Panoptic Mirror can always do degenerate things with a multitude of normally fair cards.
Sol Ring is normally fair, though it has the ability to sometimes be degenerate.
The differences is the likelihood of something being degenerate. This is the exact same reason why Painter's Servant is banned.
Panoptic Mirror - Kiki-Jiki is just as powerful and even has more immediate impact than the mirror. Which fair cards become degenerate with the mirror? Most of the time, you could get a similar effect by casting the card you would put on the mirror, and then getting it back and casting it again with regrowth or snapcaster mage. Expecting the mirror to survive for a 4th turn around the table is kind of ridiculous. It's only degenerate with specific cards like time warp.
Oh good, another thread that degenerates into an attempt to define a universal standard of "fun," "fair," or "social." Cool.
Strip Mine + Crucible in 1v1 doesn't seem particularly interesting for either player. Unless your deck is designed to play multiple lands each turn (Hello, Azusa! Exploration, yesplz!) using your land drop each turn to blow up an opposing player's land drop and keep everyone at four, three, two, lands, w/e, seems like a colossal waste of time.
That's not saying someone has probably made a great deck out of it. I could see any number of critter swarm, super-low CMC decks busting my local meta in half by locking their opponent out of lands past the third or so and relying on two or three other lands to pump out cheap dorks to mess everyone up.
The thing about a strip mine lock is that you 0-for-1 them with your land from the graveyard until they don't have a land to play. Then you play the game like normal while using your strip mine every other turn or so to stop them from doing anything. Their only out is a 1-mana artifact removal (or if they have enough to blow it up early, before all their lands are destroyed).
It's a pretty annoying combo, but it's beatable. Cheap artifact removal is already a staple becuase of all the mana rocks and powerful artifacts that are abundant in EDH.
Arguing against the point supports the unbanning of panoptic mirror. If the only reason to keep a card banned is because it doesn't add to the format in a positive way, then sol ring and mana crypt should be banned. I don't see how god hands add to the game (in a positive way). They just turn the game into immediate archenemy due to their power level.
That was not the only reason listed, you just latched onto it because it is easy to attack. You want consistency, but it can't be defined when opinion is driving most of the Ban List. There are no hard and fast rules to what gets a card banned in EDH because no rule would produce the consistency you want, it would just change which opinion mattered.
What were the other reasons then? I latched onto it because it easy to attack, but also because it was pretty much all people were saying about the card. The whole point of that post was to use arguments that other people use for banned cards as reason to ban sol ring and mana crypt.
Of course I want consistency. Who wouldn't? How about "All mana-producing artifacts on the legacy ban list are banned." or something like that? There's a reason Jusstice was pushing for the legacy ban list as the EDH ban list. If someone asks "why only the mana-producing artifacts?", you can answer with "fast mana is powerful in all formats, but other cards may not have as much impact, so they will be evaluated individually" and "if it's too fast for legacy, it's too fast for EDH - a format where longer, more epic games is the goal".
Metalworker adds anywhere from 2 to 14 mana, depending on hand size/comp.
Tolarian Academy is nuts with Esper/Affinity; while there are 0 cost Artifacts, there are few 0 cost creatures (For Gaea's Cradle) and no 0 cost Enchantments (For Serra Sanctum)
Sole Ring adds 2 colorless. Not any more. Late Game Sol Ring doesn't really do much for you, but in an artifact deck you are looking at a MASSIVE amount of mana from TA or Metalworker; enough to hard cast a Eldrazi Titan for free.
And I would consider that a god hand; you have a 1/99 chance to pull Mana Vault, a 1/99 chance to pull Tezzeret, and a 1/99 chance to pull Omniscience. Now, I'm no stats major, but even I can tell you that getting all three of those (and enough islands to use them) is NOT going to happen that often.
Metalworker adds anywhere from 0 to 198 mana (have your whole deck in hand minus metalworker and they are all artifacts - including your commander). The point, however, is that he can easily add very little mana, like 2 or 4. He also has to sit in play for a whole turn before he can add the mana, unlike mana rocks.
Tolarian Academy - Sure, there are 0-mana artifacts. What do these 0-mana artifacts do? Are they still useful without tolarian academy in hand? Some are okay, but most will do pretty much nothing - especially if you don't have the land.
Late game, cabal coffers can add tons of mana as well, and I haven't heard any complaints about that card.
It's actually a better chance than that, since you draw 7 cards (though I don't know the exact chance). Anyway, there are plenty of 4 or 5 drops that are too strong for turn 2, and these cards enable that sort of thing. Mana crypt even enables 3-drops on turn 1.
I don't know if you want lands to blow up or not, but pox is one of my favourite cards and I think it fits this strategy. If everyone is still at 40, it is a 14 damage lava axe to each player for 3 mana, and it sets everyone back quite a bit - it combos nicely with any cards that damage each turn, like sulfuric vortex and mogis, god of slaughter (which might be an okay addition to the deck as well as a possible commander choice).
My argument is that sol ring and mana crypt add nothing useful to the game - all they do is enable god hands.
If splashy, epic hands add nothing to the game, what does? "Craw Wurm adds nothing to the game, it only hits people"
Arguing against the point supports the unbanning of panoptic mirror. If the only reason to keep a card banned is because it doesn't add to the format in a positive way, then sol ring and mana crypt should be banned. I don't see how god hands add to the game (in a positive way). They just turn the game into immediate archenemy due to their power level.
And what, abandon the ~30-man group that all plays regular EDH? No one in my area plays duel commander. I even made duel commander decks, but no one plays it, so I just play them in regular EDH games.
If sol ring and mana crypt were already on the ban list, I think there would be a 0% chance that they'd come off. That's why I think the arguments against unbanning panoptic mirror are completely invalid - they could be used to ban so many other cards. Some cards seem like they're only still on there because they were already on there. If the only justification for them staying there is "they add nothing to the game" (or in other words, they are only powerful enough to ruin some casual games), I don't see how a large portion of the cards in the game could not be on there.
If you look at sol ring, all it really adds is the ability to get god hands. There's so much resistance to the ban from people having specificly good hands (usually involving a signet and then a 5-drop) - the argument being that you need a god draw for it to work. The problem is that those kinds of hands are all very hard to get without sol ring or mana crypt, and without them, they usually cause card disadvantage. Sol ring and mana crypt can take the place of lands quite easily, so it's like drawing a hand where one of your lands can be played on turn one without counting as a land drop and then your turn 2 is potentially ridiculous. There has been some mention of it being okay later in the game - like it is a bad top deck, for example. Well, so is a land, or rampant growth.
My argument is that sol ring and mana crypt add nothing useful to the game - all they do is enable god hands. When people argue that this is not enough to ban a card, I will point to other cards on the ban list (Panoptic Mirror - look at the arguments made against unbanning it in the past bunch of pages). When people argue that the rest of the table can gang up on the player with them, I argue that the same can be said for other banned cards (panoptic mirror, tolarian academy, metalworker). When people argue that sol ring and mana crypt are cool cards that can't be played in any other format, I argue that the same can be said for other banned cards (tolarian academy - but panoptic mirror and metalworker are only in legacy, which is still far from EDH in terms of the games you get).
which is a possibility, of course. They could easily make a general that does this,
Millie Milhouse 1UB
Legendary Creature - Moonfolk Ninja
When you cast Millie Milhouse, if you cast it from the command zone, each opponent puts the top 15 cards from their library into their graveyard.
1/2
My thoughts exactly (not the card, though, lol). If they made a powerful mill general in a precon, they could push mill as a strategy with that. Imagine Consuming Aberration was legendary. That'd be and awesome mill general.
"Mill X cards" and "Grind until X lands" both have the fatal flaw of being, essentially, lava axes. They do nothing to the board state, and in multiplayer, they have to either hit all opponents (which many do not), or you have to lava axe each opponent to death, one at a time. There's a reason that no one runs a deck with just burn spells - it would be a terrible deck in 4-player multiplayer (with extra life to go through as well).
The best to enable mill is to print more cards like mesmeric orb and make an actual good, legendary mill creature (to be run as a commander).
So this one time I put 64 +1/+1 counters on my Fathom Mage when I only had 28 cards left in my deck, started drawing cards, got myself down to 0 in the library, went to flash in a Laboratory Maniac with Savage Summoning...... And realized you can't do that once you draw cards. I had two 100/100's too.....
Actually, I think you can flash in lab maniac between the draws. Fathom mage's ability will trigger for each +1/+1 counter put on her, so you will have 64 "you may draw a card" triggers on the stack. Since you are flashing the lab maniac in, you can do it after 28 of fathom mage's triggers have resolved.
I thought that the trigger go on the stack, but you must complete the action first, so for practical purpurposes, if you cast a spell and draw 100 cards as single effect, you cannot respond half way through drawing.
However if there are 100 'draw 1 card effects', i.e. fathom mage effects, you can respond with Savage Summoning and Lab Maniac!
Someone correct me if I am wrong!
You are correct. On top of that, since it was 64 "you may draw a card" effects, you could just not draw for all of the triggers that would kill you. You'd have to wait a turn, but you're not dead.
Oona is by far the most viable Mill commander because she does not feed your opponents' graveyard effects and she bypasses Eldrazi entirely. She also swarms tokens which can help you live until you do the deed.
Not to mention, infinite mana is an automatic millout, and she doesn't need to get anywhere close to connecting or even lose summoning sickness in order to mill.
I think that her main problem is that she will take all your mana in order to keep milling. All the other ones can start milling on their own, and you can do whatever with your mana - such as control the board. That's not saying she's worse, though. I think she's better because she also gives you a backup plan.
My mimeoplasm deck isn't really a mill deck, but mill is a powerful resource supplier for the deck, so there is plenty of it in there. I often kill at least one opponent with mill in the games I win. Since the deck isn't dedicated to it, I don't have any answers to Eldrazi, so that is usually annoying for me (I actually hate that they are worded as they are because it was completely unnecessary for preventing reanimation). Since the deck also likes milling itself, I threw in psychic spiral, which has gotten me many kills/saved my butt many times.
I use simic charm in my Karona deck (which uses ~17 charms - I used as many as I could). I can use it to bounce Karona to save her from tuck, even on my opponent's turn. The +3/+3 helps her survive combat when people are conspiring to throw her under a bus (IE attack someone who has a 3/3 and name that creature's type to kill Karona) and also kill off that creature (if it is more valuable to do so than bounce that creature and let that player take 5 commander damage). Funily enough, the mass hexproof ability is the one I use the least.
I think creature pump is really bad in EDH, but that's because it is so narrow. Since it is so narrow and so uncommon, having it on here is actually very good for surprising people.
I think removal will be very hard for you. I'd run some, for sure, but keeping the board in check is not exactly RG's specialty. The idea is mostly to keep people from just comboing out or out valuing me. I don't want to play it as a control deck, but just have answers. For example, I'm a big fan of Mass removal when I don't play any permanents of the type to be removed. Shatterstorm or Tranquility when I own no Enchantments or Artifacts is fun.
I like Borborygmos Enraged since he can act as a powerful finisher. I think Radha would be my next pick, since, even though she conflicts with other 2-mana spells, she kind of removes your need to run them (saving slots for other things). Valid. You don't like Wort, the Raidmother? Borborygmos has the disadvantage of not doing anything for my early game. Only Late. Wort does Mid game, and Rhada does early game.
I'd honestly consider going with land destruction if your group is cool with it. There are lots of good red/green spells for destroying lands and denying mana. There are some nice red cards that can abuse your ability to ramp - thoughts of ruin and rite of ruin are both good at this. Since they only kill a flat amount of lands from each player, having more lands in play means you are punished the least. You'll probably have mostly basic lands, so you could also use things like ruination. I'll end with that, though, because I don't know if you want to be running land destruction. True, but I'm not trying to play as a control deck, I can slow them down though. Ruination I like. Stuff like Thoughts of Ruin doesn't seem bad, but I don't want to be full of Stone Rain type stuff.
Other than that, I think some sort of burn deck would be your best bet. You'd want to run things that damage people for you - sulferic vortex is very good. Lowering everyone's life total with that would help you finish the job with things like banefire and comet storm. Sulfuric Vortex seems too slow imho, but the others work. However, I'm not a huge fan of X spells in spellslinger. I feel too inclined to dump all my mana into it as soon as I get it and not keep going. As a finisher I guess it'd be fine though, but I don't think sulfuric vortex is the key.
Is there any reason you didn't want to include blue or black? They'd give you some extra card draw options as well as some more spells.
I already own a RUG Spellslinger deck which I keep taking apart and putting back together. I also own a Grixis deck (I've done spellslinger with every UGx combination), and I find a certain allure to RG spellslinger. Seems harder without Blue draw, which is what interested me.
I didn't notice that Wort gives you tokens to work with lol. That's actually really good - it's like a riku, but the copying spells ability costs 0 mana.
I suggested the big X spells and stuff so that you would have a way to end the game. Aside from Borborygmos, none of the other generals really have a clear path to victory aside from blowing someone's face in with things like banefire. Earthquake and similar cards could deal large chunks of damage to each opponent, and some smaller, repeated, damaging effects could finish them off (or the other way around).
I would run 0 stone rain effects (1-for-1 land destruction), but I think the other ones I suggested would do well. The land destruction wouldn't really be for controlling, it would be to gain a strong advantage and close out the game. It's for disruption rather than control.
With Borborygmos, you could use the land destruction effects to get some lands in your own graveyard and then use creeping renaissance as a finisher. You could also run life from the loam as a powerful engine. Combining it with fetch lands and cycling lands would be very useful. This would add some nice finishing power to your deck without taking away many slots from your overall strategy.
I think the main concern is your win condition. Borborygmos would solidify your late game, even though he doesn't do that much with your deck. There are some combo options, but with practically 0 tutors to work with, they'd be very hard to pull off.
I think removal will be very hard for you. I'd run some, for sure, but keeping the board in check is not exactly RG's specialty.
I like Borborygmos Enraged since he can act as a powerful finisher. I think Radha would be my next pick, since, even though she conflicts with other 2-mana spells, she kind of removes your need to run them (saving slots for other things).
I'd honestly consider going with land destruction if your group is cool with it. There are lots of good red/green spells for destroying lands and denying mana. There are some nice red cards that can abuse your ability to ramp - thoughts of ruin and rite of ruin are both good at this. Since they only kill a flat amount of lands from each player, having more lands in play means you are punished the least. You'll probably have mostly basic lands, so you could also use things like ruination. I'll end with that, though, because I don't know if you want to be running land destruction.
Other than that, I think some sort of burn deck would be your best bet. You'd want to run things that damage people for you - sulferic vortex is very good. Lowering everyone's life total with that would help you finish the job with things like banefire and comet storm.
Is there any reason you didn't want to include blue or black? They'd give you some extra card draw options as well as some more spells.
The most important difference between the two, disregarding anything else, is that Sol Ring will never be on the Commander banlist, while Metalworker currently is.
Panoptic Mirror - Kiki-Jiki is just as powerful and even has more immediate impact than the mirror. Which fair cards become degenerate with the mirror? Most of the time, you could get a similar effect by casting the card you would put on the mirror, and then getting it back and casting it again with regrowth or snapcaster mage. Expecting the mirror to survive for a 4th turn around the table is kind of ridiculous. It's only degenerate with specific cards like time warp.
Sol Ring - How is this card normally fair?
Liklihood of being degenerate is not why certain cards are banned while others aren't, nor should it be.
The thing about a strip mine lock is that you 0-for-1 them with your land from the graveyard until they don't have a land to play. Then you play the game like normal while using your strip mine every other turn or so to stop them from doing anything. Their only out is a 1-mana artifact removal (or if they have enough to blow it up early, before all their lands are destroyed).
It's a pretty annoying combo, but it's beatable. Cheap artifact removal is already a staple becuase of all the mana rocks and powerful artifacts that are abundant in EDH.
What were the other reasons then? I latched onto it because it easy to attack, but also because it was pretty much all people were saying about the card. The whole point of that post was to use arguments that other people use for banned cards as reason to ban sol ring and mana crypt.
Of course I want consistency. Who wouldn't? How about "All mana-producing artifacts on the legacy ban list are banned." or something like that? There's a reason Jusstice was pushing for the legacy ban list as the EDH ban list. If someone asks "why only the mana-producing artifacts?", you can answer with "fast mana is powerful in all formats, but other cards may not have as much impact, so they will be evaluated individually" and "if it's too fast for legacy, it's too fast for EDH - a format where longer, more epic games is the goal".
Metalworker adds anywhere from 0 to 198 mana (have your whole deck in hand minus metalworker and they are all artifacts - including your commander). The point, however, is that he can easily add very little mana, like 2 or 4. He also has to sit in play for a whole turn before he can add the mana, unlike mana rocks.
Tolarian Academy - Sure, there are 0-mana artifacts. What do these 0-mana artifacts do? Are they still useful without tolarian academy in hand? Some are okay, but most will do pretty much nothing - especially if you don't have the land.
Late game, cabal coffers can add tons of mana as well, and I haven't heard any complaints about that card.
It's actually a better chance than that, since you draw 7 cards (though I don't know the exact chance). Anyway, there are plenty of 4 or 5 drops that are too strong for turn 2, and these cards enable that sort of thing. Mana crypt even enables 3-drops on turn 1.
Arguing against the point supports the unbanning of panoptic mirror. If the only reason to keep a card banned is because it doesn't add to the format in a positive way, then sol ring and mana crypt should be banned. I don't see how god hands add to the game (in a positive way). They just turn the game into immediate archenemy due to their power level.
Fixed.
And what, abandon the ~30-man group that all plays regular EDH? No one in my area plays duel commander. I even made duel commander decks, but no one plays it, so I just play them in regular EDH games.
If you look at sol ring, all it really adds is the ability to get god hands. There's so much resistance to the ban from people having specificly good hands (usually involving a signet and then a 5-drop) - the argument being that you need a god draw for it to work. The problem is that those kinds of hands are all very hard to get without sol ring or mana crypt, and without them, they usually cause card disadvantage. Sol ring and mana crypt can take the place of lands quite easily, so it's like drawing a hand where one of your lands can be played on turn one without counting as a land drop and then your turn 2 is potentially ridiculous. There has been some mention of it being okay later in the game - like it is a bad top deck, for example. Well, so is a land, or rampant growth.
My argument is that sol ring and mana crypt add nothing useful to the game - all they do is enable god hands. When people argue that this is not enough to ban a card, I will point to other cards on the ban list (Panoptic Mirror - look at the arguments made against unbanning it in the past bunch of pages). When people argue that the rest of the table can gang up on the player with them, I argue that the same can be said for other banned cards (panoptic mirror, tolarian academy, metalworker). When people argue that sol ring and mana crypt are cool cards that can't be played in any other format, I argue that the same can be said for other banned cards (tolarian academy - but panoptic mirror and metalworker are only in legacy, which is still far from EDH in terms of the games you get).
My thoughts exactly (not the card, though, lol). If they made a powerful mill general in a precon, they could push mill as a strategy with that. Imagine Consuming Aberration was legendary. That'd be and awesome mill general.
"Mill X cards" and "Grind until X lands" both have the fatal flaw of being, essentially, lava axes. They do nothing to the board state, and in multiplayer, they have to either hit all opponents (which many do not), or you have to lava axe each opponent to death, one at a time. There's a reason that no one runs a deck with just burn spells - it would be a terrible deck in 4-player multiplayer (with extra life to go through as well).
The best to enable mill is to print more cards like mesmeric orb and make an actual good, legendary mill creature (to be run as a commander).
You are correct. On top of that, since it was 64 "you may draw a card" effects, you could just not draw for all of the triggers that would kill you. You'd have to wait a turn, but you're not dead.
I think that her main problem is that she will take all your mana in order to keep milling. All the other ones can start milling on their own, and you can do whatever with your mana - such as control the board. That's not saying she's worse, though. I think she's better because she also gives you a backup plan.
My mimeoplasm deck isn't really a mill deck, but mill is a powerful resource supplier for the deck, so there is plenty of it in there. I often kill at least one opponent with mill in the games I win. Since the deck isn't dedicated to it, I don't have any answers to Eldrazi, so that is usually annoying for me (I actually hate that they are worded as they are because it was completely unnecessary for preventing reanimation). Since the deck also likes milling itself, I threw in psychic spiral, which has gotten me many kills/saved my butt many times.
I think creature pump is really bad in EDH, but that's because it is so narrow. Since it is so narrow and so uncommon, having it on here is actually very good for surprising people.
I didn't notice that Wort gives you tokens to work with lol. That's actually really good - it's like a riku, but the copying spells ability costs 0 mana.
I suggested the big X spells and stuff so that you would have a way to end the game. Aside from Borborygmos, none of the other generals really have a clear path to victory aside from blowing someone's face in with things like banefire. Earthquake and similar cards could deal large chunks of damage to each opponent, and some smaller, repeated, damaging effects could finish them off (or the other way around).
I would run 0 stone rain effects (1-for-1 land destruction), but I think the other ones I suggested would do well. The land destruction wouldn't really be for controlling, it would be to gain a strong advantage and close out the game. It's for disruption rather than control.
With Borborygmos, you could use the land destruction effects to get some lands in your own graveyard and then use creeping renaissance as a finisher. You could also run life from the loam as a powerful engine. Combining it with fetch lands and cycling lands would be very useful. This would add some nice finishing power to your deck without taking away many slots from your overall strategy.
I think the main concern is your win condition. Borborygmos would solidify your late game, even though he doesn't do that much with your deck. There are some combo options, but with practically 0 tutors to work with, they'd be very hard to pull off.
I like Borborygmos Enraged since he can act as a powerful finisher. I think Radha would be my next pick, since, even though she conflicts with other 2-mana spells, she kind of removes your need to run them (saving slots for other things).
I'd honestly consider going with land destruction if your group is cool with it. There are lots of good red/green spells for destroying lands and denying mana. There are some nice red cards that can abuse your ability to ramp - thoughts of ruin and rite of ruin are both good at this. Since they only kill a flat amount of lands from each player, having more lands in play means you are punished the least. You'll probably have mostly basic lands, so you could also use things like ruination. I'll end with that, though, because I don't know if you want to be running land destruction.
Other than that, I think some sort of burn deck would be your best bet. You'd want to run things that damage people for you - sulferic vortex is very good. Lowering everyone's life total with that would help you finish the job with things like banefire and comet storm.
Is there any reason you didn't want to include blue or black? They'd give you some extra card draw options as well as some more spells.
Why is that the case?