Rest of the table: "Now that you've played Prophet of Kruphix, we're going full archenemy mode!"
Prophet player, untapping every turn with a hand full of cards and a ton of Blue mana: "You can go ahead and try."
Or more realistically..... you put pressure on that player all game and don't let them get into a situation where they have all counterspells and full hp. If you get into situations where the player with prophet is sitting that comfy you probably had lost the game before prophet resolved and just didn't know it.
If someone is playing UG ramp, draw, counterspell prophet you need to be pressuring them all game (not just after they play prophet).
This line only really works for an established group, you don't tend to know those details about an opponent's deck beforehand in pickup games or online settings, and I would argue that games fitting either of those criteria make up a meaningful portion of EDH play.
If you think "any deck in their colors" means "almost any deck in their colors" and that I should assume this, well, I have a sleeve playable black lotus to sell you. Sorry, almost sleeve playable.
This is a false equivalency and you know it to be, there is a vast gulf of difference in the contexts. One involves a subjective examination of the viability and ubiquity of abstract strategies in a wildly variable format, the other a much more objective examination of the physical condition of a tangible object.
If we pretend for a moment that we understand the difference between human conversation and a mathematical proof, this disingenuous-seeming argument falls apart pretty quickly.
For "any deck in their colors" take "the overwhelming majority of decks reasonable/viable to play in a large random selection of different metas in their colors," rather than arguing as though the other party is an arbitrarily strict debate club drone and not a human being using the typical subjective and ambiguous manner of a normal conversation. When you acknowledge this, it's clear that your counterarguments are the niche cases, not the other way around. Building this argument on the black-and-white technicality of "all" comes across as an abuse of the framing, as though you expect the argument to be presented as an equation and not an opinion or perspective from a living person.
I'm generally a combo player at heart, so most of my decks are about creating a huge mess on the stack that, typically, eventually becomes some sort of loop. But even when I'm playing my non-combo decks, even the deliberately most casual-tier brews, I'll always have at least one "out". Games have to end eventually, and sometimes it has to be my responsibility to "put down" a game that has ground down to a slog for the table. When the game stalls from going too long or a player is allowed to get out of hand with a grindy strategy, having a game-ender lets the pod shuffle up and play another instead of suffering it out or starting to bicker over forfeiting/etc.
TLDR: sometimes you need to be able to say "Alright, this has gone on long enough. Let's play another." without That One Guy insisting they need to see how this plays out.
I'll second that Necromancers' Academy is wildly more powerful than the others. Trade a land in hand for any creature in your graveyard + draw trigger interactions for 1B is... a lot.
This is giving me a headache, so I'm not going to get into much detail here. Simply put, that any of you are seriously talking about a ban for Purph speaks to me of the format being in almost TOO good of a place, such that the perpetual rules tinkerers have run out of widely compelling targets to pick at. If we're sincerely discussing banning a card this low in impact on the overall shape and attitude of the format, EDH is in a pretty good place and can probably just chill for now.
Arlinn Kord - She feels more Boros to me, since she is, if I remember right, fighting for the Innistrad humans, not to mention that she was a cathar or something, I think?
Second this, and you're right about her connection to cathars, to my recollection.
Daretti - I need to read more about him, but his interest in artifices probably makes him an Izzet.
His character arc into vengeful, selfish, underhanded iconoclast does make his second card being Rakdos fit quite well, though. I'd say the way his emotions and personality have been portrayed strains the Izzet concept, but Niv's a selfish *****head too, so...
Jaya Ballard - Okay, no clue. Gruul does value freedom, but Jaya's definitely not the "Crush them" kind of lady, so maybe not. Still, I feel like that's the closest compared to the other guilds.
Personality is Izzet in a lot of big ways, behavior is often more heroic Gruul. I'd lean toward Izzet, of the individualist using explosions with brilliance and panache variety.
Teferi - Hmmm... if I conclude correctly that he's a flighty supermage, he can't be an Azorius. I think he's probably more of an Izzet, but I may be way way off.
Way, way off. Cards pertaining to him being Azorius isn't for nothing, though he's definitely on the fringes - a little too individualistic and motivated by empathy to fit in, but nowhere near enough so for anything red aligned.
Ugin - I'm voting for Azorius, due to his preference to seeing things at large and planning things for the long run.
Generally agree, though we've seen hints that might put him in Orzhov or even Dimir too. He's increasingly showing signs of that classic draconic selfish deviousness.
The reliably higher average power of Surveil is actually a strike against it for anything like evergreen use - it can't be used for the same design purposes as Scry is without playing merry hell with the power level of sets. Scry provides smoothing and is very frequently used as a sort of trinket text, and it can show up that frequently because it's a good effect that makes games move more elegantly, but it's ultimately a pretty weak mechanic that won't disrupt the game by being common.
Most cards that cost 9+* should either give you the win, or get you very close. Expropriate is a little scary, but seems okay to me.
*not necessarily including those that have cost-reduction abilities; I highly doubt Feral Incarnation by itself is much of a wincon
Respectfully, I disagree. I would prefer this format not have any instant win cards. Sometimes you get into an amazing game and after 2 hours someone topdecks a 9-mana spell and wins that turn.... and I hate it.
2 hours? Playing one game?? And you’d be upset with a 9 mana win-con???? I’m all for long games, but I’d never be upset with a game ending like that after that amount of time. Personally, if everybody at the the table is still alive after an hour, somebody is doing something very, very wrong...
I may have exaggerated on the 2 hours. It could be 45 minutes. All I mean is that long games can be a lot of fun, and require a lot of focus and creativity turn after turn to deal with the threats. It can have lots of politics, a lot of swings... and then someone draws a 1-card win condition and it's over.
I am not calling for the banning of these cards, I just really hate it and personally do not like them in the format. I do not agree with the idea that there is a mana cost at which people should be able to win the game by default.
And there isn't. There's a mana cost at which people are justifiably able to THREATEN winning the game. There's a tipping point at which a certain amount of investment SHOULD represent a big enough threat that it could clinch a win, whether it's through raw CMC or number of cards cobbled together or whatever.
In the Web of War isn't a literal web, while Decimator Web, Magnetic Web, Sunweb, and Web of Inertia are definitely not webs in the sense of spiderweb - they are corrupt, destructive mycosynth, some type of generated magnetic field, the wings of a fallen dragon, and some type of area-of-effect spell of possibly Cephalid origin, respectively. Tsabo's Web also doesn't appear to represent a literal web, closer to a web as in the concept of a complex intersection of plotting/scheming, and Tsabo Tavoc may look somewhat arachnid, but afaik doesn't literally have spider genetics/biology.
The point of the puzzle was to create a lock as solid as possible, not to pose a riddle only the maker knew the answer to. It was even updated when Genesis Hydra was printed, because that briefly provided an out.
Which would be fine, except the first place I saw this was on a LGS's facebook page. They offered a gift card reward and definitively stated they had a working solution. Now a bunch of people are upset because it looks more and more likely that that isn't true.
That's definitely the LGS's problem, as this puzzle has been around for at least a good solid pile of years, if not longer, and almost certainly didn't originate with that store. I would have to guess they THOUGHT they had it solved, like has happened in this thread several times, or maybe it was during one of the iterations where there was briefly a new card that required a new lock in the next version.
The point of the puzzle was to create a lock as solid as possible, not to pose a riddle only the maker knew the answer to. It was even updated when Genesis Hydra was printed, because that briefly provided an out.
They both represent effects that are universally useful at an obscenely low CMC, you would have to set out with a deliberate goal to brew a blue EDH deck where these two are NOT easily worth the two slots that whatever else might occupy.
This line only really works for an established group, you don't tend to know those details about an opponent's deck beforehand in pickup games or online settings, and I would argue that games fitting either of those criteria make up a meaningful portion of EDH play.
This is a false equivalency and you know it to be, there is a vast gulf of difference in the contexts. One involves a subjective examination of the viability and ubiquity of abstract strategies in a wildly variable format, the other a much more objective examination of the physical condition of a tangible object.
For "any deck in their colors" take "the overwhelming majority of decks reasonable/viable to play in a large random selection of different metas in their colors," rather than arguing as though the other party is an arbitrarily strict debate club drone and not a human being using the typical subjective and ambiguous manner of a normal conversation. When you acknowledge this, it's clear that your counterarguments are the niche cases, not the other way around. Building this argument on the black-and-white technicality of "all" comes across as an abuse of the framing, as though you expect the argument to be presented as an equation and not an opinion or perspective from a living person.
TLDR: sometimes you need to be able to say "Alright, this has gone on long enough. Let's play another." without That One Guy insisting they need to see how this plays out.
These just don't feel dynamic or exciting, they're very flat portrayals.
Kaya's good though. The rest need more of that in situ feeling.
Second this, and you're right about her connection to cathars, to my recollection.
His character arc into vengeful, selfish, underhanded iconoclast does make his second card being Rakdos fit quite well, though. I'd say the way his emotions and personality have been portrayed strains the Izzet concept, but Niv's a selfish *****head too, so...
Gruul or Golgari, I'd say. There's a lot of commonality of character with Jarad, narratively.
Personality is Izzet in a lot of big ways, behavior is often more heroic Gruul. I'd lean toward Izzet, of the individualist using explosions with brilliance and panache variety.
Way, way off. Cards pertaining to him being Azorius isn't for nothing, though he's definitely on the fringes - a little too individualistic and motivated by empathy to fit in, but nowhere near enough so for anything red aligned.
Generally agree, though we've seen hints that might put him in Orzhov or even Dimir too. He's increasingly showing signs of that classic draconic selfish deviousness.
And there isn't. There's a mana cost at which people are justifiably able to THREATEN winning the game. There's a tipping point at which a certain amount of investment SHOULD represent a big enough threat that it could clinch a win, whether it's through raw CMC or number of cards cobbled together or whatever.
That's definitely the LGS's problem, as this puzzle has been around for at least a good solid pile of years, if not longer, and almost certainly didn't originate with that store. I would have to guess they THOUGHT they had it solved, like has happened in this thread several times, or maybe it was during one of the iterations where there was briefly a new card that required a new lock in the next version.