How many red spells cheaply remove artifacts? How many white spells exile creatures? How many green spells ramp?
I'm sure that you can find at least 15 of each of those. Comparing basic removal to Grave Pact copies is silly. How many functional Mind Over Matter cards are there? How many functional Sylvan Library cards exist? How many Land Tax variants are out there? They are powerful effects and they are powerful because they are not overly common. If there was a Sensei's Divining Top variant in every set, its effect wouldn't be seen as powerful as much as it would be commonplace.
Some colors are good at certain things and not at others. Colors also have limited access to many powerful effects. In fact, some of the most powerful cards ever printed are regarded as such because there are few to no things that duplicate those cards' effect. Survival of the Fittest, Necropotence, Crucible of Worlds, etc.
Building a deck that relies on any of these cards sometimes means that you need to play in colors that can tutor for them if you want to be able to use the card. With regard to tutors, Red is really the only color that seems to suffer severely, but that is part of the "chaos" of Red as a color. Even Gamble exists though. Just because a color has few cards that provide a certain effect doesn't justify being able to sculpt their hand to compensate for the fact they are limited by a certain effect. Red dominating when it comes to burn and land destruction/land hate when those are not as good in EDH because of the multiplayer and life totals and because land destruction/land hate is generally maligned in more casual groups.
That said, I think Red as a support color is fine. Mono-red decks such as Krenko or Daretti can be very strong (ironically enough, with plenty of redundancy). Hell, probably the only color combination that is truly garbage in EDH is Boros (and that is only because the legends are pretty awful) and mono-white and even Boros can do just fine in a casual or 75% meta, as it has done in mine. It was an Aurelia Samurai deck, if you were wondering, which is obviously far from optimal.
Mono-white can remove literally anything, but suffers in that their lifegain is not as great in a format where you already have 40 life, they have minimal card advantage, can't interact with the stack, and have little ramp (which is mitigated by colorless mana rocks). So, really, they just lack the ability to draw cards and interact with spells on the stack.
Do recall, however, that EDH isn't a competitive format so any single color pairing is viable in most casual games and circles. When players start building things optimally, some colors are going to lose out (because the very rules of the format including life totals and a multiplayer setting hurt what some colors are best at). Being able to sculpt your hand isn't going to suddenly make mono-white have card advantage. It is going to make it easier for the blue deck to stop the cards that the mono-white deck does have though. It's okay though, that white deck will have so much more opportunity to draw their spot removal for permanents! Oh wait...
The biggest piece of consistency in this singleton format is your commander, which you frequently overlook in all of your math. You're drawing direct comparisons between EDH and constructed formats yet you ignore the effect of the most consistent, reliable card in the deck that you have access to on curve 100% of the time.
Your math is irrefutable about one thing: Free Partial Paris (i.e. hand sculpting) makes a deck more consistent.
That doesn't mean consistency is a good thing for format health. Any analysis you make about what the facts of the math mean for the format is subjective and heavily biased based on your own experiences. You also base your analysis on competitive balance and building optimally, something that I feel the rules of the game should never actually address. Competitive balance between colors should exist in card design and a ban list, if competition is intended. Since it is not intended in EDH and R&D are only ever going to design cards around a constructed environment, you honestly just have to deal with it.
In the RC's model playgroup, all colors are viable, though some decks will undoubtedly be better than others depending on the strategy chosen. Your mulligan rule isn't needed and probably has more chance to ruin games than to actually help them. The last thing a deck that lacks consistency needs is for a deck that has consistency to be made more consistent while the inconsistent deck isn't going to benefit enough because those consistent decks notoriously have more card advantage engines/cards, something that the inconsistent decks are never going to have reliably no matter how good their opening hand is. The necessity of your mulligan comes down to you wanting to prop up colors that have poor card advantage tools, but all I see it doing is making sure that the colors with many card advantage tools are always going to have them, even if, proportionately, the colors being propped up gain "more".
I'd much rather stay at a 10% chance of getting a certain effect than being boosted to a 20% chance while the more consistent decks are pushing into the 90+% likelihood of getting their cards. Hell, the entire premise behind 75% is that it can beat an optimized deck when the optimized deck is on a bad draw and they are on a good draw. With your mulligan rule, that would almost never happen. By theoretically guaranteeing outcomes (as much as you can within a card game), you take away the ability of the underdog to win by ensuring the favored player will almost always have what they are looking for.
Sorry, but I'll take my volatility every day of the week and twice on Sunday.
Meanwhile a Meren deck that likes playing grave pact has a total of 3 copies.
Sure, if you ignore tutors.
It was a quick reference. I've already noted U and B have compensating factors with dig other colors do not have access to outside greens ability to tutor ramp/creatures. This puts R and W in a huge disadvantage as their dig/tutor effects are much less powerful and plentiful. I was merely noting a common effect that in constructed you could play a healthy 4 set of...and in EDH you can't event get near the redundancy threshold of 7 to imitate it. I could simply pick a red effect for this situation.
Except you can't. Red also has tutors, wheel effects, there's colorless tutors (not as efficient, but they can't be discounted)...
If a deck has a goal, the redundancy can be there. You're comparing a deck designed with redundancy in mind to one that isn't. That's not a fault of whatever mulligan rule, that's your incorrect assumptions.
And the incorrect assumptions make your math meaningless.
You can find 15 copies of effects of certain cards, but the quality between them varies. I use the cancel example because of those 15 they all cost 0-3 mana and achieve at least the effect of Cancel. Many effects will begin to cost different mana, have only partial effectiveness, or have some conditional. You don't wind up with 15 copies of equal value. White for example has Path and Swords...but we immediately see a fall of in spot removal after those. They become sorceries, conditional, cost more man, etc... There's no current model that Wizard's uses as a standard of what is a white removal instant. Cancel however is the baseline model Wizard uses and has chosen to give multiple "near-prints" rather than simply reprint it a staple. So if blue is looking for an answer...it's looking for any of its answers. Other colors are looking for a specific on to their scenario. You might run 30 answers, but not all 30 have the same situational use. I would love to run 7x Abrupt Decays/Putrefys/Beast withins...but I'm not going to find any cards that are as good as those and I'll start having to settle for significantly lesser and more varied ones...in hopes they're drawn when relevant to their difference of limitations.
My main issue is the game is simply too fast the more you press optimization. Midgame I'm very fine with the balance between redundancy and varied decks...it's the early game where things get out of hand. Currently I see players get a stronger hand often explode out before anyone can compete or stop it. It's so easy to build a deck that simply plays the statistics of 3 decks getting answers and resources in time to keep up with how fast ramp is. In partial paris, the fact that everyone was sculpted increased the odds that another person could have answers in time. Something like Hermit Druid turn 1 very often didn't kill us turn 2 in my meta...now a turn 1 or 2 Hermit druid will go unanswered VERY often before the next turn. Partial Paris saw a lot more games turn around and shift power, punishing greedy play lines. Now greedy is definitely the way to. You might get stopped going all out...but the odds are lower than ever and you will net more games just trying to go for broke. Our Partial Paris in even skill levels, fully optimized decks, saw most players afraid of being the first person to try to combo...because they knew at lest 1 or 2 answers were ready for it and it would invite another player to combo behind it. This made games last a lot longer. Now the redundancy monsters are just sweeping early games with how skewed the balance of openers are to decks that must take whatever is "playable". I used to get annoyed by a turn 1-4 Ad Nauseam deck...but I could deal with it because Partial Paris gave me an edge in multiple matches...now that deck tramples me as im stuck on repeat being too slow or with the wrong answer as it still wins at turn 1-4.
I like games that aren't purely combo-fests...but in my meta they just run everything over. I literally had to invent my own format just to be able to play this format as intended (big dumb spells and turn 8-12+ish wins). I don't enjoy what cEDH has become...but the rules allowed players to solve this format and now every other archetype is invalid...and I simply find the top tier meta to be extremely boring and devoid of player decisions to dictate winners. Opening hands have dictated most matches I've seen now and it feels really bad to play.
If you're currently only ever playing with partials, how do you ever see these games where these decks are exploding with early hands? Also, partials greatly increase the reliability that someone gets their explosive opener. Hell, Narset is no longer a "Tier 1" cEDH deck because of the loss of partials. The mulligan rule domepieced her reliability and explosiveness, which pretty much was exactly the point of the change. And she runs a ton of redundant pieces (go ahead and look at my list, it is packed with fast mana and haste outlets).
Blue also has very limited avenues with which to interact, as opposed to white removal that can be at any time once it is on the board. White removal also can't all be "exile creature" because it needs to get rid of enchantments and artifacts as well, which it also does exceptionally. I think the nature of counterspells being "unconditional" in blue is balanced because even the unconditional ones are still conditional; they're conditional on being cast while their target is on the stack or they become useless. They are an answer you have to have before the problem card gets played or you are already screwed. Every other answer is perfectly fine to answer a threat when you draw it or on your own turn to get around Grand Abolisher type effects (which are more common the more competitive you get).
Even the poster-child for redundancy in blue counterspells are only printed in redundancy because they are incredibly limited. And, even then, they often get restricted to the type of spell they can counter, or the mana cost of the spell, or allow the player to pay mana and it doesn't get countered.
Again, the mulligan rule wasn't implemented with competitive decks in mind and I believe it made competitive decks less consistent to have those openers. Decks that were already inconsistent could not have possibly been hurt that much because they couldn't have relied on drawing certain cards anyway, regardless of partials.
The new mulligan makes you look for a playable hand, getting enough mana and hopefully cards to play early on. Yeah, that means you may have to open with a 7 drop in your hand. If you don't want to potentially have to deal with that, build your deck differently. Partials rewarded greedy deckbuilding in a way that no other format does. Vancouver ameliorates those issues, which is exactly what it was intended to do.
Honestly, the consistency argument is a false flag for a lot of reasons. We shouldn't be trying to make colors do things reliably that they weren't reliably designed to do. Vancouver mulligans are plenty good enough for EDH and preferable to partials for me in almost every way.
If you're currently only ever playing with partials, how do you ever see these games where these decks are exploding with early hands? Also, partials greatly increase the reliability that someone gets their explosive opener. Hell, Narset is no longer a "Tier 1" cEDH deck because of the loss of partials. The mulligan rule domepieced her reliability and explosiveness, which pretty much was exactly the point of the change. And she runs a ton of redundant pieces (go ahead and look at my list, it is packed with fast mana and haste outlets).
Blue also has very limited avenues with which to interact, as opposed to white removal that can be at any time once it is on the board. White removal also can't all be "exile creature" because it needs to get rid of enchantments and artifacts as well, which it also does exceptionally. I think the nature of counterspells being "unconditional" in blue is balanced because even the unconditional ones are still conditional; they're conditional on being cast while their target is on the stack or they become useless. They are an answer you have to have before the problem card gets played or you are already screwed. Every other answer is perfectly fine to answer a threat when you draw it or on your own turn to get around Grand Abolisher type effects (which are more common the more competitive you get).
Even the poster-child for redundancy in blue counterspells are only printed in redundancy because they are incredibly limited. And, even then, they often get restricted to the type of spell they can counter, or the mana cost of the spell, or allow the player to pay mana and it doesn't get countered.
Again, the mulligan rule wasn't implemented with competitive decks in mind and I believe it made competitive decks less consistent to have those openers. Decks that were already inconsistent could not have possibly been hurt that much because they couldn't have relied on drawing certain cards anyway, regardless of partials.
The new mulligan makes you look for a playable hand, getting enough mana and hopefully cards to play early on. Yeah, that means you may have to open with a 7 drop in your hand. If you don't want to potentially have to deal with that, build your deck differently. Partials rewarded greedy deckbuilding in a way that no other format does. Vancouver ameliorates those issues, which is exactly what it was intended to do.
Honestly, the consistency argument is a false flag for a lot of reasons. We shouldn't be trying to make colors do things reliably that they weren't reliably designed to do. Vancouver mulligans are plenty good enough for EDH and preferable to partials for me in almost every way.
I don't play exclusively partial. I played a year and a half of cEDH with Free partial. January they switched to Vancouver. I made Modern Commander and brought back Free partial after doing tests and see the results of Vancouver confirming my theories. I still play in a Vancouver EDH and Narset is still a tier 1. The mulligan made her better because she's still just as fast or a turn slower via the consistency I explained...but now all her opponents are harmed on digging for answers in time and she is hard to out race. One of my top rivals was a NArset player and when the mull change happenned my ability to defeat them was stripped away and he pretty much top 4's every tournament with the deck, all early blow outs.
Blue has more avenues of intractability than white by FAR. You have theft, exile, bounce, tap, copy, etc... There is no spell/card type blue can't interact with. The balance doesn't quite equate. IF we're discussing narset for example. VERY few cards can get underneathe her in time to stop her from ramping out and getting into play. Every color has answers, but blue can counter her or counter her effects if too late. You don't even have to be concerned with the hexproof that is such a burden for most colors to play around. (blue also has Llawan...)
The mull made those decks less consistent by a VERY small degree. In many cases those decks would use a free mull to simply optimize an already functional hand. Other archetypes used partial paris depended on it much more to form playable hands that were relevant to the match up. The relevancy to a match up is REALLY important. You can have a playable hand that lets you play land and cast spells...but if those spells are useless to a deck that builds out fast, it doesn't matter which is sort of the repeat theme I'm trying to convey. There's just too much data in the math and actually seeing it in person every week. I was playing event EDH 3 nights a week, stat tracking winners, and observing the types of wins that took place. We see a lot of 2-4 turn losses and then everything goes to time, there's no real inbetween. In Modern EDH we see turn 8-12 games and we're using Free Partial Paris. Everyone has board states. In normal EDH, typically only one person has a boardstate.
If your theories are that decks with less redundancy are naturally going to be less consistent at doing those redundant things, you could have saved the math, because it is pretty obvious.
Certain archetypes in specific colors are not guaranteed to be viable at the highest levels of competition. That's the way it has always been. I don't agree with a mulligan rule that is designed to circumvent the negative impact of poor and/or greedy deckbuilding choices if you are talking about a format being competitive, which is where your point of view is based from. Selecting colors/a general for a competitive list shouldn't just be preference, it should be based on their ability to win. In cEDH, there are pretty clear goals and benchmarks for what makes a competitive deck. Choosing a list that doesn't meet those benchmarks will achieve the obvious results of losing a lot more than you win.
So, for the purposes of normal EDH, Vancouver is definitely superior because the speed of the format is not such that sculpting does anything positive. You don't have the explosive openers, T3-5 wins, or a need to be digging for your somehow non-redundant answer that is critical to you not losing (Deckbuilding 101).
For the purposes of competitive EDH, I don't think that archetypes that are not otherwise viable should be attempted to be propped up via a rule that also makes all of the highest tier of decks more consistent. I see there being plenty of variety.
According to the guys that do the EDH tier lists on Tapped Out, there are 15 "Tier 1" commanders, which Derevi is still a part of, and there are 43 "Tier 2" commanders that are regarded as still competitive, though not as consistent or fast. Narset is now in this second category (as a post-mulligan result). According to them and their experiences, your Derevi deck is just fine in Tier 1 while Narset is no longer at that level, so I'm more inclined to believe their assessment as it is come to by more players than yourself. Every deck lost consistency because of the mulligan change, that was literally the point.
You're referencing, however, this need for archetypes and whatnot to be viable, but ignoring that, at present, there are 58 different commanders that can compete at a high level. They are in almost every single color except White and Boros, which, while unfortunate, is really pretty good. I don't know that you could find any other format that supports any sort of diversity even close to that. Honestly, I feel like the viability of many of those lower Tier 2 lists is severely harmed by Partials, because those high-end decks that are already consistent become virtual locks against all but the other top tier lists. It's my understanding that most competitive players also happen to like what Vancouver Mulligans have done. I think the increased variance leads to fewer completely broken openers and promotes fair aggro decks, such as Edric, excelling at the highest level.
If we're talking in terms of pure removal, "bouncing" a permanent doesn't really count. It's a tempo gain, but is not an answer like actual removal is. Let's not play semantics here. Your references to "other interaction" to try and claim it dwarfs White's also ignores White's hatebears, which are rampant across the competitive EDH format and are critical for decks. Even Thalia, Guardian of Thraben can be a viable mono-W commander.
For typical EDH games (random pickup games with nothing at stake except fun), I am completely against the Free Partial Paris, for two reasons:
1. Heavy emphasis will be placed on early game interaction, which (while not objectively "bad") does not sound like the kind of EDH the RC likes to advertise.
2. The existing gap between optimized decks and for-funsies decks will be widened, as the lightning-fast proactive deck will now be supercharged, but the for-funsies player will not have the means nor the prior knowledge to fully take advantage of the mulligan. In a game with mismatched power levels, the underpowered decks stand the best chance when the powered deck stalls out due to variance, not when the underpowered decks accidentally draw into their efficient answer they aren't packing in the first place.
However, for a dedicated competitive environment like the one Droptimal is trying to foster, I would be willing to entertain the idea. If the meta is known, it sounds to me like this system has a lot of merit.
For typical EDH games (random pickup games with nothing at stake except fun), I am completely against the Free Partial Paris, for two reasons:
1. Heavy emphasis will be placed on early game interaction, which (while not objectively "bad") does not sound like the kind of EDH the RC likes to advertise.
2. The existing gap between optimized decks and for-funsies decks will be widened, as the lightning-fast proactive deck will now be supercharged, but the for-funsies player will not have the means nor the prior knowledge to fully take advantage of the mulligan. In a game with mismatched power levels, the underpowered decks stand the best chance when the powered deck stalls out due to variance, not when the underpowered decks accidentally draw into their efficient answer they aren't packing in the first place.
However, for a dedicated competitive environment like the one Droptimal is trying to foster, I would be willing to entertain the idea. If the meta is known, it sounds to me like this system has a lot of merit.
I like what you said here, and you definitely illustrate an important point: you can't arguably say one method is better versus the other in all situations and it should be up to a group/environment to develop their mulligan method.
While partials aren't perfect I've felt that my games since the mulligan change have been a straight decrease in enjoyability. Even if the mulligans were equal in outcome, its still 3 cool cards I need to swap out for boring old lands.
I think this is a point that gets skipped over in this discussion a lot. Of course your games are 'less enjoyable', its a more restrictive mulligan. This is doubly true if you didnt tweak your decks after PP went away. Thats not a reason to bring back PP, its a reason to build better decks. Just getting to toss away anything that costs more than 4 for free is too simplistic.
If people are sick of reading about stuff just stop taking part. You have 100% control over what you read. Simic Ascendancy isn't going to get banned just because you didn't tell someone to shut up on the internet.
So, it's 2018 and in both playgroups I regularly play with we still use the Free Partial Paris, and we are super happy with it. Is anybody else still playing by the old Mulligan rules?
Riku of Two Reflections - Copy, then copy again | Shattergang Brothers - Token Sac&Recur | Gahiji, Honored One - Multiple attack steps | Karametra, God of Harvests - Landfall, Creaturefall, Shroud | Ruhan of the Fomori - Stop hitting yourself | Zurgo Helmsmasher - Equipment&Wraths | Crosis, the Purger - Dragon Tribal Reanimator | Derevi, Empyrial Tactician - No stax, just tap and untap fun | Anafenza, the Foremost - Enduring Ideal Enchantress | Sharuum, the Hegemon - Sphinx Tribal Control | Noyan Dar - Spellslinger | The Mimeoplasm - Counterpalooza
Lists can be found here.
Still convinced the guy on Beseech the Queen is wearing a Mitra-type hat. Wake up sheeple!
I'm sure that you can find at least 15 of each of those. Comparing basic removal to Grave Pact copies is silly. How many functional Mind Over Matter cards are there? How many functional Sylvan Library cards exist? How many Land Tax variants are out there? They are powerful effects and they are powerful because they are not overly common. If there was a Sensei's Divining Top variant in every set, its effect wouldn't be seen as powerful as much as it would be commonplace.
Some colors are good at certain things and not at others. Colors also have limited access to many powerful effects. In fact, some of the most powerful cards ever printed are regarded as such because there are few to no things that duplicate those cards' effect. Survival of the Fittest, Necropotence, Crucible of Worlds, etc.
Building a deck that relies on any of these cards sometimes means that you need to play in colors that can tutor for them if you want to be able to use the card. With regard to tutors, Red is really the only color that seems to suffer severely, but that is part of the "chaos" of Red as a color. Even Gamble exists though. Just because a color has few cards that provide a certain effect doesn't justify being able to sculpt their hand to compensate for the fact they are limited by a certain effect. Red dominating when it comes to burn and land destruction/land hate when those are not as good in EDH because of the multiplayer and life totals and because land destruction/land hate is generally maligned in more casual groups.
That said, I think Red as a support color is fine. Mono-red decks such as Krenko or Daretti can be very strong (ironically enough, with plenty of redundancy). Hell, probably the only color combination that is truly garbage in EDH is Boros (and that is only because the legends are pretty awful) and mono-white and even Boros can do just fine in a casual or 75% meta, as it has done in mine. It was an Aurelia Samurai deck, if you were wondering, which is obviously far from optimal.
Mono-white can remove literally anything, but suffers in that their lifegain is not as great in a format where you already have 40 life, they have minimal card advantage, can't interact with the stack, and have little ramp (which is mitigated by colorless mana rocks). So, really, they just lack the ability to draw cards and interact with spells on the stack.
Do recall, however, that EDH isn't a competitive format so any single color pairing is viable in most casual games and circles. When players start building things optimally, some colors are going to lose out (because the very rules of the format including life totals and a multiplayer setting hurt what some colors are best at). Being able to sculpt your hand isn't going to suddenly make mono-white have card advantage. It is going to make it easier for the blue deck to stop the cards that the mono-white deck does have though. It's okay though, that white deck will have so much more opportunity to draw their spot removal for permanents! Oh wait...
The biggest piece of consistency in this singleton format is your commander, which you frequently overlook in all of your math. You're drawing direct comparisons between EDH and constructed formats yet you ignore the effect of the most consistent, reliable card in the deck that you have access to on curve 100% of the time.
Your math is irrefutable about one thing: Free Partial Paris (i.e. hand sculpting) makes a deck more consistent.
That doesn't mean consistency is a good thing for format health. Any analysis you make about what the facts of the math mean for the format is subjective and heavily biased based on your own experiences. You also base your analysis on competitive balance and building optimally, something that I feel the rules of the game should never actually address. Competitive balance between colors should exist in card design and a ban list, if competition is intended. Since it is not intended in EDH and R&D are only ever going to design cards around a constructed environment, you honestly just have to deal with it.
In the RC's model playgroup, all colors are viable, though some decks will undoubtedly be better than others depending on the strategy chosen. Your mulligan rule isn't needed and probably has more chance to ruin games than to actually help them. The last thing a deck that lacks consistency needs is for a deck that has consistency to be made more consistent while the inconsistent deck isn't going to benefit enough because those consistent decks notoriously have more card advantage engines/cards, something that the inconsistent decks are never going to have reliably no matter how good their opening hand is. The necessity of your mulligan comes down to you wanting to prop up colors that have poor card advantage tools, but all I see it doing is making sure that the colors with many card advantage tools are always going to have them, even if, proportionately, the colors being propped up gain "more".
I'd much rather stay at a 10% chance of getting a certain effect than being boosted to a 20% chance while the more consistent decks are pushing into the 90+% likelihood of getting their cards. Hell, the entire premise behind 75% is that it can beat an optimized deck when the optimized deck is on a bad draw and they are on a good draw. With your mulligan rule, that would almost never happen. By theoretically guaranteeing outcomes (as much as you can within a card game), you take away the ability of the underdog to win by ensuring the favored player will almost always have what they are looking for.
Sorry, but I'll take my volatility every day of the week and twice on Sunday.
EDH:
G[cEDH] Selvala, Heart of the StormG
URW[cEDH] Narset, the Last AirmericanURW
GWUSt. Jenara, the ArchangelGWU
UBGrimgrin, Chaos MarineUB
GOmnath, Mana BaronG
URWNarset, Justice League AmericaURW
GWUBAtraxa, Countess of CountersGWUB
GWUEstrid, Enbantress PrimeGWU
Except you can't. Red also has tutors, wheel effects, there's colorless tutors (not as efficient, but they can't be discounted)...
If a deck has a goal, the redundancy can be there. You're comparing a deck designed with redundancy in mind to one that isn't. That's not a fault of whatever mulligan rule, that's your incorrect assumptions.
And the incorrect assumptions make your math meaningless.
My main issue is the game is simply too fast the more you press optimization. Midgame I'm very fine with the balance between redundancy and varied decks...it's the early game where things get out of hand. Currently I see players get a stronger hand often explode out before anyone can compete or stop it. It's so easy to build a deck that simply plays the statistics of 3 decks getting answers and resources in time to keep up with how fast ramp is. In partial paris, the fact that everyone was sculpted increased the odds that another person could have answers in time. Something like Hermit Druid turn 1 very often didn't kill us turn 2 in my meta...now a turn 1 or 2 Hermit druid will go unanswered VERY often before the next turn. Partial Paris saw a lot more games turn around and shift power, punishing greedy play lines. Now greedy is definitely the way to. You might get stopped going all out...but the odds are lower than ever and you will net more games just trying to go for broke. Our Partial Paris in even skill levels, fully optimized decks, saw most players afraid of being the first person to try to combo...because they knew at lest 1 or 2 answers were ready for it and it would invite another player to combo behind it. This made games last a lot longer. Now the redundancy monsters are just sweeping early games with how skewed the balance of openers are to decks that must take whatever is "playable". I used to get annoyed by a turn 1-4 Ad Nauseam deck...but I could deal with it because Partial Paris gave me an edge in multiple matches...now that deck tramples me as im stuck on repeat being too slow or with the wrong answer as it still wins at turn 1-4.
I like games that aren't purely combo-fests...but in my meta they just run everything over. I literally had to invent my own format just to be able to play this format as intended (big dumb spells and turn 8-12+ish wins). I don't enjoy what cEDH has become...but the rules allowed players to solve this format and now every other archetype is invalid...and I simply find the top tier meta to be extremely boring and devoid of player decisions to dictate winners. Opening hands have dictated most matches I've seen now and it feels really bad to play.
Blue also has very limited avenues with which to interact, as opposed to white removal that can be at any time once it is on the board. White removal also can't all be "exile creature" because it needs to get rid of enchantments and artifacts as well, which it also does exceptionally. I think the nature of counterspells being "unconditional" in blue is balanced because even the unconditional ones are still conditional; they're conditional on being cast while their target is on the stack or they become useless. They are an answer you have to have before the problem card gets played or you are already screwed. Every other answer is perfectly fine to answer a threat when you draw it or on your own turn to get around Grand Abolisher type effects (which are more common the more competitive you get).
Even the poster-child for redundancy in blue counterspells are only printed in redundancy because they are incredibly limited. And, even then, they often get restricted to the type of spell they can counter, or the mana cost of the spell, or allow the player to pay mana and it doesn't get countered.
Again, the mulligan rule wasn't implemented with competitive decks in mind and I believe it made competitive decks less consistent to have those openers. Decks that were already inconsistent could not have possibly been hurt that much because they couldn't have relied on drawing certain cards anyway, regardless of partials.
The new mulligan makes you look for a playable hand, getting enough mana and hopefully cards to play early on. Yeah, that means you may have to open with a 7 drop in your hand. If you don't want to potentially have to deal with that, build your deck differently. Partials rewarded greedy deckbuilding in a way that no other format does. Vancouver ameliorates those issues, which is exactly what it was intended to do.
Honestly, the consistency argument is a false flag for a lot of reasons. We shouldn't be trying to make colors do things reliably that they weren't reliably designed to do. Vancouver mulligans are plenty good enough for EDH and preferable to partials for me in almost every way.
EDH:
G[cEDH] Selvala, Heart of the StormG
URW[cEDH] Narset, the Last AirmericanURW
GWUSt. Jenara, the ArchangelGWU
UBGrimgrin, Chaos MarineUB
GOmnath, Mana BaronG
URWNarset, Justice League AmericaURW
GWUBAtraxa, Countess of CountersGWUB
GWUEstrid, Enbantress PrimeGWU
Blue has more avenues of intractability than white by FAR. You have theft, exile, bounce, tap, copy, etc... There is no spell/card type blue can't interact with. The balance doesn't quite equate. IF we're discussing narset for example. VERY few cards can get underneathe her in time to stop her from ramping out and getting into play. Every color has answers, but blue can counter her or counter her effects if too late. You don't even have to be concerned with the hexproof that is such a burden for most colors to play around. (blue also has Llawan...)
The mull made those decks less consistent by a VERY small degree. In many cases those decks would use a free mull to simply optimize an already functional hand. Other archetypes used partial paris depended on it much more to form playable hands that were relevant to the match up. The relevancy to a match up is REALLY important. You can have a playable hand that lets you play land and cast spells...but if those spells are useless to a deck that builds out fast, it doesn't matter which is sort of the repeat theme I'm trying to convey. There's just too much data in the math and actually seeing it in person every week. I was playing event EDH 3 nights a week, stat tracking winners, and observing the types of wins that took place. We see a lot of 2-4 turn losses and then everything goes to time, there's no real inbetween. In Modern EDH we see turn 8-12 games and we're using Free Partial Paris. Everyone has board states. In normal EDH, typically only one person has a boardstate.
Certain archetypes in specific colors are not guaranteed to be viable at the highest levels of competition. That's the way it has always been. I don't agree with a mulligan rule that is designed to circumvent the negative impact of poor and/or greedy deckbuilding choices if you are talking about a format being competitive, which is where your point of view is based from. Selecting colors/a general for a competitive list shouldn't just be preference, it should be based on their ability to win. In cEDH, there are pretty clear goals and benchmarks for what makes a competitive deck. Choosing a list that doesn't meet those benchmarks will achieve the obvious results of losing a lot more than you win.
So, for the purposes of normal EDH, Vancouver is definitely superior because the speed of the format is not such that sculpting does anything positive. You don't have the explosive openers, T3-5 wins, or a need to be digging for your somehow non-redundant answer that is critical to you not losing (Deckbuilding 101).
For the purposes of competitive EDH, I don't think that archetypes that are not otherwise viable should be attempted to be propped up via a rule that also makes all of the highest tier of decks more consistent. I see there being plenty of variety.
According to the guys that do the EDH tier lists on Tapped Out, there are 15 "Tier 1" commanders, which Derevi is still a part of, and there are 43 "Tier 2" commanders that are regarded as still competitive, though not as consistent or fast. Narset is now in this second category (as a post-mulligan result). According to them and their experiences, your Derevi deck is just fine in Tier 1 while Narset is no longer at that level, so I'm more inclined to believe their assessment as it is come to by more players than yourself. Every deck lost consistency because of the mulligan change, that was literally the point.
You're referencing, however, this need for archetypes and whatnot to be viable, but ignoring that, at present, there are 58 different commanders that can compete at a high level. They are in almost every single color except White and Boros, which, while unfortunate, is really pretty good. I don't know that you could find any other format that supports any sort of diversity even close to that. Honestly, I feel like the viability of many of those lower Tier 2 lists is severely harmed by Partials, because those high-end decks that are already consistent become virtual locks against all but the other top tier lists. It's my understanding that most competitive players also happen to like what Vancouver Mulligans have done. I think the increased variance leads to fewer completely broken openers and promotes fair aggro decks, such as Edric, excelling at the highest level.
If we're talking in terms of pure removal, "bouncing" a permanent doesn't really count. It's a tempo gain, but is not an answer like actual removal is. Let's not play semantics here. Your references to "other interaction" to try and claim it dwarfs White's also ignores White's hatebears, which are rampant across the competitive EDH format and are critical for decks. Even Thalia, Guardian of Thraben can be a viable mono-W commander.
EDH:
G[cEDH] Selvala, Heart of the StormG
URW[cEDH] Narset, the Last AirmericanURW
GWUSt. Jenara, the ArchangelGWU
UBGrimgrin, Chaos MarineUB
GOmnath, Mana BaronG
URWNarset, Justice League AmericaURW
GWUBAtraxa, Countess of CountersGWUB
GWUEstrid, Enbantress PrimeGWU
1. Heavy emphasis will be placed on early game interaction, which (while not objectively "bad") does not sound like the kind of EDH the RC likes to advertise.
2. The existing gap between optimized decks and for-funsies decks will be widened, as the lightning-fast proactive deck will now be supercharged, but the for-funsies player will not have the means nor the prior knowledge to fully take advantage of the mulligan. In a game with mismatched power levels, the underpowered decks stand the best chance when the powered deck stalls out due to variance, not when the underpowered decks accidentally draw into their efficient answer they aren't packing in the first place.
However, for a dedicated competitive environment like the one Droptimal is trying to foster, I would be willing to entertain the idea. If the meta is known, it sounds to me like this system has a lot of merit.
Draft my Mono-Blue Cube!
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RW Aurelia, The Warleader --- R Daretti, Scrap Savant --- RUB Thraximundar
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