General Tazri is terrible design! Sure, you could build an ally tribal deck, but the best build is food chain combo, so why would you do anything else? It's just a linear boring commander!
You've always got a choice in deck construction. No one is making you put in a combo. If you didn't have a combo to dig to, you'd probably be more inclined to actually cast your madness cards, because there's no magic bullet at the end of the rainbow. Granted, most madness cards aren't super strong, but when they don't cost a card and they all have flash, most of them are at least decent.
Unless you're playing cEDH, every deck has to intentionally limit its own power in some way. That's hardly unique to Anje.
General tazri supports a tribal ally strategy innately. Every bit of text on the card is supporting an ally tribal strategy. If you show a newer player general tazri that's what they'll think the card is about. You can build a general tazri deck taking full advantage of its abilities and not even think of including food chain combos.
Anje is not this way. Within seconds of reading anje's text almost every player is thinking "so I run every madness card that's legal as a redraw to good cards". That's what the card was clearly designed to do, and it ends up being miserable in practice.
It's like saying "you can just not run wheels in leovold" yeah but in practice everyone is running wheels in leovold. (I am not saying anje is banworthy)
Or to take it to a bigger extreme, you could not run wheels in a nekusar deck, but then why are you playing a nekusar deck?
Generals lead you to deck construction decisions by what they support, nekusar supports wheels, titania supports land sacrifices, karlov supports life gain triggers. Anje supports playing the equivalent of a 20 card deck. The deck anje was clearly built to be the commander of, is not fun or interesting in the slightest.
To put it another way, you don't just have to make the deck weaker, you have to go and deliberately exclude synergy with your general to make room for weaker cards with anje. That's not good design. It feels awful to do this.
So don't do that. Again, you are not forced to do anything. You don't have to run all 40 madness, you don't have to run all the tutors, and you don't have to run wheels. You're complaining that your choices have taken you somewhere you don't want to be, so choose a different path.
But why are you running anje if you aren't going to be taking advantage of the obvious things she does? Generals tend to have things they support in more "obvious" ways, like titania and lands that sacrifice themselves. You can build them other ways, but ... why?
She encourages running every madness card because they are all 0 mana redraws, and then the raw card power of a lot of legal cards encourage you to run those as well. When you run the stuff anje encourages, you end up with almost no deck slots left, and then you have limited choices. Sure, you could reanimate something that isn't worldgorger dragon, but nothing will be even close to as powerful, so you are just adding unnecessary extra steps to your win when you have almost no card slots to work with.
If you run all the madness cards and then a reasonable number of lands, you are left with about 24 card slots(35 land, 40 madness cards, anje), you can reduce that even further because there are a few cards you are probably including no matter what, like wheel of fortune, vampiric tutor, demonic tutor, gamble. By the time you are through, you are down to only maybe 15 cards to pick and include. It's hard to assemble any sort of fair, fun gameplan with so few card slots to play around with, you are almost forced into a combo win.
When you play anje in commander, optimal, winning deck construction and play patterns involve completely ignoring the text on all your madness cards. They are just blank, 0 mana redraws. You don't care what text is on them. They could read lose the game and you are still running every copy to get down to the tiny number of cards you care about.
It is a madness based general that makes you ignore what your madness cards do.
It encourages playing the exact same way every single game, cycle through every madness card you draw until you can't anymore and hope you drew your win.
Get to three mana -> cast anje -> cycle every card until you can't anymore -> hope you have your win in the top ~50 cards of your deck
The card does not encourage decision making, it does not encourage clever deck construction. It does not encourage interactive game. In fact, you might not run any interaction at all in an anje deck because you know you are going to hit your winning combo so consistently that you won't have mana to spare on bothering to disrupt anything your opponents do.
The worst part is, you could see how incredibly fun this card could have been if it wasn't so absurdly good at reducing your overall deck size. If you had a plethora of madness options and treating your graveyard as your hand, you could have a great time as you cycle through your deck at a reasonable rate. That's not the winning move though.
I give this horrible card an F- for it's execution and wasted potential.
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General tazri supports a tribal ally strategy innately. Every bit of text on the card is supporting an ally tribal strategy. If you show a newer player general tazri that's what they'll think the card is about. You can build a general tazri deck taking full advantage of its abilities and not even think of including food chain combos.
Anje is not this way. Within seconds of reading anje's text almost every player is thinking "so I run every madness card that's legal as a redraw to good cards". That's what the card was clearly designed to do, and it ends up being miserable in practice.
It's like saying "you can just not run wheels in leovold" yeah but in practice everyone is running wheels in leovold. (I am not saying anje is banworthy)
Or to take it to a bigger extreme, you could not run wheels in a nekusar deck, but then why are you playing a nekusar deck?
Generals lead you to deck construction decisions by what they support, nekusar supports wheels, titania supports land sacrifices, karlov supports life gain triggers. Anje supports playing the equivalent of a 20 card deck. The deck anje was clearly built to be the commander of, is not fun or interesting in the slightest.
To put it another way, you don't just have to make the deck weaker, you have to go and deliberately exclude synergy with your general to make room for weaker cards with anje. That's not good design. It feels awful to do this.
But why are you running anje if you aren't going to be taking advantage of the obvious things she does? Generals tend to have things they support in more "obvious" ways, like titania and lands that sacrifice themselves. You can build them other ways, but ... why?
She encourages running every madness card because they are all 0 mana redraws, and then the raw card power of a lot of legal cards encourage you to run those as well. When you run the stuff anje encourages, you end up with almost no deck slots left, and then you have limited choices. Sure, you could reanimate something that isn't worldgorger dragon, but nothing will be even close to as powerful, so you are just adding unnecessary extra steps to your win when you have almost no card slots to work with.
When you play anje in commander, optimal, winning deck construction and play patterns involve completely ignoring the text on all your madness cards. They are just blank, 0 mana redraws. You don't care what text is on them. They could read lose the game and you are still running every copy to get down to the tiny number of cards you care about.
It is a madness based general that makes you ignore what your madness cards do.
It encourages playing the exact same way every single game, cycle through every madness card you draw until you can't anymore and hope you drew your win.
Get to three mana -> cast anje -> cycle every card until you can't anymore -> hope you have your win in the top ~50 cards of your deck
The card does not encourage decision making, it does not encourage clever deck construction. It does not encourage interactive game. In fact, you might not run any interaction at all in an anje deck because you know you are going to hit your winning combo so consistently that you won't have mana to spare on bothering to disrupt anything your opponents do.
The worst part is, you could see how incredibly fun this card could have been if it wasn't so absurdly good at reducing your overall deck size. If you had a plethora of madness options and treating your graveyard as your hand, you could have a great time as you cycle through your deck at a reasonable rate. That's not the winning move though.
I give this horrible card an F- for it's execution and wasted potential.