Sundering Titan can be placed in any deck, but it really shines in decks that blink/flicker
and decks that makes lots of tokens/copies of creatures. Infinite reflection, rite of replication,
clones, abuse it with dead-eye navigator, etc, etc. Pretty easy to see how it could become
unfun.
This right here is why I certainly don't feel that Titan was specifically needing to be banned "officially." If people can't get control of their "play groups" then they should probably "play elsewhere." In this case, I am going to go a head and side with the majority and just treat the ban list like it doesn't exist.
I'm sorry, sir, but I have to disagree with you. Just as with your experience, most of the decks I play against never played Sundering Titan. However once in a blue moon that one deck out of a hundred decks I played against in the month plays it, then it get's Master of Etherium'd or discarded and Reanimate'd or just hardcast off Thran Dynamo / Sol Ring, and then cloned or reanimated again. What happens? Everyone groans and the whole game goes out the window (especially since everything just gets worse when it is removed). It's not out-and-out banned in my playgroup simply because it hardly ever comes up! But when it does come up, it is always a problem.
Just because a card is not seeing play doesn't mean it should not be banned, especially since the reason it's not seeing play is because it sends the gamestate to hell and everyone really, really dislikes that, which is PRECISELY why it SHOULD be banned!
This right here is why I certainly don't feel that Titan was specifically needing to be banned "officially." If people can't get control of their "play groups" then they should probably "play elsewhere." In this case, I am going to go a head and side with the majority and just treat the ban list like it doesn't exist.
Certain groups play with this banlist on top of their own group-enforced
lists. My playgroup has banned: sol ring, mana crypt, kiki-jiki, sensei's top,
spike weaver, demonic/vampiric tutor, rhystic study, bribery, consecrated
sphinx, phyrexian altar, ashnod's altar, lion's eye diamond, gaea's cradle,
glacial chasm and strip mine. These cards are all piled on the official EDH
banlist.
Basically anything that provides unfair card advantage, cards requiring an
exorbitant amount of time to resolve and cards that make "comboing out"
super easy to do. Oh, we also unbanned Kokopuffs!
I strongly encourage that you come up with/pitch your own banned card
list. It really streamlines a game and while an EDH game can often times
be resolved in less than fifteen minutes thanks to aggressive combo decks,
the games feel more rewarding to win.
Sundering Titan is a good ban in regards to folks who seek to break it, but the guy who throws one in his deck 'cause it looks cool and is a one-shot powerful thing, that guy isn't the reason this got banned.
The whole point of EDH/Commander was to make a format that was not as competitive as the rest, a format that emphasized fun, group play.
The reason Sundering Titan was banned was because enough people were using it to be competitive and unfriendly instead of fun.
Griselbrand? Yeah, he was made for EDH, and so stupidly broken in that format it as ridiculous. Making cards for specific formats and then banning a short while later is an obvious design oversight by WOTC and has become increasingly common these days. It's highly annoying.
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"The difference between MTG and science is that one has people dressed up in silly clothes, using words you can't understand and doing potentially quite dangerous stuff while the other has people dressed up in silly clothes, using words you can't understand and doing potentially quite dangerous stuff while playing cards."
My Decks: WAnglesW WUBRGThe BroodGRBUW WUGAllymillGUW
Made for EDH... seem much legacy coverage lately? Griselbrand is fantastic in reanimator and Sneak and Show. He just so happened to also be bonkers in Commander.
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By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
-Richard Dawkins
The reason Sundering Titan was banned was because enough people were using it to be competitive and unfriendly instead of fun.
Competition and fun aren't mutually exclusive, and building a good deck isn't "unfriendly". I tend to feel that pulling punches in deck composition or choosing not to make a play because it would be "too good" is disrespectful to one's opponents - it operates on the assumption that your opponent isn't good enough to need the big guns, so you should beat them with a handicap. It's condescending, and condescension has no place in a friendly game.
If anyone is really complaining about Griselbrand being banned, they need to stop and think for a few minutes about what they're saying. Griselbrand is literally the most broken card that has ever been printed, if you're talking about the specific context of the Commander format. Black Lotus would be a more balanced card in Commander than Griselbrand. Ancestral Recall is not as broken as Griselbrand ... it only draws THREE cards, and Griselbrand draws TWENTY-EIGHT. I mean, you're playing 99 cards in your deck, and you start with 40 life. That means that if you put Griselbrand onto the field, you get to draw almost a third of your deck, if not a little more, immediately and for free. There are enough "free" spells (lesser Moxen, Urza-block land-untapping spells, alternate-casting-cost spells, etc.) to virtually guarantee that you have the opportunity to continue to play spells even though you may have tapped out to put Griselbrand into play. There are enough infinite combos that can be assembled with 2 or 3 cards that you can build your deck in such a way as to virtually guarantee that you draw one or more of them, AND the free/fast mana necessary to cast them, as soon as Griselbrand comes into play. Griselbrand is effectively a 1-card combo that represents approximately a third of the sum potential of your entire deck ... and if you can't come up with a list of 60-some cards that DON'T allow you to kill an entire table immediately upon resolving Griselbrand, you're just not trying hard enough, or you're being willfully obtuse and contrary.
And it's also a 7/7 flying lifelink (aka "when this creature enters combat, draw 7 cards"), which can be cheated into play though reanimation, among other strategies.
The concept that Griselbrand is anything less than the most powerful card in the history of the Commander format is barely worth backing in an argument ... and the concept that it is a "balanced" card is downright comical. Let's be real here. This format would not have survived Griselbrand if he had been allowed to stay.
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Thanks to Gabgabdevo for the awesome sig image!
I'm always looking for foil Madcap Skills and Ghitu Fire-Eater, [trade thread link forthcoming]
Competition and fun aren't mutually exclusive, and building a good deck isn't "unfriendly". I tend to feel that pulling punches in deck composition or choosing not to make a play because it would be "too good" is disrespectful to one's opponents - it operates on the assumption that your opponent isn't good enough to need the big guns, so you should beat them with a handicap. It's condescending, and condescension has no place in a friendly game.
I 100% agree with ya.
But a big part of this is how each individual is interacting with each other.
While I really enjoy to have strong/competitive opponents I totally dislike when they make really degenerate stuff (wich is allowed) while they're whining about other stuff (wich is allowed as well)...
Just for example: When s/o cast Tooth and Nail with it's entwine cost but don't like if it get's countered by s/o or s/o picks out the two best creatures cards out of his library as a reaction.
I mean in fact they whant that T&N reads like "you win the game"...
This kind of behaviour I really dislike.
My advice is to know all the people in your area good enough to decide if you whant to play with/against them. Mostly you allready know what kind of player you have in front of ya when you see the commander of the choice...
If anyone is really complaining about Griselbrand being banned, they need to stop and think for a few minutes about what they're saying. Griselbrand is literally the most broken card that has ever been printed, if you're talking about the specific context of the Commander format. Black Lotus would be a more balanced card in Commander than Griselbrand. Ancestral Recall is not as broken as Griselbrand ... it only draws THREE cards, and Griselbrand draws TWENTY-EIGHT. I mean, you're playing 99 cards in your deck, and you start with 40 life. That means that if you put Griselbrand onto the field, you get to draw almost a third of your deck, if not a little more, immediately and for free. There are enough "free" spells (lesser Moxen, Urza-block land-untapping spells, alternate-casting-cost spells, etc.) to virtually guarantee that you have the opportunity to continue to play spells even though you may have tapped out to put Griselbrand into play. There are enough infinite combos that can be assembled with 2 or 3 cards that you can build your deck in such a way as to virtually guarantee that you draw one or more of them, AND the free/fast mana necessary to cast them, as soon as Griselbrand comes into play. Griselbrand is effectively a 1-card combo that represents approximately a third of the sum potential of your entire deck ... and if you can't come up with a list of 60-some cards that DON'T allow you to kill an entire table immediately upon resolving Griselbrand, you're just not trying hard enough, or you're being willfully obtuse and contrary.
And it's also a 7/7 flying lifelink (aka "when this creature enters combat, draw 7 cards"), which can be cheated into play though reanimation, among other strategies.
The concept that Griselbrand is anything less than the most powerful card in the history of the Commander format is barely worth backing in an argument ... and the concept that it is a "balanced" card is downright comical. Let's be real here. This format would not have survived Griselbrand if he had been allowed to stay.
which really begs the question, should wotc be printing cards with edh in mind, or should they stick to their old method of we'll print whatever splashy thing we want.
I will miss Sundering Titan, not because I play it (I cut it a long time ago), but because now my opponents will not play it. Since I play Thada Adel, this just drops the number of good finishers I am likely to find in a typical opponent's deck.
If anyone is really complaining about Griselbrand being banned, they need to stop and think for a few minutes about what they're saying. Griselbrand is literally the most broken card that has ever been printed, if you're talking about the specific context of the Commander format. Black Lotus would be a more balanced card in Commander than Griselbrand. Ancestral Recall is not as broken as Griselbrand ... it only draws THREE cards, and Griselbrand draws TWENTY-EIGHT. I mean, you're playing 99 cards in your deck, and you start with 40 life. That means that if you put Griselbrand onto the field, you get to draw almost a third of your deck, if not a little more, immediately and for free. There are enough "free" spells (lesser Moxen, Urza-block land-untapping spells, alternate-casting-cost spells, etc.) to virtually guarantee that you have the opportunity to continue to play spells even though you may have tapped out to put Griselbrand into play. There are enough infinite combos that can be assembled with 2 or 3 cards that you can build your deck in such a way as to virtually guarantee that you draw one or more of them, AND the free/fast mana necessary to cast them, as soon as Griselbrand comes into play. Griselbrand is effectively a 1-card combo that represents approximately a third of the sum potential of your entire deck ... and if you can't come up with a list of 60-some cards that DON'T allow you to kill an entire table immediately upon resolving Griselbrand, you're just not trying hard enough, or you're being willfully obtuse and contrary.
And it's also a 7/7 flying lifelink (aka "when this creature enters combat, draw 7 cards"), which can be cheated into play though reanimation, among other strategies.
The concept that Griselbrand is anything less than the most powerful card in the history of the Commander format is barely worth backing in an argument ... and the concept that it is a "balanced" card is downright comical. Let's be real here. This format would not have survived Griselbrand if he had been allowed to stay.
Cabal Coffers and Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth makes Griselbrand even more degenerate. I was playing against my mates who just added Griselbrand into their Commander decks recently. In 1v1 games, I never stood a chance when Griselbrand resolved (I was playing a RG Tribal Hydras). In 4 player Chaos, whenever a guy casted Griselbrand, the game immediately switched to Archenemy mode. 3v1 and Griselbrand still won. Those games more or less convinced me the banhammer would be coming down soon if not later.
I'm sorry, sir, but I have to disagree with you. Just as with your experience, most of the decks I play against never played Sundering Titan. However once in a blue moon that one deck out of a hundred decks I played against in the month plays it, then it get's Master of Etherium'd or discarded and Reanimate'd or just hardcast off Thran Dynamo / Sol Ring, and then cloned or reanimated again. What happens? Everyone groans and the whole game goes out the window (especially since everything just gets worse when it is removed). It's not out-and-out banned in my playgroup simply because it hardly ever comes up! But when it does come up, it is always a problem.
Just because a card is not seeing play doesn't mean it should not be banned, especially since the reason it's not seeing play is because it sends the gamestate to hell and everyone really, really dislikes that, which is PRECISELY why it SHOULD be banned!
The bolded is the best assessment of this situation I've read.
Certain groups play with this banlist on top of their own group-enforced
lists. My playgroup has banned: sol ring, mana crypt, kiki-jiki, sensei's top,
spike weaver, demonic/vampiric tutor, rhystic study, bribery, consecrated
sphinx, phyrexian altar, ashnod's altar, lion's eye diamond, gaea's cradle,
glacial chasm and strip mine. These cards are all piled on the official EDH
banlist.
Basically anything that provides unfair card advantage, cards requiring an
exorbitant amount of time to resolve and cards that make "comboing out"
super easy to do. Oh, we also unbanned Kokopuffs!
I strongly encourage that you come up with/pitch your own banned card
list. It really streamlines a game and while an EDH game can often times
be resolved in less than fifteen minutes thanks to aggressive combo decks,
the games feel more rewarding to win.
I'm sorry but banning kiki-jiki?? Also rhystic study and glacial chasm seem extremely silly to ban.
Intelligent/experienced players will only treat rhystic study as a mana tax on spells, and glacial chasm wouldn't be a problem if your meta had a healthy dose of LD, which every meta should. Even without LD glacial chasm doesn't prevent loss of life.
But you are correct in that playgroups should definitely not be afraid to take additional bannings into their own hands; i'm just glad im not playing your playgroup, no offense.
Recent discussions here and elsewhere have made it clear that there seems to be a group of players who consider blue and control synonymous, as if they somehow started playing a game with four identical and "bad" colors that do nothing interesting because they just "turn men sideways" and then true, glorious blue, the only thinking person's color.
EDH decks
Marath, Will of the Wild
Sygg, River Cutthroat
Slobad, Goblin Tinkerer
Marchesa, the Black Rose
I'm sorry but banning kiki-jiki?? Also rhystic study and glacial chasm seem extremely silly to ban.
Intelligent/experienced players will only treat rhystic study as a mana tax on spells, and glacial chasm wouldn't be a problem if your meta had a healthy dose of LD--which every meta should.
It's hard to have a healthy dose of it if they ban it . . .
Exactly. This is why I hate house ban lists. People banning cards because they are too lazy to figure out how to play against them. Really banning a land and an enchantment? Last time I checked there was at least one card per set that destroys one of each. How many times we're disenchant/naturalize/stone rain plus their many many progenies reprinted? Come on! Don't be lazy players. Magic is fun because it's like an ever changing puzzle.
I'm sorry but banning kiki-jiki?? Also rhystic study and glacial chasm seem extremely silly to ban. Intelligent/experienced players will only treat rhystic study as a mana tax on spells, and glacial chasm wouldn't be a problem if your meta had a healthy dose of LD--which every meta should.
You're totally missing the point if you are going to make this into a "stupid"
player and "smart" player distinction.
This is about a group of players wanting to have a fun game without
cards that absorb lots of playtime and/or creates a degenerative
gamestate/unfun environment. Because our definition of a fun game
does not include many of the powerful cards you may play with does
not in any way diminish from the experience.
It seems to me like you are all equating a banlist to something that
restricts certain plays and chokes option, but what we see is a very
good opportunity to play with different cards and to be honest I got
tired of seeing so many demonic tutors, kiki-jiki instawins and the
hours and hours spent staring at the top three cards of your
library a la divining top.
If anything, the quality of our games have greatly improved without
hurting our playtime. Our "house" banlist was the best thing to happen to
the EDH environment in my region and I encourage everyone in a similar
situation to sit down with their friends and try to come up with their own
list.
If you can't understand this then it is your hang up.
why doesnt WotC handle it if they picked it up as a recognized format and changed the name from EDH to Commander?
It's a reconignized CASUAL format,and WotC feels right or wrong that the RC (which includes a guy working at WotC) are doing jsut a dandy job of handling it.
Sundering Titan can be placed in any deck, but it really shines in decks that blink/flicker
and decks that makes lots of tokens/copies of creatures. Infinite reflection, rite of replication,
clones, abuse it with dead-eye navigator, etc, etc. Pretty easy to see how it could become
unfun.
Griselbrand is such a no-brainer.
WUR Enduring Ideal RUW
GGG Stompy Crux GGG
-- Elder Dragon Highlander --
UBU
Grimgrin, Zombie HordeUBURWR
Jor Kadeen TronRWRBRU Sedris Beatdown URB
UUU Llawan, Empress of "No" UUU
WBW Vish Kal Tron WBW
GRG Thromok Token GRG
RRR Zo-Zu, Hater of Everything RRR
I'm sorry, sir, but I have to disagree with you. Just as with your experience, most of the decks I play against never played Sundering Titan. However once in a blue moon that one deck out of a hundred decks I played against in the month plays it, then it get's Master of Etherium'd or discarded and Reanimate'd or just hardcast off Thran Dynamo / Sol Ring, and then cloned or reanimated again. What happens? Everyone groans and the whole game goes out the window (especially since everything just gets worse when it is removed). It's not out-and-out banned in my playgroup simply because it hardly ever comes up! But when it does come up, it is always a problem.
Just because a card is not seeing play doesn't mean it should not be banned, especially since the reason it's not seeing play is because it sends the gamestate to hell and everyone really, really dislikes that, which is PRECISELY why it SHOULD be banned!
Certain groups play with this banlist on top of their own group-enforced
lists. My playgroup has banned: sol ring, mana crypt, kiki-jiki, sensei's top,
spike weaver, demonic/vampiric tutor, rhystic study, bribery, consecrated
sphinx, phyrexian altar, ashnod's altar, lion's eye diamond, gaea's cradle,
glacial chasm and strip mine. These cards are all piled on the official EDH
banlist.
Basically anything that provides unfair card advantage, cards requiring an
exorbitant amount of time to resolve and cards that make "comboing out"
super easy to do. Oh, we also unbanned Kokopuffs!
I strongly encourage that you come up with/pitch your own banned card
list. It really streamlines a game and while an EDH game can often times
be resolved in less than fifteen minutes thanks to aggressive combo decks,
the games feel more rewarding to win.
WUR Enduring Ideal RUW
GGG Stompy Crux GGG
-- Elder Dragon Highlander --
UBU
Grimgrin, Zombie HordeUBURWR
Jor Kadeen TronRWRBRU Sedris Beatdown URB
UUU Llawan, Empress of "No" UUU
WBW Vish Kal Tron WBW
GRG Thromok Token GRG
RRR Zo-Zu, Hater of Everything RRR
The whole point of EDH/Commander was to make a format that was not as competitive as the rest, a format that emphasized fun, group play.
The reason Sundering Titan was banned was because enough people were using it to be competitive and unfriendly instead of fun.
Griselbrand? Yeah, he was made for EDH, and so stupidly broken in that format it as ridiculous. Making cards for specific formats and then banning a short while later is an obvious design oversight by WOTC and has become increasingly common these days. It's highly annoying.
WAnglesW
WUBRGThe BroodGRBUW
WUGAllymillGUW
Made for EDH... seem much legacy coverage lately? Griselbrand is fantastic in reanimator and Sneak and Show. He just so happened to also be bonkers in Commander.
-Richard Dawkins
Competition and fun aren't mutually exclusive, and building a good deck isn't "unfriendly". I tend to feel that pulling punches in deck composition or choosing not to make a play because it would be "too good" is disrespectful to one's opponents - it operates on the assumption that your opponent isn't good enough to need the big guns, so you should beat them with a handicap. It's condescending, and condescension has no place in a friendly game.
And it's also a 7/7 flying lifelink (aka "when this creature enters combat, draw 7 cards"), which can be cheated into play though reanimation, among other strategies.
The concept that Griselbrand is anything less than the most powerful card in the history of the Commander format is barely worth backing in an argument ... and the concept that it is a "balanced" card is downright comical. Let's be real here. This format would not have survived Griselbrand if he had been allowed to stay.
Thanks to Gabgabdevo for the awesome sig image!
I'm always looking for foil Madcap Skills and Ghitu Fire-Eater, [trade thread link forthcoming]
I 100% agree with ya.
But a big part of this is how each individual is interacting with each other.
While I really enjoy to have strong/competitive opponents I totally dislike when they make really degenerate stuff (wich is allowed) while they're whining about other stuff (wich is allowed as well)...
Just for example: When s/o cast Tooth and Nail with it's entwine cost but don't like if it get's countered by s/o or s/o picks out the two best creatures cards out of his library as a reaction.
I mean in fact they whant that T&N reads like "you win the game"...
This kind of behaviour I really dislike.
My advice is to know all the people in your area good enough to decide if you whant to play with/against them. Mostly you allready know what kind of player you have in front of ya when you see the commander of the choice...
which really begs the question, should wotc be printing cards with edh in mind, or should they stick to their old method of we'll print whatever splashy thing we want.
Rith, Rhys, Ghave, Karador, Oona, Wrexial, Uril, Animar, Damia, Mimeoplasm
Check out http://www.mtgbrodeals.com/author/john-murphy/ for my EDH articles!
They just say it because he fit's perfectly.
If he was invent for Commander they wouldnt put it in a expansion set but in the next commander decks.
Cabal Coffers and Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth makes Griselbrand even more degenerate. I was playing against my mates who just added Griselbrand into their Commander decks recently. In 1v1 games, I never stood a chance when Griselbrand resolved (I was playing a RG Tribal Hydras). In 4 player Chaos, whenever a guy casted Griselbrand, the game immediately switched to Archenemy mode. 3v1 and Griselbrand still won. Those games more or less convinced me the banhammer would be coming down soon if not later.
Signature by Syndarion from Aeternal Studios!
[Deck/Primer] Knights in Legacy
[Deck] Darth Knights in Legacy
[Deck] Casual Knights in Legacy
[Deck/Primer] Modern Knights
[Deck/Primer] Modern Ninjas
LEGACY
Legacy Knights Variants WG,WU,WR,WB,W,B
Soldiers Stompy W
NinjaStill UB
FOWless Merfolk UW
Aggro Elves G
MODERN
Modern Knights Variants WG,BR
Modern Ninjas Variants UB,UG,UW,UWR
Modern Kithkins WR,W
The bolded is the best assessment of this situation I've read.
EDH is a CASUAL format. Get with the program, or GTFO.
http://www.wizards.com/magic/magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/other/06202012a
here the link i even clicked on the banned list by format and clicked commander and neither of these cards were on this. so whats up with this?
cuz WotC doesn't handle the offical commander ban list,the one they have listed on the websit is I think for MTGO
the Rules commitee at http://mtgcommander.net/rules.php
I'm sorry but banning kiki-jiki?? Also rhystic study and glacial chasm seem extremely silly to ban.
Intelligent/experienced players will only treat rhystic study as a mana tax on spells, and glacial chasm wouldn't be a problem if your meta had a healthy dose of LD, which every meta should. Even without LD glacial chasm doesn't prevent loss of life.
But you are correct in that playgroups should definitely not be afraid to take additional bannings into their own hands; i'm just glad im not playing your playgroup, no offense.
http://stat.rumandmonkey.com/tests/1/6/5261/20801.jpg
EDH decks
Marath, Will of the Wild
Sygg, River Cutthroat
Slobad, Goblin Tinkerer
Marchesa, the Black Rose
It's hard to have a healthy dose of it if they ban it . . .
Exactly. This is why I hate house ban lists. People banning cards because they are too lazy to figure out how to play against them. Really banning a land and an enchantment? Last time I checked there was at least one card per set that destroys one of each. How many times we're disenchant/naturalize/stone rain plus their many many progenies reprinted? Come on! Don't be lazy players. Magic is fun because it's like an ever changing puzzle.
You're totally missing the point if you are going to make this into a "stupid"
player and "smart" player distinction.
This is about a group of players wanting to have a fun game without
cards that absorb lots of playtime and/or creates a degenerative
gamestate/unfun environment. Because our definition of a fun game
does not include many of the powerful cards you may play with does
not in any way diminish from the experience.
It seems to me like you are all equating a banlist to something that
restricts certain plays and chokes option, but what we see is a very
good opportunity to play with different cards and to be honest I got
tired of seeing so many demonic tutors, kiki-jiki instawins and the
hours and hours spent staring at the top three cards of your
library a la divining top.
If anything, the quality of our games have greatly improved without
hurting our playtime. Our "house" banlist was the best thing to happen to
the EDH environment in my region and I encourage everyone in a similar
situation to sit down with their friends and try to come up with their own
list.
If you can't understand this then it is your hang up.
WUR Enduring Ideal RUW
GGG Stompy Crux GGG
-- Elder Dragon Highlander --
UBU
Grimgrin, Zombie HordeUBURWR
Jor Kadeen TronRWRBRU Sedris Beatdown URB
UUU Llawan, Empress of "No" UUU
WBW Vish Kal Tron WBW
GRG Thromok Token GRG
RRR Zo-Zu, Hater of Everything RRR
It's a reconignized CASUAL format,and WotC feels right or wrong that the RC (which includes a guy working at WotC) are doing jsut a dandy job of handling it.