Similar experiences here. My Ruhan of the Fomori, Marath, Will of the Wild, Animar, Soul of Elements, and Uril, the Miststalker decks all barely splash(ed) red. When I first started playing I felt like I was sort of obligated to include more red cards, but the more I played the more I realized that if the deck works better leaning towards two colors, go for it. You aren't obligated to have a particular percentage of any color.
I wonder how many Reaper King players don't use a full 5-color deck.
Similar experiences here. My Ruhan of the Fomori, Marath, Will of the Wild, Animar, Soul of Elements, and Uril, the Miststalker decks all barely splash(ed) red. When I first started playing I felt like I was sort of obligated to include more red cards, but the more I played the more I realized that if the deck works better leaning towards two colors, go for it. You aren't obligated to have a particular percentage of any color.
I wonder how many Reaper King players don't use a full 5-color deck.
I once had Reaper King Esper Artifacts with Sen Triplets as the lieutenant. Quite bad, and the new colour identity rule has made the concept mostly obsolete, although it was nice to ramp into the Bringers.
Based on the decklist in your sig, it sounds like you have a slow meta. A tuned Meren deck is going to dominate the long game, so you need to apply a lot of pressure while disrupting her. (I like hasty commander damage for this, but normal creature attacks + burn works too).
Also, looks like she's running infinite combos. Stack-based infinite combos like Firemind's Foresight -> Reiterate/Reset/Brainstorm or the like have an advantage over her, because she can't interact with it.
If the rest of the table frowns on knocking players out of the game early, or infinite combos don't appeal, maybe Meren brought a gun to a knife fight.
I have less fun playing with and against proxies because they're less attractive than a real card. Still, I support it in casual play, up to 100% proxies. Most of my Commander decks are in the $400-1,000 range and will trounce a precon out of the box. Even a relatively budget deck is a few hundred. I can afford this hobby because I've been collecting for a long time and trade intelligently, but if I say "no proxies," I'll never convince any of my friends to invest in a deck to play against me against me.
You don't want to run too many nonbasics, especially if you are running Emeria, but some help. Grabbing cycle lands with Weathered Wayfarer is nice in a pinch.
Also, it helps to have mana rocks that turns into cards late game, like:
Stax cards like Winter Orb and Overburden paint a target. They incentivize players with aggressive decks to take you out as quickly as possible to get rid of your annoying lockdown effects. The board sweepers you have I wouldn't specifically call stax cards, though.
I find that the best way to fly "under the radar" as mono-blue is, paradoxically, to establish a board presence. If all you do in the early game is play lockdown spells and draw cards, your opponents' best strategy is to kill you early before you build up steam. But if you instead have a more proactive strategy that plays "fair" and doesn't counter stuff early on, then people don't think blue deck until you slowly bury them with card advantage and well-timed counterspells in the late game. Talrand, Thada Adel, Azami, Teferi (creature), Sakashima, Thassa, and Sun Quan are all generals that work well with proactive strategies.
Remember to pack Regrowth effects, or even Runesweeper, in case you lose the Timberpack Wolf.
e: Also note that Riku can turn any flicker effect into a clone, although I don't know which specific ones you might want to use.
About half my decks are Modern-border only for aesthetic reasons. I don't think it's a significant enough alteration to power level or cost to justify a new format.
Modern sets + Conspiracy/Commander unique cards would be a much more significant change to the card pool. No Sol Ring, Necro, Brainstorm... That banlist is more interesting to me.
I treat people whom I'm playing with for the first time as low-threat until they show otherwise. Lots of boogeymen like Sharuum, Narset, and Zegana are also casual favorites, and I don't want somebody who's new to the playgroup to feel ganged up on because they chose a cool, flashy creature as their commander. Plus, the longer they stay in, the more chances I have to see what their play philosophy is and what cool things their deck does.
Keep in mind, well-built and well-played U/G control is one of the most powerful strategies in multiplayer. It sounds like your friend with the Kruphix deck is playing with some very powerful tools like Sylvan Library, and that your other friends aren't packing much disruption, meaning that if you let him survive to the late game, he'll be nigh-unstoppable.
Counterflux and Last Word are good band-aid solutions, but in the end, it's totally reasonable that it might take a whole table to focus-fire down a Kruphix deck. Just having you be the only guy packing answers won't cut it.
I was initially under the impression you could not force another player to concede. Having done some additional research I can only find reference to this idea, though, and not a distinct rule to that effect. To follow is a portion of the FAQ text from Sorin Markov. I do not have unassailable basis for this, but I believe I am correct in saying that you cannot force a player to concede or abstain from conceding.
Being unable to force a player to concede with Sorin/Mindslaver is part of the definition of "controlling a player."
Quote from "Comprehensive Rules" »
712.6. The controller of another player can't make that player concede.
It says nowhere in the Comprehensive Rules that the game rules can't force a player to concede, only that the rules can't prevent another player from conceding:
Quote from "Comprehensive Rules" »
101.1. Whenever a card's text directly contradicts these rules, the card takes precedence. The card overrides only the rule that applies to that specific situation. The only exception is that a player can concede the game at any time (see rule 104.3a).
You should ask Maro on his tumblr for an [O] ruling on Frankie Peanuts, since he's the one who decides these things. (That's the facetious answer... the real answer is that I don't understand the point of rules-lawyering an Un-Card in the first place, since by RAW, it's not legal in this format anyway!)
Do you feel that EDH is a strategically rewarding game of skill, or do you think it's flip cup? The comparison I used once is "cat's cradle". It's less strategically pure than some games such as Chess, certainly, but I definitely think it's more toward the spectrum of Poker/Bridge than Flip Cup, a category including D&D. There are goals that you are competing against other players to achieve. There are good decisions and bad decisions, and opponents can either exploit the bad decisions or fail to do so. Nothing about this has to do with the approach to the game, rather, it's the nature of it. You lose when opponents life-totals are zero, and you do that by throwing more their way than they do to you.
I do understand though if there are some people who do feel that it's flip-cup, and shinier cups make for better flipping. But again, the question is whether they have to make their case to me or I have to make my case to them. The rules as they exist now should make the case for me.
I think that there definitely is an element of skill in EDH but it's not the be-all and end-all to the game. The appeal in EDH for me is in playing with the other 99% of cards that just aren't good enough for competitive play, and being able to play the same Magic with a group of friends at once. Playing it competitively makes it just another tournament format, and there's nothing wrong with that but there are other tournament formats I prefer to play.
Keep in mind that EDH started as a way for judges to socialize, basically. It has a proud casual heritage. As long as lots of people are playing EDH casually and lots of people are playing it competitively, I see no need to say that one or the other type is the "true" version of the format -- so long as when people with different ideas of the format converge, they can talk it out and either find a way to have fun together or agree to disagree.
So gets my question does someone like you even need a banlist ? Would you not have fun without one when you think it's comparable to flip cup? If I told you your not playing beer pong by the pro tour rules and it's "not really beer pong" your Tables the wrong length what would you say ? Do d&d players need to play be "the rules" to casually have fun? The idea of having a casual banlist is laughable to me because if your casual you don't need a banlist ...
I've been playing EDH since the banlist was like 10 cards, most of which me and my friends couldn't afford anyway. I don't care about the banlist at my home table. It's a good list of things that are really powerful or have combo potential, but if my friend wants to use Painter's Servant in a deck without Grindstone or Iona, I'm not gonna say no.
I just happen to think that EDH really is quite different in how people are expected to react to skill/power disparities. It's just not the same as any other game on that. Literally, the player base encourages each other to use ineffective strategy. I challenge anyone to name a game that is anything like that.
Pen and paper RPGs like D&D -- you know, the playerbase our hobby sprung out of. Some playgroups expect members to play optimally while others deride "powergamers," just like in EDH.
I understand being annoyed at people who whine about what is and isn't the spirit of EDH. But most of your discussion here seems based on a premise that people should want to play EDH well. With respect to my playgroup, I think being skilled at EDH is like being skilled at flip cup: it's a fun skill to have, but I'm not playing flip cup to get better at it.
I once had Reaper King Esper Artifacts with Sen Triplets as the lieutenant. Quite bad, and the new colour identity rule has made the concept mostly obsolete, although it was nice to ramp into the Bringers.
Also, looks like she's running infinite combos. Stack-based infinite combos like Firemind's Foresight -> Reiterate/Reset/Brainstorm or the like have an advantage over her, because she can't interact with it.
If the rest of the table frowns on knocking players out of the game early, or infinite combos don't appeal, maybe Meren brought a gun to a knife fight.
You don't want to run too many nonbasics, especially if you are running Emeria, but some help. Grabbing cycle lands with Weathered Wayfarer is nice in a pinch.
Also, it helps to have mana rocks that turns into cards late game, like:
A few recent options I've been having a lot of success with:
I find that the best way to fly "under the radar" as mono-blue is, paradoxically, to establish a board presence. If all you do in the early game is play lockdown spells and draw cards, your opponents' best strategy is to kill you early before you build up steam. But if you instead have a more proactive strategy that plays "fair" and doesn't counter stuff early on, then people don't think blue deck until you slowly bury them with card advantage and well-timed counterspells in the late game. Talrand, Thada Adel, Azami, Teferi (creature), Sakashima, Thassa, and Sun Quan are all generals that work well with proactive strategies.
If you're looking for stuff to do on the stack, how about Dualcaster Mage or Mystic Snake?
Shared Animosity
Alpha Brawl
Kessig Wolf Run
Remember to pack Regrowth effects, or even Runesweeper, in case you lose the Timberpack Wolf.
e: Also note that Riku can turn any flicker effect into a clone, although I don't know which specific ones you might want to use.
Modern sets + Conspiracy/Commander unique cards would be a much more significant change to the card pool. No Sol Ring, Necro, Brainstorm... That banlist is more interesting to me.
Counterflux and Last Word are good band-aid solutions, but in the end, it's totally reasonable that it might take a whole table to focus-fire down a Kruphix deck. Just having you be the only guy packing answers won't cut it.
Being unable to force a player to concede with Sorin/Mindslaver is part of the definition of "controlling a player."
It says nowhere in the Comprehensive Rules that the game rules can't force a player to concede, only that the rules can't prevent another player from conceding:
You should ask Maro on his tumblr for an [O] ruling on Frankie Peanuts, since he's the one who decides these things. (That's the facetious answer... the real answer is that I don't understand the point of rules-lawyering an Un-Card in the first place, since by RAW, it's not legal in this format anyway!)
I think that there definitely is an element of skill in EDH but it's not the be-all and end-all to the game. The appeal in EDH for me is in playing with the other 99% of cards that just aren't good enough for competitive play, and being able to play the same Magic with a group of friends at once. Playing it competitively makes it just another tournament format, and there's nothing wrong with that but there are other tournament formats I prefer to play.
Keep in mind that EDH started as a way for judges to socialize, basically. It has a proud casual heritage. As long as lots of people are playing EDH casually and lots of people are playing it competitively, I see no need to say that one or the other type is the "true" version of the format -- so long as when people with different ideas of the format converge, they can talk it out and either find a way to have fun together or agree to disagree.
I've been playing EDH since the banlist was like 10 cards, most of which me and my friends couldn't afford anyway. I don't care about the banlist at my home table. It's a good list of things that are really powerful or have combo potential, but if my friend wants to use Painter's Servant in a deck without Grindstone or Iona, I'm not gonna say no.
Pen and paper RPGs like D&D -- you know, the playerbase our hobby sprung out of. Some playgroups expect members to play optimally while others deride "powergamers," just like in EDH.
I understand being annoyed at people who whine about what is and isn't the spirit of EDH. But most of your discussion here seems based on a premise that people should want to play EDH well. With respect to my playgroup, I think being skilled at EDH is like being skilled at flip cup: it's a fun skill to have, but I'm not playing flip cup to get better at it.