Much of your argument has been that PE is abusable in most decks most of the time - that most decks have enough mana rocks to take advantage of PE. I just went through the 21 decks 'random deck of the week' thread. None had PE. 3-4 of them had enough mana rocks to take advantage of PE should it have been in the list.
1) Hopefully this will explain why I am not going point by point with your response, and I meant his in the most polite possible way -- this statement of yours is evidence that you are either skimming of making serious assumptions that are not in what I posted at all. I have never claimed PE is abusable by "most decks." I'll even quote myself from this very page to hopefully drive that home.
There are many decks. Not most.
The biggest difference is that we don't see the same level of cloning/bribing as we saw with prophet, and of course the reason for that is that PE is a somewhat narrower card. But not narrow enough in my opinion:) Its power level ceiling is much higher but it's not quite busted enough to join dramatic scepter in CEDH only town.
I'm at the point I don't want to make an artifact deck or a mana dork deck anymore because they seem to demand paradox engine almost. It's so absurdly good in those shells it's hard to eschew. Without making your deck much worse anyway.
Point is that if you watch the prevalence, PE is rapidly becoming accepted as the engine of choice for its decks in a very similar (but slower) way than Prophet of Kruphix did.
Decks with a high volume of creatures or artifacts with tap effects are the ones that play Paradox Engine.
If I had PE showing up as often as you do, I would be playing a lot more artifact hate. Cleansing Nova, Vandalblast, Shatterstorm, even more ETB creatures that break artifacts. If everyone has 10+ artifacts these cards will always be good.
Please review the discussion in the Prophet of Kruphix thread on why "play more removal" is not the answer to every problem.
Your statement is a variant of "git gud scrub" combined with "dies to removal." You are welcome to peruse my decks but you'll find I probably play more removal than most people (with an exception for my Gitrog deck which runs just enough and my MW deck which is in the tuning phase).
When I see a Paradox engine the odds I have a piece of removal are quite high. Unfortunately, much like Prophet of Kruphix, removal is often moot against it. You can go read the various Prophet of Kruphix threads for explanations on this if you like.
ANECDOTE ALERT
Vague anecdote about removal;
One time I tried to remove my opponent's paradox engine, he floated mana, pacted my removal, and cast soulscour. Said "Thanks, I needed the mana from the free untap off pact!" It was weird sequencing where I did it in his main phase because I wanted to prevent him from untapping his creatures second main or something? or I had to float extra mana? I can't remember. But I surely do remember the pact getting him to the necessary mana
PE has some similar issues with prophet of kruphix in that respect. if your removal isn't countermagic, the game is often over once they get the first untap trigger (since the first spell they cast gives them mana to defend it - so you had best remove it right then during the narrow window).
It's kinda the reverse though in some ways in that you have to proactively attack their board state to keep them from keeping critical mass of rocks and tap effects -- vs. Prophet you have to stop all the instant speed bullcrap they do after they drop it. So it's easier to attack in some ways, but harder in others.
-----------------------------------
Oh hey, I found another doozy in there I wanted to respond to:
- PE does absolutely nothing by itself. You need to follow-up with a spell to do anything with it. Meaning, it is not a good play if you have 5 mana. You need more mana or you give your opponents a whole turn cycle to deal with it. Next, if you have no mana dorks or mana rocks, PE is not broken. As creatures and artifacts are the two easiest permanents to destroy, I do not believe that, on average, people have enough of these permanents to go off. Finally, you play PE specifically to combo off. It is like High Tide. The percentage of EDH players who want to combo off is relatively low. This is why most of us do not see PE very often.
Now see these quotes from the PoK thread and see why I think there's a lot of alignment here
This is a 5 mana card that produces no mana draws no cards doesn't tutor has no etb litteraly does nothing
Prophet by itself is not a must answer. With a board and a card advantage engine it needs to die the turn it was played. A T2 PoK from Land, Manavault, Land isn't a threat, yet. A T5 PoK with Mystic Remora or Survival out is a different story, the game will end.
Its super powerful.. but its only an enabler. It doesn't do a huge amount alone it requires something else for it to abuse.
If people are sick of reading about stuff just stop taking part. You have 100% control over what you read. Simic Ascendancy isn't going to get banned just because you didn't tell someone to shut up on the internet.
So the next time you feel the urge to say "Prophet was played way more than Paradox Engine!" This is almost certainly incorrect.
Prophet was played more.
I hate EDHrec. It doesn’t paint anywhere near to a complete picture, and often caters to a higher tier of players than the casuals the format is pointed at.
Fact: I’ve played EDH for 10+ years. I’ve built hundred of decks, both in paper and online. I have visited EDHrec exactly 1 time, and have never posted a decklist on there. That point, in and of itself, buries any point you are trying to make by using EDHrec. It’s a valuable tool, but hardly paints a complete picture.
Another fact: I’ve revived my MTGO account to play some jank. My groups haven’t gotten together as much and it helps scratch that itch. I started about the beginning of June again, play about 3-4 games a night, both 1v1 and Multi-player. I have yet to see Paradox engine, even once. So in over 100 matches, this boogeyman, has yet to be played. In a forum that isn’t exactly kind to the social contract.
Originally, I had played MTGO from M11 thru Amonkhet. I saw PrimeTime, Sylvan Primordial, and Prophet of Kruphix all played significantly more than I have ever seen P.E. The same goes for paper.
You are really underselling how much PoK was played, and with literally no data to back it up.
I’ve also reviewed my decks. The deck that would probably make the most use out of P.E is my DragonLord Ojutai. I run Sol Ring, Signet, Mind Stone, Coalition Relic, and Basalt Monolith(with power artifact, to fuel a game ending Stroke of Genius if needed). What’s the reason to run P.E? Untap Ojutai? Make 5 additional mana? I’d have to add a few more expensive($$) rocks, more draw to keep the spells in hand, and all the while tweak the deck as a whole. For what? To make P.E. Do something stupid?
What I am curious about, though, is what the rock/dork density is in those decks that have P.E. That would be actual relevant information. What does it take for X cards to make P.E work degenerately? Is it 10 rocks/dorks? 10% of your deck, after ~40% of your deck is dedicated to mana-sources that don’t work with P.E? How much draw power is there? Is it confined to a specific color combination? Does it appear more in Blue decks than Green, etc.?
1. Prophet was played less!! See, how we're equally right. There's some data, EDHRec is mostly all we have. I don't claim to say it's the gospel but it's probably more representative than you think, at least in my experience. Stuff like, Mana crypt being in 1 in 11 decks - that feels fairly close to me. Lots of the randoms I run into have at least one mana crypt.
Maybe worst case I think I saw Prophet as much as twice as often as I see Paradox engine now. But some of that may be bias because prophet made for much more tedious games of magic and was cloned and such more as well.
2. I can't really discuss MTGO's metagame intelligently. But if I had to make a guess I would say that the combos with PE have to be quite tedious to click through right? I think I would die if I had to activate staff of domination 70 times on MTGO.
3. I'm underselling how much PoK was played? I mean, all I can do is guestimate based on limited data. But I know in my personal groups most of us had one PoK deck but no one really had more than one for the most part. We saw it a lot, but a lot of that was related to the meta at the time; the game has changed a LOT since then in terms of enabling spell and artifact strategies.
I don't even know that paradox engine would have seen much play had it been printed in 2014, because we've seen I would guess a tripling of the pool of generals who can leverage it well. There are probably a dozen generals that are two card combos with PE that have been printed since then.
4. I think most decks need 15 combined rocks/dorks/tap effects to want to play PE. This makes for a subset of decks that I suspect are between 5 and 10% of the metagame just guessing. It includes every general who will combo with PE though too, and here's a list:
If those, I would say about a third are green and the rest are blue for the most part, and not all of them PE is an autoinclude.
There are mainly two (three with urza and selvala 2 :P) categories of PE decks I see:
1) Paradox engine makes your general make insane mana - cards like Rishkar, Selvala 1, Kudele, etc.
2) Paradox engine turns your general into a functional infinite draw engine - cards like azami, arcanis, muzzio, thrasios, nin
3) Paradox engine does both (Urza, Selvala 2, Thrasios + kydele)
I think each one of those types of decks probably wants to play a different ramp profile. Decks where your general is card advantage can afford to just play crazy tons of mana. Decks where your general makes crazy amounts of mana require less.
The interesting thing about the "all I play is mana" approach is that you can really just keep chaining all the rocks in your deck since every time you cast a rock you draw cards.
A lot of people not seeing Paradox Engine seems pretty easy to point to : Its price.
Now it could also be that people get/got tired of it, and its use in '75% metas' trickled down.
I certainly am not saying its in every deck, or that it ruins every game night I get to. Its just been enough I think it hits the marks.
PE being a 40 dollar card from a 2 year old set purely on the basis of EDH demand is pretty telling. There's no way it's just CEDH driving this.
The closest analogue we have is probably Expropriate - though it not being a standard set is confounding.
When a recent set mythic is 40 bucks and only played in EDH you can bet damned good money that it is seeing a ton of play in semi-competitive (75%) decks. Can anyone think of a CEDH staple analogue?
This was challenging. Prophet is not a traditionally obvious problem card for Commander, so we chose to take a conservative approach and see if casual groups could adapt. In the past, we've seen unpopular cards generate a lot of outcry, but be handled reasonably well. Powerful cards existing is OK and exploring them responsibly is an essential part of Commander.
This didn't happen with Prophet. Casual groups haven't been able to work around it and problematic play has not dropped off in hoped-for ways. Instead, the primary approach has been to steal it, clone it, run it yourself, or get run over. Ultimately, it seems the card is too perfect - it does everything U/G Commander players want to be doing and it does it in a way that makes counterplay difficult. With traditional boogeymen such as Consecrated Sphinx, you're forced to expend a lot of your mana to cast it and will have a challenge protecting it as the turn goes around the table. With Prophet, it has virtual protection built in, negating that disadvantage almost immediately.
Prophet becomes only the second multicolored card on the banlist (after the structurally-problematic Coalition Victory). It's telling just how pervasive Prophet is despite such a restriction. Yes, U/G is the most popular color combination in Commander, but we've reached the point where Prophet is driving U/G deck choice, rather than vice-versa. That's centralizing in ways we can't ignore, so it's time for Prophet to take a break.
Whenever we decide to ban a card, we take a long look at the current list to see if any cards can come off, as we believe a casual format is better served by a minimalist banlist. After extensive discussion, however, we concluded that everything on the list served a purpose, so we won't be unbanning anything. It's been two years since the last (non-consolidation) card got banned, which is an acceptable growth rate!
Ok, so instead of quoting irrelevant points, let’s bring relevant information to this discussion. From the gospel!
And this is the most telling bit.
Yes, U/G is the most popular color combination in Commander, but we've reached the point where Prophet is driving U/G deck choice, rather than vice-versa. That's centralizing in ways we can't ignore, so it's time for Prophet to take a break.
So, no, we are not “equally right”. Prophet of Kruphix was driving people to U/G, that’s how good/centralizing it is. That’s why it was banned. Paradox Engine is nowhere close to that level. It’s not driving deck choices. It’s not creating sub-games within the game. It doesn’t create value just by existing. You are literally building a deck around it. All of those commanders you listed do busted things without P.E, it would be pretty damn ignorant to say otherwise.
You’re also one pretty hypocritical individual. You claim Dunhareow skims your novels, yet you only cherry pick points out of others reply’s. You’ve also resorted to being a bit smug, but whatever.
And why the hell do you keep bringing up CEDH? What relevance does that have here?
Actually, let’s go one step further.
-15 rocks/dorks. Or, 15% of your deck. 50% of your deck is mana sources. Yeah, that definitely sounds like the majority of decks.
-in my Ojutai deck, I listed 5 rocks. So I’d need to cut 11 cards to fit in a card+enablers. I never had to do that with PoK. 1 for 1 exchange always did the trick.
-Of the rocks almost required to make P.E worthwhile are freaking eternal format staples, and easily dwarf the price of the enabler. So, take a seat on that price tag comment.
[quote from="Dunharrow »" url="/forums/the-game/commander-edh/commander-rules-discussion-forum/771098-paradox-engine?comment=257"]
If I had PE showing up as often as you do, I would be playing a lot more artifact hate. Cleansing Nova, Vandalblast, Shatterstorm, even more ETB creatures that break artifacts. If everyone has 10+ artifacts these cards will always be good.
Please review the discussion in the Prophet of Kruphix thread on why "play more removal" is not the answer to every problem.
Your statement is a variant of "git gud scrub" combined with "dies to removal." You are welcome to peruse my decks but you'll find I probably play more removal than most people (with an exception for my Gitrog deck which runs just enough and my MW deck which is in the tuning phase).
When I see a Paradox engine the odds I have a piece of removal are quite high. Unfortunately, much like Prophet of Kruphix, removal is often moot against it. You can go read the various Prophet of Kruphix threads for explanations on this if you like.
You misunderstand me. Artifact hate kills the artifacts you need to have in play to go off with Paradox Engine. A turn 4 shatterstorm means that PE is unlikely to do anything should anyone play it. You also have the added benefit of disrupting people's mana.
Oh hey, I found another doozy in there I wanted to respond to:
- PE does absolutely nothing by itself. You need to follow-up with a spell to do anything with it. Meaning, it is not a good play if you have 5 mana. You need more mana or you give your opponents a whole turn cycle to deal with it. Next, if you have no mana dorks or mana rocks, PE is not broken. As creatures and artifacts are the two easiest permanents to destroy, I do not believe that, on average, people have enough of these permanents to go off. Finally, you play PE specifically to combo off. It is like High Tide. The percentage of EDH players who want to combo off is relatively low. This is why most of us do not see PE very often.
Now see these quotes from the PoK thread and see why I think there's a lot of alignment here
This is a 5 mana card that produces no mana draws no cards doesn't tutor has no etb litteraly does nothing
Prophet by itself is not a must answer. With a board and a card advantage engine it needs to die the turn it was played. A T2 PoK from Land, Manavault, Land isn't a threat, yet. A T5 PoK with Mystic Remora or Survival out is a different story, the game will end.
Its super powerful.. but its only an enabler. It doesn't do a huge amount alone it requires something else for it to abuse.
Vehemently disagree with this poster about PoK. You always had a creature to cast. All you needed for PoK to be good was cards in hand and a commander in the command zone. The main difference is also that turn 5 PoK on an empty board is a threat that needs to be answered that same turn, and PE is a turn 5 do nothing on an empty board that you can answer any time.
Sylvan primordial was banned because by itself it was too much value. Protean Hulk was unbanned. Which card is more powerful?
If you can understand why SP was banned but PH was unbanned, you will understand why PE is not in contention for banning.
'Too good in a very specific deck' is not grounds for banning. It never has and never will be.
It should be noted that any data for or against what you believe in a thread like this taken from a website is taken from a self selected smaller much more into the game group of people who decide they want to put their list of cards online and think about the game beyond when the game ends or when the store is left.
There is a huge bias in that data or any data of the sort.
(1) You’re also one pretty hypocritical individual. You claim Dunhareow skims your novels, yet you only cherry pick points out of others reply’s. You’ve also resorted to being a bit smug, but whatever.
(2) And why the hell do you keep bringing up CEDH? What relevance does that have here?
(3) Actually, let’s go one step further.
-15 rocks/dorks. Or, 15% of your deck. 50% of your deck is mana sources. Yeah, that definitely sounds like the majority of decks.
-in my Ojutai deck, I listed 5 rocks. So I’d need to cut 11 cards to fit in a card+enablers. I never had to do that with PoK. 1 for 1 exchange always did the trick.
-Of the rocks almost required to make P.E worthwhile are freaking eternal format staples, and easily dwarf the price of the enabler. So, take a seat on that price tag comment.
1) I respond to the points I want to respond to. This is different than responding to straw men arguments I have not made. If you want to grab a couple lines from my post and ask me to clarify by all means.
2) CEDH is relevant because there is an argument in play that has been regularly been made that Paradox Engine is only played in CEDH. And also because we know from past banning history that the rules committee largely does not care if a card is broken in CEDH. Ergo discussing the degree to which a card gravitates toward CEDH is relevant.
3) 15 rocks and 30-35 lands is at most 50% of your deck. EDH standard is to play in the vicinity of 45-50 mana sources. If you look at any given deck it'll be 45 +/- 10 for the most part. your Ojutai deck does not seem to be very good with Paradox engine. Cool? I never claimed it was good in every deck, so I don't know where that is coming from.
It's good in lots of decks. Lots of decks play 15 or so mana accelerants total.
From reading hundreds of lists the normal number seems to be about 10, but as a deck skews more toward competitive it gets closer and closer to 12-15.
Edit: something to remember there is that card draw, cantrips and tutors factor in as well, and of course the commanders that make a butt ton of mana.
Quote from Dunharrow »
(1) You misunderstand me. Artifact hate kills the artifacts you need to have in play to go off with Paradox Engine. A turn 4 shatterstorm means that PE is unlikely to do anything should anyone play it. You also have the added benefit of disrupting people's mana.
(2) Sylvan primordial was banned because by itself it was too much value. Protean Hulk was unbanned. Which card is more powerful?
1) no, I understand you. Playing removal to solve a problem is the same whether it's denying resources or killing the engine. If your answer to a card that potentially creates too much advantage is "play more removal" then I think there's a problem with your framing o the question. The question is not "can it be answered?" but "does it create too much of an advantage?" Dying to removal or being kept in check by removal is not a thing the banlist is really about, if it was Prophet would still be around as it is even more vulnerable to hate than paradox engine.
2) SP vs. Hulk is a very complex discussion. My opinion is that the banlist is primarily used to address how much disruption a card causes to medium to high power level games. If you'll pardon some oversimplification and rough analyis--
Hulk is say, a 9/10 in power in competitive, a 6/10 in 75% metas, and a 4-5/10 in 50% metas
Sylvan Primordial is a 0/10 in competitive, a 9/10 in 75% and an 8/10 in 50% metas
So you hit on something I've been talking about with the CEDH stuff, which is that a card's impact has to be assessed in the major realms of EDH but primarily in 50 and 75%.
And what we're arguing about here is largely what category Paradox Engine lives in.
I would rank Paradox Engine as a 7/10 in competitive, an 8/10 in 75%, and a 2/10 in 50%, maybe even as low as a 0.
Prophet I would say was a 0/10 in competitive, 9/10 in 75%, and 6/10 in 50%. Maybe higher in 50%.
Where I think Paradox Engine is a huge problem is in more tuned, but non-CEDH metas, where people have access to high power level cards but tend to have a little bit of restraint. And it continues to get worse and worse the longer it's unbanned because of its overlap with the hyper competitive metas.
Its very nature is to blur the lines and cause people to start playing Winter Orb because it's good with engine, not because they necessarily want to make a hardcore stax deck.
And boy do I hate that. I've had more casuals drop Static orb on me since paradox engine was printed than in the last 5 years of EDH.
It's good in lots of decks. Lots of decks play 15 or so mana accelerants total.
And when has this ever been a criteria for banning?
From reading hundreds of lists the normal number seems to be about 10, but as a deck skews more toward competitive it gets closer and closer to 12-15.
10 is nowhere near enough. Point me to a list, and I’ll point you to your beloved EDHrec, which breaks down deck contents. 15-17 is about normal. Most lists on this site have well over 10.
I respond to the points I want to respond to. This is different than responding to straw men arguments I have not made. If you want to grab a couple lines from my post and ask me to clarify by all means.
You keep using this term, but I don’t think you know what it means, or are just using it incorrectly. You have constantly, throughout this thread, hyped P.E as a driving force for deck construction. Comments like “It’s good in lots of decks” basically means it’s good in, well, lots of decks. That’s not true, though. It’s good in a handful of decks. Decks you’ve built around P.E. You yourself are creating strawman arguments. Again, being hypocritical.
CEDH is relevant...
No, it is not. Stop bringing it up. They are completely different formats all together. They share about as much in common as Pauper and Legacy do.
As far as relevant replies go, no commentary on the meat of my reply? You know, the part that comes from the RC?
Listen man, you're being a bit too aggro for me to want to continue to engage with you. I feel like we've had this chat before. I have plenty of things to say to your stuff, but I'll do you the courtesy of not taking parting shots.
Alright, cool. No commentary on the most relevant bit of information there is. Got it.
Missed this Ninja Edit
Edit: something to remember there is that card draw, cantrips and tutors factor in as well, and of course the commanders that make a butt ton of mana.
How, exactly, does this help your case? You are adding more pieces to make P.E better. So ~60-65% of your deck is there just to profit off of P.E.? Again, you played Prophet of Kruphix and that was it. You didn’t have to build around it.
2) CEDH is relevant because there is an argument in play that has been regularly been made that Paradox Engine is only played in CEDH. And also because we know from past banning history that the rules committee largely does not care if a card is broken in CEDH. Ergo discussing the degree to which a card gravitates toward CEDH is relevant.
I think your phrasing for this is very confusing. I believe you are saying that PE turns 75% decks into near-cEDH decks, and pushes casual deckbuilders towards more competitive builds. I am not sure I agree, but before I get into that I want to see if I understand you.
1) no, I understand you. Playing removal to solve a problem is the same whether it's denying resources or killing the engine. If your answer to a card that potentially creates too much advantage is "play more removal" then I think there's a problem with your framing o the question. The question is not "can it be answered?" but "does it create too much of an advantage?" Dying to removal or being kept in check by removal is not a thing the banlist is really about, if it was Prophet would still be around as it is even more vulnerable to hate than paradox engine.
. PoK could be played on an empty board and fill the board by the person's next turn. PE does not do this. This is not to say that PE is fair because you can destroy its enablers. It is to say that PE is harder to abuse than PoK. This is important because your argument is that PE is the problem when we are saying that cEDH deckbuilders are going to build cEDH decks regardless of what is banned or unbanned. You can try to build casually with PE, but it will not work a lot of the time as your enablers will die from collateral damage. PoK didn't need enablers.
2) SP vs. Hulk is a very complex discussion. My opinion is that the banlist is primarily used to address how much disruption a card causes to medium to high power level games. If you'll pardon some oversimplification and rough analyis--
Hulk is say, a 9/10 in power in competitive, a 6/10 in 75% metas, and a 4-5/10 in 50% metas
Sylvan Primordial is a 0/10 in competitive, a 9/10 in 75% and an 8/10 in 50% metas
So you hit on something I've been talking about with the CEDH stuff, which is that a card's impact has to be assessed in the major realms of EDH but primarily in 50 and 75%.
And what we're arguing about here is largely what category Paradox Engine lives in.
I would rank Paradox Engine as a 7/10 in competitive, an 8/10 in 75%, and a 2/10 in 50%, maybe even as low as a 0.
Prophet I would say was a 0/10 in competitive, 9/10 in 75%, and 6/10 in 50%. Maybe higher in 50%.
Where I think Paradox Engine is a huge problem is in more tuned, but non-CEDH metas, where people have access to high power level cards but tend to have a little bit of restraint. And it continues to get worse and worse the longer it's unbanned because of its overlap with the hyper competitive metas.
Its very nature is to blur the lines and cause people to start playing Winter Orb because it's good with engine, not because they necessarily want to make a hardcore stax deck.
And boy do I hate that. I've had more casuals drop Static orb on me since paradox engine was printed than in the last 5 years of EDH.
Let's just ignore your estimates for playability in cEDH, because it is irrelevant as you are saying bannings are done based on 50-75% decks.
You are saying that PE is an 8/10 in 75% decks. I think we disagree about what 75% decks are. I think there has been power creep in your meta, because 75% decks do not play: Mana vault, mana crypt, grim monolith, mox diamond... People who are playing with these expensive/hard to obtain cards are not 75% deckbuilders in my opinion.
Also, a rating like this is misleading. PE is a 0/10 in most 75% decks. It is a 10/10 in a few.
But you know what? Eater of the Dead is a 10/10 in Phenax.
So the argument should not be that PE is situationally very powerful. It should be that PE is overly present in 50-75% metas. And this is what I disagree with. If one in 20 EDH decks runs PE, I am not calling it overtly present in the meta. I understand that those 1/20 decks are making it unfun, but that is the same to me as so many other unfun cards.
Sylvan Primordial was banned because it was unfun by itself. PoK was banned because it was unfun by itself. PE has to be unfun by itself. To be able to claim this, you have to be able to show that on average, decks can abuse PE. But this is not the case. Only a small subset of decks run enough rocks to abuse PE. Of those decks, how many actually have a reliable way to chain spells?
The problem is not PE, it is people who are building with PE. They are building combo decks that durdle and it isn't fun. It was not fun 7 years ago when I first faced Mishra eggs, and it is not fun now.
While I don't agree with Paradox Engine needing to be banned (or the other two cards needing to be banned) PoK was not banned because it was "unfun by itself".
PoK and PE are very similar cards in a lot of ways it is why the comparisons kind of work. There are games I have played against both of these cards and they have floundered and done little because they are both engines surrounded by bigger things.
The ease of accessing the power of those engines is what is being discussed here.
(also framing the differences between cEDH and not as purely a function of budget removes a lot of the history of MTG cards, it is how people build and play and not what they build and play that determines the style of deck)
I think we probably have a definition problem about what a 75% deck is. I think you can play all kinds of crazy stuff and still have your deck be a 75% deck. You're going hard, you're playing powerful cards. You're constrained by gameplan not by budget.
Playing expensive mana rocks does not intrinsically make a deck competitive, nor does playing expensive cards like Survival of the fittest.
The fundamental things about competitive decks for me are
1) Trying their hardest to maximize their win rate
2) constructed with the appropriate critical turn in mind (this is probably 2 or 3 in CEDH - if you are not interacting or winning by turn 3 you're doing something wrong, right?)
3) Strong gameplan
4) No budget constraints
You can make a deck that is non-competitive but that is not constrained by budget. Both my Ephara and my Gitrog&& decks are excellent examples; I have tons of dumb cards, but I'm usually doing a few things differently than CEDH:
* Not curving as aggressively as needed for CEDH
* Not playing a CEDH ready gameplan
Fundamentally I like playing a really firm foundation of mana from which to build my tower of nonsense so I invest heavily in manabases and efficient enablers.
In the end I think if we don't agree on what a mid-powered deck is that's probably the heart of our disagreement. At my shop people play all kinds of crazy cards, but also weaker cards, weaker gameplans, and weaker generals. I saw a dude with a Mana Crypt in his Windgrace Tokens deck the other day. Doubling season so he could double his worm havrest tokens.
I lost to a guy who was playing Paradox Engine in his Urza Voltron deck with some CEDH powerhouse cards as Grappling Hook.
&& I'll cede that the Gitrog deck is going a little harder than typical (85%, say) but it doesn't combo and the gameplan of "cast a bunch of eldrazi" is fairly slow.
And back to the point at hand. I see all kinds of bad decks playing paradox engine in a way that accidentally wins sometimes. But sometimes these bad decks have mana crypt and mox diamond. But maybe their general sucks and they don't play any tutors. Or maybe their endgame is to flood the board with creatures with crazy PE mana and pass the turn.
I think PE is the natural focal point for too many deck styles.
While I don't agree with Paradox Engine needing to be banned (or the other two cards needing to be banned) PoK was not banned because it was "unfun by itself".
This isn’t necessarily true, either. I provided the RC’s explanation on why it needed to be banned, and the explanation that it was Ultimately, it seems the card is too perfect - it does everything U/G Commander players want to be doing and it does it in a way that makes counterplay difficult. reads, to me, that PoK was unfun by itself. And it really was. PoK could hit an empty board, and then BAM, you’ve amassed an army or triggered 10+ etbs before it even was your turn again.
You weren’t playing bad cards to make it good. You didn’t need to combine it’s effect with anything. It was just stupid value as long as you untapped. Which, in PoK case, was the very next upkeep and not just your next upkeep. That’s where the difference between the 2 becomes significant. I mean, sure, you can generate more value immediately with P.E, but at that point we aren’t talking about 5 drop, it’s a 5-drop and...
Just want to point out the cEDH is always relevant to discussions involving problematic casual omnipresence, because if the card is wildly popular in cEDH then things like EDHRec numbers are less reliable for judging it's casual omnipresence. EDHRec trends more competitive than the overall meta game, so if a card that doesn't see much competitive play is in the top 20, that's a good sign that it really is pretty omnipresent, buy if a card sees a ton of competitive play then the amount of casual play it sees is likely less than it's ranking would indicate at first blush. If the 20th most played artifact turns out to only have 25% of the lists it's included in be non cEDH, then it's not omnipresent and is mostly a cEDH card, and thus it's "score" on problematic casual omnipresence goes down. It might be really popular, but not at the tables that matter for banning. It is precisely because cEDH is irrelevant for banning purposes that it is relevant to discussing casual omnipresence, because it is necessary to ascertain how much of a cards prevelance is made up of cEDH so that you can disregard it and focus only on its prevelance in casual decks. It's about sifting out the noise.
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The Meaning of Life: "M-hmm. Well, it's nothing very special. Uh, try and be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in, and try and live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations"
Onering's 4 simple steps that let you solve any problem with Magic's gameplay
Whether its blue players countering your spells, red players burning you out, or combo, if you have a problem with an aspect of Magic's gameplay, you can fix it!
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Just want to point out the cEDH is always relevant to discussions involving problematic casual omnipresence, because if the card is wildly popular in cEDH then things like EDHRec numbers are less reliable for judging it's casual omnipresence. EDHRec trends more competitive than the overall meta game, so if a card that doesn't see much competitive play is in the top 20, that's a good sign that it really is pretty omnipresent, buy if a card sees a ton of competitive play then the amount of casual play it sees is likely less than it's ranking would indicate at first blush. If the 20th most played artifact turns out to only have 25% of the lists it's included in be non cEDH, then it's not omnipresent and is mostly a cEDH card, and thus it's "score" on problematic casual omnipresence goes down. It might be really popular, but not at the tables that matter for banning. It is precisely because cEDH is irrelevant for banning purposes that it is relevant to discussing casual omnipresence, because it is necessary to ascertain how much of a cards prevelance is made up of cEDH so that you can disregard it and focus only on its prevelance in casual decks. It's about sifting out the noise.
Thanks. This explains my point well. Understanding where PE sees play is critical to understanding whether it is a problem or not. I honestly am not sure but the engine decks I have played against and reviewed skew to the "going hard" side of 75% but are overwhelmingly not cedh decks.
I think it's worth everyone's time to review some of the edhrec decks that actually have engines. I'll try to pull a few samples if I have time tomorrow.
The ultimate disposition of PE really depends on problematic casual omnipresence more than anything. We know it is strong enough to be banned--there are weaker cards on the list. But we don't really know how much it's seeing play, how bad it makes games, and what metas it's played in most.
Edit: this is also closely tied with the connection to very competitively weak banned cards like prophet and sylvan primordial.
This explanation needs to fleshed out a bit more, because if anything, it just straddles the fence even more.
On EDHrec, the card exists in 6% of decks. One user claims that’s insane. EDHrec is skewed more towards competitive deck builders, but that same user says this proves his point that it’s casually omnipresent. I fail to see how we’ve arrived at the conclusion based on the analysis provided.
Beyond that, you have the RC mantra is “Build casually, play competitively” which flies in the face of any of the data that has been provided up until this point.
To me, this means that slotting PoK into an existing deck isn’t a move to improve my level of “compete”. It’s cutting an underachieving card for one that has value all on it’s own. It’s a smart decision to make, no?
On the flip side, having to make sure I’m hitting a threshold of Rocks/Dorks/draw just to make P.E not feel wasted, is in fact a move to improve my compete level because, under those circumstances, the cards busted. Otherwise, it underachieves, no? So that’s building competitively.
So, we sit here with this take away-
-EDHrec is a valuable tool, until it isn’t, because it really isn’t the target audience.
-We care about CEDH, until we don’t, because we actually don’t care about it.
That is baffling as all hell, and how anybody can create any rational argument based off of that is beyond me.
Half this s*** in the recent pages of this thread is mostly made up. Ask 5 people what a 75% deck is and you’ll get 5 different answers.
And nobody has still addressed the point I made above about the official ban announcement for PoK and how it pertains to P.E. But we probably don’t care about that anymore, either.
The supposition that EDHREC trends more competitive than overall EDH requires a lot more substantiation I think. it is *riddled* with budget decks. Like half the decks on there are <$500 that I see.
Here's a selection of decks I picked out of a hat from EDHREC. My methodology was to pick the most expensive deck on the first page of decklists that has a paradox engine.
This deck doesn't have a mana cyrpt or a grim monolith or even a chrome mox, no mox diamond. It has nonsense tapped land jank, bad cards, etc. But it still has a paradox engine and only a few mana rocks but lots of tap effects. It appears set up to use PE to combo with Isochron Scepter or something.
This is the most tuned deck we've seen so far, but it still runs all kinds of jank like Brudiclad and Vedalken Archmage and comet storm and Jaya's Immolating Inferno, and Elixir of Immortality, and Storm the Vault.
This deck is going to win on turn 3 a lot, it's very powerful, but it's not near CEDH Jhoira. It's got way too many lands and is way too light on interaction and has a lot of cute stuff. It's the tuned side of 75% at best.
I can't tell enough about this to tell if it's competitive or not. It feels fairly tuned I guess, but it's missing a lot of stuff I would expect to see in a competitive build. Stuff like instill energy and hall of the bandit lord.
It plays a few pieces of jank but it's relatively tuned.
If anyone has any requests, pick your favorite commander on the Paradox Engine top commanders page and I will look at all their decklists and analyze the ones that have PE.
Of these decks the majority are under $1000, (134/246 decks) and 53/246 are budget decks at <500.
It looks to me like most of the first 100 decks or so are fairly tuned, just from looking at a number of them. There's varying degrees of stax and such though,
And there's a lot of random jank in there even in the $2500 decks
Now, Urza is a pretty bad example because he's both 1) a combo with PE, and 2) likely to be skewed competitive, and 3) not a very large sample size at 250 decks.
High level stats
* of 246 decks, probably ~80-100 are what I would consider competitive or close enough to CEDH to not be playable in casual circles.
* Of 246 decks, 50 are seriously budget (and often still have PEs)
TL;DR on the budget issue: If Urza were the only general I would look at I would consider the thesis that EDHrec skews competitive to be probably correct. I'll look at another general or two later and see.
I decided to look at a cheaper general that doesn't synergize quite as much with Paradox engine, but still plays it as a high rate. Rishkar, Peema Renegade has 200 decks on EDHREC and 64% of them run Paradox Engine.
Of the 204 decks, not a single one is CEDH or even close. the most expensive deck is 1400 bucks and does not even close to CEDH. Most decks are budget, even the cheap ones run PE at a high rate.
This is reasonably strong but packs almost no interaction and is basically trying to just do its thing. It'll do its thing fast but not particularly consistently since it has no real way to find its various pieces except by Glimpsing off or casting a big draw spell.
My concern with this is that it doesn't really prove anything except that Rishkar is usually built as a medium powered or lower deck because he sucks.
My overall thinking however is this:
EDHREC probably does not skew competitive overall because it seems to follow the pattern that very powerful generals skew competitive and weaker generals seem to skew casual/budget. Many generals that are rather strong but also happen to be good budget commanders seem to skew budget.
EDHrec also has a way higher percentage of budget decks than I see on a regular basis. I basically never see decks that are under 500 bucks these days. But EDHRec is littered with 30 dollar decks.
Edit:
There is another possible thesis I see in there after noodling on it, and it's this:
Paradox engine is primarily played by competitive decks, and very little in casual decks, so the 6% figure is probably inflated; if you corrected for competitive decks (which we have established don't matter) with Paradox Engine the prevalence would be much lower.
I think this could be proved by analyzing a group of comparable cards and the types of decks that play them:
These are all powerful cards played about the same amount, but Panharmonicon *probably* skews casual, and the others probably lean competitive. It would probably take a lot of doing but it's likely you could determine if Paradox Engine and also Aetherflux Reservoir are "safe" because they have a very low prevalence rate outside of competitive decks.
I'm not sure what the best methodology would be to approach that, but I think it could be done - though EDHRec does not appear to expose the data you would need (e.g. list of decks that play Panharmonicon is not a thing you can find, at least I can't).
There is another level to that though isn't there.
A commander whose whole job is to make other creatures into mana dorks has more investment than most to play the Engine.
Regardless of what or how powerful the outcomes with it are.
I bet the Reservoir likewise is good in all kinds of decks that gain life because unlike the traditional lifegain wincons you don't have to wait a turn around with it.
There is another level to that though isn't there.
A commander whose whole job is to make other creatures into mana dorks has more investment than most to play the Engine.
Regardless of what or how powerful the outcomes with it are.
I bet the Reservoir likewise is good in all kinds of decks that gain life because unlike the traditional lifegain wincons you don't have to wait a turn around with it.
There's tons of levels in everything here. It's why just looking at individual commanders is probably fruitless for making actual statements sadly. Every commander has confounding variables that would skew its results - Urza plays more paradox engine because it's a straight combo with him, Rishkar is less competitive because he's weak, blah blah etc etc. It adds up to EDHrec not really providing quite enough information I don't think, without lots of deeper analysis of the data.
That said, if we knew the answer to this question:
What percentage of decks that play X are competitive decks?
It would really facilitate discussion on any card that's only real reason to be discussed for banning is problematic casual omnipresence, since it would give a good data point for "casual omnipresence" part of problematic casual omnipresence.
From the EDHRec data set, the easiest way to do that would be to use Cost as a shorthand for competitiveness - which it probably is at least for the most part. So say, what percentage of Decks that play paradox Engine are >2000, for example, might be a useful data point. in my survey of Urza for example, 2k was about the break point where decks started having too much jank to be competitive.
Unfortunately, I am not sure how we would get at that data from EDhrec. Anyone know anything about that?
Apparently EDHRec did some kinda saltiness poll and Paradox Engine is in the top 20, above such cards as Humility, Sunder, and Hokori, Dust Drinker
Edit, followup: EDHRec apparently does not have an API we can browse, so the data they expose is the data they show in the UI. maybe I will contact them.
You should be able to filter by cards, ie shove in Mana Cryp and Mox Diamond in addition to the legendary and you should get more results in line with actual cEDH.
You should be able to filter by cards, ie shove in Mana Cryp and Mox Diamond in addition to the legendary and you should get more results in line with actual cEDH.
This is a fairly useful tool. unfortunately has to start with a commander, but you can do some neat stuff with the advanced filters.
That's some really interesting stuff. Pretty strong suggestion that of the more likely to be paradox engine focused and also fairly competitive generals:
~25% of the decks are probably competitive
~25% play paradox engine but are not competitive
That's all requiring a lot of assumptions but I don't think there are that many competitive Sisay decks without crypts, no matter how strong they are, and same with Seton without Cradle. Might be strong but not CEDH.
And obviously having a mana crypt isn't the sole determiner of competitiveness, and a deck could be pretty egregiously powerful without having a crypt - but it's a pretty decent yardstick for how serious someone is about competing.
More than likely having a crypt is a reasonable proxy for competitiveness because the variance should cancel itself out -- that is, there will be decks that are competitive without crypts and then there'll also be non-competitive decks with crypts, but on the balance most decks that have crypts will be competitive wakka wakka.
You should be able to filter by cards, ie shove in Mana Cryp and Mox Diamond in addition to the legendary and you should get more results in line with actual cEDH.
This is a fairly useful tool. unfortunately has to start with a commander, but you can do some neat stuff with the advanced filters.
That's some really interesting stuff. Pretty strong suggestion that of the more likely to be paradox engine focused and also fairly competitive generals:
~25% of the decks are probably competitive
~25% play paradox engine but are not competitive
That's all requiring a lot of assumptions but I don't think there are that many competitive Sisay decks without crypts, no matter how strong they are, and same with Seton without Cradle. Might be strong but not CEDH.
And obviously having a mana crypt isn't the sole determiner of competitiveness, and a deck could be pretty egregiously powerful without having a crypt - but it's a pretty decent yardstick for how serious someone is about competing.
More than likely having a crypt is a reasonable proxy for competitiveness because the variance should cancel itself out -- that is, there will be decks that are competitive without crypts and then there'll also be non-competitive decks with crypts, but on the balance most decks that have crypts will be competitive wakka wakka.
This is actually very informative information. I am not sure if Gaea's Cradle is a good measure because of the cost, but I think Mana crypt is a good measure in any deck that can reasonably play it. Obviously, not perfect, but close to half the decks playing PE are playing other competitive pieces from this list.
I am going to go grab data for Thrasios and Tymna, which I have seen the most as a cEDH deck. Of decks that have PE, 70% also run Mana Crypt. But only 29% of T&T decks on EDH Rec play PE, and 61% play Mana Crypt. Meanwhile, in decks not playing Mana Crypt, 21% run PE.
Takeaway?
I don't know.
Mana crypt is in 61% of T&T decks, makes EDHRec seem very competitive.
However, Mana crypt is only in 9% of the EDHrec decks posted online.
I took a look at Selvala, Explorer returned, Teferi, Temporal Archmage... PE decks are generally playing more of the more dedicated combo cards in these decks.
All this is telling me is that there is bias depending on which general we are looking at.
I don't know what to think of this right now. The stats do not seem to support any one argument.
I'm glad to see you're seeing exactly what I'm seeing at least.
I'm seeing a few patterns that I think are worth thinking about--
* The more competitive the general the more competitive the decks tend to be (this seems obvious, but it's useful for thinking about EDHrec data -- it certainly does not skew competitive across the board).
* A high percentage of the decks that play paradox engine are stronger generals, or mono brown (karn, kozilek)
(Of the top 18 generals that play Paradox engine, I would say that at least 8 of those are heavily used In CEDH - several pairs of partners, Urza, Arcum, Sisay, jhoira, and Azami)
* Paradox Engine appears to be used most heavily in decks that are fairly competitive; I could not find very many really poor decks that had it, outside of Urza. Mostly 75% and up.
* Paradox engine does have a large footprint overall in non-competitive decks; at least half of the decks that play it are non-competitive from the survey I did.
Few more thoughts--
A kind of a summary thought there, I think it is very probable that for generals that are likely to play paradox engine, its prevalence will be exaggerated. For example if you look at say, Azami, an say "55% of azami decks play paradox engine." That's a huge number, but....it's very possible that Azami decks are just going to be competitive because she's pretty darned strong.
So from a "problematic casual omnipresence" deck we probably care more about the non-competitive Azami decks, and say you pull the 25% that run Crypt, and it doesn't really look quite so bad -- maybe more like 25% of non-competitive Azami decks are running Paradox engine, and given its obvious synergy with her that's not quite so bad.
Anyway my ultimate takeaway form the EDHRec data is that it's pretty darned interesting and probably more representative for some generals than others. But also that we probably have to be careful from drawing too many deep conclusions. Unfortunately it's our only real dataset other than anecdotes.
1) Hopefully this will explain why I am not going point by point with your response, and I meant his in the most polite possible way -- this statement of yours is evidence that you are either skimming of making serious assumptions that are not in what I posted at all. I have never claimed PE is abusable by "most decks." I'll even quote myself from this very page to hopefully drive that home.
There are many decks. Not most.
2) Second point, you said:
Please review the discussion in the Prophet of Kruphix thread on why "play more removal" is not the answer to every problem.
Your statement is a variant of "git gud scrub" combined with "dies to removal." You are welcome to peruse my decks but you'll find I probably play more removal than most people (with an exception for my Gitrog deck which runs just enough and my MW deck which is in the tuning phase).
When I see a Paradox engine the odds I have a piece of removal are quite high. Unfortunately, much like Prophet of Kruphix, removal is often moot against it. You can go read the various Prophet of Kruphix threads for explanations on this if you like.
ANECDOTE ALERT
Vague anecdote about removal;
One time I tried to remove my opponent's paradox engine, he floated mana, pacted my removal, and cast soulscour. Said "Thanks, I needed the mana from the free untap off pact!" It was weird sequencing where I did it in his main phase because I wanted to prevent him from untapping his creatures second main or something? or I had to float extra mana? I can't remember. But I surely do remember the pact getting him to the necessary mana
PE has some similar issues with prophet of kruphix in that respect. if your removal isn't countermagic, the game is often over once they get the first untap trigger (since the first spell they cast gives them mana to defend it - so you had best remove it right then during the narrow window).
It's kinda the reverse though in some ways in that you have to proactively attack their board state to keep them from keeping critical mass of rocks and tap effects -- vs. Prophet you have to stop all the instant speed bullcrap they do after they drop it. So it's easier to attack in some ways, but harder in others.
-----------------------------------
Oh hey, I found another doozy in there I wanted to respond to:
Now see these quotes from the PoK thread and see why I think there's a lot of alignment here
UW Ephara Hatebears [Primer], GB Gitrog Lands, BRU Inalla Combo-Control, URG Maelstrom Wanderer Landfall
Now it could also be that people get/got tired of it, and its use in '75% metas' trickled down.
I certainly am not saying its in every deck, or that it ruins every game night I get to. Its just been enough I think it hits the marks.
1. Prophet was played less!! See, how we're equally right. There's some data, EDHRec is mostly all we have. I don't claim to say it's the gospel but it's probably more representative than you think, at least in my experience. Stuff like, Mana crypt being in 1 in 11 decks - that feels fairly close to me. Lots of the randoms I run into have at least one mana crypt.
Maybe worst case I think I saw Prophet as much as twice as often as I see Paradox engine now. But some of that may be bias because prophet made for much more tedious games of magic and was cloned and such more as well.
2. I can't really discuss MTGO's metagame intelligently. But if I had to make a guess I would say that the combos with PE have to be quite tedious to click through right? I think I would die if I had to activate staff of domination 70 times on MTGO.
3. I'm underselling how much PoK was played? I mean, all I can do is guestimate based on limited data. But I know in my personal groups most of us had one PoK deck but no one really had more than one for the most part. We saw it a lot, but a lot of that was related to the meta at the time; the game has changed a LOT since then in terms of enabling spell and artifact strategies.
I don't even know that paradox engine would have seen much play had it been printed in 2014, because we've seen I would guess a tripling of the pool of generals who can leverage it well. There are probably a dozen generals that are two card combos with PE that have been printed since then.
4. I think most decks need 15 combined rocks/dorks/tap effects to want to play PE. This makes for a subset of decks that I suspect are between 5 and 10% of the metagame just guessing. It includes every general who will combo with PE though too, and here's a list:
If those, I would say about a third are green and the rest are blue for the most part, and not all of them PE is an autoinclude.
There are mainly two (three with urza and selvala 2 :P) categories of PE decks I see:
1) Paradox engine makes your general make insane mana - cards like Rishkar, Selvala 1, Kudele, etc.
2) Paradox engine turns your general into a functional infinite draw engine - cards like azami, arcanis, muzzio, thrasios, nin
3) Paradox engine does both (Urza, Selvala 2, Thrasios + kydele)
I think each one of those types of decks probably wants to play a different ramp profile. Decks where your general is card advantage can afford to just play crazy tons of mana. Decks where your general makes crazy amounts of mana require less.
The interesting thing about the "all I play is mana" approach is that you can really just keep chaining all the rocks in your deck since every time you cast a rock you draw cards.
PE being a 40 dollar card from a 2 year old set purely on the basis of EDH demand is pretty telling. There's no way it's just CEDH driving this.
The closest analogue we have is probably Expropriate - though it not being a standard set is confounding.
When a recent set mythic is 40 bucks and only played in EDH you can bet damned good money that it is seeing a ton of play in semi-competitive (75%) decks. Can anyone think of a CEDH staple analogue?
UW Ephara Hatebears [Primer], GB Gitrog Lands, BRU Inalla Combo-Control, URG Maelstrom Wanderer Landfall
Ok, so instead of quoting irrelevant points, let’s bring relevant information to this discussion. From the gospel!
And this is the most telling bit.
So, no, we are not “equally right”. Prophet of Kruphix was driving people to U/G, that’s how good/centralizing it is. That’s why it was banned. Paradox Engine is nowhere close to that level. It’s not driving deck choices. It’s not creating sub-games within the game. It doesn’t create value just by existing. You are literally building a deck around it. All of those commanders you listed do busted things without P.E, it would be pretty damn ignorant to say otherwise.
You’re also one pretty hypocritical individual. You claim Dunhareow skims your novels, yet you only cherry pick points out of others reply’s. You’ve also resorted to being a bit smug, but whatever.
And why the hell do you keep bringing up CEDH? What relevance does that have here?
Actually, let’s go one step further.
-15 rocks/dorks. Or, 15% of your deck. 50% of your deck is mana sources. Yeah, that definitely sounds like the majority of decks.
-in my Ojutai deck, I listed 5 rocks. So I’d need to cut 11 cards to fit in a card+enablers. I never had to do that with PoK. 1 for 1 exchange always did the trick.
-Of the rocks almost required to make P.E worthwhile are freaking eternal format staples, and easily dwarf the price of the enabler. So, take a seat on that price tag comment.
You misunderstand me. Artifact hate kills the artifacts you need to have in play to go off with Paradox Engine. A turn 4 shatterstorm means that PE is unlikely to do anything should anyone play it. You also have the added benefit of disrupting people's mana.
Vehemently disagree with this poster about PoK. You always had a creature to cast. All you needed for PoK to be good was cards in hand and a commander in the command zone. The main difference is also that turn 5 PoK on an empty board is a threat that needs to be answered that same turn, and PE is a turn 5 do nothing on an empty board that you can answer any time.
Sylvan primordial was banned because by itself it was too much value. Protean Hulk was unbanned. Which card is more powerful?
If you can understand why SP was banned but PH was unbanned, you will understand why PE is not in contention for banning.
'Too good in a very specific deck' is not grounds for banning. It never has and never will be.
8.RG Green Devotion Ramp/Combo 9.UR Draw Triggers 10.WUR Group stalling 11.WUR Voltron Spellslinger 12.WB Sacrificial Shenanigans
13.BR Creatureless Panharmonicon 14.BR Pingers and Eldrazi 15.URG Untapped Cascading
16.Reyhan, last of the Abzan's WUBG +1/+1 Counter Craziness 17.WUBRG Dragons aka Why did I make this?
Building: The Gitrog Monster lands, Glissa the Traitor stax, Muldrotha, the Gravetide Planeswalker Combo, Kydele, Chosen of Kruphix + Sidar Kondo of Jamuraa Clues, and Tribal Scarecrow Planeswalkers
There is a huge bias in that data or any data of the sort.
1) I respond to the points I want to respond to. This is different than responding to straw men arguments I have not made. If you want to grab a couple lines from my post and ask me to clarify by all means.
2) CEDH is relevant because there is an argument in play that has been regularly been made that Paradox Engine is only played in CEDH. And also because we know from past banning history that the rules committee largely does not care if a card is broken in CEDH. Ergo discussing the degree to which a card gravitates toward CEDH is relevant.
3) 15 rocks and 30-35 lands is at most 50% of your deck. EDH standard is to play in the vicinity of 45-50 mana sources. If you look at any given deck it'll be 45 +/- 10 for the most part. your Ojutai deck does not seem to be very good with Paradox engine. Cool? I never claimed it was good in every deck, so I don't know where that is coming from.
It's good in lots of decks. Lots of decks play 15 or so mana accelerants total.
From reading hundreds of lists the normal number seems to be about 10, but as a deck skews more toward competitive it gets closer and closer to 12-15.
Edit: something to remember there is that card draw, cantrips and tutors factor in as well, and of course the commanders that make a butt ton of mana.
1) no, I understand you. Playing removal to solve a problem is the same whether it's denying resources or killing the engine. If your answer to a card that potentially creates too much advantage is "play more removal" then I think there's a problem with your framing o the question. The question is not "can it be answered?" but "does it create too much of an advantage?" Dying to removal or being kept in check by removal is not a thing the banlist is really about, if it was Prophet would still be around as it is even more vulnerable to hate than paradox engine.
2) SP vs. Hulk is a very complex discussion. My opinion is that the banlist is primarily used to address how much disruption a card causes to medium to high power level games. If you'll pardon some oversimplification and rough analyis--
Hulk is say, a 9/10 in power in competitive, a 6/10 in 75% metas, and a 4-5/10 in 50% metas
Sylvan Primordial is a 0/10 in competitive, a 9/10 in 75% and an 8/10 in 50% metas
So you hit on something I've been talking about with the CEDH stuff, which is that a card's impact has to be assessed in the major realms of EDH but primarily in 50 and 75%.
In my opinion, Prophet of Kruphix was more of a Sylvan Primordial than a Protean Hulk.
And what we're arguing about here is largely what category Paradox Engine lives in.
I would rank Paradox Engine as a 7/10 in competitive, an 8/10 in 75%, and a 2/10 in 50%, maybe even as low as a 0.
Prophet I would say was a 0/10 in competitive, 9/10 in 75%, and 6/10 in 50%. Maybe higher in 50%.
Where I think Paradox Engine is a huge problem is in more tuned, but non-CEDH metas, where people have access to high power level cards but tend to have a little bit of restraint. And it continues to get worse and worse the longer it's unbanned because of its overlap with the hyper competitive metas.
Its very nature is to blur the lines and cause people to start playing Winter Orb because it's good with engine, not because they necessarily want to make a hardcore stax deck.
And boy do I hate that. I've had more casuals drop Static orb on me since paradox engine was printed than in the last 5 years of EDH.
UW Ephara Hatebears [Primer], GB Gitrog Lands, BRU Inalla Combo-Control, URG Maelstrom Wanderer Landfall
And when has this ever been a criteria for banning?
10 is nowhere near enough. Point me to a list, and I’ll point you to your beloved EDHrec, which breaks down deck contents. 15-17 is about normal. Most lists on this site have well over 10.
You keep using this term, but I don’t think you know what it means, or are just using it incorrectly. You have constantly, throughout this thread, hyped P.E as a driving force for deck construction. Comments like “It’s good in lots of decks” basically means it’s good in, well, lots of decks. That’s not true, though. It’s good in a handful of decks. Decks you’ve built around P.E. You yourself are creating strawman arguments. Again, being hypocritical.
No, it is not. Stop bringing it up. They are completely different formats all together. They share about as much in common as Pauper and Legacy do.
As far as relevant replies go, no commentary on the meat of my reply? You know, the part that comes from the RC?
UW Ephara Hatebears [Primer], GB Gitrog Lands, BRU Inalla Combo-Control, URG Maelstrom Wanderer Landfall
Missed this Ninja Edit
How, exactly, does this help your case? You are adding more pieces to make P.E better. So ~60-65% of your deck is there just to profit off of P.E.? Again, you played Prophet of Kruphix and that was it. You didn’t have to build around it.
. PoK could be played on an empty board and fill the board by the person's next turn. PE does not do this. This is not to say that PE is fair because you can destroy its enablers. It is to say that PE is harder to abuse than PoK. This is important because your argument is that PE is the problem when we are saying that cEDH deckbuilders are going to build cEDH decks regardless of what is banned or unbanned. You can try to build casually with PE, but it will not work a lot of the time as your enablers will die from collateral damage. PoK didn't need enablers.
Let's just ignore your estimates for playability in cEDH, because it is irrelevant as you are saying bannings are done based on 50-75% decks.
You are saying that PE is an 8/10 in 75% decks. I think we disagree about what 75% decks are. I think there has been power creep in your meta, because 75% decks do not play: Mana vault, mana crypt, grim monolith, mox diamond... People who are playing with these expensive/hard to obtain cards are not 75% deckbuilders in my opinion.
Also, a rating like this is misleading. PE is a 0/10 in most 75% decks. It is a 10/10 in a few.
But you know what? Eater of the Dead is a 10/10 in Phenax.
So the argument should not be that PE is situationally very powerful. It should be that PE is overly present in 50-75% metas. And this is what I disagree with. If one in 20 EDH decks runs PE, I am not calling it overtly present in the meta. I understand that those 1/20 decks are making it unfun, but that is the same to me as so many other unfun cards.
Sylvan Primordial was banned because it was unfun by itself. PoK was banned because it was unfun by itself. PE has to be unfun by itself. To be able to claim this, you have to be able to show that on average, decks can abuse PE. But this is not the case. Only a small subset of decks run enough rocks to abuse PE. Of those decks, how many actually have a reliable way to chain spells?
The problem is not PE, it is people who are building with PE. They are building combo decks that durdle and it isn't fun. It was not fun 7 years ago when I first faced Mishra eggs, and it is not fun now.
8.RG Green Devotion Ramp/Combo 9.UR Draw Triggers 10.WUR Group stalling 11.WUR Voltron Spellslinger 12.WB Sacrificial Shenanigans
13.BR Creatureless Panharmonicon 14.BR Pingers and Eldrazi 15.URG Untapped Cascading
16.Reyhan, last of the Abzan's WUBG +1/+1 Counter Craziness 17.WUBRG Dragons aka Why did I make this?
Building: The Gitrog Monster lands, Glissa the Traitor stax, Muldrotha, the Gravetide Planeswalker Combo, Kydele, Chosen of Kruphix + Sidar Kondo of Jamuraa Clues, and Tribal Scarecrow Planeswalkers
PoK and PE are very similar cards in a lot of ways it is why the comparisons kind of work. There are games I have played against both of these cards and they have floundered and done little because they are both engines surrounded by bigger things.
The ease of accessing the power of those engines is what is being discussed here.
(also framing the differences between cEDH and not as purely a function of budget removes a lot of the history of MTG cards, it is how people build and play and not what they build and play that determines the style of deck)
I think we probably have a definition problem about what a 75% deck is. I think you can play all kinds of crazy stuff and still have your deck be a 75% deck. You're going hard, you're playing powerful cards. You're constrained by gameplan not by budget.
Playing expensive mana rocks does not intrinsically make a deck competitive, nor does playing expensive cards like Survival of the fittest.
The fundamental things about competitive decks for me are
1) Trying their hardest to maximize their win rate
2) constructed with the appropriate critical turn in mind (this is probably 2 or 3 in CEDH - if you are not interacting or winning by turn 3 you're doing something wrong, right?)
3) Strong gameplan
4) No budget constraints
You can make a deck that is non-competitive but that is not constrained by budget. Both my Ephara and my Gitrog&& decks are excellent examples; I have tons of dumb cards, but I'm usually doing a few things differently than CEDH:
* Not curving as aggressively as needed for CEDH
* Not playing a CEDH ready gameplan
Fundamentally I like playing a really firm foundation of mana from which to build my tower of nonsense so I invest heavily in manabases and efficient enablers.
In the end I think if we don't agree on what a mid-powered deck is that's probably the heart of our disagreement. At my shop people play all kinds of crazy cards, but also weaker cards, weaker gameplans, and weaker generals. I saw a dude with a Mana Crypt in his Windgrace Tokens deck the other day. Doubling season so he could double his worm havrest tokens.
I lost to a guy who was playing Paradox Engine in his Urza Voltron deck with some CEDH powerhouse cards as Grappling Hook.
&& I'll cede that the Gitrog deck is going a little harder than typical (85%, say) but it doesn't combo and the gameplan of "cast a bunch of eldrazi" is fairly slow.
--------------------------------------------------------
And back to the point at hand. I see all kinds of bad decks playing paradox engine in a way that accidentally wins sometimes. But sometimes these bad decks have mana crypt and mox diamond. But maybe their general sucks and they don't play any tutors. Or maybe their endgame is to flood the board with creatures with crazy PE mana and pass the turn.
I think PE is the natural focal point for too many deck styles.
I'm glad it's not the case for your meta
UW Ephara Hatebears [Primer], GB Gitrog Lands, BRU Inalla Combo-Control, URG Maelstrom Wanderer Landfall
This isn’t necessarily true, either. I provided the RC’s explanation on why it needed to be banned, and the explanation that it was Ultimately, it seems the card is too perfect - it does everything U/G Commander players want to be doing and it does it in a way that makes counterplay difficult. reads, to me, that PoK was unfun by itself. And it really was. PoK could hit an empty board, and then BAM, you’ve amassed an army or triggered 10+ etbs before it even was your turn again.
You weren’t playing bad cards to make it good. You didn’t need to combine it’s effect with anything. It was just stupid value as long as you untapped. Which, in PoK case, was the very next upkeep and not just your next upkeep. That’s where the difference between the 2 becomes significant. I mean, sure, you can generate more value immediately with P.E, but at that point we aren’t talking about 5 drop, it’s a 5-drop and...
Onering's 4 simple steps that let you solve any problem with Magic's gameplay
Step 1: Identify the problem. What aspect of Magic don't you like? Step 2: Find out how others deal with the problem. How do players deal with this aspect of the game when they run into it? Step 3: Do what those players do. Step 4: No more problem. Bonus: You are now better at Magic. Enjoy those extra wins!
Thanks. This explains my point well. Understanding where PE sees play is critical to understanding whether it is a problem or not. I honestly am not sure but the engine decks I have played against and reviewed skew to the "going hard" side of 75% but are overwhelmingly not cedh decks.
I think it's worth everyone's time to review some of the edhrec decks that actually have engines. I'll try to pull a few samples if I have time tomorrow.
The ultimate disposition of PE really depends on problematic casual omnipresence more than anything. We know it is strong enough to be banned--there are weaker cards on the list. But we don't really know how much it's seeing play, how bad it makes games, and what metas it's played in most.
Edit: this is also closely tied with the connection to very competitively weak banned cards like prophet and sylvan primordial.
UW Ephara Hatebears [Primer], GB Gitrog Lands, BRU Inalla Combo-Control, URG Maelstrom Wanderer Landfall
On EDHrec, the card exists in 6% of decks. One user claims that’s insane. EDHrec is skewed more towards competitive deck builders, but that same user says this proves his point that it’s casually omnipresent. I fail to see how we’ve arrived at the conclusion based on the analysis provided.
Beyond that, you have the RC mantra is “Build casually, play competitively” which flies in the face of any of the data that has been provided up until this point.
To me, this means that slotting PoK into an existing deck isn’t a move to improve my level of “compete”. It’s cutting an underachieving card for one that has value all on it’s own. It’s a smart decision to make, no?
On the flip side, having to make sure I’m hitting a threshold of Rocks/Dorks/draw just to make P.E not feel wasted, is in fact a move to improve my compete level because, under those circumstances, the cards busted. Otherwise, it underachieves, no? So that’s building competitively.
So, we sit here with this take away-
-EDHrec is a valuable tool, until it isn’t, because it really isn’t the target audience.
-We care about CEDH, until we don’t, because we actually don’t care about it.
That is baffling as all hell, and how anybody can create any rational argument based off of that is beyond me.
Half this s*** in the recent pages of this thread is mostly made up. Ask 5 people what a 75% deck is and you’ll get 5 different answers.
And nobody has still addressed the point I made above about the official ban announcement for PoK and how it pertains to P.E. But we probably don’t care about that anymore, either.
Here's a selection of decks I picked out of a hat from EDHREC. My methodology was to pick the most expensive deck on the first page of decklists that has a paradox engine.
Arcum Dagsson, supposedly uber competitive
https://edhrec.com/deckpreview/7864250e38ba00c12ffeefc7888f3dfc
This deck doesn't have a mana cyrpt or a grim monolith or even a chrome mox, no mox diamond. It has nonsense tapped land jank, bad cards, etc. But it still has a paradox engine and only a few mana rocks but lots of tap effects. It appears set up to use PE to combo with Isochron Scepter or something.
Dralnu, Lich Lord
https://edhrec.com/deckpreview/299bb16ed53aadae466bd6d98a1a0db1
Here we have a pretty reasonably strong Dralnu deck that is absolutely not CEDH ready. It's full of jank like Wretched Confluence and Final Parting and Commander Sphere and Phyrexian Arena and Will Kenrith. Not to mention an awful manabase consisting of some luminaries as Dismal Backwater[/car] and dimir aquaduct.
Jhoira, Weatherlight Captain
https://edhrec.com/deckpreview/ac13b11fb72841f8f2e966e7cc579290
This is the most tuned deck we've seen so far, but it still runs all kinds of jank like Brudiclad and Vedalken Archmage and comet storm and Jaya's Immolating Inferno, and Elixir of Immortality, and Storm the Vault.
And Swiftwater Cliffs for the love of all that's holy. Not even an Ancient tomb which is absurd with Jhoira.
This deck is going to win on turn 3 a lot, it's very powerful, but it's not near CEDH Jhoira. It's got way too many lands and is way too light on interaction and has a lot of cute stuff. It's the tuned side of 75% at best.
Selvala, Heart of the Wilds
https://edhrec.com/deckpreview/9cc74d73d5da9ac0ebe6830814dbd77d
I can't tell enough about this to tell if it's competitive or not. It feels fairly tuned I guess, but it's missing a lot of stuff I would expect to see in a competitive build. Stuff like instill energy and hall of the bandit lord.
It plays a few pieces of jank but it's relatively tuned.
If anyone has any requests, pick your favorite commander on the Paradox Engine top commanders page and I will look at all their decklists and analyze the ones that have PE.
https://edhrec.com/cards/paradox-engine
The one I looked at myself is Urza, Lord High artificer, since he has PE in 70% of the decks that use him, because he straight up combos with it.
https://edhrec.com/listofdecks/urza-lord-high-artificer
Of these decks the majority are under $1000, (134/246 decks) and 53/246 are budget decks at <500.
It looks to me like most of the first 100 decks or so are fairly tuned, just from looking at a number of them. There's varying degrees of stax and such though,
And there's a lot of random jank in there even in the $2500 decks
Now, Urza is a pretty bad example because he's both 1) a combo with PE, and 2) likely to be skewed competitive, and 3) not a very large sample size at 250 decks.
High level stats
* of 246 decks, probably ~80-100 are what I would consider competitive or close enough to CEDH to not be playable in casual circles.
* Of 246 decks, 50 are seriously budget (and often still have PEs)
TL;DR on the budget issue: If Urza were the only general I would look at I would consider the thesis that EDHrec skews competitive to be probably correct. I'll look at another general or two later and see.
UW Ephara Hatebears [Primer], GB Gitrog Lands, BRU Inalla Combo-Control, URG Maelstrom Wanderer Landfall
I decided to look at a cheaper general that doesn't synergize quite as much with Paradox engine, but still plays it as a high rate. Rishkar, Peema Renegade has 200 decks on EDHREC and 64% of them run Paradox Engine.
https://edhrec.com/listofdecks/rishkar-peema-renegade
Of the 204 decks, not a single one is CEDH or even close. the most expensive deck is 1400 bucks and does not even close to CEDH. Most decks are budget, even the cheap ones run PE at a high rate.
This is the best deck I found:
https://edhrec.com/deckpreview/0d25a27ac40d2e44b7b24e7c58bafbfb
This is reasonably strong but packs almost no interaction and is basically trying to just do its thing. It'll do its thing fast but not particularly consistently since it has no real way to find its various pieces except by Glimpsing off or casting a big draw spell.
My concern with this is that it doesn't really prove anything except that Rishkar is usually built as a medium powered or lower deck because he sucks.
My overall thinking however is this:
EDHREC probably does not skew competitive overall because it seems to follow the pattern that very powerful generals skew competitive and weaker generals seem to skew casual/budget. Many generals that are rather strong but also happen to be good budget commanders seem to skew budget.
EDHrec also has a way higher percentage of budget decks than I see on a regular basis. I basically never see decks that are under 500 bucks these days. But EDHRec is littered with 30 dollar decks.
Edit:
There is another possible thesis I see in there after noodling on it, and it's this:
Paradox engine is primarily played by competitive decks, and very little in casual decks, so the 6% figure is probably inflated; if you corrected for competitive decks (which we have established don't matter) with Paradox Engine the prevalence would be much lower.
I think this could be proved by analyzing a group of comparable cards and the types of decks that play them:
These are all powerful cards played about the same amount, but Panharmonicon *probably* skews casual, and the others probably lean competitive. It would probably take a lot of doing but it's likely you could determine if Paradox Engine and also Aetherflux Reservoir are "safe" because they have a very low prevalence rate outside of competitive decks.
I'm not sure what the best methodology would be to approach that, but I think it could be done - though EDHRec does not appear to expose the data you would need (e.g. list of decks that play Panharmonicon is not a thing you can find, at least I can't).
UW Ephara Hatebears [Primer], GB Gitrog Lands, BRU Inalla Combo-Control, URG Maelstrom Wanderer Landfall
A commander whose whole job is to make other creatures into mana dorks has more investment than most to play the Engine.
Regardless of what or how powerful the outcomes with it are.
I bet the Reservoir likewise is good in all kinds of decks that gain life because unlike the traditional lifegain wincons you don't have to wait a turn around with it.
There's tons of levels in everything here. It's why just looking at individual commanders is probably fruitless for making actual statements sadly. Every commander has confounding variables that would skew its results - Urza plays more paradox engine because it's a straight combo with him, Rishkar is less competitive because he's weak, blah blah etc etc. It adds up to EDHrec not really providing quite enough information I don't think, without lots of deeper analysis of the data.
That said, if we knew the answer to this question:
What percentage of decks that play X are competitive decks?
It would really facilitate discussion on any card that's only real reason to be discussed for banning is problematic casual omnipresence, since it would give a good data point for "casual omnipresence" part of problematic casual omnipresence.
From the EDHRec data set, the easiest way to do that would be to use Cost as a shorthand for competitiveness - which it probably is at least for the most part. So say, what percentage of Decks that play paradox Engine are >2000, for example, might be a useful data point. in my survey of Urza for example, 2k was about the break point where decks started having too much jank to be competitive.
Unfortunately, I am not sure how we would get at that data from EDhrec. Anyone know anything about that?
I did find this that kinda cracked me up though:
https://edhrec.com/top/salt
Apparently EDHRec did some kinda saltiness poll and Paradox Engine is in the top 20, above such cards as Humility, Sunder, and Hokori, Dust Drinker
Edit, followup: EDHRec apparently does not have an API we can browse, so the data they expose is the data they show in the UI. maybe I will contact them.
UW Ephara Hatebears [Primer], GB Gitrog Lands, BRU Inalla Combo-Control, URG Maelstrom Wanderer Landfall
This is a fairly useful tool. unfortunately has to start with a commander, but you can do some neat stuff with the advanced filters.
For example:
Seton, Krosan Protector - 25% of Seton decks have both Gaea's Cradle and paradox Engine while 64% of Seton decks have Paradox Engine.
Azami, Lady of Scrolls - 23% have both mana crypt and paradox engine, 55% have Paradox engine
Captain Sisay - 23% have mana crypt + engine, 53% have Paradox Engine
Urza, lord high artificer - 35% mana crypt + paradox engine, 70% Paradox engine
That's some really interesting stuff. Pretty strong suggestion that of the more likely to be paradox engine focused and also fairly competitive generals:
~25% of the decks are probably competitive
~25% play paradox engine but are not competitive
That's all requiring a lot of assumptions but I don't think there are that many competitive Sisay decks without crypts, no matter how strong they are, and same with Seton without Cradle. Might be strong but not CEDH.
And obviously having a mana crypt isn't the sole determiner of competitiveness, and a deck could be pretty egregiously powerful without having a crypt - but it's a pretty decent yardstick for how serious someone is about competing.
More than likely having a crypt is a reasonable proxy for competitiveness because the variance should cancel itself out -- that is, there will be decks that are competitive without crypts and then there'll also be non-competitive decks with crypts, but on the balance most decks that have crypts will be competitive wakka wakka.
UW Ephara Hatebears [Primer], GB Gitrog Lands, BRU Inalla Combo-Control, URG Maelstrom Wanderer Landfall
This is actually very informative information. I am not sure if Gaea's Cradle is a good measure because of the cost, but I think Mana crypt is a good measure in any deck that can reasonably play it. Obviously, not perfect, but close to half the decks playing PE are playing other competitive pieces from this list.
I am going to go grab data for Thrasios and Tymna, which I have seen the most as a cEDH deck. Of decks that have PE, 70% also run Mana Crypt. But only 29% of T&T decks on EDH Rec play PE, and 61% play Mana Crypt. Meanwhile, in decks not playing Mana Crypt, 21% run PE.
Takeaway?
I don't know.
Mana crypt is in 61% of T&T decks, makes EDHRec seem very competitive.
However, Mana crypt is only in 9% of the EDHrec decks posted online.
I took a look at Selvala, Explorer returned, Teferi, Temporal Archmage... PE decks are generally playing more of the more dedicated combo cards in these decks.
All this is telling me is that there is bias depending on which general we are looking at.
I don't know what to think of this right now. The stats do not seem to support any one argument.
8.RG Green Devotion Ramp/Combo 9.UR Draw Triggers 10.WUR Group stalling 11.WUR Voltron Spellslinger 12.WB Sacrificial Shenanigans
13.BR Creatureless Panharmonicon 14.BR Pingers and Eldrazi 15.URG Untapped Cascading
16.Reyhan, last of the Abzan's WUBG +1/+1 Counter Craziness 17.WUBRG Dragons aka Why did I make this?
Building: The Gitrog Monster lands, Glissa the Traitor stax, Muldrotha, the Gravetide Planeswalker Combo, Kydele, Chosen of Kruphix + Sidar Kondo of Jamuraa Clues, and Tribal Scarecrow Planeswalkers
I'm seeing a few patterns that I think are worth thinking about--
* The more competitive the general the more competitive the decks tend to be (this seems obvious, but it's useful for thinking about EDHrec data -- it certainly does not skew competitive across the board).
* A high percentage of the decks that play paradox engine are stronger generals, or mono brown (karn, kozilek)
(Of the top 18 generals that play Paradox engine, I would say that at least 8 of those are heavily used In CEDH - several pairs of partners, Urza, Arcum, Sisay, jhoira, and Azami)
* Paradox Engine appears to be used most heavily in decks that are fairly competitive; I could not find very many really poor decks that had it, outside of Urza. Mostly 75% and up.
* Paradox engine does have a large footprint overall in non-competitive decks; at least half of the decks that play it are non-competitive from the survey I did.
Few more thoughts--
A kind of a summary thought there, I think it is very probable that for generals that are likely to play paradox engine, its prevalence will be exaggerated. For example if you look at say, Azami, an say "55% of azami decks play paradox engine." That's a huge number, but....it's very possible that Azami decks are just going to be competitive because she's pretty darned strong.
So from a "problematic casual omnipresence" deck we probably care more about the non-competitive Azami decks, and say you pull the 25% that run Crypt, and it doesn't really look quite so bad -- maybe more like 25% of non-competitive Azami decks are running Paradox engine, and given its obvious synergy with her that's not quite so bad.
Anyway my ultimate takeaway form the EDHRec data is that it's pretty darned interesting and probably more representative for some generals than others. But also that we probably have to be careful from drawing too many deep conclusions. Unfortunately it's our only real dataset other than anecdotes.
UW Ephara Hatebears [Primer], GB Gitrog Lands, BRU Inalla Combo-Control, URG Maelstrom Wanderer Landfall