If you are following some arbitery goal when playing you are not playing the game. You are doing something else. To define trying to winn within the bounderies of the game as 'competetive' is pure idiotecy.
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I have dyslexia, no I am not going to spell check for you, yes you have to live with the horrors of it.
If you are following some arbitery goal when playing you are not playing the game. You are doing something else. To define trying to winn within the bounderies of the game as 'competetive' is pure idiotecy.
I refer to the people you are referring to as Farmvillers. They hate it. I tell them it is really no offense, I used to love Farmville.
You are very much reading in a lot more than I put into that, also I don't really appreciate being called a troll as that is what I take meaning from someone calling something I posted as 'bait'.
EDIT: However I am willing to bet that I am the one in error here in that I typically see the word Competitive bandied around here as an opposite to Casual and not as a descriptor for a highest level of Commander deck, so I responded to it as the former and not the latter, my bad.
I don't think you're a troll, I just think that your post was misleading, whether intentional or not. I hate to see a good conversation get lost in the weeds because people are talking past each other, using different definitions.
competitive is *kind of* in opposition to casual, however we're talking about casual vs competitive in terms of deckbuilding and in terms of deckplaying.
In the first category, obviously different people like very different things. It's on a spectrum, though - no one is building decks that are completely nonfunctional (i.e. 99 wastes + atogatog), so everyone's obviously building their decks to be competitive to SOME degree. Some by imposing certain restrictions on themselves, some by just not seeking out competitive lists, or not being aware of them. A lot of people prefer a lower level of power in deckbuilding because of the variety it allows, as well as the inclusiveness to more players, and the greater possibilities for interesting games and interactions. Personally I count myself in that group. Allowing competitive-power decks in a game with casual-power decks severely cuts down on all of those benefits to casual deckbuilding, which is why I'm against it.
In the second category, there's also a spectrum but it's less contentious. Besides a few people building the aforementioned no-wincon group hug decks, I don't think many people aren't trying to play well, and few people get mad at someone for seriously considering their moves carefully and trying to play well, as long as it's not holding up the game excessively. I think there are people that don't think too carefully about their moves, and definitely in a format with so many legal cards and so much going on in some games it's difficult to keep track of all the possible interactions, but I think most people try to make their best move, within the limits of their abilities.
A small playrgoup of 8 people in my old home town played commander on and off for about 3 years. Between once every two weaks to several times a weak. It was a great social group and I had several friends in that group. I had not played commander in a long time, but I would bring my old commander decks. It was great fun.
After about 2 years of very cassual and fun play they started upgrading their decks. Within 8 months one person bought a tier 1 deck, all the card online. After that it was an arms race for a short while. But the more competetive the decks got the less fun it was to play. After 4 months they had stopped playing commander.
While anecdotal, I think this is a good example of fun vs competetivness in commander. I have not had luck brininging all the players to one location after that, even for doing something else. Commander was a great social activaty for them, but the bubble burst.
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I have dyslexia, no I am not going to spell check for you, yes you have to live with the horrors of it.
If you are following some arbitery goal when playing you are not playing the game. You are doing something else. To define trying to winn within the bounderies of the game as 'competetive' is pure idiotecy.
I refer to the people you are referring to as Farmvillers. They hate it. I tell them it is really no offense, I used to love Farmville.
Calling them farmvillers is quite offensive though. At least when they are offended by it. Farmvil is a great way in many ways (one of the most played games in thr world, small treshhold for entering, great for passing time etc.) I have seen atraxa players who try to get as many counters as they can. I am unsure if this is because they think it is better or not. I have myself at one time fallen to a similar thing when I had Kalonial Hydra , vigor some creatures and Blasphemous Act in hand.
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I have dyslexia, no I am not going to spell check for you, yes you have to live with the horrors of it.
When I first started playing magic (circa odyssey), I had what I thought was the best deck I could build at the time. In retrospect it was a godawful trainwreck - 4 colors, little fixing, huge CMCs, lifegain-only spells...I wish I could see the decklist now for a laugh. But at the time it was super fun finding new cards I'd never heard of, adding to my deck, turning it into the horrible monstrosity that it was. I enjoyed the process of "improving" my deck, like I enjoy leveling up in an RPG. It really was a lot of fun.
I think for new players, the format starts off like that. You don't know what you're doing, but you see cool cards and cool ideas and you start to cobble something together. You want to take your ideas and then make it better and better. Of course, better and better, given enough time, eventually leads to Tazri combo or whatever. The inevitable evolution of a commander player ends with either the conscious decision that they want to restrict their power level voluntarily, or they're going to end up playing a top-tier deck.
I think that idea that you should voluntarily limit your own power level is difficult to swallow. It's kind of in opposition to everything that the rest of the game is about, and certainly what other formats are about. It's also just unsatisfying to stop improving, the progression of improving your deck and doing better and better really appeals to that lizard brain and goal-oriented thinking. I think some people can't shake the idea that their goal is to get better and better, and so they end up building decks that result in games that aren't fun anymore. The unfortunate truth about playing a casual format casually, as an experienced and proficient player, is that it takes discipline, and it takes deep thought, not simply "how do I make this deck better?" but "how can I still find ways to enjoy deckbuilding while also creating decks that lead to enjoyable games?" And that's a really hard question that I think few people face head-on.
Other..
Obviously I would communicate, find out what decks they have and why they play "bad" decks (without insulting them or their decks).
Usually people don't have access to cards or don't have money.
Luckily I always have my trading map which has a ton of cheap but good cards. That might help people to find some new tricks.
If you are following some arbitery goal when playing you are not playing the game. You are doing something else. To define trying to winn within the bounderies of the game as 'competetive' is pure idiotecy.
I refer to the people you are referring to as Farmvillers. They hate it. I tell them it is really no offense, I used to love Farmville.
Calling them farmvillers is quite offensive though. At least when they are offended by it. Farmvil is a great way in many ways (one of the most played games in thr world, small treshhold for entering, great for passing time etc.) I have seen atraxa players who try to get as many counters as they can. I am unsure if this is because they think it is better or not. I have myself at one time fallen to a similar thing when I had Kalonial Hydra , vigor some creatures and Blasphemous Act in hand.
Offensive? Really? You find it offensive? Even the people I say it to don't really get offended. In fact we kind of laugh about it.
If you are following some arbitery goal when playing you are not playing the game. You are doing something else. To define trying to winn within the bounderies of the game as 'competetive' is pure idiotecy.
What do you mean with following arbitrary rules?
If that just means "not official rules" then I want to inform you that this is what EDH is all about: People started making up their own rules because they didn't like the normal kind of games.
There is a difference between playing to win and playing to have fun.
If I want to crush someone, I'll pull out a win on my third turn against a noob. I won, but it wasn't fun. I lurked in, seeing their deck while they was playing against his friend and already knew they didn't stand a chance. I didn't need to play them to know I would win. When I challenged them with my best deck, and crushed their morale, it was an empty win.
If I see a noob playing with their friend, more likely than not, I'll ask if not to duel, but to join in next game. Depending on how close they seem (the chance they'll instantly try to double team me) will decide the power level of my deck. Regardless, I will not double team the weaker of the two, I will not play my best deck with out giving plenty of warning, nor will I play something like Statis.
I would much rather have a close game, than a dominated game. I'd rather learn something through the loss, than to have an obvious win everyone knew I'd have turns ago.
Mind you, I've been playing for a looooong time. I've played things competitively to the point where all the joy of the game was gone. I quit that game cold turkey and have rarely played it since. My favorite deck to play against a large group has no built in win condition. It is liberating! Sure, I have an infect commander, but no, I don't play Blightsteel Colossus. I've lost on the opponent's third turn and I've won on my third turn with a deck comprised entirely out of commons. I know I'm good, but I know that there is always someone out there better than I am.
Which gets me back to the topic at hand. Maybe the people with the "weak" commanders are sentimental. Maybe they are lulling you into a false sense of security (I sure as heck have a commander like that). Maybe they are just starting off, or just came back and have a limited card pool.
THAT is where trading comes in. I used to play with a bunch of elementary school kids. I could trounce them easily, with most of my decks. Heck, I made decks one weekend out of spare cards that were STILL better than most of the decks they were using. So I:
pulled my punches by giving myself extra challenges (ex. I can't _____ someone('s permanent) unless they have ____(mine) first)
after duels I would offer to look at their deck and check out their mana curve/ratio/general speed and such.
supply them with commons that would greatly aid their deck (introducing Fog to their meta was one of the best moves I probably did).
Taught them to keep what they weren't using as cards to use for trading.
Traded with them by LGS prices, not by what I needed (2 commons for my uncommon, 2 uncommons for my rare, 3 rares for my mythic, unless it was crap, then it was worth a rare, and yes that means 12 commons would get a decent mythic [obviously things of theirs worth more were I made sure they received market value [the kid that wasn't using the foreign Chromanticore got ten dollars market value worth of my cards]
Introduced Eldrazi, indestructible, and removal through trading. Sure I knew how to deal with all of those things, but someone with their Terra Stomper all high and mighty suddenly had to deal with Victim of the Night.
Sure, most of them didn't learn everything. I tried teaching them counterspell and out of the literal blue I had someone draw into one and try to "counter" my creature that had been on the field for three turns. That was an afternoon. The point is that I upped the meta a little. Okay I upped their meta a lot. It still wasn't to "my level" most of the time. So I met them halfway.
It was great to watch them grow and successfully assess and deal with new situations. I remember the first time one of them pulled out Giant Adephage and got two tokens from it and having to figure out a way to deal with it. That's the thing: we play this game because we like its style, but just like the Gatewatch, it isn't fun when they always win, sometimes it is more interesting to lose than to win (like the time I took my burn deck up against a Tolarian Academy deck with moxes and the like. You best believe I lost. It was spectacular).
So um, TL;DR:
Trade with them, and look for teachable moments. To quote Miley Cyrus:" It's not about how fast you get there [to the end of the game], it's the climb [aka the experience of the match]!"
I think some of you are getting the wrong idea about me. I work hard at building killer decks, that is not the same as "building to win as soon as possible". If I did, I'd never play a deck that couldn't have Islands. This does not mean I'm going to fumble around and durdle for three turns with a Fertilid and Solemn Simulacrum either. I'm aggressive, I will attack the players that try to durdle around and turtle up, usually because these decks have a better late game than my cheap burn and aggressive dudes like Geralf's Messenger + Glistening Oil. But here's the kicker - nothing I do isn't inherently "unfair". Not even Contamination lock is a surefire thing, and that's about the closest I've got from "douche mode".
I fully admit that I am by far the most competitive/strongest player among my friends. They know it too, we talk about it frequently. I've been playing this game since 4th Ed/Ice Age, that's a long time to have been involved with the same hobby.
For those that missed it, this is what I'm currently playing: http://tappedout.net/mtg-decks/alesha-cube-draft-cmdr/ <--- literally can't even plan a pre-game strategy as I don't even know the contents of my own deck until we start. But I know what I can do with the cards in general, and I will play them to the fullest extent that I can.
I think that idea that you should voluntarily limit your own power level is difficult to swallow. It's kind of in opposition to everything that the rest of the game is about, and certainly what other formats are about. It's also just unsatisfying to stop improving, the progression of improving your deck and doing better and better really appeals to that lizard brain and goal-oriented thinking. I think some people can't shake the idea that their goal is to get better and better, and so they end up building decks that result in games that aren't fun anymore. The unfortunate truth about playing a casual format casually, as an experienced and proficient player, is that it takes discipline, and it takes deep thought, not simply "how do I make this deck better?" but "how can I still find ways to enjoy deckbuilding while also creating decks that lead to enjoyable games?" And that's a really hard question that I think few people face head-on.
No. It's not my responsibility to limit my power level because you can't handle it. We all have access to the same card pool, you know your deck better than I do. If you know a strategy is extra good against you, it's up to you to build counter-measures to that strategy into your deck. If you don't, you're accepting you're going to lose to whatever strategy that is that you're extra susceptible to. That's like knowing you get awful gas mileage and choosing to skip over the gas station to travel 300 miles, then getting mad when you ran out of gas halfway there.
This is a social format, but it's also a responsible one. Attempting to ostracize a player because they beat you is as much immature and anti-social as the guy with power nine that beats up on middle school kids. Take responsibility for your deck's weaknesses and learn to cope, even minimize them. You don't need that fifteenth six drop as much as you could have fielded a much lower to the ground response or other means of disrupting that opponent. This you can do regardless what price point you're playing at. And if you don't know what kind of response you could have used? Ask. I can't speak for everyone, but people know me as a sort of walking encyclopedia of Magic cards, I can come up with a card better for the situation for almost anything you're in.
If you are following some arbitery goal when playing you are not playing the game. You are doing something else. To define trying to winn within the bounderies of the game as 'competetive' is pure idiotecy.
Just seconding this. It's all well and good if you "want to see how many times you can activate Divining Top in a single game", cool for you. But this is still a game and the end result is one person winning and the others...not winning. To believe otherwise is dishonest to yourself and your motives to the game.
I tend to be a stronger player than most of my playgroups. That being said, I have a variety of decks at different power levels. I tend to point out "answer cards" that people should be running in their decks anyways to stop combos and stax stuff (things like krosan grip, tormod's crypt, return to dust, aura of silence, etc). I tend to play mid-ling decks that are fun while providing play and card suggestions to them to improve their game so I can steadily climb them up to a level where I can use stronger decks against them and have it feel like a challenging match. I don't mind having goofy fun with things like Fumiko and Gonti or playing voltron beats, etc though.
No. It's not my responsibility to limit my power level because you can't handle it. We all have access to the same card pool, you know your deck better than I do. If you know a strategy is extra good against you, it's up to you to build counter-measures to that strategy into your deck. If you don't, you're accepting you're going to lose to whatever strategy that is that you're extra susceptible to. That's like knowing you get awful gas mileage and choosing to skip over the gas station to travel 300 miles, then getting mad when you ran out of gas halfway there.
This is a social format, but it's also a responsible one. Attempting to ostracize a player because they beat you is as much immature and anti-social as the guy with power nine that beats up on middle school kids. Take responsibility for your deck's weaknesses and learn to cope, even minimize them. You don't need that fifteenth six drop as much as you could have fielded a much lower to the ground response or other means of disrupting that opponent. This you can do regardless what price point you're playing at. And if you don't know what kind of response you could have used? Ask. I can't speak for everyone, but people know me as a sort of walking encyclopedia of Magic cards, I can come up with a card better for the situation for almost anything you're in.
Probably not worth bringing up, but you're preaching to the choir about deck construction. I'm more than capable of building a strong deck and I've got every legal card worth playing. So I'll assume you're using the rhetorical "you".
That said, there's lots of fun to be had trying suboptimal things. Is Celestial Kirin ever likely to be any good? Probably not, but it's fun to try to make it work as well as possible, and in a more casually-built setting, it might be able to win every once in a while. At least it might not get totally embarrassed. In an environment where everyone is playing powerful decks, though, it's most likely going to lose very badly over and over, and be very little fun to play (especially when someone throws down T4 flashfires and says "that's what you get for playing mono-white"... ). Playing only powerful decks severely limits the sorts of decks that can be played at the same table with any reasonable chance of winning, and that lack of variety makes the game a lot less interesting.
The problem with constructed tournament Magic formats is that eventually everyone's playing the same handful of decks. Because everyone is building to maximize their win percentage, eventually the highest EV choices emerge and the meta becomes stale. There's no way to prevent this - there will always be the best decks, and people will always choose to play them when the stakes are high. The games are fair contests of skill, but they're very limited in their possibilities.
Commander offers something different than that, by taking away the monetary incentives for victory, making the format multiplayer, and suggesting a gentleman's agreement. As long as everyone agrees to avoid building high-powered decks, the field becomes vast. There are countless choices to be made and infinite strategies, good and bad, to be explored. The games can still be fair contests of skill, with everyone restricting themselves in a similar manner, but with so much more variation and replayability than the same decks against each other over and over like standard and modern. With nothing on the line, there's no motivation to break the gentleman's agreement, and we can all play fair games while still enjoying greater variety than any other format. And with huge playerbase as well, since the format can be played with a reasonable chance of winning for the low cost of $30 or so. Do you think commander would have grown to the popularity it now enjoys if people like you were sitting at every kitchen table? I think not.
I get the feeling you think you're a terribly good player for building a few (semi) powerful decks. You strike me as simply a medium-sized fish in a tiny pond. Building powerful commander decks is a solved puzzle, and not a terribly interesting one for most of us. Could we build powerful decks? Yes, easily. Trivially. But if we did that, we'd lose so much of the potential variety and novelty that the format has to offer. We don't build suboptimally because we're incapable, but because we want to enjoy the format with intentional naiveté. To recapture something like what the game was like when we first started learning, and we were exploring strategies without a compass or a heading. And someone driving a bulldozer through that with a "competitive" deck isn't showing how much better at the game they are, but rather how much they don't understand what makes the format great.
(all that said, if your opponents are fine with the power level of your deck, go nuts. Sidebar: I'm pretty sure you didn't read the context of VidarThor's post because he's not agreeing with you on anything you care about)
If you are following some arbitery goal when playing you are not playing the game. You are doing something else. To define trying to winn within the bounderies of the game as 'competetive' is pure idiotecy.
What do you mean with following arbitrary rules?
If that just means "not official rules" then I want to inform you that this is what EDH is all about: People started making up their own rules because they didn't like the normal kind of games.
I can see that we are getting a bit of topic. It was a comment regarding Drik Gently's two definitions of competetive. One is they play to winn once they sitt down to play, regardless of deck. The other defenistion of competeteive is that they are using a tier one deck. This is a very good defenition, so thanks to DirkGently.
However, I do feel that the first definition is implisitt, it is assumed, we do not need to say that when playing magic people are trying to winn. It is after all the point of the game. If they are not trying to do so to the best of their abilaties you can hardly say they are playing the game inn their full capasaty. There are reason for doing this sometimes. When playing with children you some times let them winn, you try not to kill the new player to soon etc. Then they are following an arbitrary rule they themselves has made up.
There is a rescent adition to my play group. One person who plays Atraxa. He often has enourmus resources sitting on the table in form of big creatures. But often he does not use them and they get get swept away by a sweeper, like Damantion. He might be going for a doplomatic game where he does not want to attack anyone, but I think this is a bad strategy, but this is rather subjective and not here nor there. I think instead what is going on is that he is trying to get as many counters as he can. He was very please with himself when he ha 30 counters on Atraxa, Praetors' Voice. Yet he never attacke with her even though she has vigilance and lifelink until someone at the table killed her. If he is setting a goil of not winning and instead make as big creatures as possible, he is setting himself an arbitrary goal while playing.
While things like this can happen, it is not often the case. I at least assume that all players do not set arbitrery goals, and they are playing to winn. I therefor think of the word competetive in the sence that when we talk about competetetive decks, we are talking about a tier 1 deck, or close to it. As I have previusly stated, I think competetetive commander is a very bad thing for the game, as the game is very badly regulated. The list of cards that needs to be banned to balance the format is a very long one. I also do not think they do it as some of those cards are fine on their own with some self policing. Something most groups do already.
No. It's not my responsibility to limit my power level because you can't handle it. We all have access to the same card pool, you know your deck better than I do. If you know a strategy is extra good against you, it's up to you to build counter-measures to that strategy into your deck. If you don't, you're accepting you're going to lose to whatever strategy that is that you're extra susceptible to. That's like knowing you get awful gas mileage and choosing to skip over the gas station to travel 300 miles, then getting mad when you ran out of gas halfway there.
3drinks your argument is not well thought out, you are not taking this to it's exstreme. If your deck is good and you are winning because your deck is superior, then the natural progresion with that world view is for your opponents to make a better deck. And you would need to make a better deck. It is what is called an arms race. Soon the best deck is a tier one deck.
Your prode yourself on good deckbuilding skills, and a good knowledge of cars. But in a world of competetive commander those skills are mostly useless. The best decks are mostly discovered.* Having the best deck is a matter of taking 5 minuts looking of decks online and then buy them from a vendor. More importantly in this world of super powers the averadge game lasts 6 turns, and take 10 minuts to play. People are mostly golfishing their combo decks, ignoring each other and having very little interaction. In my experience it is about as much fun as playing soletair on the computer. Unless this is your meta, you can forget about everything you like about commaner, because those elements are not to be found.
I actually think you sound rather less clever when you say you on't think it is your responasbilaty to limit your powerlevel. The skills your pride yourself on having will not benefit you in a competetive setting, all deckbuilding choises have been crowd sourced by the 21.87 million magic players world wide. The way you describe it you are in fact limiting your power level quite a lot, but in such a way that you are always ahead of your local meta. Or you are even less clever and can't come up with a tier 1 deck, even though you are trying. Hands down I am also to dumb to come up with a tier 1 deck on my own. I would just use the mtg communaty as a resource and just coppy it.
(Although creating a Karador, Ghost Chieftain deck is a matter of putting in the combo decks that are banned in modern, legacy and that proved strong in standar through the ages. When they unbann things like promethean hulk things are not rocket sciense.)
* Not there is always room for innovation. The new modern death shadow for instance lay formant for a while. Lantern controll needed to be discovered. But it is hard to find something nobody has seen before.
You're making an awful lot of assumptions based on "fun" or other arbitrary determinations about what is otherwise such a broad format when really, you can't define that. What is fun? What's fun for you may or may not be fun for others. And vice versa. Why do you keep going to the casual vs competitive well? That's the most circular argument to a (any) competitive out there. Nothing is solved by taking that approach, nothing is proved when the dust settles. All it does is ruffle feathers and further that dividing line between the playerbase. It heats up everyone involved for no real net gain in ground.
"Problem" with competitive formats? Most commander decks are built with ~70% of the same cards, homogenization exists already. But, even if it didn't, why is such a "stale metagame" a bad thing? That is if that's even true. Look at Vintage, this is a format that's been around since the beginning of time, with the same card pool, and it still has it's own diversity - from Tinker to Tezz-Vault to Shops to Fastbond-Gush to Imperial-Painter to Oath, to Noble Fish (one of the least accurate deck names tbh, featuring neither nobility or fish...) that sounds pretty diverse to me. For you to preach about players like me ruining the format like it's going to become a stale two-deck format is hyperbole in the Nth degree, though admittedly I'm flattered at the ideal of myself being so influential on a vintage format such that everyone either is playing a 3drinks brew or anti-3drinks brew so...in a way, thanks for that? Backwards compliment as it may have been.
If you want to change a meta you feel has gotten "stale"...you have to make moves to force a chance. Nothing will change if you always stay the same. Deckbuilding is not a one-and-done, it is an ever-eternal process, continually evolving to stay ahead of the pack.
In the end though, the biggest take-away I'm getting from this is you're somehow equating skill to go hand-in-hand with playing subpar as if that puts you somehow on a perceived, imaginary moral high ground but the reality of it all is at-best you sound naively hopeful and at-worst, it makes you sound pretentious. When ultimately, we're both two sides of the same coin; we have our way to play, neither is really, truly wrong...just different from the other. You have your playgroup where people don't play the best decks, that's fine more power to you. But what about for those that don't have dedicated groups? When you walk into an LGS and just sit in on a game, you don't know these people, are you really going to assume they don't want a top game? That's disrespectful to the opponent and the art of competition as a whole. Do you log into MODO and get mad when you face an onslaught of Baral and Breya and flip Nissa and Narset? Of course not. I mean well I guess you could - wouldn't really do you any good, but you could do that...but you don't, you either say "okay this format isn't for me..." or you build to beat these decks. That's the same thing when you walk into a LGS and could play any number of people you don't know; you don't "expect" to play sawft decks. You expect the worst, because people expect that of you. What's that old adage? To live and die by the sword...
P.S.
And if mono-W was the deck to beat? You bet your ass I'd be packing some Flashfires and Virtue's Ruin. But it's not, so I will enjoy my Cryoclasms, Red Elemental Blasts, & Boils, while catching some plains in the collateral damage of an Omen of Fire. I will continue rocking Perish in my Mardu builds, because Perish continues to be live AF. Accurate metagaming is as important to deckbuilding as playtesting.
3drinks you are all over the place. Perhaps it is my dyslexia that is throwing you off.
In your MTGO example are you thinking about 1 on 1 commaners? I asume you are, Baral is quite good there but he is bad in multiplayer. We are talking about multiplayer commander in this thread, so keep 1 on 1 out of this.
You also seem to think you have to force change. Something along the line 'necessity is the mother of invention'. I think you will find curiosety is the father of invention, and most peoples commander decks are just goofing around with a commander, mechanics or a sett of cards they want to explore.
"When you walk into an LGS and just sit in on a game, you don't know these people, are you really going to assume they don't want a top game? " I don't know what you mean about 'top game'. I have walked into LGS and had a great time, I would call that a 'top game'.
I will try to sum up my thoughts in a few easy points as to not confuse you:
- I like commander games that are fun.
- I do not like commander games with tier 1 decks. They limit creativaty, deck construction and I frankly find most of those games boring. Not though this is purply subjective. I do not consider that a 'moral high ground' to be more right then another option.
- If people are not playing tier 1 decks, they are not dumb, they are merly playing a game of magic more akin to a boardgame instead of a competetive magic format like legacy, modern or standar.
- I do not want the banlist to be balanced, I would rather have people have the chance to play what they want.
- If anybody is not playing a tier 1 deck in commander they are limiting their power. This is objective and true. And to think that they have not taken upon them the responsabilaty to limit their power they are dilusional.
3drinks you are all over the place. Perhaps it is my dyslexia that is throwing you off.
In your MTGO example are you thinking about 1 on 1 commaners? I asume you are, Baral is quite good there but he is bad in multiplayer. We are talking about multiplayer commander in this thread, so keep 1 on 1 out of this.
It was then I had noticed most people are not playing the same game I am playing...
Or, more accurately, I'm realizing when people say "commander" I instantly equate that to 1v1 games because that's what I prefer to play. I do not play politics well (re: at all), this whole thread has started because of a stance that I mistakenly took up........over 1v1, when others, such as Dirk, were speaking of multiplayer. How awkward.
Round and round... Debating the the purely subjective based on personal opinion.
And this notion that, somehow, every possible deck has already been realized by the player base so deck building has become obsolete in the age of netdecking is absurd. They can't even list all the infinite combos, I checked the list, there are a bunch missing. That list might represent half of the possible combos. But yet, somehow, it is impossible for anyone to come up a tier 1 deck archetype on their own. Nothing original left in Magic in spite of WotC flooding the market with new cards constantly. To me that just sounds like an excuse to suck.
You're making an awful lot of assumptions based on "fun" or other arbitrary determinations about what is otherwise such a broad format when really, you can't define that. What is fun? What's fun for you may or may not be fun for others. And vice versa. Why do you keep going to the casual vs competitive well? That's the most circular argument to a (any) competitive out there. Nothing is solved by taking that approach, nothing is proved when the dust settles. All it does is ruffle feathers and further that dividing line between the playerbase. It heats up everyone involved for no real net gain in ground.
"Problem" with competitive formats? Most commander decks are built with ~70% of the same cards, homogenization exists already. But, even if it didn't, why is such a "stale metagame" a bad thing? That is if that's even true. Look at Vintage, this is a format that's been around since the beginning of time, with the same card pool, and it still has it's own diversity - from Tinker to Tezz-Vault to Shops to Fastbond-Gush to Imperial-Painter to Oath, to Noble Fish (one of the least accurate deck names tbh, featuring neither nobility or fish...) that sounds pretty diverse to me. For you to preach about players like me ruining the format like it's going to become a stale two-deck format is hyperbole in the Nth degree, though admittedly I'm flattered at the ideal of myself being so influential on a vintage format such that everyone either is playing a 3drinks brew or anti-3drinks brew so...in a way, thanks for that? Backwards compliment as it may have been.
If you want to change a meta you feel has gotten "stale"...you have to make moves to force a chance. Nothing will change if you always stay the same. Deckbuilding is not a one-and-done, it is an ever-eternal process, continually evolving to stay ahead of the pack.
In the end though, the biggest take-away I'm getting from this is you're somehow equating skill to go hand-in-hand with playing subpar as if that puts you somehow on a perceived, imaginary moral high ground but the reality of it all is at-best you sound naively hopeful and at-worst, it makes you sound pretentious. When ultimately, we're both two sides of the same coin; we have our way to play, neither is really, truly wrong...just different from the other. You have your playgroup where people don't play the best decks, that's fine more power to you. But what about for those that don't have dedicated groups? When you walk into an LGS and just sit in on a game, you don't know these people, are you really going to assume they don't want a top game? That's disrespectful to the opponent and the art of competition as a whole. Do you log into MODO and get mad when you face an onslaught of Baral and Breya and flip Nissa and Narset? Of course not. I mean well I guess you could - wouldn't really do you any good, but you could do that...but you don't, you either say "okay this format isn't for me..." or you build to beat these decks. That's the same thing when you walk into a LGS and could play any number of people you don't know; you don't "expect" to play sawft decks. You expect the worst, because people expect that of you. What's that old adage? To live and die by the sword...
P.S.
And if mono-W was the deck to beat? You bet your ass I'd be packing some Flashfires and Virtue's Ruin. But it's not, so I will enjoy my Cryoclasms, Red Elemental Blasts, & Boils, while catching some plains in the collateral damage of an Omen of Fire. I will continue rocking Perish in my Mardu builds, because Perish continues to be live AF. Accurate metagaming is as important to deckbuilding as playtesting.
I disagree about staples. Sure, some utility cards (i.e. removal, lands, tutors, cards named sol ring) are going to be very similar across similarly-colored decks, but the pool of cards that are playable in the right archetype is vast. I've spent a lot of time trying to get them all, and so far I'm up to 6.5K. There are some cards that show up in almost every deck (sol ring, mana crypt) but that's about it. Even extremely versatile cards like demonic tutor are only going to show up in black decks. Maybe some mono-black decks share 70% of cards, but most of those are lands. I think this homogenization is vastly overblown.
Maybe vintage has a dozen top-tier decks. Maybe it has a hundred, I wouldn't know. Commander has a nearly uncountable number of decks that, when played by a skilled player in a "normal" metagame, have a chance to win. If you want to prove that vintage is anywhere near as diverse as commander, you'd better start listing a lot more archetypes than...seven.
I hope I never gave you the impression I was impressed by your decks, they all look like fairly standard decks with a few (presumably better in 1v1)
hate cards thrown in like thoughtseize and sinkhole. And as I'm sure you're the first to admit, they're not exactly tier-1 competitive. In reality I think competitive commander has a fairly limited impact on the metagame, and certainly you personally have close to zero impact (as do I), but I do think the competitive-build crowd has a net negative impact on the format, except for those who only play against other competitive decks.
I'm not trying to equate intentionally-lowering power level as skill, but it does take discipline to rein yourself in. I certainly cross the line plenty of times myself. Is it just different but equal from playing competitively? If you're playing competitive vs competitive, then I'll concede yes. When you're playing other competitive decks on modo, I don't see any problem with playing competitive decks too (though I personally have no interest). When you're playing at an LGS and curb stomping people who built decks to have fun because you brought a gun to a knife fight, that's not "another side of the same coin". That's cowardly.
I feel like I'm repeating myself, but in my experience "assuming the worst" is a ludicrous way to play commander a local level. The number of top-tier decks I run into is very low, and I play quite a few different people. Having a powerful deck for the occasional powerful opponent is fine, but assuming that everyone else at an LGS is playing no-holds-barred no-budget EDH is an insane assumption, statistically.
Last and probably least...you're hilariously misusing that quote. Not only are you misquoting it ("live by the sword, die by the sword" being the most common interpretation) but it says the exact opposite of what I think you intend. The point is that those who use violence will probably die by violence - in other words, a call to pacifism. Not even I would go so far as to play EDH pacifistically
It was then I had noticed most people are not playing the same game I am playing...
Or, more accurately, I'm realizing when people say "commander" I instantly equate that to 1v1 games because that's what I prefer to play. I do not play politics well (re: at all), this whole thread has started because of a stance that I mistakenly took up........over 1v1, when others, such as Dirk, were speaking of multiplayer. How awkward.
lol....I'm pretty sure I mentioned that I was talking about multiplayer at some point (when I was mentioning that your multiplayer decklists contain a 1v1 decklist). Or maybe you're organizing by banlist and you only play 1v1? I don't understand why you wouldn't assume people are talking about multiplayer unless specified otherwise.
Round and round... Debating the the purely subjective based on personal opinion.
And this notion that, somehow, every possible deck has already been realized by the player base so deck building has become obsolete in the age of netdecking is absurd. They can't even list all the infinite combos, I checked the list, there are a bunch missing. That list might represent half of the possible combos. But yet, somehow, it is impossible for anyone to come up a tier 1 deck archetype on their own. Nothing original left in Magic in spite of WotC flooding the market with new cards constantly. To me that just sounds like an excuse to suck.
In the past I've made fairly powerful decks. I still tended to avoid combo just because I find it boring.
The reality is that very few people play commander in that way, and you can't tune a deck versus a casual metagame. And it won't be fun for anyone. If you really want to spend time inventing and tuning a competitive deck, why not do it in standard, where you'll actually have a chance to use it for real competition?
I think people might be confused by my diversity statement. Maybe there are a hundred, mostly-undiscovered, tier 1 commander decks. Who knows. That's still infinitely less diversity than is allowed by stepping down from the top tier. There are many, many decks (i.e. celestial kirin) that are never ever going to be at the top-tier, or anywhere close, competitiveness-wise.
Round and round... Debating the the purely subjective based on personal opinion.
And this notion that, somehow, every possible deck has already been realized by the player base so deck building has become obsolete in the age of netdecking is absurd. They can't even list all the infinite combos, I checked the list, there are a bunch missing. That list might represent half of the possible combos. But yet, somehow, it is impossible for anyone to come up a tier 1 deck archetype on their own. Nothing original left in Magic in spite of WotC flooding the market with new cards constantly. To me that just sounds like an excuse to suck.
Disclaimer: I like how casual edh sucks and I suck along with it. Problem being?
@DirkGently- I only brought up the combo list to illustrate that any notion that the cardpool has been exhausted and we are left with nothing but a bunch of perfectly tuned netdecks to choose from is preposterous. That is just giving up on creativity.
Furthermore, I've browsed these netdecks many times looking for card ideas. 75% of all netdecks are pure garbage. And that is being generous. Most of the 'killer' netdecks all run the same spike stuff with flashy stuff on top. I see it as mostly stagnant and uninspired.
Round and round... Debating the the purely subjective based on personal opinion.
And this notion that, somehow, every possible deck has already been realized by the player base so deck building has become obsolete in the age of netdecking is absurd. They can't even list all the infinite combos, I checked the list, there are a bunch missing. That list might represent half of the possible combos. But yet, somehow, it is impossible for anyone to come up a tier 1 deck archetype on their own. Nothing original left in Magic in spite of WotC flooding the market with new cards constantly. To me that just sounds like an excuse to suck.
Disclaimer: I like how casual edh sucks and I suck along with it. Problem being?
This whole thing is weird to me. After years of playing standard formats and various modes online, the casual debate was always a thing. I figured switching to commander would eliminate most of that. Y'know, casual, Singleton format... What could go wrong? Its literally ten times worse.
Round and round... Debating the the purely subjective based on personal opinion.
And this notion that, somehow, every possible deck has already been realized by the player base so deck building has become obsolete in the age of netdecking is absurd. They can't even list all the infinite combos, I checked the list, there are a bunch missing. That list might represent half of the possible combos. But yet, somehow, it is impossible for anyone to come up a tier 1 deck archetype on their own. Nothing original left in Magic in spite of WotC flooding the market with new cards constantly. To me that just sounds like an excuse to suck.
Disclaimer: I like how casual edh sucks and I suck along with it. Problem being?
This whole thing is weird to me. After years of playing standard formats and various modes online, the casual debate was always a thing. I figured switching to commander would eliminate most of that. Y'know, casual, Singleton format... What could go wrong? Its literally ten times worse.
Yeah, a lot of entrenched views. Part of why I didn't dip into edh until my group did and I still don't play in stores.
I refer to the people you are referring to as Farmvillers. They hate it. I tell them it is really no offense, I used to love Farmville.
competitive is *kind of* in opposition to casual, however we're talking about casual vs competitive in terms of deckbuilding and in terms of deckplaying.
In the first category, obviously different people like very different things. It's on a spectrum, though - no one is building decks that are completely nonfunctional (i.e. 99 wastes + atogatog), so everyone's obviously building their decks to be competitive to SOME degree. Some by imposing certain restrictions on themselves, some by just not seeking out competitive lists, or not being aware of them. A lot of people prefer a lower level of power in deckbuilding because of the variety it allows, as well as the inclusiveness to more players, and the greater possibilities for interesting games and interactions. Personally I count myself in that group. Allowing competitive-power decks in a game with casual-power decks severely cuts down on all of those benefits to casual deckbuilding, which is why I'm against it.
In the second category, there's also a spectrum but it's less contentious. Besides a few people building the aforementioned no-wincon group hug decks, I don't think many people aren't trying to play well, and few people get mad at someone for seriously considering their moves carefully and trying to play well, as long as it's not holding up the game excessively. I think there are people that don't think too carefully about their moves, and definitely in a format with so many legal cards and so much going on in some games it's difficult to keep track of all the possible interactions, but I think most people try to make their best move, within the limits of their abilities.
EDH Primers
Phelddagrif - Zirilan
EDH
Thrasios+Bruse - Pang - Sasaya - Wydwen - Feather - Rona - Toshiro - Sylvia+Khorvath - Geth - QMarchesa - Firesong - Athreos - Arixmethes - Isperia - Etali - Silas+Sidar - Saskia - Virtus+Gorm - Kynaios - Naban - Aryel - Mizzix - Kazuul - Tymna+Kraum - Sidar+Tymna - Ayli - Gwendlyn - Phelddagrif 4 - Liliana - Kaervek - Phelddagrif 3 - Mairsil - Scarab - Child - Phenax - Shirei - Thada - Depala - Circu - Kytheon - GrenzoHR - Phelddagrif - Reyhan+Kraum - Toshiro - Varolz - Nin - Ojutai - Tasigur - Zedruu - Uril - Edric - Wort - Zurgo - Nahiri - Grenzo - Kozilek - Yisan - Ink-Treader - Yisan - Brago - Sidisi - Toshiro - Alexi - Sygg - Brimaz - Sek'Kuar - Marchesa - Vish Kal - Iroas - Phelddagrif - Ephara - Derevi - Glissa - Wanderer - Saffi - Melek - Xiahou Dun - Lazav - Lin Sivvi - Zirilan - Glissa
PDH - Drake - Graverobber - Izzet GM - Tallowisp - Symbiote Brawl - Feather - Ugin - Jace - Scarab - Angrath - Vraska - Kumena Oathbreaker - Wrenn&6
After about 2 years of very cassual and fun play they started upgrading their decks. Within 8 months one person bought a tier 1 deck, all the card online. After that it was an arms race for a short while. But the more competetive the decks got the less fun it was to play. After 4 months they had stopped playing commander.
While anecdotal, I think this is a good example of fun vs competetivness in commander. I have not had luck brininging all the players to one location after that, even for doing something else. Commander was a great social activaty for them, but the bubble burst.
Calling them farmvillers is quite offensive though. At least when they are offended by it. Farmvil is a great way in many ways (one of the most played games in thr world, small treshhold for entering, great for passing time etc.) I have seen atraxa players who try to get as many counters as they can. I am unsure if this is because they think it is better or not. I have myself at one time fallen to a similar thing when I had Kalonial Hydra , vigor some creatures and Blasphemous Act in hand.
I think for new players, the format starts off like that. You don't know what you're doing, but you see cool cards and cool ideas and you start to cobble something together. You want to take your ideas and then make it better and better. Of course, better and better, given enough time, eventually leads to Tazri combo or whatever. The inevitable evolution of a commander player ends with either the conscious decision that they want to restrict their power level voluntarily, or they're going to end up playing a top-tier deck.
I think that idea that you should voluntarily limit your own power level is difficult to swallow. It's kind of in opposition to everything that the rest of the game is about, and certainly what other formats are about. It's also just unsatisfying to stop improving, the progression of improving your deck and doing better and better really appeals to that lizard brain and goal-oriented thinking. I think some people can't shake the idea that their goal is to get better and better, and so they end up building decks that result in games that aren't fun anymore. The unfortunate truth about playing a casual format casually, as an experienced and proficient player, is that it takes discipline, and it takes deep thought, not simply "how do I make this deck better?" but "how can I still find ways to enjoy deckbuilding while also creating decks that lead to enjoyable games?" And that's a really hard question that I think few people face head-on.
EDH Primers
Phelddagrif - Zirilan
EDH
Thrasios+Bruse - Pang - Sasaya - Wydwen - Feather - Rona - Toshiro - Sylvia+Khorvath - Geth - QMarchesa - Firesong - Athreos - Arixmethes - Isperia - Etali - Silas+Sidar - Saskia - Virtus+Gorm - Kynaios - Naban - Aryel - Mizzix - Kazuul - Tymna+Kraum - Sidar+Tymna - Ayli - Gwendlyn - Phelddagrif 4 - Liliana - Kaervek - Phelddagrif 3 - Mairsil - Scarab - Child - Phenax - Shirei - Thada - Depala - Circu - Kytheon - GrenzoHR - Phelddagrif - Reyhan+Kraum - Toshiro - Varolz - Nin - Ojutai - Tasigur - Zedruu - Uril - Edric - Wort - Zurgo - Nahiri - Grenzo - Kozilek - Yisan - Ink-Treader - Yisan - Brago - Sidisi - Toshiro - Alexi - Sygg - Brimaz - Sek'Kuar - Marchesa - Vish Kal - Iroas - Phelddagrif - Ephara - Derevi - Glissa - Wanderer - Saffi - Melek - Xiahou Dun - Lazav - Lin Sivvi - Zirilan - Glissa
PDH - Drake - Graverobber - Izzet GM - Tallowisp - Symbiote Brawl - Feather - Ugin - Jace - Scarab - Angrath - Vraska - Kumena Oathbreaker - Wrenn&6
Obviously I would communicate, find out what decks they have and why they play "bad" decks (without insulting them or their decks).
Usually people don't have access to cards or don't have money.
Luckily I always have my trading map which has a ton of cheap but good cards. That might help people to find some new tricks.
But I would definitely not play my best deck.
Offensive? Really? You find it offensive? Even the people I say it to don't really get offended. In fact we kind of laugh about it.
What do you mean with following arbitrary rules?
If that just means "not official rules" then I want to inform you that this is what EDH is all about: People started making up their own rules because they didn't like the normal kind of games.
If I want to crush someone, I'll pull out a win on my third turn against a noob. I won, but it wasn't fun. I lurked in, seeing their deck while they was playing against his friend and already knew they didn't stand a chance. I didn't need to play them to know I would win. When I challenged them with my best deck, and crushed their morale, it was an empty win.
If I see a noob playing with their friend, more likely than not, I'll ask if not to duel, but to join in next game. Depending on how close they seem (the chance they'll instantly try to double team me) will decide the power level of my deck. Regardless, I will not double team the weaker of the two, I will not play my best deck with out giving plenty of warning, nor will I play something like Statis.
I would much rather have a close game, than a dominated game. I'd rather learn something through the loss, than to have an obvious win everyone knew I'd have turns ago.
Mind you, I've been playing for a looooong time. I've played things competitively to the point where all the joy of the game was gone. I quit that game cold turkey and have rarely played it since. My favorite deck to play against a large group has no built in win condition. It is liberating! Sure, I have an infect commander, but no, I don't play Blightsteel Colossus. I've lost on the opponent's third turn and I've won on my third turn with a deck comprised entirely out of commons. I know I'm good, but I know that there is always someone out there better than I am.
Which gets me back to the topic at hand. Maybe the people with the "weak" commanders are sentimental. Maybe they are lulling you into a false sense of security (I sure as heck have a commander like that). Maybe they are just starting off, or just came back and have a limited card pool.
THAT is where trading comes in. I used to play with a bunch of elementary school kids. I could trounce them easily, with most of my decks. Heck, I made decks one weekend out of spare cards that were STILL better than most of the decks they were using. So I:
Sure, most of them didn't learn everything. I tried teaching them counterspell and out of the literal blue I had someone draw into one and try to "counter" my creature that had been on the field for three turns. That was an afternoon. The point is that I upped the meta a little. Okay I upped their meta a lot. It still wasn't to "my level" most of the time. So I met them halfway.
It was great to watch them grow and successfully assess and deal with new situations. I remember the first time one of them pulled out Giant Adephage and got two tokens from it and having to figure out a way to deal with it. That's the thing: we play this game because we like its style, but just like the Gatewatch, it isn't fun when they always win, sometimes it is more interesting to lose than to win (like the time I took my burn deck up against a Tolarian Academy deck with moxes and the like. You best believe I lost. It was spectacular).
So um, TL;DR:
Trade with them, and look for teachable moments. To quote Miley Cyrus:" It's not about how fast you get there [to the end of the game], it's the climb [aka the experience of the match]!"
I fully admit that I am by far the most competitive/strongest player among my friends. They know it too, we talk about it frequently. I've been playing this game since 4th Ed/Ice Age, that's a long time to have been involved with the same hobby.
For those that missed it, this is what I'm currently playing: http://tappedout.net/mtg-decks/alesha-cube-draft-cmdr/ <--- literally can't even plan a pre-game strategy as I don't even know the contents of my own deck until we start. But I know what I can do with the cards in general, and I will play them to the fullest extent that I can.
No. It's not my responsibility to limit my power level because you can't handle it. We all have access to the same card pool, you know your deck better than I do. If you know a strategy is extra good against you, it's up to you to build counter-measures to that strategy into your deck. If you don't, you're accepting you're going to lose to whatever strategy that is that you're extra susceptible to. That's like knowing you get awful gas mileage and choosing to skip over the gas station to travel 300 miles, then getting mad when you ran out of gas halfway there.
This is a social format, but it's also a responsible one. Attempting to ostracize a player because they beat you is as much immature and anti-social as the guy with power nine that beats up on middle school kids. Take responsibility for your deck's weaknesses and learn to cope, even minimize them. You don't need that fifteenth six drop as much as you could have fielded a much lower to the ground response or other means of disrupting that opponent. This you can do regardless what price point you're playing at. And if you don't know what kind of response you could have used? Ask. I can't speak for everyone, but people know me as a sort of walking encyclopedia of Magic cards, I can come up with a card better for the situation for almost anything you're in.
Just seconding this. It's all well and good if you "want to see how many times you can activate Divining Top in a single game", cool for you. But this is still a game and the end result is one person winning and the others...not winning. To believe otherwise is dishonest to yourself and your motives to the game.
Steel Sabotage'ng Orbs of Mellowness since 2011.
That said, there's lots of fun to be had trying suboptimal things. Is Celestial Kirin ever likely to be any good? Probably not, but it's fun to try to make it work as well as possible, and in a more casually-built setting, it might be able to win every once in a while. At least it might not get totally embarrassed. In an environment where everyone is playing powerful decks, though, it's most likely going to lose very badly over and over, and be very little fun to play (especially when someone throws down T4 flashfires and says "that's what you get for playing mono-white"... ). Playing only powerful decks severely limits the sorts of decks that can be played at the same table with any reasonable chance of winning, and that lack of variety makes the game a lot less interesting.
The problem with constructed tournament Magic formats is that eventually everyone's playing the same handful of decks. Because everyone is building to maximize their win percentage, eventually the highest EV choices emerge and the meta becomes stale. There's no way to prevent this - there will always be the best decks, and people will always choose to play them when the stakes are high. The games are fair contests of skill, but they're very limited in their possibilities.
Commander offers something different than that, by taking away the monetary incentives for victory, making the format multiplayer, and suggesting a gentleman's agreement. As long as everyone agrees to avoid building high-powered decks, the field becomes vast. There are countless choices to be made and infinite strategies, good and bad, to be explored. The games can still be fair contests of skill, with everyone restricting themselves in a similar manner, but with so much more variation and replayability than the same decks against each other over and over like standard and modern. With nothing on the line, there's no motivation to break the gentleman's agreement, and we can all play fair games while still enjoying greater variety than any other format. And with huge playerbase as well, since the format can be played with a reasonable chance of winning for the low cost of $30 or so. Do you think commander would have grown to the popularity it now enjoys if people like you were sitting at every kitchen table? I think not.
I get the feeling you think you're a terribly good player for building a few (semi) powerful decks. You strike me as simply a medium-sized fish in a tiny pond. Building powerful commander decks is a solved puzzle, and not a terribly interesting one for most of us. Could we build powerful decks? Yes, easily. Trivially. But if we did that, we'd lose so much of the potential variety and novelty that the format has to offer. We don't build suboptimally because we're incapable, but because we want to enjoy the format with intentional naiveté. To recapture something like what the game was like when we first started learning, and we were exploring strategies without a compass or a heading. And someone driving a bulldozer through that with a "competitive" deck isn't showing how much better at the game they are, but rather how much they don't understand what makes the format great.
(all that said, if your opponents are fine with the power level of your deck, go nuts. Sidebar: I'm pretty sure you didn't read the context of VidarThor's post because he's not agreeing with you on anything you care about)
EDH Primers
Phelddagrif - Zirilan
EDH
Thrasios+Bruse - Pang - Sasaya - Wydwen - Feather - Rona - Toshiro - Sylvia+Khorvath - Geth - QMarchesa - Firesong - Athreos - Arixmethes - Isperia - Etali - Silas+Sidar - Saskia - Virtus+Gorm - Kynaios - Naban - Aryel - Mizzix - Kazuul - Tymna+Kraum - Sidar+Tymna - Ayli - Gwendlyn - Phelddagrif 4 - Liliana - Kaervek - Phelddagrif 3 - Mairsil - Scarab - Child - Phenax - Shirei - Thada - Depala - Circu - Kytheon - GrenzoHR - Phelddagrif - Reyhan+Kraum - Toshiro - Varolz - Nin - Ojutai - Tasigur - Zedruu - Uril - Edric - Wort - Zurgo - Nahiri - Grenzo - Kozilek - Yisan - Ink-Treader - Yisan - Brago - Sidisi - Toshiro - Alexi - Sygg - Brimaz - Sek'Kuar - Marchesa - Vish Kal - Iroas - Phelddagrif - Ephara - Derevi - Glissa - Wanderer - Saffi - Melek - Xiahou Dun - Lazav - Lin Sivvi - Zirilan - Glissa
PDH - Drake - Graverobber - Izzet GM - Tallowisp - Symbiote Brawl - Feather - Ugin - Jace - Scarab - Angrath - Vraska - Kumena Oathbreaker - Wrenn&6
I can see that we are getting a bit of topic. It was a comment regarding Drik Gently's two definitions of competetive. One is they play to winn once they sitt down to play, regardless of deck. The other defenistion of competeteive is that they are using a tier one deck. This is a very good defenition, so thanks to DirkGently.
However, I do feel that the first definition is implisitt, it is assumed, we do not need to say that when playing magic people are trying to winn. It is after all the point of the game. If they are not trying to do so to the best of their abilaties you can hardly say they are playing the game inn their full capasaty. There are reason for doing this sometimes. When playing with children you some times let them winn, you try not to kill the new player to soon etc. Then they are following an arbitrary rule they themselves has made up.
There is a rescent adition to my play group. One person who plays Atraxa. He often has enourmus resources sitting on the table in form of big creatures. But often he does not use them and they get get swept away by a sweeper, like Damantion. He might be going for a doplomatic game where he does not want to attack anyone, but I think this is a bad strategy, but this is rather subjective and not here nor there. I think instead what is going on is that he is trying to get as many counters as he can. He was very please with himself when he ha 30 counters on Atraxa, Praetors' Voice. Yet he never attacke with her even though she has vigilance and lifelink until someone at the table killed her. If he is setting a goil of not winning and instead make as big creatures as possible, he is setting himself an arbitrary goal while playing.
While things like this can happen, it is not often the case. I at least assume that all players do not set arbitrery goals, and they are playing to winn. I therefor think of the word competetive in the sence that when we talk about competetetive decks, we are talking about a tier 1 deck, or close to it. As I have previusly stated, I think competetetive commander is a very bad thing for the game, as the game is very badly regulated. The list of cards that needs to be banned to balance the format is a very long one. I also do not think they do it as some of those cards are fine on their own with some self policing. Something most groups do already.
3drinks your argument is not well thought out, you are not taking this to it's exstreme. If your deck is good and you are winning because your deck is superior, then the natural progresion with that world view is for your opponents to make a better deck. And you would need to make a better deck. It is what is called an arms race. Soon the best deck is a tier one deck.
Your prode yourself on good deckbuilding skills, and a good knowledge of cars. But in a world of competetive commander those skills are mostly useless. The best decks are mostly discovered.* Having the best deck is a matter of taking 5 minuts looking of decks online and then buy them from a vendor. More importantly in this world of super powers the averadge game lasts 6 turns, and take 10 minuts to play. People are mostly golfishing their combo decks, ignoring each other and having very little interaction. In my experience it is about as much fun as playing soletair on the computer. Unless this is your meta, you can forget about everything you like about commaner, because those elements are not to be found.
I actually think you sound rather less clever when you say you on't think it is your responasbilaty to limit your powerlevel. The skills your pride yourself on having will not benefit you in a competetive setting, all deckbuilding choises have been crowd sourced by the 21.87 million magic players world wide. The way you describe it you are in fact limiting your power level quite a lot, but in such a way that you are always ahead of your local meta. Or you are even less clever and can't come up with a tier 1 deck, even though you are trying. Hands down I am also to dumb to come up with a tier 1 deck on my own. I would just use the mtg communaty as a resource and just coppy it.
(Although creating a Karador, Ghost Chieftain deck is a matter of putting in the combo decks that are banned in modern, legacy and that proved strong in standar through the ages. When they unbann things like promethean hulk things are not rocket sciense.)
* Not there is always room for innovation. The new modern death shadow for instance lay formant for a while. Lantern controll needed to be discovered. But it is hard to find something nobody has seen before.
"Problem" with competitive formats? Most commander decks are built with ~70% of the same cards, homogenization exists already. But, even if it didn't, why is such a "stale metagame" a bad thing? That is if that's even true. Look at Vintage, this is a format that's been around since the beginning of time, with the same card pool, and it still has it's own diversity - from Tinker to Tezz-Vault to Shops to Fastbond-Gush to Imperial-Painter to Oath, to Noble Fish (one of the least accurate deck names tbh, featuring neither nobility or fish...) that sounds pretty diverse to me. For you to preach about players like me ruining the format like it's going to become a stale two-deck format is hyperbole in the Nth degree, though admittedly I'm flattered at the ideal of myself being so influential on a vintage format such that everyone either is playing a 3drinks brew or anti-3drinks brew so...in a way, thanks for that? Backwards compliment as it may have been.
If you want to change a meta you feel has gotten "stale"...you have to make moves to force a chance. Nothing will change if you always stay the same. Deckbuilding is not a one-and-done, it is an ever-eternal process, continually evolving to stay ahead of the pack.
In the end though, the biggest take-away I'm getting from this is you're somehow equating skill to go hand-in-hand with playing subpar as if that puts you somehow on a perceived, imaginary moral high ground but the reality of it all is at-best you sound naively hopeful and at-worst, it makes you sound pretentious. When ultimately, we're both two sides of the same coin; we have our way to play, neither is really, truly wrong...just different from the other. You have your playgroup where people don't play the best decks, that's fine more power to you. But what about for those that don't have dedicated groups? When you walk into an LGS and just sit in on a game, you don't know these people, are you really going to assume they don't want a top game? That's disrespectful to the opponent and the art of competition as a whole. Do you log into MODO and get mad when you face an onslaught of Baral and Breya and flip Nissa and Narset? Of course not. I mean well I guess you could - wouldn't really do you any good, but you could do that...but you don't, you either say "okay this format isn't for me..." or you build to beat these decks. That's the same thing when you walk into a LGS and could play any number of people you don't know; you don't "expect" to play sawft decks. You expect the worst, because people expect that of you. What's that old adage? To live and die by the sword...
P.S.
And if mono-W was the deck to beat? You bet your ass I'd be packing some Flashfires and Virtue's Ruin. But it's not, so I will enjoy my Cryoclasms, Red Elemental Blasts, & Boils, while catching some plains in the collateral damage of an Omen of Fire. I will continue rocking Perish in my Mardu builds, because Perish continues to be live AF. Accurate metagaming is as important to deckbuilding as playtesting.
Steel Sabotage'ng Orbs of Mellowness since 2011.
Both kinds of game are fun, IMO. Don't mind playing at "their level" at all.
In your MTGO example are you thinking about 1 on 1 commaners? I asume you are, Baral is quite good there but he is bad in multiplayer. We are talking about multiplayer commander in this thread, so keep 1 on 1 out of this.
You also seem to think you have to force change. Something along the line 'necessity is the mother of invention'. I think you will find curiosety is the father of invention, and most peoples commander decks are just goofing around with a commander, mechanics or a sett of cards they want to explore.
"When you walk into an LGS and just sit in on a game, you don't know these people, are you really going to assume they don't want a top game? " I don't know what you mean about 'top game'. I have walked into LGS and had a great time, I would call that a 'top game'.
I will try to sum up my thoughts in a few easy points as to not confuse you:
- I like commander games that are fun.
- I do not like commander games with tier 1 decks. They limit creativaty, deck construction and I frankly find most of those games boring. Not though this is purply subjective. I do not consider that a 'moral high ground' to be more right then another option.
- If people are not playing tier 1 decks, they are not dumb, they are merly playing a game of magic more akin to a boardgame instead of a competetive magic format like legacy, modern or standar.
- I do not want the banlist to be balanced, I would rather have people have the chance to play what they want.
- If anybody is not playing a tier 1 deck in commander they are limiting their power. This is objective and true. And to think that they have not taken upon them the responsabilaty to limit their power they are dilusional.
It was then I had noticed most people are not playing the same game I am playing...
Or, more accurately, I'm realizing when people say "commander" I instantly equate that to 1v1 games because that's what I prefer to play. I do not play politics well (re: at all), this whole thread has started because of a stance that I mistakenly took up........over 1v1, when others, such as Dirk, were speaking of multiplayer. How awkward.
Steel Sabotage'ng Orbs of Mellowness since 2011.
And this notion that, somehow, every possible deck has already been realized by the player base so deck building has become obsolete in the age of netdecking is absurd. They can't even list all the infinite combos, I checked the list, there are a bunch missing. That list might represent half of the possible combos. But yet, somehow, it is impossible for anyone to come up a tier 1 deck archetype on their own. Nothing original left in Magic in spite of WotC flooding the market with new cards constantly. To me that just sounds like an excuse to suck.
Maybe vintage has a dozen top-tier decks. Maybe it has a hundred, I wouldn't know. Commander has a nearly uncountable number of decks that, when played by a skilled player in a "normal" metagame, have a chance to win. If you want to prove that vintage is anywhere near as diverse as commander, you'd better start listing a lot more archetypes than...seven.
I hope I never gave you the impression I was impressed by your decks, they all look like fairly standard decks with a few (presumably better in 1v1)
hate cards thrown in like thoughtseize and sinkhole. And as I'm sure you're the first to admit, they're not exactly tier-1 competitive. In reality I think competitive commander has a fairly limited impact on the metagame, and certainly you personally have close to zero impact (as do I), but I do think the competitive-build crowd has a net negative impact on the format, except for those who only play against other competitive decks.
I'm not trying to equate intentionally-lowering power level as skill, but it does take discipline to rein yourself in. I certainly cross the line plenty of times myself. Is it just different but equal from playing competitively? If you're playing competitive vs competitive, then I'll concede yes. When you're playing other competitive decks on modo, I don't see any problem with playing competitive decks too (though I personally have no interest). When you're playing at an LGS and curb stomping people who built decks to have fun because you brought a gun to a knife fight, that's not "another side of the same coin". That's cowardly.
I feel like I'm repeating myself, but in my experience "assuming the worst" is a ludicrous way to play commander a local level. The number of top-tier decks I run into is very low, and I play quite a few different people. Having a powerful deck for the occasional powerful opponent is fine, but assuming that everyone else at an LGS is playing no-holds-barred no-budget EDH is an insane assumption, statistically.
Last and probably least...you're hilariously misusing that quote. Not only are you misquoting it ("live by the sword, die by the sword" being the most common interpretation) but it says the exact opposite of what I think you intend. The point is that those who use violence will probably die by violence - in other words, a call to pacifism. Not even I would go so far as to play EDH pacifistically lol....I'm pretty sure I mentioned that I was talking about multiplayer at some point (when I was mentioning that your multiplayer decklists contain a 1v1 decklist). Or maybe you're organizing by banlist and you only play 1v1? I don't understand why you wouldn't assume people are talking about multiplayer unless specified otherwise. In the past I've made fairly powerful decks. I still tended to avoid combo just because I find it boring.
The reality is that very few people play commander in that way, and you can't tune a deck versus a casual metagame. And it won't be fun for anyone. If you really want to spend time inventing and tuning a competitive deck, why not do it in standard, where you'll actually have a chance to use it for real competition?
I think people might be confused by my diversity statement. Maybe there are a hundred, mostly-undiscovered, tier 1 commander decks. Who knows. That's still infinitely less diversity than is allowed by stepping down from the top tier. There are many, many decks (i.e. celestial kirin) that are never ever going to be at the top-tier, or anywhere close, competitiveness-wise.
EDH Primers
Phelddagrif - Zirilan
EDH
Thrasios+Bruse - Pang - Sasaya - Wydwen - Feather - Rona - Toshiro - Sylvia+Khorvath - Geth - QMarchesa - Firesong - Athreos - Arixmethes - Isperia - Etali - Silas+Sidar - Saskia - Virtus+Gorm - Kynaios - Naban - Aryel - Mizzix - Kazuul - Tymna+Kraum - Sidar+Tymna - Ayli - Gwendlyn - Phelddagrif 4 - Liliana - Kaervek - Phelddagrif 3 - Mairsil - Scarab - Child - Phenax - Shirei - Thada - Depala - Circu - Kytheon - GrenzoHR - Phelddagrif - Reyhan+Kraum - Toshiro - Varolz - Nin - Ojutai - Tasigur - Zedruu - Uril - Edric - Wort - Zurgo - Nahiri - Grenzo - Kozilek - Yisan - Ink-Treader - Yisan - Brago - Sidisi - Toshiro - Alexi - Sygg - Brimaz - Sek'Kuar - Marchesa - Vish Kal - Iroas - Phelddagrif - Ephara - Derevi - Glissa - Wanderer - Saffi - Melek - Xiahou Dun - Lazav - Lin Sivvi - Zirilan - Glissa
PDH - Drake - Graverobber - Izzet GM - Tallowisp - Symbiote Brawl - Feather - Ugin - Jace - Scarab - Angrath - Vraska - Kumena Oathbreaker - Wrenn&6
Furthermore, I've browsed these netdecks many times looking for card ideas. 75% of all netdecks are pure garbage. And that is being generous. Most of the 'killer' netdecks all run the same spike stuff with flashy stuff on top. I see it as mostly stagnant and uninspired.
This whole thing is weird to me. After years of playing standard formats and various modes online, the casual debate was always a thing. I figured switching to commander would eliminate most of that. Y'know, casual, Singleton format... What could go wrong? Its literally ten times worse.