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- Jenesis
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Member for 14 years, 7 months, and 9 days
Last active Mon, Jan, 22 2018 21:06:57
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Feb 3, 2014
Jenesis posted a message on Launch Giveaway!My favorite card is Steppe Lynx. It's a cute and cuddly kitty that looks harmless at first, but ends up beating for tons of damage!Posted in: Announcements -
Oct 16, 2012
Jenesis posted a message on Maelstrom Wanderer EDHWow, didn't see this comment for a month. Derp.Posted in: Jenesis Blog
Quote from MorrainTheCorruptorPlease realize read over all land quantitys again. Overall good deck! You have restored my faith in cascade decks! So many people jam in all cascade cards. Ive faced one and ran over it with my one and only Riku deck!
I'll definently have more trouble with this deck though. You did a nice job with it, but I have a Yeva in the deck. Who doesn't want to give a cascade cascade general flash! 
good luck with the deck though.
The land quantities are 1x of each with the exception of the basic lands. The "0" represents their CMC, but since they don't proc cascade I suppose that isn't necessary.
Yeva seems like a good idea for some early defense as well, since the 3 mana for Alchemist's Refuge can be problematic at times. I'll look toward making a spot for her. The list hasn't been updated since the Primeval Titan ban, anyway.
Thanks and glad you enjoyed the deck -
Feb 20, 2010
Jenesis posted a message on Legendary Artifact Land Enchantment Creature Land PlaneswalkerThere is an immensely convoluted way to give a planeswalker permanent named "Chandra Ablaze" a Licid's ability. However, since an Aura that's also a creature can't enchant anything, it's put into the graveyard as a state-based action, before any more type-changing effects can be piled onto the Chandra-Licid's Enchantment - Aura. (And to think, all that time I wasted when I could have just looked up the CR...)Posted in: bert Blog
There is an Aura that gives enchanted creature banding. Unfortunately, since Chandra is colorless due to the Mycosynth Lattice, she can't band with other without help... - To post a comment, please login or register a new account.
Thoughts on preemptive tappers?
My personal opinion is that the majority of currently existent EDH deck lists are terrible, because the majority of EDH players don't play to win. But assuming that EDH is a broad enough format that a win-focused Spike can massage just about any vague strategic concept into a high-powered deck, then it becomes a matter of testing those decks against each other to determine if one will always be a few percentage points lower than another one, in which case the weaker one should be discarded (even if it is good enough to regularly pubstomp the majority of decks).
How do you define a "tier-1 deck," if not "a deck that can be competitive and win often"?
This is the kind of discussion I think this thread needs more of. What weaknesses do you perceive as attackable in the currently perceived "top tier"? "Getting bad draws", for example, is probably something that can't be helped considering the structure of the format - even some Vintage decks frequently get bad opening draws.
Here is where the disconnect lies and why the assumptions Sirlin makes about games like Street Fighter and League of Legends, for example, fall apart when applied to CEDH. Online play against a global pool of randomly matchmade opponents who are all playing to win is the gold standard for competitive multiplayer these days. In the current state of CEDH, you are limited by a) how many players are primarily motivated by winning, b) which players you have access to geographically, c) which cards you can afford to buy, and d) how much you can learn about the testing results of the CEDH community at large, since there are no CEDH tournaments and AFAIK no well-known strategy forums people can use to discuss and debate CEDH strategy.
Heck, regular Magic is limited in a)-c), and it's still vastly ahead of CEDH in d). If I want to find out what the best Standard strategy is without doing any of the testing myself, I can watch tournament streams, compile tournament results, read articles, listen to podcasts, and start debate threads on Internet forums. If I want to find out what the best CEDH deck is... I can look at "tier lists".
I disagree that you can "play to win" using any random deck. Deck select is part of strategy, as much as I personally may not like it. If you play Homarid tribal in Vintage, regardless of how well you may try to pilot that particular deck, you are not "playing to win" because there are non-Homarid-tribal decks that are strictly better in terms of win percentage. Now, maybe CEDH is diverse and balanced enough that there are so many different decks at the top level of strategies that it's pointless to try to keep track of all of them. I would certainly be surprised if that were the case, but I've seen the claim made for other eternal formats like Legacy, that a couple strategies are top tier but several dozen other ones are a not-wholly-embarrassing-choice in the right field, or if you have a disproportionate amount of familiarity with the deck's strengths. That's still different from saying "local metagame, therefore the concept of 'good deck' vs 'bad deck' doesn't mean anything."
Regarding playgroups, inbreeding, and "honing suboptimal tactics," I think it's good to recognize (and Sirlin does acknowledge) that it's good to play decks that would be suboptimal in the "global metagame" to exploit known local metagame weaknesses, but you should also know that it is a weakness you are exploiting and not assume that your deck is the "best deck" in any other scenarios. "Honing suboptimal tactics" specifically means only playing one strategy and assuming it will be good forever. E.g. a player who pubstomps casual decks with Hermit Druid, then decides that they will only ever play Hermit Druid, even when confronted with decks that beat HD or the possible existence of a storm deck that goes off faster and more consistently than HD. If the player is destined to only ever play against those casual decks, it is absolutely "playing to win" to play HD and nothing but HD. Given that in the Internet age the player should be aware of other potential opponents and other strategies, they should branch out and learn new strategies to beat the best strategies those other opponents are able to present.
(Actually, that may be a point to add to the article - you shouldn't just stop at your local playgroup, even if they're a very good one, if you want to seriously "be good at" CEDH. e.g. the reddit forum is a potential resource for non-local playtest partners.)
I mean, I play a mono-red control deck that tries to ramp/draw cards/recur ETB value dudes and usually ends up with more of its own lands blown up than the opponents', so you'll get no argument from me on that point. (It's not a very good deck, but it's different enough that it stays interesting.)
The Runes honestly seemed quite self-explanatory. Cast the ones in the main color(s) of your opponents' beatdown decks and cycle off the rest.
Is 20 enchantments too few for Serra's Sanctum?
For some more creatures that like being blinked at instant speed, you could consider:
Angel of Serenity
Fiend Hunter
Leonin Relic-Warder
Petravark
(in combination with the above) Reveillark
Better?
And I still have yet to see an example of this mythical EDH deck that somehow is good enough to battle at competitive tables but loses to combat-oriented decks with inefficient curves and little disruption. You'll note that every deck in the OP, even the ones that aren't labeled as "combo", has some way of tutoring to combo out. Oftentimes it's built right into the commander.
Can you give an example? It seems that all CEDH decks, just like Vintage decks (that don't rely on extensive amounts of 4-of creatures) are capable of winning by either combo or lockdown, so against an opponent with no disruption and a slow clock it should be easy to just tutor for the relevant pieces. Particularly in casual multiplayer against opponents who suck at threat assessment.
If 50% of the CEDH meta doesn't fall within the Pillar Archetypes, doesn't that make it a bad comparison? What "Pillar" would you put Yisan into, for instance? Maybe 1% of the competitive Vintage metagame falls outside the categories of Bazaar/Shops/Storm/Ux "Control"/Ux "Aggro". (Granted, the last two categories are not terribly well-defined, but it's generally accepted that the same kind of sideboard hate works against all decks in that category, similar to Bazaar and Shops.)
Rereading the Archetypes section of the primer again, it seems that the rock-paper-scissors triangle is thus:
* Fast Combo decks are usually B, are good against Value Grind, and are bad against Heavy Disruption
* Value Grind decks are usually BG, are good against Heavy Disruption, and are bad against Fast Combo
* Heavy Disruption decks are usually U, are good against Fast Combo, and are bad against Value Grind
(In the Vintage metagame, Storm plays the role of Fast Combo, Ux "Aggro" plays the role of Value Grind, and Shops plays the role of Heavy Disruption. "Control" can either beat or lose to Storm or Shops depending on how it prioritizes its hate. Dredge isn't a Magic deck.)
Weren't you the one who was complaining a couple pages ago about how Izzet doesn't have any combat oriented generals? It seems like you know perfectly well the difference between combat oriented and not, you're just being deliberately obtuse because you don't like the prevailing opinion about Boros. It would help if you stopped honing in on the strawman of "hurr durr Boros players just want card draw" and actually read some of the things that have been suggested, i.e. a general themed around equipment, a hatebears general, a burn/lifegain general, none of which necessarily involves giving Boros recursion or card draw.
Azami, Lady of Scrolls, for example, is in no way a "combat oriented" card. You could make her an enchantment and she'd retain 99.99% of her functionality. "Indestructible" is not a trait that orients a card toward any particular strategy. I mean, all the Theros god cards are indestructible, but that doesn't mean that Ephara, Phenax, Mogis, Karametra, Athreos, Keranos, and Kruphix are necessarily going to play anything alike, because their abilities other than "indestructible" all do different things and synergize with different types of cards. (I also wouldn't call any of them "combat oriented" either - you can certainly plan around keeping them as enchantments!) Anya, Iroas, and Tajic (and many others), on the other hand, all have abilities that only matter in combat. Indestructible is useful at keeping them alive, but there's only a benefit to keeping them alive if you care about attacking and blocking with creatures.
Could also consider Purphoros, God of the Forge to combo with all of the blinking and go in a more burn-y direction.
Technically, Alesha, Who Smiles at Death is a recursion general in Boros, Orzhov, and Mardu.
Granted she still requires getting into the red zone in order to do anything, but...progress?
What does Avacyn do? She protects your creatures from (some) Wraths...but so do Astral Slide, Skybind, and the random one-of blink cards. She can wipe (small) creatures off the board...but so can all your other board wipes. She can beat for damage...but so does your suite of other Angels. In fact, barring lifegain, a non-Commander Gisela will kill an opponent in the same number of swings as a flipped Avacyn, and Gisela doesn't require you to first get into play then sac off one of your fifteen non-Angel creatures.
I suppose she can do a mediocre impression of all three things, and that might be enough to justify her slot in the deck, but it doesn't make her feel like the star of the show.
What do you mean by that?
By "anything goes" I mean that the social contract does not soft-ban any disliked tactics. You're allowed to use suboptimal tactics, but the only incentive for you to stop using them is that you eventually get frustrated with losing all the time. Likewise, if you find an optimal tactic that makes the game degenerate because it results in you winning all the time, the only incentive for you to stop doing it is when the group develops a counter-tactic, or you decide to move off it for the purposes of experimenting with different tactics.
The way I see it, there are two ways to play the game: "Anything goes" and "not". The P2W thread is for the "anything goes" players who also care about optimizing their win percentage. This thread is for the "not" players to share why they enjoy the "not" category more. (I suppose there could be "anything goes" players who don't actually care about optimizing their win percentage, but I'd imagine that to be such a tiny fraction of an already small percentage of players that the odds of them making a thread would be nearly zero.)
Also, it's certainly possible to win a lot without finding it satisfying, enjoyable, or fun. See: Every broken format ever.