MTG Salvation

I don't know if remorseful is the right word — maybe defeated — but I wish I could have found a way to make Mr. Bones play better.

I think my dilemma is one of wanting to build a novel deck that expresses my creativity and ingenuity but also wanting to build a deck that creates good gameplay. And for the life of me, I could not find a way to make Mr. Bones play well. Just about everything the deck needs to make work is anathema to good gameplay. Maybe if I were more creative, more knowledgeable, there may have been some way to make it work, but I tried just about everything I can muster, and I really don't think there's anything I can do. That's why, after having developed the decks for several years, me valuing good gameplay finally won out, and I took apart Mr. Bones. I can always rebuild it. I just can't subject anyone to it anymore without also feeling like I could have done something else to make the experience richer for them.

Quote from Onering »

It's funny that you bring that up, because if that is the case, then you are advocating for a change to those official rules that a majority oppose and only a bit over a third support.

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Fundamentally though, the Crux of your argument for planeswalkers as commanders is that it's a popular idea and the RC is out of touch with players by not allowing it, but this poll, and others I've seen, suggest that the opposite is true.

Onering, you've brought the poll up on more than one occasion, but I think your interpretation of it isn't all that great.

First, this isn't a detailed poll. It doesn't afford any room for caveat or for voter explanation. It merely provides two binary options and one apathy option. That's it. There's no indication of voter confidence. There's no "I don't know" option. It's just a crummy poll, only useful for a surface reading of what outcome voters think they prefer. And most folks, regardless of how they voted, probably put less than a gut's reaction into whatever they ultimately decided to vote for. You keep referring to this poll like it's sacrosanct, but it appears to me like something that should only be taken with a grain of salt.

Second, the apathy option is effectively a second yes vote. Those voters are saying they're perfectly fine with the rules being changed. To lump those voters in as "not yes," while technically true, is a bit misleading. As such, what you're really looking at isn't 33% of people supporting change. It's 47% of people saying they're fine with change.

Third, MTGS is practically the old guard of Commander. Between Facebook, Reddit, and other more prevalent platforms, MTGS sees only a tiny fraction of the total Commander discussion. The folks who do engage here tend to be among the most loyal and most enfranchised Commander players out there though. Combine that with the fact that the Commander Rules Discussion subforum has a reputation for being one of the most virulent parts of the board, and what you get is even fewer casual faces even making it to the poll to begin with. It hardly represents what the actual Commander playerbase thinks.

Now, I don't know how the Commander community at large feels about making planeswalkers commanders. I suspect less enfranchised players will be much more likely to favor that change, but that's only a suspicion. But to read this poll as "only one in three people think this change should be made, so business as usual" isn't a great interpretation. If anything, this should be read as "nearly half of the old guard thinks it's okay for planeswalkers to be commanders." That, I think, is rather startling, especially given just how easy it is for anyone to be against something but how hard it is to be for something.

The time I countered my own spell so I could put it higher on the stack.

I was playing Mr. Bones, and I was set to go off next turn. My opponents knew this, but they didn't have any way to stop me. So, rather than giving me the satisfaction of trapping them all on the Ride, they tried to kill themselves before it got back to me. I was having none of that.

With two opponents having no cards left in their libraries, the third cast Minds Aglow for lethal. I respond by flashing in Abyssal Persecutor off Vedalken Orrery to save them. My opponent then activates Geier Reach Sanitarium before my demon resolves. At this point, I'm cursing under my breath. I had missed the Sanitarium completely, and my only counterspell, Retard, can't counter activated abilities, putting me in a bit of a bind. Luckily, I had found my out. With everything still on the stack, I cast Retard and exile my Abyssal Persecutor. From there, I activate Mirror of Fate and build a new library with Abyssal Persecutor on top. Then I activate Scroll Rack, redraw the Persecutor, and cast it a second time. The Persecutor resolves, and everyone is thoroughly impressed with my ability to jump hoops.

Amass, like most mechanics, is fine. What determines whether people will play amass cards isn't the mechanic per se. It's whether Wizards actually prints any cards with amass that are good enough for Commander. Poring through the set, it looks like all the amass cards were designed for either Standard or limited. As such, you're probably not going to see many played in Commander.

If I had to pick a "most likely to be seen," it would probably be Gleaming Overseer. It could possibly slot into existing zombie tribal decks that have a heavy token bend already.

Quote from tstorm823 »

Man, that sub forum is really good at hiding things.

Perhaps for the better.

Quote from toctheyounger77 »

I mean there's plenty of other cons to making the change and not enough pros to make the change without taking this into consideration anyway.

Sure, that may very well be the case. I'm not entirely convinced letting planeswalker out of the bag is that bad of a decision though. I may or may not post my thoughts on the subject at length sometime in the near future depending upon how I'm feeling.

Quote from papa_funk »

"There are already boring options, so you should add a bunch more" is not a compelling reason to make a change.

Agreed. That wasn't the point I was trying to make though.

The point I was trying to make was that demand should be (one of several) compelling reasons to make a change, not how interesting whatever the thing is that is in demand. Whether you or I find planeswalkers interesting ought not be a factor at all.

Quote from papa_funk »

But right now, when I hear "I want to build a Kiora deck!" it's solely driven by Kiora's backstory, not because the Kiora cards are interesting.

Does that really matter though? I mean, not to be argumentative, but who are we to say whether or not a card should be legal on the basis of how interesting it is? There are already droves of legal commanders that I think are boring as dirt. Ultimately, isn't demand a better metric to follow here? If, hypothetically, tons and tons of players wanted to play Kiora decks, shouldn't those players be allowed to do that regardless of how boring their creations might be? After all, those same players are already free to build as many other boring decks as they like for every other existing commander. I don't see why how interesting a card is should be a factor here.

Quote from login »

Quote from Raptorchan »

I think the main problem about Elder Spell is not the manacost. You have no reasons to cast it on turn 2 - there are no targets.
You can cast it to get rid of other walkers and pump your walker to the level of ultimate which usually wins you the game - in this case, casting other things on the same turn doesn't really matter.
That's why the mana cost doesn't matter much I guess. That's how I see it. The spell is powerful in the right environment but that's all. Maybe it being cheap also helps your opponents to counter it with cheaper counterspells - but in the other hand, taxing counterspells would do poor job at countering it. So-so.

Of course it matters because you can have mana for protecting it with counterspells. ALso control matchups is where this thing is going to be played more.

Not to mention the inexpensive mana cost makes it easier to play a planeswalker of your own prior to casting The Elderspell if you didn't already have one in play. The fact that this costs 2 is a huge deal.

So, a Sigil of the Empty Throne of sorts. The tokens don't have flying, but do have vigilance, and you get a 3/6 double striker with psuedo-recurrence instead of a do-nothing enchantment.

This is easily my favorite of the Zombie Gods. Super powerful.

Wtf? Destroy all creatures you don't control costs 9 mana, but destroy all planeswalkers you don't control only costs 2? Except The Elder Spell is even better than that because it also puts extra loyalty counters on any planeswalker you happen to have.

Yeah, this card is literally and deliberately broken.

I'm pretty let down by the God-Eternals so far. This late into spoiler season, Wizards has done a great job keeping their spoilers interesting despite having spoiled almost none of the mythics. Now that spoilers are coming to an end though, I guess I have higher expectations for these mythics since Wizards must be saving the best for last, right? Anyway, I'm going to pick on God-Eternal Bontu for a moment.

Now, I love drawing cards. I especially love drawing lots of cards particularly if I can draw them all at once and for as little mana as possible. Resource accrual is just something I deeply care about. For that reason, God-Eternal Bontu should be the kind of card that excites me. It's a relatively inexpensive way to draw lots of cards all at once, and it leaves a 5/6 menace to boot. What's not to love here? Well, if there's one thing I hate doing, it's losing my board state, and sacrificing my board to draw lots of cards feels like the definition of counterproductive. I mean, why would I want to throw away cards I've already drawn and then found worthwhile enough to cast only to draw different cards in their place? Like, it's one thing to loot cards away while they're still in my hand. In those instances, I'm making an equivalent exchange in an effort to find cards more valuable than the ones I already have. But once I've made an effort to put my cards in play, I can only imagine wanting to keep those cards. If not, I wouldn't have bothered casting them in the first place. In that sense, sacrificing my board to draw cards feels a lot like targeting my face with my own Lightning Bolt. Sure, the worth of any individual card I have in play can decrease in value over time to the point where it's actually worth less than one random card, but generally speaking I don't fill my decks full of permanent cards to have those cards not be valuable once I've played them. That just sounds ridiculous.

So, I was thinking, what's the least valuable thing I can sacrifice to God-Eternal Bontu? Because if there's a way to make a lot of that thing, then maybe I could also make Bontu worthwhile. A few things come to mind. First, obviously, 1/1 creature tokens. They're fairly ubiquitous, and it's difficult to find non-card permanents that are less useful than 1/1s. In the token department, we do also have clues though. That, and things like treasure tokens made off the back of Smothering Tithe. In addition to tokens though, there are also cards that I actively want to kill off because they do something useful when they die but simultaneously aren't very useful to keep on the battlefield. I'm thinking of cards like Academy Rector, Reveillark, and False Prophet (although maybe not that last one in tandem with Bontu). With these sorts of cards, the battlefield is more of a stepping stone to the graveyard than it is for actually developing any kind of meaningful board state. I guess that makes them kind of like weird, delayed sorceries. In any case, it's going to be difficult to have many of those kinds of cards in play to sacrifice to Bontu, so I'm going to focus on tokens instead, specifically 1/1s.

Imagine I have five 1/1 tokens. Let's call them saprolings. Now, they don't have to be saprolings specifically. Maybe they were Wood Elves at some point in time. For now though, they're effectively 1/1 creatures with no other useful text. With Bontu, I can sacrifice all of these 1/1s to draw five cards, and that would almost certainly be more useful than keeping five 1/1s around. Having said that, this is still a non-starter for me since paying five mana to draw five cards at the cost of five 1/1s still isn't good enough despite the fact that it also develops a 5/6 menace. The opportunity cost is simply too great. For roughly the same amount of mana, I could have played something like the incredibly unsexy Collective Blessing instead. Now, all of these 1/1s are suddenly much more relevant, and I didn't need to throw them away to make them so. In this way, I can use cards like Collective Blessing to advance my existing board state even further without losing any board in the process. To make losing board worthwhile, God-Eternal Bontu would have to do something even more powerful in comparison, and that just seems like a tall order. Unintuitively, I suppose God-Eternal Bontu actually gets better the fewer things you sac to it since the opportunity cost decreases as you draw fewer cards. But then, why would I want to play this card if I weren't using it to draw lots of cards?

Man oh man, do I love this card. To my knowledge, it's the only card in the game so far that outright stops your opponents from making you discard, AND is only one of three cards that prevents forced sacrifice AND IT ONLY COSTS FOUR MANA? No joke, I would honestly play this card if it had no other abilities whatsoever, so the fact that it's also sometimes a card advantage engine in addition to being a potential E-Witness just makes me want to scream!

Quote from Zygous »

1. Several countercards exist to Emrakul being cheated into play. Obviously Emrakul is at her scariest early in the game where she can threaten to quickly annihilate most of a players board, this is basically the way she is played in the 60 card, 4 copy formats modern and legacy. Hoever, there have been several cards printed that strait up hose trying to cheat a creature into play. Most notably Containment Priest.

I don't think the existence of Emrakul countercards matters all that much. What I think is important is whether or not these countercards are actually prevalent in the Commander metagame at large. Currently, I don't think they are. Now, if Emrakul were unbanned, you would likely see an increase in countercard usage, but I don't think you would see a significant increase. That's just not the way most players tend to build decks. Players (whether they ought to or not) tend to focus much more on refining their own deck's central premise than answering specific problem cards that may or may not see play against them. And this is especially true if those problem cards require narrow or niche answers. As such, if Emrakul were unbanned, I think you would see virtually the same amount of harm as before.

Quote from Zygous »

2. Protection from colored spells isn't actually that good anymore. Sure, you can't just Swords to Plowshares Emrakul, but there are plenty of good removal spells that can deal with her. WE've had several printings of better style Oblivion Rings, lots of planeswalkers can kill creatures, way more wrath effcts now then there used to be, we have colorless removal spells, Cyclonic Rift is the #2 EDH card behind Sol Ring, and there are fantastic EDH cards like Crackling Doom and Profane Procession that somebody will often be back packing in their decks.

Completely disagree. Protection from colored spells is extremely relevant. That doesn't have anything to do with whether or not countercards exist. Countercards do exist, and they have always been around. Protection from colored spells just blanks the most prevalent forms of removal. We're not seeing any kind of significant increase in players playing cards that can answer Emrakul.

Quote from Zygous »

3. Annihilator 6 isn't that good anymore either. It seems like MTG has been really gungho on the tokens as of late. It seems like every set we get some new type of token, be it treasure, clues, gold, or just creature tokens that decks are so capable of flooding a board with so many paper tokens that we politely ask them to just use a dice. I've been playing with and against the other OG titans Ulamog and Kozilek and I've had cards like Smothering Tithe, Curse of Opulence, Spell Swindle, and Nesting Dragon just completly absord annihilator triggers through multiple rounds of combat. Let's not forget about Teferi's Protection either.

Again, I disagree. Annihilator 6 is still extremely powerful. Granted, it may not be as strong as it once was due to the prevalence of token generating cards like Smothering Tithe and Tireless Tracker, but the stages of the game in which annihilator 6 is backbreaking are largely unchanged. Emrakul has always been most problematic during the early and middle stages of the game where annihilating six permanents means losing half your board state, and the subtle weakening of Emrakul's ability in the later stages of the game don't help significantly reduce Emrakul's harmful effects during the earlier stages of the game which has always been where its impact is most relevant.

Quote from JqlGirl »

Aside from the power level concerns that have been discussed here, my biggest concern on this subject is how having planeswalkers as commanders would affect the length of games. Planeswalkers are all basically life gain spells, as they draw aggro away from the control and can't attack like a creature commander can. Additionally, the lines of play for a planeswalker tend to be more complex than for a creature and so that would add even more time to the game. In short, I believe that making this change would be bad for the format in terms of making games take too much longer. Commander isn't a format like standard or modern where there's a clock and a time limit. Commander goes as long as it goes, and I know that I'm always happy on days where I can get in more shorter games of Commander than days where I play fewer, longer games.

See, I'm not convinced having planeswalkers as commanders will actually make the game longer. Hear me out.

Generally speaking, I agree with what you're saying. Planeswalkers do buffer life totals; they do draw aggro away from players. By extension that means life totals that would otherwise be shrinking are now cushier than before. All of that is true, but that doesn't necessarily mean games will be longer. That merely sounds true. In practice, I think the results might honestly stay the same.

Commander, as it is, already grants players an enormous life buffer to hide behind, so much so that traditional aggro decks are basically unheard of. In my experience, what tends to end games of Commander isn't some grindy battle of attrition. No, it's usually a dramatic shift in the balance of power. Yes, sometimes games are decided by the careful accrual and denial resources, but more often I find games are decided by someone going way over the top of everyone else. Some player invariably makes a ton of mana, or draws forty cards, or assembles some multi-card combo that wins the game. Whatever it is they're doing, it's way more powerful than everything else going on, and it provides that player with such a commanding lead that they're able to take over the rest of the game from there.

Imagine a game where four players have been battling it out for a while, but they're all still in the game with varying amounts of life, cards, and board states. Now imagine one player with a moderately sized army casts Craterhoof Behemoth. This player was chipping away at people's life totals earlier, but now they suddenly have a massive amount of damage to distribute, so much so that all the maneuvering they did before is rendered mostly negligible in comparison; the damage up until now was simply too paltry to matter. This is how I suspect planeswalkers might play if they could be commanders. Yes, planeswalkers would probably redirect damage away from players and towards them, but the stage in the game at which this occurs might not affect the overall length of the game because that Craterhoof or similar such card is still going to run everyone down anyway.

Quote from JqlGirl »

Additionally, the lines of play for a planeswalker tend to be more complex than for a creature and so that would add even more time to the game.

I disagree. I think planeswalkers are much simpler than creatures.

For the most part, planeswalkers tend to follow a similar pattern. They have a plus ability, a minus ability, and an ultimate. Most of the time, players can't ult their planeswalkers (and when they can it's really obvious if they should), so that just leaves the other two abilities. From there, you can usually do process of elimination to figure out which ability you should use. Am I working towards my ultimate? Use my plus ability. Are there any useful targets for my minus ability? Use my plus ability. Can I even afford my minus ability? You get the idea. And timing isn't really a restriction here either since players can only activate planeswalker abilities once per turn and at sorcery speed to boot.

You know what really bogs games down though? Decision paralysis. Planeswalkers are modular, sure, but creatures are especially modular because creatures get to participate in combat whereas planeswalkers usually don't. And in giant multiplayer games, it isn't uncommon for boards to stall out and for combat math to become so burdensome that players skip combat entirely in favor of playing it safe. That really slows down games because even though players might actually be in a position to bring the game to its conclusion, finding the lines to reach that point can be extremely difficult, especially if politics are involved. The complexity of these situations just causes mental shutdowns sometimes, and that's almost always because of creatures.