Speaking as someone who has played Mind Sculptor in EDH in the past: It's a lot worse in multiplayer than in 1v1 where it can easily dominate games. Its reputation from 1v1 also carries over, so people tend to be overly-scared of it and will try to kill it often with even more prejudice than most planeswalkers.
This one kind of interests me, because people have all sorts of opinions, with some people going so far as to say JtMS is an actively bad card in Commander. He clearly is not as strong as he was at the time in Standard or as he is in Modern, Vintage or Legacy, but his functionality as a control piece is very limited in a multiplayer format. I would even go so far as to say that he is probably not the right card for the majority of EDH decks that might run him. His impact to cost ratio just isn't high enough in a multiplayer game. With this in mind, I recently traded away one of my two copies, picking up a literal stack of other cards which I think will serve much better across a much wider range of decks.
This is not to say jdtsd is wrong. First off, he wants what he wands. Second, his might be one of the decks where JtMS has strong enough synergy with the deck's goals and the other cards in the deck that it is a very good card there. The one deck where I currently play it, I don't see anything else likely to replace it any time soon, even though it's not one of the most key cards in the deck.
I really didn't want to see this thread degenerate into a slam of people playing old, pricey cards.
Oof. This is not what I intended. People ought to play what they want, but, I find that there is some truth to being able to dunk players by having expensive cards, and that may not be to the player's taste. That is all.
If people use their expensive cards to build competitive, killer decks, sure. That's lame, unless they are playing against other cEDH players. Are there some people who do that? Sure. We should rightly call them a-holes.
On the other hand, there are people who simply have deeper card pools, either because they've been playing for a long time and picked up a lot of stuff along the way, or because they've paid for them (or both, I guess). The question is, what do they do with those cards? Are they playing 100-card singleton Legacy, or are they playing decks built around a bunch of cards that can't complete in Vintage or Legacy or even Modern (were they in the Modern card pool)? Not everybody has original duals or good fetches, which is frankly unfortunate, but not everyone who does have them uses them to build T4 combo-wombo instawin decks, either. For example, one of my decks includes Badlands, Underground Sea, Volcanic Island, the corresponding Ravnica duals, Bloodstained Mire, Polluted Delta and Cavern of Souls. Does that give me an advantage over some player who has a bunch of CIPT duals from recent standard sets and Commander precons? Sure. But fact is, the deck in question is still a vampire tribal deck commanded by Garza Zol, Plague Queen. Yep, I might use my fetches to get an Unlimited or Revised dual land, but my T1 play (if I have one) is still gonna be something like Blade of the Bloodchief or Guul Draz Assassin. If a strongly-thematic, combat-based tribal deck headed by 7-mana beater counts as picking on the scrubs just because it has a strong mana base and a few other pricey cards (Vampiric Tutor being the most pricey outside the manabase, and chosen because it was obviously the most thematic), I dunno what to say. My other vampire deck - Edgar Markov - has no orignial duals and only one fetch, but it has a much higher win rate - and a tendency to win a lot quicker - than my decks including more pricey stuff, simply because Edgar is a vastly more powerful commander, even when (as the case with my build) the deck isn't based around all the 1-2 drop vampires and swarming the field with vamp tokens.
I really didn't want to see this thread degenerate into a slam of people playing old, pricey cards. This is exactly the format in which those cards can be played; in fact, it was designed in part to give people a format in which those cards could be played, because things like Invoke Prejudice and All Hallows Eve and Moat are not viable Legacy/Vintage cards. They only work in a less competitive, more social setting. Heck, it was originally based around the Elder Dragons from Legends, which are some of the least cost-effective cards ever printed.
Are some of the old cards pretty over-powered? Sure. You can say the same thing about much later cards, including many Storm and Dredge cards. And let's be real here, what's really scarier, Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale or a tuned Storm deck? And are some of the old cards hard for most players to access? Sure. Heck, I only have a lot of the old stuff I have because I started playing Magic within a few months of the original printings, and even though I have more disposable income than the average player, there's no way I'm going to buy cards that cost more than my monthly mortgage payment.
Having a deeper card pool gives you more options, and sometimes more power, than is available to a player who doesn't have the same resources, but that really isn't an issue in this format unless you are playing it competitively, which is not what it was designed to be. You can play old and pricey stuff, but you don't need that stuff to play and to do fine. Many of my decks have ABU duals and old cards, and they don't have significantly better win percentages than my decks which just have more recent cards and Ravnica duals. I think my Brudiclad and Edgar Markov decks - neither of which has anything from the Reserved list - have higher win percentages than my most pricey decks (Tazri 5-color allies and Kurkesh, both of which are pricey mostly because of the mana bases, with Kurkesh including Mishra's Workshop). The beauty of this format is that through the nature of multiplayer dynamics, politics and just luck of the draw, a player who has a well-built deck consisting mostly of junk rares and staples can pull out games against players with much pricier decks.
Edited to add an example:
Recently I played in a game with a guy who is fairly new to Commander, and to Magic in general. I am pretty sure he's been playing less than a year. He had two decks. One of them was a very fast Gishath dino tribal deck. It consisted mostly of dinos, green ramp, haste enablers and cards that made him resistant to boardwipes (things like Boros Charm, Rootborn Defenses and Heroic Intervention), plus a few staple removal cards and some recent green card draw (Beast Whisperer, Lifecrafter's Bestiary, Rishkar's Expertise). His manabase was mostly basic lands and a few CIPT duals and stuff like Evolving Wilds. I was playing my Lord Windgrace deck which, while not particularly pricey, still probably cost at least about 10x what his deck cost(I don't think he ran a single card approaching $10) and someone else was playing a superfriends build, and the Gishath player was more than holding his own.
Well, trading my Moat means I don't have one now for my Lyra deck. On the other hand, I got a Judge foil Gaea's Cradle with it, so I can't regret it too much.
But yeah, probably Moat. All the others I really want, I have. (My darling spoils me so much, and for my birthday and Christmas and our anniversary, he always gets me Magic cards. This year, he got me the Masterpiece Teferi and Liliana... <3)
Aside from the 3 ABU duals that I can never afford now.... The Abyss Love everything about the card and I'll definitely never own one.
The Abyss is already in my Nath stax deck. I slotted it in when black Braids got banned from being in the 99 when Banned as a Commander went to just Banned. It's not Braids, but it's very solid. I think Nether Void would complement it wonderfully.
I only play one stax deck, and I only play that occasionally since it isn't a favored playstyle among the people I usually play with, but I figure if I am going to have just one, it might as well be a damned good one, and I've been playing and tuning it long enough that I don't think there are very many cards that would actually make it tangibly better (as opposed to merely different in some manner that might be advantageous but would also be less effective in some other aspect of how the deck currently functions). Nether Void is the one exception that comes to mind, probably largely because I used to own it as much as anything.
Simple question. Name a card that you don't own but wish you did so you could play it in a Commander deck (as opposed to wanting it for a collection or to sell or something), and explain why you would like to have that card.
For me, it's Nether Void. I used to have one, pulled from a pack back in the day. When I dropped out of magic around the time of Weatherlight, I sold off my Moxen and my Black Lotus, but I kept most of the rest of my cards. When I got back into Magic and started playing Commander (right before Innistrad) I sold and traded off a lot of old stuff that was now pretty valuable in order to catch up on the years of cool cards I missed out on. Some of it, like Bazaar of Baghdad, Library of Alexandria, Time Walk and a bunch of copies of Force of Will, I don't miss at all, but I do wish I hadn't gotten rid of Nether Void, because it turns out it would go perfectly into my single Stax deck (Nath). I figured I could always pick up another copy some day if I really wanted it, but I never got around to it, and the way cards on the reserved list have shot up in value, I doubt I ever will now.
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This one kind of interests me, because people have all sorts of opinions, with some people going so far as to say JtMS is an actively bad card in Commander. He clearly is not as strong as he was at the time in Standard or as he is in Modern, Vintage or Legacy, but his functionality as a control piece is very limited in a multiplayer format. I would even go so far as to say that he is probably not the right card for the majority of EDH decks that might run him. His impact to cost ratio just isn't high enough in a multiplayer game. With this in mind, I recently traded away one of my two copies, picking up a literal stack of other cards which I think will serve much better across a much wider range of decks.
This is not to say jdtsd is wrong. First off, he wants what he wands. Second, his might be one of the decks where JtMS has strong enough synergy with the deck's goals and the other cards in the deck that it is a very good card there. The one deck where I currently play it, I don't see anything else likely to replace it any time soon, even though it's not one of the most key cards in the deck.
If people use their expensive cards to build competitive, killer decks, sure. That's lame, unless they are playing against other cEDH players. Are there some people who do that? Sure. We should rightly call them a-holes.
On the other hand, there are people who simply have deeper card pools, either because they've been playing for a long time and picked up a lot of stuff along the way, or because they've paid for them (or both, I guess). The question is, what do they do with those cards? Are they playing 100-card singleton Legacy, or are they playing decks built around a bunch of cards that can't complete in Vintage or Legacy or even Modern (were they in the Modern card pool)? Not everybody has original duals or good fetches, which is frankly unfortunate, but not everyone who does have them uses them to build T4 combo-wombo instawin decks, either. For example, one of my decks includes Badlands, Underground Sea, Volcanic Island, the corresponding Ravnica duals, Bloodstained Mire, Polluted Delta and Cavern of Souls. Does that give me an advantage over some player who has a bunch of CIPT duals from recent standard sets and Commander precons? Sure. But fact is, the deck in question is still a vampire tribal deck commanded by Garza Zol, Plague Queen. Yep, I might use my fetches to get an Unlimited or Revised dual land, but my T1 play (if I have one) is still gonna be something like Blade of the Bloodchief or Guul Draz Assassin. If a strongly-thematic, combat-based tribal deck headed by 7-mana beater counts as picking on the scrubs just because it has a strong mana base and a few other pricey cards (Vampiric Tutor being the most pricey outside the manabase, and chosen because it was obviously the most thematic), I dunno what to say. My other vampire deck - Edgar Markov - has no orignial duals and only one fetch, but it has a much higher win rate - and a tendency to win a lot quicker - than my decks including more pricey stuff, simply because Edgar is a vastly more powerful commander, even when (as the case with my build) the deck isn't based around all the 1-2 drop vampires and swarming the field with vamp tokens.
Are some of the old cards pretty over-powered? Sure. You can say the same thing about much later cards, including many Storm and Dredge cards. And let's be real here, what's really scarier, Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale or a tuned Storm deck? And are some of the old cards hard for most players to access? Sure. Heck, I only have a lot of the old stuff I have because I started playing Magic within a few months of the original printings, and even though I have more disposable income than the average player, there's no way I'm going to buy cards that cost more than my monthly mortgage payment.
Having a deeper card pool gives you more options, and sometimes more power, than is available to a player who doesn't have the same resources, but that really isn't an issue in this format unless you are playing it competitively, which is not what it was designed to be. You can play old and pricey stuff, but you don't need that stuff to play and to do fine. Many of my decks have ABU duals and old cards, and they don't have significantly better win percentages than my decks which just have more recent cards and Ravnica duals. I think my Brudiclad and Edgar Markov decks - neither of which has anything from the Reserved list - have higher win percentages than my most pricey decks (Tazri 5-color allies and Kurkesh, both of which are pricey mostly because of the mana bases, with Kurkesh including Mishra's Workshop). The beauty of this format is that through the nature of multiplayer dynamics, politics and just luck of the draw, a player who has a well-built deck consisting mostly of junk rares and staples can pull out games against players with much pricier decks.
Edited to add an example:
Recently I played in a game with a guy who is fairly new to Commander, and to Magic in general. I am pretty sure he's been playing less than a year. He had two decks. One of them was a very fast Gishath dino tribal deck. It consisted mostly of dinos, green ramp, haste enablers and cards that made him resistant to boardwipes (things like Boros Charm, Rootborn Defenses and Heroic Intervention), plus a few staple removal cards and some recent green card draw (Beast Whisperer, Lifecrafter's Bestiary, Rishkar's Expertise). His manabase was mostly basic lands and a few CIPT duals and stuff like Evolving Wilds. I was playing my Lord Windgrace deck which, while not particularly pricey, still probably cost at least about 10x what his deck cost(I don't think he ran a single card approaching $10) and someone else was playing a superfriends build, and the Gishath player was more than holding his own.
He sounds like a keeper, for sure.
The Abyss is already in my Nath stax deck. I slotted it in when black Braids got banned from being in the 99 when Banned as a Commander went to just Banned. It's not Braids, but it's very solid. I think Nether Void would complement it wonderfully.
I only play one stax deck, and I only play that occasionally since it isn't a favored playstyle among the people I usually play with, but I figure if I am going to have just one, it might as well be a damned good one, and I've been playing and tuning it long enough that I don't think there are very many cards that would actually make it tangibly better (as opposed to merely different in some manner that might be advantageous but would also be less effective in some other aspect of how the deck currently functions). Nether Void is the one exception that comes to mind, probably largely because I used to own it as much as anything.
For me, it's Nether Void. I used to have one, pulled from a pack back in the day. When I dropped out of magic around the time of Weatherlight, I sold off my Moxen and my Black Lotus, but I kept most of the rest of my cards. When I got back into Magic and started playing Commander (right before Innistrad) I sold and traded off a lot of old stuff that was now pretty valuable in order to catch up on the years of cool cards I missed out on. Some of it, like Bazaar of Baghdad, Library of Alexandria, Time Walk and a bunch of copies of Force of Will, I don't miss at all, but I do wish I hadn't gotten rid of Nether Void, because it turns out it would go perfectly into my single Stax deck (Nath). I figured I could always pick up another copy some day if I really wanted it, but I never got around to it, and the way cards on the reserved list have shot up in value, I doubt I ever will now.