play piddly little things early, be totally nonthreatening. aim for the long game not the short one. if you have an answer to something and the choice is play your rock or keep mana up to deal with that thing, keep the mana up. make a friend as quick as you can. guy bro over there is about to get his ***** stopped? shoot some disruption out to stop that and gain his favor.
what i find is sometimes i do have to be mean to a single player. green guy is ramping? spell pierce his cultivate, let that other guy's cultivate go through even though you could stop it. strip mine his only black source, or his coffers. its difficult because you can't be TOO aggressive with control early. you have to be subtle. basically you're shooting for table police to try and gain favor
sometimes its tricky, because people will gun for the control player right away especially if they know your tricks... but thats where politics come into play. getting pounded? try to strike a deal. explain how you're not the threat to the rest of the table.
now if they're just charging into you right away, disrupting you, stopping you while you already have no board state... well... call them on it. explain to them how unfun that is for you, to have no board state and to not be a threat and just get hammered into the ground while someone else is free to do whatever they want for the win. it sucks. it does. but a lot of people forget that there should be no memory from the previous pod.
I think most of the confusion for Paradox Engine's banning is why now and not 20 months ago?
The RC/CAD is between a rock and a hard place.
Ban it early on and be criticized for not giving it a chance.
Give it a chance and be criticized for not banning it early on.
They chose the latter, which I tend to agree with.
if it took this long to realize it was a problem what game are they even playing?
there's giving things a chance, and then there's not doing anything. the card's been out so long its rotated out of standard... that should have been plenty of time to say hey wait a minute, even in decks that use it "fairly" its degenerate.
If everybody played EDH the way it’s laid out in that article, then subforums like these probably wouldn’t exist. At least ones that get so heated, or turn into flat out pissing contests.
Meh, i played EDH that way for years and was really happy. My whole playgroup was happy.
Then came a guy who tought himself to be smart because he could google "mikaeus + triskelion combo" and that was it.
you think he went out of his way to find that combo and that's some horrible offense, but it really isn't. its natural progression of the game. if he went out of his way to find a combo, or he found it accidentally, it doesn't really make a difference. this just happens to be the one he used. there have been a lot of games over the years where i've seen someone go 'oh that's a combo' and they've woops into it and now its what they gun for every time.
you can't really stop the arms race that is magic deck building. you can try to mitigate it through bannings, but thats about it. even then you ban one thing and then something else crops up, then something else, then something else, then something else.
the philosophy behind edh was sound years ago, or would be with a very static pool of cards to pick from. that's not a reality that exists with new sets coming out all the time. every single set ends up with cards that break other cards intentional or otherwise. players find them. even a casual group will become competitive
wotc can't keep up with problems in the format because its ruled by the committee, they also can't really print much that's going to have immediate or long term impacts because so much of the data on what's a problem is fairly hidden compared to say standard, modern, or even legacy
the committee lately has been very out of touch and laughable in their approach.
to ban iona... can you remember the last time you even saw someone PLAY iona?
yet bigger offenders are untouched. fast mana which enables games to get out of hand quickly. craterhoof, when was the last time you saw a deck sporting green NOT win with a hoof? what about the eot cyclonic rift into a win? expropriate into table scoops? i see these every. single. edh night. there's so much more out there thats "against the spirit of edh" that's just completely ignored.
i find a lot of the philosophy both frustrating and confusing.
it talks about things like wins out of nowhere and resource denial, about wanting games to be fun and different...
...but then it lets things like expropriate exist. a card that ends games by itself every single time it resolves. even in the rare cases it doesn't the sheer obnoxiousness that comes about from extra turns AND stealing peoples ***** makes people scoop. then there's the race to combo using palinchron, or tooth nail into win, or protean hulk into win, or craterhoof. craterhoof. craterhoof. every single ******* game ends in craterhoof. stuff like con sphinx pushes the person miles ahead. every game sees a cyclonic rift eot, maybe two, maybe six. mikaeus who only exists to combo.
like, really? get out of the basement. every game ends the same these days because of cards like these.
i'm sorry, but as has been stated in this thread already, the entire thing reads like 'i don't want to play against that card so we're banning it' while REAL offenders run free.
you can't stop the arms race, and on a long enough timeline you can't stop the combos either... but maybe its time to put in a little bit more ******* effort than a half assed banning with vague rationale that could be applied to any number of more highly offensive cards once a year. he talks about being conservative in what gets banned... but man, you can't have it both ways. you can't bitch about combo, or competitiveness, and then not ban cards that are in literally every single ******* deck that either end the game on the spot or push the caster so far ahead no one can catch back up.
as it stands, a lot of these decisions, and especially the articles and statements, come across as a group of people who aren't actually playing the game in 2019, but are instead caught up in what it was back in 2010. building ***** out of whatever was laying around with no real motive other than to see how many times craw wurm can be cloned and thrown into more craw wurms.
cEDH player checking in with some of my thoughts, though it sounds like we're all at least mostly in agreement.
Firstly, combos are easier, faster, more available, and more resilient nowadays. That's just going to happen as you print more cards. But would I say combo is more prevalent? No. I don't think so at all. If people are going down the combo route now, they would have done so before. Arms race was happening in my playgroup in 2011, it's the natural progression of things. Why is Sheldon talking about it now? Because he's starting to actually play EDH with people outside his niche and realizing that a large percentage of people don't play the game the way he does. Immediately after, he started the Commander Advisory Group as a way to combat being so out of the loop.
So how do we take combo down a peg?
The life total should not change, but even if it did, that won't stop combo; Ring/Crypt should be banned but that won't stop combo;
I don't personally condone banning any tutors, but even if some were, that won't stop combo; and
I actually agree with MRHBlue that there are too many combos of comparable power to warrant banning any of them.
Not only is there no way to stop combo from being the best way to kill a table, but arms race is inevitable (barring a discussion about power level that brings everyone to absolute agreement, something I consider almost impossible considering most people want different things out of this game).
And to derail some more: blue is the strongest color, followed by green and a very close black, then white, then a distant red (however for mono color decks, white is the worst)
i don't think servant should've been on the list to begin with.
i also don't agree with the iona ban. sure, she sucks if you're in monocolor, but you need to be prepared for her, that promotes creative deck building, creative deck building is good, answers are good. sure, unbanning servant and then sticking iona is a blowout... but if you're able to do that consistently good for you i guess? its not as easy as people would think.
anyway, engine's ban should've happened about a year ago. card is ******* dumb. just. ******* dumb. it has created more OOPS I WIN scenarios than any other card i've experienced in the past 10 years. people who say they run it fairly oops into a win almost every time too. its degenerate as **** all.
to set aside isn't actually an official rule, and some people in some play groups get really really butthurt when you use that method. so they'd have to make an official statement regarding that unofficial approach to mulligans and how that interacts with the london mulligan.
The problem isn't that combo is a means to end the game, the problem is that, at a certain level of competition, it's very nearly the ONLY means to end the game.
In a better format, people should be able to make their decks more competitive without necessarily gravitating toward combo control. Every other format has a relatively diverse set of archetypes available at high levels of competition. But in commander, it's just a truism that competitive = combo. And that's very boring for those of us who aren't interested in playing combo.
I think the fault for this comes down to the rules. 40 life is really the primary problem. As long as there is 120 life to face down, combo will be the dominant competitive strategy by a country mile. If anything, 30 isn't far enough imo. I'd argue for 20. You still have 60 enemy life to deal with, not to mention 100 card singleton - modern-style burn isn't suddenly going to become viable. But tight, aggressive strategies might actually be able to pressure combo decks and force them to interact with them, at least in a semi-competitive scene.
Sure, some aggro decks will be obnoxiously powerful in a weaker meta - but that's already true of combo and control decks.
i hear this a lot from less experienced aggro players, i don't hear it from ones that are prepared with ways to protect the monster they've created, their swarm, or ways to disrupt combopants over there.
combo isn't inherently bad. games have to end. there's no difference between killing a pod with infinite combo x instead of just hoofing out, or shared animosity tokens zerg rush, or voltron bull*****, either way someone or everyone dies.
i've also long argued that embracing it makes for a more interactive game. if you know everyone is combo'ing off you're going to run more ways to stop those and if you're doing it yourself you're going to run more ways to protect your own. interactivity increases. it goes from being a 20 hour long pod where everyone lines up craw wurms like gentlemen to an actual game.
sheldon's views on commander... i've never agreed with them. he takes an approach that's very much do nothing. he's against just about everything that isn't just dudes lining up. its a very boring non-interactive way to play. that's his thing though, kitchen tables where nothing happens and eventually 90/90 hydra of bull***** gains trample and doesn't eat a doom blade.
its a totally different way to play, but its also baby's first edh game and that doesn't last very long. the natural progression of any group is to move toward winning. interacting with each other more. the very nature of the game and playing with the same people over a long period of times makes it an arms race. its not just an edh thing. even that 60 card casual group in college is going to find ways to beat that guy next week, or steve will get a new dragon for his dragons deck.
lean into it. stop fighting it.
edit: and yeah, you're gonna have a real bad time if you take his approach to edh and run into people who don't.
There is absolutely a difference in how you win.
If you win through resource denial, the game can drag on and get really boring
If you win through suddenly resolving a single spell that doesn't care about the game up to that point, it doesn't create a satisfying conclusion
If you win through building up a strong board position and killing everyone with it, that's what a lot of casual players would be more ok with
etc
The conclusion to the game is like a story, there can be good ways to end a story and bad ways to end a story.
And I find that when everyone is trying to combo off, the game becomes, well, just not a fun game to play. Boy I sure did love that game where my opponent spent 30 minutes digging through their deck with the paradox engine I tried to counter! You played broken mana rocks and cast godo on turn 3 and no one had a free counter to stop it, what a great game we are playing! Ad nauseum after the table spent their resources stopping the previous player from trying to win that turn? Why yes I do think that's fair to draw 30 cards for 5 mana at instant speed and then use those cards to end the game immediately.
okay... but like... the game still ends. that's the point. people say they're in it for the experience, and to create a story, but you're not. the nature of the game is to win. no one likes losing. even a super casual vorthos deck is going to eventually move along to be able to keep up if all it does is lose.
look if your opponent combos out and you're sitting there making him play it out, that's on you. not them. my experience with combo has been vastly different than yours. where when almost everyone is packing some form of infinite combo, everyone else steps up and runs ways to disrupt it. they've been far more enjoyable games for everyone involved so long as everyone is on the same page because you're interacting with each other. its not just sit there and watch the sliver player turn sideways every turn. you've having counter wars, you're digging for answers, you're keeping mana up, you're actively thinking about what other players are doing rather than just what you're doing. i can't stress that point enough.
edit:
i think this is the biggest point for me. as long as everyone is on the same page, as long as everyone accepts that combo happens...
you're actively thinking about what other players are doing rather than just what you're doing
once that starts happening the game becomes more interactive, people run ways to stop your combo, they run ways to protect their combo, they run ways to disrupt your board to get their team through, etc etc.
i see a lot of the time aggro players bitching they can't keep up, but they aren't running the ways to stop a combo, or disrupt control, or they blow their load on 10 slivers and no way to give haste.
the whole thing breaks down to interaction, and games where everyone is responding to each other rather than just play card pass play card pass attack pass attack pass... are far more enjoyable.
people gripe about certain archetypes, but they remember those decks and those games. they come back next week (in a perfect world) sporting answers to what made them lose.
yes, it creates an arms race... welcome to 26 ******* years of magic: the gathering.
combo isn't inherently bad. games have to end. there's no difference between killing a pod with infinite combo x instead of just hoofing out, or shared animosity tokens zerg rush, or voltron bull*****, either way someone or everyone dies.
i've also long argued that embracing it makes for a more interactive game. if you know everyone is combo'ing off you're going to run more ways to stop those and if you're doing it yourself you're going to run more ways to protect your own. interactivity increases. it goes from being a 20 hour long pod where everyone lines up craw wurms like gentlemen to an actual game.
sheldon's views on commander... i've never agreed with them. he takes an approach that's very much do nothing. he's against just about everything that isn't just dudes lining up. its a very boring non-interactive way to play. that's his thing though, kitchen tables where nothing happens and eventually 90/90 hydra of bull***** gains trample and doesn't eat a doom blade.
its a totally different way to play, but its also baby's first edh game and that doesn't last very long. the natural progression of any group is to move toward winning. interacting with each other more. the very nature of the game and playing with the same people over a long period of times makes it an arms race. its not just an edh thing. even that 60 card casual group in college is going to find ways to beat that guy next week, or steve will get a new dragon for his dragons deck.
lean into it. stop fighting it.
edit: and yeah, you're gonna have a real bad time if you take his approach to edh and run into people who don't.
Eh, no, I think I'll just play Draw from Dreams for the same amount of mana.
...there's a ton of things that cheese this into ezmode... ponder brainstorm preordain sensei's divining top future sight... anything that either lets you look at or manipulate your top card
is it great? no. but its easier to pull off than realized.
cool i guess? these never did much for me. funny story, i actually recently discovered i have playsets of all of them. they were in a binder under some other binders, shows how often i've needed to use these.
play piddly little things early, be totally nonthreatening. aim for the long game not the short one. if you have an answer to something and the choice is play your rock or keep mana up to deal with that thing, keep the mana up. make a friend as quick as you can. guy bro over there is about to get his ***** stopped? shoot some disruption out to stop that and gain his favor.
what i find is sometimes i do have to be mean to a single player. green guy is ramping? spell pierce his cultivate, let that other guy's cultivate go through even though you could stop it. strip mine his only black source, or his coffers. its difficult because you can't be TOO aggressive with control early. you have to be subtle. basically you're shooting for table police to try and gain favor
sometimes its tricky, because people will gun for the control player right away especially if they know your tricks... but thats where politics come into play. getting pounded? try to strike a deal. explain how you're not the threat to the rest of the table.
now if they're just charging into you right away, disrupting you, stopping you while you already have no board state... well... call them on it. explain to them how unfun that is for you, to have no board state and to not be a threat and just get hammered into the ground while someone else is free to do whatever they want for the win. it sucks. it does. but a lot of people forget that there should be no memory from the previous pod.
if it took this long to realize it was a problem what game are they even playing?
there's giving things a chance, and then there's not doing anything. the card's been out so long its rotated out of standard... that should have been plenty of time to say hey wait a minute, even in decks that use it "fairly" its degenerate.
you think he went out of his way to find that combo and that's some horrible offense, but it really isn't. its natural progression of the game. if he went out of his way to find a combo, or he found it accidentally, it doesn't really make a difference. this just happens to be the one he used. there have been a lot of games over the years where i've seen someone go 'oh that's a combo' and they've woops into it and now its what they gun for every time.
you can't really stop the arms race that is magic deck building. you can try to mitigate it through bannings, but thats about it. even then you ban one thing and then something else crops up, then something else, then something else, then something else.
the philosophy behind edh was sound years ago, or would be with a very static pool of cards to pick from. that's not a reality that exists with new sets coming out all the time. every single set ends up with cards that break other cards intentional or otherwise. players find them. even a casual group will become competitive
wotc can't keep up with problems in the format because its ruled by the committee, they also can't really print much that's going to have immediate or long term impacts because so much of the data on what's a problem is fairly hidden compared to say standard, modern, or even legacy
the committee lately has been very out of touch and laughable in their approach.
to ban iona... can you remember the last time you even saw someone PLAY iona?
yet bigger offenders are untouched. fast mana which enables games to get out of hand quickly. craterhoof, when was the last time you saw a deck sporting green NOT win with a hoof? what about the eot cyclonic rift into a win? expropriate into table scoops? i see these every. single. edh night. there's so much more out there thats "against the spirit of edh" that's just completely ignored.
it talks about things like wins out of nowhere and resource denial, about wanting games to be fun and different...
...but then it lets things like expropriate exist. a card that ends games by itself every single time it resolves. even in the rare cases it doesn't the sheer obnoxiousness that comes about from extra turns AND stealing peoples ***** makes people scoop. then there's the race to combo using palinchron, or tooth nail into win, or protean hulk into win, or craterhoof. craterhoof. craterhoof. every single ******* game ends in craterhoof. stuff like con sphinx pushes the person miles ahead. every game sees a cyclonic rift eot, maybe two, maybe six. mikaeus who only exists to combo.
like, really? get out of the basement. every game ends the same these days because of cards like these.
i'm sorry, but as has been stated in this thread already, the entire thing reads like 'i don't want to play against that card so we're banning it' while REAL offenders run free.
you can't stop the arms race, and on a long enough timeline you can't stop the combos either... but maybe its time to put in a little bit more ******* effort than a half assed banning with vague rationale that could be applied to any number of more highly offensive cards once a year. he talks about being conservative in what gets banned... but man, you can't have it both ways. you can't bitch about combo, or competitiveness, and then not ban cards that are in literally every single ******* deck that either end the game on the spot or push the caster so far ahead no one can catch back up.
as it stands, a lot of these decisions, and especially the articles and statements, come across as a group of people who aren't actually playing the game in 2019, but are instead caught up in what it was back in 2010. building ***** out of whatever was laying around with no real motive other than to see how many times craw wurm can be cloned and thrown into more craw wurms.
this guy gets it.
i also don't agree with the iona ban. sure, she sucks if you're in monocolor, but you need to be prepared for her, that promotes creative deck building, creative deck building is good, answers are good. sure, unbanning servant and then sticking iona is a blowout... but if you're able to do that consistently good for you i guess? its not as easy as people would think.
anyway, engine's ban should've happened about a year ago. card is ******* dumb. just. ******* dumb. it has created more OOPS I WIN scenarios than any other card i've experienced in the past 10 years. people who say they run it fairly oops into a win almost every time too. its degenerate as **** all.
i hear this a lot from less experienced aggro players, i don't hear it from ones that are prepared with ways to protect the monster they've created, their swarm, or ways to disrupt combopants over there.
okay... but like... the game still ends. that's the point. people say they're in it for the experience, and to create a story, but you're not. the nature of the game is to win. no one likes losing. even a super casual vorthos deck is going to eventually move along to be able to keep up if all it does is lose.
look if your opponent combos out and you're sitting there making him play it out, that's on you. not them. my experience with combo has been vastly different than yours. where when almost everyone is packing some form of infinite combo, everyone else steps up and runs ways to disrupt it. they've been far more enjoyable games for everyone involved so long as everyone is on the same page because you're interacting with each other. its not just sit there and watch the sliver player turn sideways every turn. you've having counter wars, you're digging for answers, you're keeping mana up, you're actively thinking about what other players are doing rather than just what you're doing. i can't stress that point enough.
edit:
i think this is the biggest point for me. as long as everyone is on the same page, as long as everyone accepts that combo happens...
you're actively thinking about what other players are doing rather than just what you're doing
once that starts happening the game becomes more interactive, people run ways to stop your combo, they run ways to protect their combo, they run ways to disrupt your board to get their team through, etc etc.
i see a lot of the time aggro players bitching they can't keep up, but they aren't running the ways to stop a combo, or disrupt control, or they blow their load on 10 slivers and no way to give haste.
the whole thing breaks down to interaction, and games where everyone is responding to each other rather than just play card pass play card pass attack pass attack pass... are far more enjoyable.
people gripe about certain archetypes, but they remember those decks and those games. they come back next week (in a perfect world) sporting answers to what made them lose.
yes, it creates an arms race... welcome to 26 ******* years of magic: the gathering.
i've also long argued that embracing it makes for a more interactive game. if you know everyone is combo'ing off you're going to run more ways to stop those and if you're doing it yourself you're going to run more ways to protect your own. interactivity increases. it goes from being a 20 hour long pod where everyone lines up craw wurms like gentlemen to an actual game.
sheldon's views on commander... i've never agreed with them. he takes an approach that's very much do nothing. he's against just about everything that isn't just dudes lining up. its a very boring non-interactive way to play. that's his thing though, kitchen tables where nothing happens and eventually 90/90 hydra of bull***** gains trample and doesn't eat a doom blade.
its a totally different way to play, but its also baby's first edh game and that doesn't last very long. the natural progression of any group is to move toward winning. interacting with each other more. the very nature of the game and playing with the same people over a long period of times makes it an arms race. its not just an edh thing. even that 60 card casual group in college is going to find ways to beat that guy next week, or steve will get a new dragon for his dragons deck.
lean into it. stop fighting it.
edit: and yeah, you're gonna have a real bad time if you take his approach to edh and run into people who don't.
...there's a ton of things that cheese this into ezmode... ponder brainstorm preordain sensei's divining top future sight... anything that either lets you look at or manipulate your top card
is it great? no. but its easier to pull off than realized.
just not necessarily in standard or limited.