- Chairwolf
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Member for 11 years, 6 months, and 22 days
Last active Tue, Nov, 5 2019 21:09:28
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Feb 3, 2014Chairwolf posted a message on Launch Giveaway!My favorite card has always been Counterbalance. I just love that it turns deck-manipulation spells, like Brainstorm or Telling Time, into counterspells. I just like building around it. I'm a Blue mage at heart.Posted in: Announcements
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Giving any piece of a combo win-condition flash is awesome. Almost too many to name though, and I don't know if that's the direction you want to take anyway.
I don't know if flashing Planeswalkers is actually that awesome. You activate them once on your main phase or you flash them in and... activate them once on your main phase. Maybe something with a really impactful effect, like Teferi, Temporal Archmage.
Arcanis is a dope suggestion.
For mono-Red, or Boros, maybe. Maaaaaaaybe. But I think I would be more inclined to play Kiki+Conscripts. I know it's a 2-card combo versus a one-card combo, but... I think Kiki and Conscripts are just better cards. And by a large margin, too.
If you asked me whether or not I would play either of these cards, individually, in a deck, my answer would probably be "hell no." I do remember a day when using Godo to fetch 'clamp or Swords was good enough, but I haven't seen that in a while. Helm by itself seems real bad.
Kiki and Conscripts aren't like, mad auto includes by themselves either. But they at least do something. Godo does something, too, but Helm does mad nothing.
Once you start branching out of mono-Red or Boros, the options just start getting so much better.
It's a pretty valuable thing to keep in mind though. There aren't a lot of true one-card win-conditions.
The combo also (kind-of) bricks if you draw the helm. You can lay it early, yeah, but then it's vulnerable to at least a whole extra turn of removal (or costs considerably more mana).
100% this. The biggest mistake I see people make in Commander at ANY level is not taking advantage of their mulligan. Sure, you will lose some percent of games to mulliganing into oblivion, and I understand that people hate when that happens because sitting out of a long Commander game really, really sucks. But you will lose a much larger percentage of games by keeping "safe" hands that actually just do nothing.
When the OP says that there are only 5 or 6 good pieces of artifact mana that get played, okay. So you've got every so slightly over a 5% chance of drawing one of those cards in one draw. You get seven draws in an opener. If you mulligan hard (and going down to six with a draw and a scry isn't that "hard") you get three chances to roll those dice. I'm not going to throw out numbers because it would just be napkin probability and everyone's an expert, but the odds are better than you think.
I really don't want to be that guy, but Narset has hexproof. I know there's probably a bunch of other examples of what you're talking about, and that your point is bigger than just this one example, and you could have just as easily said "a counterspell" instead of "spot removal," but... it's hard to believe part of the problem isn't user error when you just obviously didn't read a card in this example that you chose.
Just as something else that stuck out to me, you say that hand with two lands and Mox Diamond is "a joke," but it's not. If that hand has Dark Confidant, Jace, Vryn's Prodigy, Wheel of Fortune, Impulse, Windfall, Lim-Dul's Vault, Night's Whisper, Demonic Tutor, Ponder, Preordain, Brainstorm, Enlightened Tutor, Mystical Tutor, Mystic Remora, Faithless Looting, Gamble, Sylvan Library, Sensei's Divining Top or Merchant Scroll in it (just off the top of my head), I'd totally play that hand.
I'm interested where you're getting your lists from, and if you're copying them exactly. Obviously, the math of "5 good mana rocks" is gonna change if you can't afford a Mana Crypt. Cards that seem like they don't matter, especially cheap early draw or card filtering, are really the backbone of decks that play a low land count. If you're editing the lists by dropping these, you're sealing your own fate.
I don't know where people get this idea that cEDH decks aren't built to be consistent. They are. Decks would look very different if people were only concerned with going off as fast as possible. You should have seen the piles that were running around when Partial Paris was still a thing. But even those piles had some degree of consistency because, again, of the mulligan... I'd be just as leery of anyone bragging about 70+% winrates in 4-player games, but I honestly don't see anyone I respect in the cEDH community doing that.
I will agree that a lot of these U/x decks feel very... dicey when you're just looking at opening hands of a couple lands and some cantrips. And I don't know your life, but I think if you spent a good deal of time playing those hands out you'd find yourself becoming more comfortable with them.
Hey, personally, that's the reason I play a lot of G/x decks instead of like, 4-color Storm. I like having access to like, 5 one-mana dorks that help fix my hands.
Bounce in general is pretty underrated. I get that you have to play around ETBs, but a lot of times the tempo can still be worth it.
It's not that Tatyova draws you a million cards off The Great Aurora.
It's that Tatyova, by nature of her ability, makes sure that the number of things in play + the number of cards in hand is very high for you, compared to your opponents, because all your lands and ramp spells go +1 at minimum.
Players who get to 5 mana and immediately play Tatyova will get punished. Play her like Angry Omnath, wait until you have some extra lands to drop or fetches to crack before you play her. Playing lands doesn't use the stack so if she resolves, you're pretty sure to at least get one card.
It always sucks if your Commander gets removed but if you can manage to get a couple cards before she does, it sucks a lot less. The deck should ramp enough that re-casting her is also less of a problem than it is for other decks.
As far as winning the game goes, I just threw in some extra turn spells and let it work itself out, and it did. It's a pretty generic U/G deck, you can probably put whatever you want at the top end and it'll work fine. Really depends on what you want to be playing (and the kind of people you play with), but anything from Lab Man to infinite turns to Dramatic/Scepter to just green beats seems achievable.
My personal takeaway was that The Great Aurora is awesome in this deck. With every ramp spell getting you twice as many cards that count for Aurora as usual, my number was a good bit more than double my opponents' when I cast it. I'm confident it's not optimal by any means, but I love that card and I'm sure someone out there will love it in this deck too.
I wouldn't discount them right off the bat is all I'm saying.
Beyond that, yes, just talking to people about their experience is going to give you a lot to go on. If you play with the same people consistently, cubing can be a very personal thing. You'll likely find that your players love some less-than-optimal cards, and dislike some cards that the internet would tell you are absolutely fine. People tend to be vocal when they have a particularly good or bad experience so you shouldn't have to like, have in-depth psychotherapy with your drafters to get the picture.
As to the OP, I don't want you to get the wrong impression based on the couple of posters who have taken the time to reply to you so far - it is not the general consensus that using cards like Library/Drain will ruin your c/ube. Far from it.
Are you saying this based on experience or are you just making an assumption? Based on how you seem to feel about high-power level cards, it seems unlikely to me that you have ever tried them in your own c/ube. I don't really see how a card being good enough to go into any deck is going to push players away from archetypes.
Coming from the other direction, I would adivse the OP to not go too hard on narrow, archetype-specific cards. The most powerful ones will naturally stand out and be high picks on their own, but after a certain point decks will start to feel very same-ey if you include too many cards that only one deck wants.
That's why I say that powerful cards don't hurt archetypes at all. If you pick a Skullclamp early, you can still go in any direction. If you pick up Guttersnipe or a +1/+1 counter lord, your draft is pretty much planned out for you from the get go.
The archetype list is a good start and I would first look for strong signal/payoff cards. Beyond that look for support that exists in cards that you would consider playing anyway.
As for c/ube size, the key is variance. How many drafters do you expect to have? If you draft a 360 with 8 players you'll see the whole c/ube every time, and I think you'll find that the "archetype" decks end up looking pretty similar each time they're drafted. Personally, I like to have some portion of my c/ube that doesn't get drafted, so if you have 8 players 540 is good, if you expect to get less then you can have a good amount of variance out of 360.
Squirrely is absolutely right. I think cards like Land Tax, Mana Drain, and Library lose a lot of their power in Peasant because the cards surrounding them are not as good. A deck playing one mana down to Library can get run over much more easily because the comeback mechanics in Peasant are weaker. Mana Drain can be brutal but the things it powers out are weaker and more vulnerable to Peasant-level removal (which tends to be way, way stronger than the creatures unless you're building your c/ube deliberately away from that). Honestly, the most problematic card the OP is currently playing is probably Loxodon Warhammer, as it's nearly impossible for aggro decks to race and represents a hard counter.
The cards that Squirrely listed are far more problematic than the other cards that people have been complaining about so far. And the OP isn't playing Propaganda or Wall of Denial.
Now, if you are playing some of these more powerful cards, you absolutely should increase the asfan of artifact/enchantment removal in your c/ube so that your players feel as though there is counterplay available to them.
The best advice I can give the OP is just to draft the c/ube. The #1 way to get a feel for the environment and what is good/bad is to see it in action. Maybe you'll discover that you don't like the stronger cards once you play in this environment with or against them, who knows. The c/ube is an evolving thing. If you play with it once and your drafters don't love it, that doesn't mean that you have to be done with it forever. Listen to their feedback and make changes. The same goes for making cuts and additions - as you play you'll start to notice how decks come together, what cards tend to be low picks, etc.
of as many cards as he or she had before. Subsequent hands decrease by one card as normal"), which was the same in 2013 as it is today, and I assume a fair amount of time before that, and I'm guessing they assumed that was the case for Commander as well.
I'm also guessing, although I'm not positive, that before Wizards released any Commander product, they didn't have anything relating to Commander in the CR, so all people had to go on was that generic multiplayer rule.
It's actually in the CR that the first mulligan is free in multiplayer. It's super silly with Partial but that's why people do it, I suppose.
We've done away with Partial and we're all happier for it.
I'm not sure if "combo" is even really part of the conversation - even most combo decks would mull hard for acceleration. I think most of it boils down to Sol Ring and Mana Crypt. Even very casual decks can create lopsided games if they get to mull hard for Sol Ring and sculpt the rest of their hand.
Honestly, the (heavy air quotes) "recommended" mulligan of Vancouver, first free, no shuffling creates bonkers starts more often than not. It's still a lot of selection. I can't remember the last time I had to go below 6 to find something playable. So I don't think Paris has any benefits over the current mulligan rule, even assuming people aren't sculpting dramatic hands with it.
They've made a change in their philosophy towards banning things in Standard. It used to be, like, "only use in case of emergencies." But now they'll do it any time they think it'll make a format better. It's not that they've suddenly made a ton of mistakes and now Standard is worse than it's ever been. If they had the same banning philosophy in past standard environments, we'd have seen bans there too.