most interestingly, games often turn into political battles of threats vs threats. If one player has a huge indestructible monster, and someone can path it, situation over. But what if he has a huge indy monster, I have a horde of small creatures and another player has a big flying monster. The interaction between these threats is much more interesting than the interaction between threats and removal.
Part of the reason why there's less interesting decks to build for EDH / Commander right now and I've noticed this with a lot of the newer Legendary Creatures printed in Throne of Eldraine is that Wizards of the Coast isn't willing to think outside the box far enough to where brewing decks don't feel as "cookie cutter" which actually used to be a phrase for netdecking in Yu-Gi-Oh! way back when. Auto includes are definitely a problem in this format to the point where 50% of the time you're seeing almost the exact same cards played in almost every game thanks to draw and tutoring. My Nissa, Vastwood Seer EDH deck has a similar problem where it consistently gets out both Avenger of Zendikar and Craterhoof Behemoth to close out games almost every time. Shadowborn Athreos had the same problem where you just literally play all your Shadowborn Apostles with Thrumming Stone. It's so dumb.
"Restriction breeds creativity." - Sheldon Menery on EDH / Commander in Magic: The Gathering
"Cancel Culture is the real reason why everyone's not allowed to have nice things anymore." - Anonymous
"For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?" - Mark 8:36
"Most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution." - Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
"Every life decision is always a risk / reward proposition." - Sanjay Gupta
You will see the difference.
Shu Yun, the Silent Tempest WUR Voltron Control
Temmet, Vizier of Naktamun WU Unblockable Mirror Trickery
Ra's al Ghul (Sidar Kondo) and Face-Down Ninjas
Brudiclad, Token Engineer
Vaevictis (VV2) the Dire Lantern
Rona, Disciple of Gix
Tiana the Auror
Hallar
Ulrich the Politician
Zur the Rebel
Scorpion, Locust, Scarab, Egyptian Gods
O-Kagachi, Mathas, Mairsil
"Non-Tribal" Tribal Generals, Eggs
The point of Singleton is to push game variety. Searching for your cards is a crutch.
There, I said it.
Humans are afraid of the unknown and don’t like putting things up to chance, it is scary for them. Many people play Magic because it is something they understand and can control, granting them stability.
I have to keep my hands busy and have background noise else my focus greatly diminishes. I acknowledge MtG is an escape and probably the most controlled part of my life.
Having played of over 20 years I have learned winning isn’t everything, or rather, I define what it means to win. Maybe I win by killing my opponents, maybe I win by stealing someone’s creature and hitting them in the face with it, maybe I win by dealing at least 5 damage to all creatures on the board with a source that has lifelink, or block an all out effect with a Fog effect, or politic my way to second place.
I enjoy many decks, but my chaos deck was built for Chaos and only Chaos. The deck has three missions: don’t be the last one standing, creature as much chaos as possible, and don’t be the first eliminated. If I rules-win with that deck, I did something wrong, and if one card causes a win repeatedly (like Forced Fruition) it is cut from the deck.
I used to game to be the best and in one game I spent hours perfecting everything and four hours in to a typical six hour practice session, I realized I had wanted to throw my laptop across the room for the past few days. This “game” wasn’t fun for me, winning had become everything and ruined what little joy I had.
I’ve returned to that game, but only to play casually. Just like Magic. I could have quit my summer job and ran the GPs during Theros block. Spent my time traveling away from my S.O. and said summer job I wish I still had (but I needed to pay bills :/). I almost sacrificed the joy in my life to be the best... until rotation.
TL;DR = if your Meta is too competitive, try something more casual. Your soul will thank you.
Having a template to apply to any deckbuilding means you have some sense of direction when making a new deck.
And interaction with other players is the far more interesting part of the multiplayer experience over solitairing your own cards.
The deckbuilding is(was) the interesting part of the game. If that's just a template now there is nothing left in this game for me to enjoy.
From your statements here (and from previous topics) it really sounds like you are choosing to make the format worse for yourself.
Links to my most current deck lists;
Primary EDH; Rakka Mar Token Perfection, Crosis Mnemonic Betrayal, Cromat Villainous, Judith Gravestorm, Rakdos Empty Storm, Exava Artifacts, Bant Trash, & Fumiko Voltron!
EDH kept at home; Ruzzian Isset & Rakdos LoR!
EDH (nostalgic/pimp/retired) in storage;
Latulla Burns, Akroma Smash, Jeska Voltron, Rakdos Storm, Bladewing Darghans, Lyzolda Worldgorger, Xantcha Steals your Heart, Jori Storm, Wydwen Permission, Gwendlyn Paradox, Jeleva Warps, & Sigarda Brick!
Legacy Showanimator and High Tide!
I'm confused. Thats not how stack works. It always requires to pass priority to resolve anything so everyone has chance to interact. If everyone ends their turn without ability to interact then _this_ looks to me like everyone plays solitaire. Also prolonging games that on average each take more than an hour is not something that I'm looking forward to (this does not means that I would enjoy games where everyone races to their combo and game ends t3 after 10 minutes).
I do agree that lately most potential commanders are very obvious what they are designed to do. Most also don't really allow "open" deckbuilding. On the other hand I found that a lot of the lower power legends (mostly uncommon) allows clever deckbuilding to make some niche strategy viable. The problem is that those decks end up being in lower areas of power spectrum and may not work if your meta is of higher power.
If you can consistently pull off Hoof and Apostle kills in the same playgroup then it seems that people you play with are not interested in adapting... or something? Anyway i would get bored quickly with winning in the same way over and over consistently and rebuild the decks to do something more interesting.
If my post has no tags, then i posted from my phone.
The combo decks run more interaction because combo kills take fewer card slots, and tend to be the most boring decks for me to build and play. You just take all the extra slots and run the slightly less good interaction/draw/tutor/ramp
The niche decks also tend to be very limited in what cards you can include. The restrictions tend to be so severe that card inclusions are too obvious instead of actual decisions. Decks like titania, protector of argoth are not at all interesting to me because it feels like the deck is already made for me.
And as others have stated with the exception of (maybe)mana rocks most slots of the template you used can be filled//are often filled with synergistic versions of such cards making it less staple more synergistic. Making finding those "the interesting part of the deck[building process]"
I... I apologize but I'm not sure what you are expecting.
Do you not want this game to have a ratio of needed effects that best supports victory? Do you not want there to be a critical mass of generically good cards to shove into any skeleton after 25+ years? Do you not want there to be a large community contributing to forums and sources like EDHRec in a way that defeats the purpose of browsing your binders to find the best cards for yourself?
For that matter, what is it that you really want?
Do you want to make token decks with 40+ token producers that have decent chances of victory at competitive tables? Do you want to routinely search through your collection and find hidden gems that nobody else is talking about? Do you want the average commander to have multiple abilities that could each be potentially build around (Like Teysa Karlov), to create deckbuilding restrictions that cut off most common choices (such as Ruric Thar, The Unbowed), or to be built in ways that actively push these ratios (as a Neheb, the Worthy deck might run less card draw or a token-based deck may run fewer wraths)?
I can get the frustration. I remember brewing decks in Middle School and High School, matching my raw wits and ingenuity (and limited collection) against those of friends. Nowadays, though, getting all of that back doesn't really seam feasible. If they banned every staple overnight, commander would be "solved" (to the extent it can be solved) a month later. If you build your decks "free-hand", that won't remove your pre-existing knowledge of staples and deckbuilding strategies. Having a game with 50+ expansions and 25+ years of history to be consistently balanced to the point where several completely divergent paths to deckbuilding are equally viable without making it obvious (as with Titania, Edgar Markov, etc) would be incredibly unlikely.
Back on point, what do you want to happen now? Moving forward from how things are right now, how do you want things to change in a way that will make you happy? Do you see a way to move things closer to what we see in other formats, where there is notably larger variance in the amount of interaction/card advantage/threats?
You have your broken fast mana that I put in a deck before I even know what general it will be, and goodstuffs cards that are so stupid in their effects that any attempt to synergize with my general cannot hope to outperform what these cards do on their own.
Give me back my deck slots.
If this is such an issue for you, have you talked to the people you play with about it? Chatting on forums is good for generic information but we have zero knowledge of your playgroup.
Comparing competitive cards to deck function is really just a weak topic. I feel like a relatable scenario for this entire thread would be someone playing their modern deck in a legacy tournament and then immediately complaining about an opponent suggesting force of will to them when they're playing logic knot.
If you feel like you're being expected to play more powerful cards, then do or don't. You can choose who and what you play.
Links to my most current deck lists;
Primary EDH; Rakka Mar Token Perfection, Crosis Mnemonic Betrayal, Cromat Villainous, Judith Gravestorm, Rakdos Empty Storm, Exava Artifacts, Bant Trash, & Fumiko Voltron!
EDH kept at home; Ruzzian Isset & Rakdos LoR!
EDH (nostalgic/pimp/retired) in storage;
Latulla Burns, Akroma Smash, Jeska Voltron, Rakdos Storm, Bladewing Darghans, Lyzolda Worldgorger, Xantcha Steals your Heart, Jori Storm, Wydwen Permission, Gwendlyn Paradox, Jeleva Warps, & Sigarda Brick!
Legacy Showanimator and High Tide!
That is over a hundred cards I just listed and that is likely the tip of the iceberg. While some of them aren’t competitive right now, you need to nuke almost everything to get rid of the auto-picks. Even if all of the top rate tutors in black were banned, for example, it would still be better to run Diabolic Tutor rather than running yet another token creator in your Endrik deck.
This is why I don’t get the complaint. You want to get those deck slots “back” but the simple fact is that you likely never had them to begin with. What most likely happened is that you (and/or your gaming group) gained more knowledge of the card game and got better cards. The game didn’t magically change overnight.
Beyond that, the request doesn’t make sense when you get down to it. When I’m crafting Toshiro Umezawa, he wants me to use kill spells. If any of those kill spells are decent, however, I will feel pressured to use them in my Endrek deck to interact and follow the template. If there are enough awesome token makers for Endrek that it’s worth not using that kill spell, however, then Toshiro is pressured to use those token spells. I don’t know what sort of artificial silos you want between commanders but that is fundamentally not how this game works.
I guess that I should ask what type of cards you actually want. It seems that you oppose generic good cards and cards that are so great for the archetype that they are obvious. When building an Orzhov Enchantment Deck, you would be against Land Tax and necropotence (which are generically powerful) along with cards like Enlightened Tutor (which is an auto-include for enchantment decks). That just seems to leave us with middle-ground cards like Extinguish Hope or Three Dreams. If you banned tutor/necro/tax, however, we would be having this exact same conversation about how cards like Extinguish Hopes, by being the best available tier of enchantment support, forces you to include it and robs you of your deck slots.
I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong. Could you give me an example of the sort of synergy cards you wish could be played that would not risk becoming autoincludes if all of the better cards were banned? That just seems like a problem of infinite regression from where I’m standing.
Paying four extra mana for a spell is a huge cost. This statement is not true. Decks are not trying to find room for 4 mana tutors despite, as you claim here, being better than including another redundant spell. It's too slow. This generally would require spending one turn searching for the spell and one turn casting the spell you searched for. That is not strong.
Different decks should want different cards. You want token synergy cards with endrek because you run other token synergy cards. You want kill spell cards in toshiro to synergize with your general. Those synergies should be more rewarding than just running standalone good cards that don't relate to your strategy, otherwise every deck just runs the same cards, which is what is happening to edh now. I can build a deck of any color really
Cards like enlightened tutor aren't just auto include for enchantment decks. They are auto include for all decks that run white. Vampiric tutor, demonic tutor, mystical tutor, there are lots of em.
There is a point where spending extra mana for spells becomes a real choice in tutors, and I'd prefer they were like that. Keeps the variance higher and makes lines of play more diverse game to game.
A card like three dreams is a good example of a card that will almost certainly never be an auto include, but would likely be used by an aura based strategy. Most decks run very few auras to begin with and don't want it, and most decks aren't going want to pay 5 mana to find 3 of them, but there are generals that want auras and would probably be happy to pay 5 mana for 3 of them.
Part of this is a general desire to slow the game down. EDH mana, draw power, and tutors are completely out of control to the point of making alternate strategies irrelevant.
They do to a certain extend and always be what I want to know is where you would draw the line to what that extent should be and what that would accomplish.
And Rosy also raised a point I'd like to add to and that is if you remove the "Autoincludes" other cards will just take their spot leaving you exactly where you started.
Edit:
that sure sounds like an auto include for a given strategy and as I said before even most of the "template" slots are strategy based "autoincludes"