JWK, I agree on your points about increased deck size making tutors and shuffling take longer, although I don't think they provide a significant enough reasson to keep the maximum deck size stuck at 100. You're losing me on how by keeping the maximum deck size imited, that the power level is limited. If anything allowing decks to go over 100 cards would drop the power level of decks since you're making your 1% chance to get an specific card a little bit harder with each card you add above 100.
Every 110 deck would just be a worse version of a 100 card deck.
@Impossible The RC has made many changes to EDH core rules over the years. You used to have to use a legends elder dragon, but they opened it up to all legendary creatures. You used to have to care specifically about card color, then they invented CI to allow for Memnarch to work. There is a small but growing list of cards that allowing us to break the highlander rule.
Does anyone think that most players are going to suddenly make 250 card decks if they get rid of the 100 card limit? I doubt you'd intentionally see a deck over 100 cards ever, unless it was Battle of Wits.
It's also worth noting that you probably play with and against decks that are over 100 cards already and on a regular basis too, assuming you play paper magic. Everybody buys their sleeves in 100 count boxes, but those boxes always have some extra sleeves, usually 103-108. You're going to run into players who just kept putting cards in sleeves until they ran out and didn't count them exactly.
My personal opinion is that the reasons to keep the maximum deck size locked to 100 don't carry that much weight, so it should be changed to 100 minimum, anysize maximum; even if that maximum size increase only ends up benfiting Battle of Wits decks.
I've seen a few decks combo out with Paradox Engine, but it's not been something common here. I actually tried the card myself in a deck with about 10 mana rocks, but never felt it was very good in my own deck, since I really needed a mass of artifact mana to do anything with it.
I do want to ask, doyou mostly see PE enable the combo plays due to it's controller having excessive artifact mana or do they usually have another enabler?
My expereince with PE has that I've never seen somebody just combo off with like 2-3 mana rocks and it, but I have seen it dominate a game when people were using creatures that enabled excessive mana generation. The ones I've seen were super competative Seton, Krosan Protector druid tribal, which the pilot netdecked so it was probably going to be nutty even without PE.; but the main offenders I see is everyones favorite elf Selvala, Heart of the Wilds or Selvala, Explorer Returned, since she specializes in absurd mana generation and also gives it's owner card draw to keep the PE gassed up.
Been playing it in my Jaya Ballard, Task Mage control deck. So far it's been good. My group usually plays 3 player pods, so sometimes it just rips lands from both opponent's and if somebody has a Top they will give me a land 100% of the time. The card usually is going to give you an unusual card that doesn't exactly fit your decks strategy, but sometimes you get a niche answer card or a super bomb and you can turn the game on it's head.
I've been thinking about the idea of building Keiga, the Tide Star deck. The only problem is that the general actually needs to die and go to the graveyard for the trigger to happen, so I'm looking for cards similar to Relic of Progenitus that let me send the general back to the command zone once it's sitting in the yard.
My friend has a had a casual Izzet coinflip deck for years. With Battlebond right around the corner he asked if he could proxy the new izzet partners as his commander. Very first game with the partners at the helm he gets a one shot kill with a 48/48 Okaun, Eye of Chaos. Good times.
A couple cards from Battlebond look promising for a Jaya deck.
Victory Chimes - Ignore the ability to gift someone else mana; that's rarely if ever going to be something you want to do in FFA commander games. A rock that untaps everyturn is just good on it's own. It has great synergy with Mind's Eye and one extra mana on each opponent's turn can be super helpful for getting top activations or just holding up enough mana to threaten Jaya activations.
Khorvath's Fury - It's Chandra, Flamecaller's 0 ability for one less mana with the ability to Sudden Impact all your opponents. It's going to lose out to Chandra if she lives for multiple turns, but it's hard to keep a walker around for many turns. Sudden Impact effects can be very good in commander too.
Stolen Strategy - Not quite as good as the Etali, Primal Storm trigger every upkeep, but being able to psedo draw a card off each opponent's deck is likely to cause all sorts of craziness.
Cause Library wouldn't quadruple in price AT ALL if it became EDH legal....eeeeeesh
It absolutely would become the most expensive legal card or close to it.
The arguemnt for unbanning it is that even though it will become super expensive:
1. There are very few actual copies of the card meaning the damage it can do to games is very limited.
2. Does it even do damage to games? You need to have exactly 7 cards in hand at every point of the game to draw one additional card per turn. This is the format where draw is so good that you'll likely get much more value out of a Reliquary Tower letting you hold a grip of 12 then LoA giving you a draw.
When Library was like $200; I was in favor of unbanning it; now that it's $1600 I'm not due to it jumping higher then I'd ever be able to justify spending on a card. I still don't think it's the absurdly powerful autoinclude that it's made out to be by the RC, but then again I've never played against the card in all my years of magic due to it being legacy banned, commander bannded, and not even good in vintage.
I think those of us discussing PBtE banning on a MTG message board may be too deep in the forest to understand what the new to EDH player experience is actually like.
I say this because I do have a VERY expensive deck with many reserve list and foil cards and my other decks don't hold a candle too it price wise. My experiences with newer players is that they really don't know anything about card value. I could hand my pimped out deck to a new player and ask them to pick out the 3 most expensive cards and there is no way they would get it correct.
That's because card value isn't determined only by how good a card is in a commander game; there are so many other factors. Condition, set it's printed in, RI/recent reprint status, use in 4 copy formats, and that's just scratching the surface.
Normally what happens when I play an expensive card is that nobody actually notices. I've had one single player in three years of me playing the deck constantly ever ask to read my Mishra's Workshop to know what it does. They just don't even notice it.
I've had multiple games were I plop down some old looking card that just happens to have a powerful effect on the game and had my opponnets complain about my cards being too expensive for them to beat when the card they were sore about was just a Antiquities printing of Titania's Song which sells for $4 and the reprints are worth les then 50¢. I've heard the same gripes about my 59¢ Portcullis dominating the table.
New players just don't know card prices at all, they think powerful card = expensive card like it would be in a format like standard; this isn't true in EDH. There are many cheap cards that are wickedly powerful and many expensive cards that a bad. (I'm looking at you Caverns of Despair.)
If you're sore at your buddy for having deeper pockets then you and playing some high end cards, you can always kill them with some extremely affordable answer cards. I've had a 49¢ Consulate Crackdown send over a grand in cardboard to exile on several occassions.
I think the only RL card that is both pricy and is close to staple status is Wheel of Fortune.
Cards like Academy Rector are luxery pieces in certain specific styles of decks, enchantment themed in rectors case. You can make that deck without the high end cards or you can make a deck that isn't enchantment heavy and therefore wont play Rector. Wheel is just a generally good card; it's hard to argue that any deck with a red CI wont be improved by playing it.
Because I'm easing back into EDH banlist discussion can I get a quick summary where people are generally at on Painter's servant?
The card was originally banned for it's interactions with Grindstone and Iona, Shield of Emeria. These combos either mill a single player at a time or they lock your opponents out of casting spells.
The RC, most notably papafunk because he always chimes in on PS discussion, tend to say that Painter's Servant doesn't add much to the format when considering it for unbanning. I do agree with them in this regard, very few people are going to do anything clever with PS, like turning on Green Sun's Zenith to fetch a Shriekmaw. I imagine that when PS is unbanned, if you see a PS in play at all it's probably part of a combo.
I believe Painter's Servant will eventually come off the banned list. I think the RC will just have to add one or two more cards because WotC prints something outrageous and they will want to keep the list short so PS will get unbanned to keep the banlist as short as possible. I think that is what happened with the Hulk unban.
I'm assuming that the Inferno effect will kill multiple creatures in play, including Jaya herself. Do I get them all? Do I get to choose which creature has the scyth at the end?
I play Serra Ascendent myself in my aggro decks, but my experience has been the opposite from ISBP's. The optimal strategy is to tunnel vision SA into one person, chipping them down 12 or 24 life in the early turns usually guarantees that even if they deal with SA they will probably die to random aggression later in the game. Additionally unless the other two players are feeling very generous, they will let you ram SA into the one person repeatedly and not bother using removal on it.
I don't think it really falls into banworthy territory. It's a card that is really only good as a turn one play, takes 7 turns to kill one player, and is very unlikely to live long enough to kill multiple players.
I really can't see the RC acting on it at this point or in the future. However, there is a small chance that WOTC will issue errate for those cards to have him turn on at 10 more then starting life total instead of 30. One of the Duels of the Planeswalkers games already fetures this errate to SA to prevent it from being a bomb in 2HG games; but WOTC didn't carry it over when they reprinted SA in a master set.
Every 110 deck would just be a worse version of a 100 card deck.
@Impossible The RC has made many changes to EDH core rules over the years. You used to have to use a legends elder dragon, but they opened it up to all legendary creatures. You used to have to care specifically about card color, then they invented CI to allow for Memnarch to work. There is a small but growing list of cards that allowing us to break the highlander rule.
Does anyone think that most players are going to suddenly make 250 card decks if they get rid of the 100 card limit? I doubt you'd intentionally see a deck over 100 cards ever, unless it was Battle of Wits.
It's also worth noting that you probably play with and against decks that are over 100 cards already and on a regular basis too, assuming you play paper magic. Everybody buys their sleeves in 100 count boxes, but those boxes always have some extra sleeves, usually 103-108. You're going to run into players who just kept putting cards in sleeves until they ran out and didn't count them exactly.
My personal opinion is that the reasons to keep the maximum deck size locked to 100 don't carry that much weight, so it should be changed to 100 minimum, anysize maximum; even if that maximum size increase only ends up benfiting Battle of Wits decks.
I do want to ask, doyou mostly see PE enable the combo plays due to it's controller having excessive artifact mana or do they usually have another enabler?
My expereince with PE has that I've never seen somebody just combo off with like 2-3 mana rocks and it, but I have seen it dominate a game when people were using creatures that enabled excessive mana generation. The ones I've seen were super competative Seton, Krosan Protector druid tribal, which the pilot netdecked so it was probably going to be nutty even without PE.; but the main offenders I see is everyones favorite elf Selvala, Heart of the Wilds or Selvala, Explorer Returned, since she specializes in absurd mana generation and also gives it's owner card draw to keep the PE gassed up.
Some of my greatest hits in the few weeks I've played it have been:
-Torment of Hailfire when I had a gauntlet in play.
-Exsanguinate when I was at 8 life.
-Capture of Jingzhou.
-Scour from Existence to take out a Consulate Crackdown.
I'm happy just to see the upkeep trigger give me more options on my turn, even if I decide not to use them.
Little known fact: Before Arcum took up the study and repair of artifacts, he used to be a gym coach. Exhibit A: Arcum's Whistle
Victory Chimes - Ignore the ability to gift someone else mana; that's rarely if ever going to be something you want to do in FFA commander games. A rock that untaps everyturn is just good on it's own. It has great synergy with Mind's Eye and one extra mana on each opponent's turn can be super helpful for getting top activations or just holding up enough mana to threaten Jaya activations.
Khorvath's Fury - It's Chandra, Flamecaller's 0 ability for one less mana with the ability to Sudden Impact all your opponents. It's going to lose out to Chandra if she lives for multiple turns, but it's hard to keep a walker around for many turns. Sudden Impact effects can be very good in commander too.
Stolen Strategy - Not quite as good as the Etali, Primal Storm trigger every upkeep, but being able to psedo draw a card off each opponent's deck is likely to cause all sorts of craziness.
It absolutely would become the most expensive legal card or close to it.
The arguemnt for unbanning it is that even though it will become super expensive:
1. There are very few actual copies of the card meaning the damage it can do to games is very limited.
2. Does it even do damage to games? You need to have exactly 7 cards in hand at every point of the game to draw one additional card per turn. This is the format where draw is so good that you'll likely get much more value out of a Reliquary Tower letting you hold a grip of 12 then LoA giving you a draw.
When Library was like $200; I was in favor of unbanning it; now that it's $1600 I'm not due to it jumping higher then I'd ever be able to justify spending on a card. I still don't think it's the absurdly powerful autoinclude that it's made out to be by the RC, but then again I've never played against the card in all my years of magic due to it being legacy banned, commander bannded, and not even good in vintage.
I say this because I do have a VERY expensive deck with many reserve list and foil cards and my other decks don't hold a candle too it price wise. My experiences with newer players is that they really don't know anything about card value. I could hand my pimped out deck to a new player and ask them to pick out the 3 most expensive cards and there is no way they would get it correct.
That's because card value isn't determined only by how good a card is in a commander game; there are so many other factors. Condition, set it's printed in, RI/recent reprint status, use in 4 copy formats, and that's just scratching the surface.
Normally what happens when I play an expensive card is that nobody actually notices. I've had one single player in three years of me playing the deck constantly ever ask to read my Mishra's Workshop to know what it does. They just don't even notice it.
I've had multiple games were I plop down some old looking card that just happens to have a powerful effect on the game and had my opponnets complain about my cards being too expensive for them to beat when the card they were sore about was just a Antiquities printing of Titania's Song which sells for $4 and the reprints are worth les then 50¢. I've heard the same gripes about my 59¢ Portcullis dominating the table.
New players just don't know card prices at all, they think powerful card = expensive card like it would be in a format like standard; this isn't true in EDH. There are many cheap cards that are wickedly powerful and many expensive cards that a bad. (I'm looking at you Caverns of Despair.)
If you're sore at your buddy for having deeper pockets then you and playing some high end cards, you can always kill them with some extremely affordable answer cards. I've had a 49¢ Consulate Crackdown send over a grand in cardboard to exile on several occassions.
Cards like Academy Rector are luxery pieces in certain specific styles of decks, enchantment themed in rectors case. You can make that deck without the high end cards or you can make a deck that isn't enchantment heavy and therefore wont play Rector. Wheel is just a generally good card; it's hard to argue that any deck with a red CI wont be improved by playing it.
The card was originally banned for it's interactions with Grindstone and Iona, Shield of Emeria. These combos either mill a single player at a time or they lock your opponents out of casting spells.
The RC, most notably papafunk because he always chimes in on PS discussion, tend to say that Painter's Servant doesn't add much to the format when considering it for unbanning. I do agree with them in this regard, very few people are going to do anything clever with PS, like turning on Green Sun's Zenith to fetch a Shriekmaw. I imagine that when PS is unbanned, if you see a PS in play at all it's probably part of a combo.
However, there is also the view that keeping PS banned doesn't really stop anything. There are other combinations of cards that do exactly the same combos that PS enables. If a player wants to mill out one player at a time there is Rest in Peace and Helm of Obedience and if they want to lock their opponts out of spells they can play Teferi, Mage of Zhalfir and Knowledge Pool/Possibility Storm or Solemnity and Decree of Silence
I believe Painter's Servant will eventually come off the banned list. I think the RC will just have to add one or two more cards because WotC prints something outrageous and they will want to keep the list short so PS will get unbanned to keep the banlist as short as possible. I think that is what happened with the Hulk unban.
I'm assuming that the Inferno effect will kill multiple creatures in play, including Jaya herself. Do I get them all? Do I get to choose which creature has the scyth at the end?
I don't think it really falls into banworthy territory. It's a card that is really only good as a turn one play, takes 7 turns to kill one player, and is very unlikely to live long enough to kill multiple players.
I really can't see the RC acting on it at this point or in the future. However, there is a small chance that WOTC will issue errate for those cards to have him turn on at 10 more then starting life total instead of 30. One of the Duels of the Planeswalkers games already fetures this errate to SA to prevent it from being a bomb in 2HG games; but WOTC didn't carry it over when they reprinted SA in a master set.