Big props for Gishath. No, he's not good in cEDH. That strikes me as a feature, not a bug.
In my opinion, if a big stompy dinosaur deck doesn't have a place at the table, then maybe you should be playing Vintage, Legacy or Modern rather than Commander.
Small draw spells may not be big, splashy plays, but they are nonetheless extremely good, moreso than a lot of players realize. Blue Sun's Zenith and Necropotence are great, but sometimes things like Artificer's Epiphany, Sign in Blood or Chart a Course do the job just fine. They are usable in the early game and still useful late in the game.
Fun is somewhat an overused word and is certainly dependent on local things like the playgroup and your own definition of fun. After a long time playing I realized that "fun" is something that changes a lot and sometimes even depends on your mood. What worked for me is always something that can interact with the table, e.g.
- UB Silumgar theft deck (most of the time you win with cards you got from the table). This scales very well with the other players decks and is therefore not overpowered, hence let's call it "fair". But sometimes it might be a bit frustrating for other players to lose their stuff to you, at least I experienced it. But all the players always enjoyed that the decks plays differently every time.
Many people have an irrational and undying hatred of theft effects. Nothing will piss off some people more than you casting Bribery on them or using an effect like Rubinia Soulsinger to grab one of their creatures. I have seen people rage quit over Hostage Taker, of all things. I don't really get it, but I see it all the time, so when choosing to run theft-based decks, keep in mind that doing so might make you enemies just because of what you are running.
If you are going to get rid of powerful tutors, you need also to nix any card that lets you search for more than two lands.
The problem with this whole approach, though, is that while it may slow down combo, it won't stop overpowered stuff from happening. People can still win on the spot by playing Genesis Wave or Primal Surge in a properly-tuned deck and running lots of draw effects to get to those cards. Tutors on a stick which might not seem problematic can be very powerful when paired with recursion (Sun Titan, Alesha, Nim Deathmantle, etc.)
Of course, "crazy stuff happening" is part of what we should probably be striving for in EDH, so long as it isn't boring crazy stuff, like tutoring for an "I win" combo game after game. How cards like GWave and PSurge fit into that is an open question.
Remember, most ramp decks don't actually have a significantly higher % of their deck as lands - this means that going nuts and ramping for the first 4-5 turns of the game means that the proportion of lands left in their deck is smaller than the rest of the table. This means that no, nuking all the lands DOESN'T hurt the other players more, since they're more likely to be able to draw into their lands as the game goes. It hampers the ramp player a lot harder than many of us think.
This, again, is not what actually happens most of the time. Ramp decks may or may not run a higher percentage of land (most don't, at least not significantly), but they do run a higher percentage of ramp cards, usually including lots of cheap ones, which they will continue to draw into post-MLD, so they can likely recover more quickly from MLD strategies than anyone other than the MLD user, who typically has built their deck around that aspect. MLD is not a balancing strategy. It is a resource denial strategy that pretends to be an answer to ramp.
There ARE other ways to offset ramp in any given meta though; constant pressure, a lower curve, more hand-disruption, improved threat assessment/memory, and otherwise taxing them for having more lands than other players or punish them for ramping (damping engine, damping sphere, ankh of mishra).
These are much better strategies to address ramp without making it miserable for the rest of the players.
And everyone should run at least a few bits of spot removal that hits select lands. If you can't afford or don't own Wasteland, run Strip Mine, and if that is beyond your means, there's always Ghost Quarter. If Fulminator Mage is outside your colors, there are lots of other cards wihch can ping individual lands, This strategy won't full-stop ramp, but it can slow it down a lot by removing select pieces, and they have the benefit of applying to everyone. It's rare someone doesn't run at least one or two lands in their deck that should be blown up, and if a mono-black player owns Cabal Coffers they will likely run it even if theirs isn't a dedicated ramp deck.
I think Phyexian Altar would be played a lot more if there were more copies of it around. It having gotten pricey and not received a reprint until very recently probably keeps more people from playing it.
That said, I still think it would be better for the format to ban Paradox Engine.
Actually, MLD tends to punish non-ramp decks a lot more than it does ramp decks. Ramp decks run lots of ramp cards, and if they designed well, at some point the player who is ramping has enough mana to do what the deck is supposed to do and moves on to do that, often holding onto yet more ramp in their hands. Thus, when someone does MLD, the Rampster can often recover faster than the players who have been doing everything they can to move their own board states and who are less likely to have as many additional mana sources in hand or to draw into them.
The best way to stop ramp decks is to figure out what the ramp player is looking to accomplish with all that mana and focus on stopping that. That might include some targeted LD - it's always a good idea to take out things like Cabal Coffers, Gaea's Cradle or Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx - but will also likely involve some combination of spot removal, sweepers of various sorts and/or countermagic.
Another option is to gang up on the guy who is spending his first several turns doing nothing but ramping beyond the level of the other players at the table. Swing into him when he doesn't have blockers, or force him to use creatures that enable his ramp strategy to absorb damage. Remove the support pieces with spot removal. Whenever I play my Zacama deck, people who have played against it know to kill the mana doublers and things like Oracle of Mul Daya on sight, and to try to have answers to the big dino on board.
Personally, I consider Ruric Thar, the Unbowed the most fun commander. He's especially great if you can have him and Possibility Storm in play at the same time.
Many other people are not quite so fond of Thar, sadly.
I have used copy effects (Phyrexian Metamorph, Clever Impersonator) on others' Paradox Engines, and I have seen others do so at well. It is rare that I run blue and don't include a couple of broadly-useful copy/clone effects. I don't run those cards just for Paradox Engine, and I don't think very many others do either - as Sheldon notes, they tend to just be good value cards in most EDH games, though as ISB notes, that also depends on what people are playing - but depending on one's deck and current boardstate, PE can often be a tempting target.
I honestly don't know why Clever Impersonator isn't among the most-played blue staples. I don't think I've every played in a game in which I had that card in hand and didn't have several tempting options to choose from. Gods, planeswalkers, strong artifacts, off-color, powerful enchantment effects... that card can do so much.
I have food chained all of my animated lands to fiery confluence all other lands after casting Natural Affinity and a bunch of other stuff like Vitalize to make the non creature mana I would need post lands.
There be weird combos with all cards tutors involved or not.
Yeah, but that's not what people are really talking about when they use the shorthand "Food Chain combo."
The weird combos are cool. The easy, familiar ones, more boring. Your Food Chain one, that would be interesting to see. Food Chain and Prossh? Yawn.
I think Triskellion is largely a terrible card, but if someone found a cool combo with it that wasn't the same Mike/Trike snoozefest or something more or less equivalent to that, that could be cool.
I think that if you are sandbagging a game winning combo to draw out the game it would be better for you to win the game and switch to a more appropriate deck.
I just don't understand all of you posters saying you refuse to play combos. I mean... I never liked combos, but I like recursion, and this often leads to infinite combos. But if your combos takes 4 cards that otherwise do a lot of fun things in your deck.... are you really going to cut out those cards?
2 card combos, especially those enabled by the commander (but tutoring the pieces or by being one of the two cards), are really boring. But if my Ayli, Eternal Pilgrim + Pitiless Plunderer + Sun Titan + Gift of Immortality infinite life combo is something my opponents have a problem with I think it is laughable. It is 4 pieces for infinite life. Easy to disrupt. Are you cutting Sun Titan if this is your deck? Even though it is fits Ayli so well?
Do people have problems with my using Karametra's Acolyte, Temur Sabertooth, 6 devotion worth of green permanents, a haste enabler, and a Soul of the Harvest to draw my deck and find a way to win the game? If this was your deck, what would you cut?
When you have 4-5 card combos, they come up so rarely... like most of the time you were going to win the game anyway.
And they are disruptable.
This is not like people who play Food Chain combos where you really need enchantment removal or you're dead.
The sort of combos you are talking about, I think those not just fine, but actively cool. I mean, if you can win with Gift of Immortality, cool. Beats the hell out of Mike/Trike. The sorts of combos you cite are almost unavoidable in decks built with a fair bit of synergy, and they pretty much have to develop over the course of the game, vs. being tutored for game after game. Much different from Food Chain combo or things like that.
This is a strange card for me. It can be very good if you draw and cast it at the right time, but later in the game, it is even worse than normal ramp cards. I considered it in my Zacama deck but ended up going with more typical green ramp. I don't currently play it in any decks. If I ever do make a Muldrotha deck, I think it very likely to make the cut there.
Both of these decks are boring and one dimensional with Teferi being slightly less so but still limited.
tutor and 1-c combo generals typically wind up playing out the same and it gets old super fast.
I agree with this sentiment 100%. If you are playing in a very competetive group, I suppose they are fine, but in the more typical Commander game, linear
decks like this are really boring and unfun to play against. Personally, I would find either of them really boring to run as well, but YMMV, obviously.
I wouldn't be surprised to see Mana Crypt show up in a future Conspiracy or Battlebond sort of set, but I think it would be very problematic to place in a Commander deck, just because a) there aren't very many cards that can be reprinted that would balance the value of a deck with Mana Crypt (Mana Drain is one of the few that leaps immediately to mind), and b) if they don't balance it - and find a way to do it that doesn't become a beacon to Vintage/Legacy/Modern players) - the decks will sell very unevenly and we will have a repeat of the True Name Nemesis fiasco.
Big props for Gishath. No, he's not good in cEDH. That strikes me as a feature, not a bug.
In my opinion, if a big stompy dinosaur deck doesn't have a place at the table, then maybe you should be playing Vintage, Legacy or Modern rather than Commander.
Sign in Blood is a very solid card. That said, I personally prefer Read the Bones, but it's often best to play both (and Night's Whisper).
Many people have an irrational and undying hatred of theft effects. Nothing will piss off some people more than you casting Bribery on them or using an effect like Rubinia Soulsinger to grab one of their creatures. I have seen people rage quit over Hostage Taker, of all things. I don't really get it, but I see it all the time, so when choosing to run theft-based decks, keep in mind that doing so might make you enemies just because of what you are running.
The problem with this whole approach, though, is that while it may slow down combo, it won't stop overpowered stuff from happening. People can still win on the spot by playing Genesis Wave or Primal Surge in a properly-tuned deck and running lots of draw effects to get to those cards. Tutors on a stick which might not seem problematic can be very powerful when paired with recursion (Sun Titan, Alesha, Nim Deathmantle, etc.)
Of course, "crazy stuff happening" is part of what we should probably be striving for in EDH, so long as it isn't boring crazy stuff, like tutoring for an "I win" combo game after game. How cards like GWave and PSurge fit into that is an open question.
This, again, is not what actually happens most of the time. Ramp decks may or may not run a higher percentage of land (most don't, at least not significantly), but they do run a higher percentage of ramp cards, usually including lots of cheap ones, which they will continue to draw into post-MLD, so they can likely recover more quickly from MLD strategies than anyone other than the MLD user, who typically has built their deck around that aspect. MLD is not a balancing strategy. It is a resource denial strategy that pretends to be an answer to ramp.
These are much better strategies to address ramp without making it miserable for the rest of the players.
And everyone should run at least a few bits of spot removal that hits select lands. If you can't afford or don't own Wasteland, run Strip Mine, and if that is beyond your means, there's always Ghost Quarter. If Fulminator Mage is outside your colors, there are lots of other cards wihch can ping individual lands, This strategy won't full-stop ramp, but it can slow it down a lot by removing select pieces, and they have the benefit of applying to everyone. It's rare someone doesn't run at least one or two lands in their deck that should be blown up, and if a mono-black player owns Cabal Coffers they will likely run it even if theirs isn't a dedicated ramp deck.
That said, I still think it would be better for the format to ban Paradox Engine.
The best way to stop ramp decks is to figure out what the ramp player is looking to accomplish with all that mana and focus on stopping that. That might include some targeted LD - it's always a good idea to take out things like Cabal Coffers, Gaea's Cradle or Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx - but will also likely involve some combination of spot removal, sweepers of various sorts and/or countermagic.
Another option is to gang up on the guy who is spending his first several turns doing nothing but ramping beyond the level of the other players at the table. Swing into him when he doesn't have blockers, or force him to use creatures that enable his ramp strategy to absorb damage. Remove the support pieces with spot removal. Whenever I play my Zacama deck, people who have played against it know to kill the mana doublers and things like Oracle of Mul Daya on sight, and to try to have answers to the big dino on board.
Many other people are not quite so fond of Thar, sadly.
I think that is what Taleran meant by "one is not going to and keeps slowly climbing in price."
Dumb card to be on the reserve list, but I hate the whole concept of the reserve list with a passion anyhow.
I honestly don't know why Clever Impersonator isn't among the most-played blue staples. I don't think I've every played in a game in which I had that card in hand and didn't have several tempting options to choose from. Gods, planeswalkers, strong artifacts, off-color, powerful enchantment effects... that card can do so much.
Yeah, but that's not what people are really talking about when they use the shorthand "Food Chain combo."
The weird combos are cool. The easy, familiar ones, more boring. Your Food Chain one, that would be interesting to see. Food Chain and Prossh? Yawn.
I think Triskellion is largely a terrible card, but if someone found a cool combo with it that wasn't the same Mike/Trike snoozefest or something more or less equivalent to that, that could be cool.
The sort of combos you are talking about, I think those not just fine, but actively cool. I mean, if you can win with Gift of Immortality, cool. Beats the hell out of Mike/Trike. The sorts of combos you cite are almost unavoidable in decks built with a fair bit of synergy, and they pretty much have to develop over the course of the game, vs. being tutored for game after game. Much different from Food Chain combo or things like that.
I agree with this sentiment 100%. If you are playing in a very competetive group, I suppose they are fine, but in the more typical Commander game, linear
decks like this are really boring and unfun to play against. Personally, I would find either of them really boring to run as well, but YMMV, obviously.