There's strategy in the sense of deciding where and when to use answers but there's no politics in the sense of actually trying to help the combo player. If I ever would it would only be to distract my other opponents for another turn, and only if I had lots of answers ready. Not a fun play experience imo.
It sounds like you are thinking of a game where one out of the four players is “combo player”, and then the other three are ostensibly not. Agree, that would not be a fun game, and a bit painful to ask the table to hold up answers for the combo player in the middle of having a game on board. But, really no different than any other game where the power-level of decks is out of whack.
Take something like Mimeoplasm reanimator deck that makes Jin-Gitaxias consistently early on, then the rest of the table with slow-developing decks that play cards like Sandwurm Convergence. I’m fairly certain the same feeling results. Hold removal, or watch the game blow up abruptly out of your control.
The analogy I've used in the past, which I think is very apt, is a go-kart race. Your friends want to race go-karts ("fair" commander decks) and you've instead brought a Ferrari (combo deck) - but you say "no, it's fine, I'll just drive it really slow, then it will be a fun, close race, just like you wanted!" The race being fun and close is a PRODUCT of everyone playing to the best of their abilities with fairly matched decks (or vehicles). If the whole thing is a farce, dependent on how fast you feel like going and whether you feel like winning, then it's not any fun. At least, not if anyone knows what's going on.
Two points. One, this game will either be a slow-roll while you are playing or while you are building your deck. As a TCG, engaging with the game through your deck-building skill is just a resonant a touchstone as your in-game skills. It’s hard to ask players to stagger their deck’s power behind their actual knowledge of how to build decks. Since somebody could just claim something is a Ferrari when you still consider it a go-kart, besides, what should ultimately guide you is what you consider fun to play with and against.
Second point, I like an analogy a lot that I heard from an old poster here, Phil – EDH is a racing car club. Everyone loves checking out what is under the hood, but if you want to race you are a jerk.
Problem is, I don’t know how to play with cards like Mana Drain and Survival of the Fittest when all I am allowed to do with them is cast Siege Behemoth and pray that all the chip-damage will eventually eat through players starting at 40 life. It is one thing to limit the size of your engine. Another thing entirely to haul around a turbocharged V-8 under your hood, and then intentionally lay enough issues into the same chassis you installed it on so the car’s top speed is 50mph.
But, you know, bringing 2 decks is really difficult. And simply asking people if the meta is competitive is practically impossible. And losing a fast combo game in 20 minutes is worse than death. And everyone knows the only way to beat a combo deck is to play a combo deck. So I guess you really have no alternatives.
I’m picking up your sarcasm, but it is actually really hard for me to sleeve up 2 decks. One, collection issues. Two, I go maybe 1-2 weeks between play sessions, and if I am brainstorming tweaks and improvements in the meantime, I have limited mental energy to invest.
Yes, asking people whether the meta is competitive is impossible. Some people think their Unesh, Criosphinx Sovereign deck is competitive, and other people might think it’s reasonable to expect the table to stop a 5-part station combo with the Fifth Dawn pieces.
Losing a fast combo game won’t kill you, but playing Thrun, the Last Troll into it is a waste of time. The worst part isn’t losing, it’s having nothing to do in the game. Same goes for playing a combo to beat a combo. You can tutor for the 1x counterspell in your deck once you smell combo, but I am assuming that you actually want to play a straight-up game instead of just rallying the table to stop a combo before you go back to doing whatever. From the above also, it seems like a fair back and forth seems to be the kind of game you’re wanting to play.
I think you misunderstand my first point. I don't mean that one can't deal with combo, obviously one can. But if your deck is literally just nothing but "assemble X combo and do nothing else" then there's no politics there. There's no such thing as teaming up to take down the stronger player if the only way you can fight is to kill everyone at once. Even if another player has a massive board advantage and we're getting crushed, I have nothing to gain by helping you because if I'm successful all I'll do is kingmake you. Counterplay, sure, politics, no.
Well to your point, I am not sure that I’ve seen a deck that all it does is combo off. I am not sure it would be a successful deck playing against a field of decks that had win conditions of similar power-level. The “competitive” decks are usually 2-3 combos, as many tutors as are in color, some premium draw cards, then the rest stuffed full of counterplay. So, it wouldn’t really be the case that the only thing they can do to fight is wipe out the table. I understand that this is the impression drawn, but a lot of decision-making goes into how the counterplay cards are expended, just like a board-oriented game.
Whose tutor/draw do I counter? Is this the right time for a hate card like Cursed Totem? A lot of politics and table-talk go into those decisions. And yes, it’s usually in teaming up to stop the stronger player, as measured by some strong engine online like Necropotence. A few players might agree to team up, and it might ends up that somebody just had their own combo the whole time and were waiting for the table to run out of answers. Maybe kingmaking to some, but sounds like politics to me.
I do understand the perspective because things like board position and life-totals are not very big influencers. I do see it as a matter of perspective though, because things like deck access and disruption take their place instead.
I'll try not to rail against you personally, but DAMN do I hate it when people play like you're describing. It's like the equivalent of when you play a game of (insert sport here) and after a hard-fought victory the other guy turns and says "well, you only won because I LET you win." The goal of a game of magic is to win, and the fun should arise from that competition, not because you're deigning to let me "do my thing" when you had a win the entire time. You're treating the other players like you'd treat children when you play like that. Adults want a fair competition where everyone is trying their best, so if the competition isn't fair then let's make it fair by changing decks, not compensate by playing badly on purpose.
If you need to have something competitive to play in the (in my experience very rare) scenario that you find yourself at a competitive table, bring multiple decks or a sideboard or something. Usually you can tell how competitive the table is by the other commanders, or you could just ask. What's the worst case scenario, you lose one game because you misread the table? Plus you know you could just run anti-combo answers while not including a combo yourself, right?
I think the key is that I usually only do this for public or online games, and so people don’t know at the end that a combo was in my deck. I also usually only run one combo in a deck with this approach, which is something that I’d never do if I’m actually building a competitive deck. And, I’d never say that I’d have won if I tutored for something else, because really that defeats the whole purpose. Why I do that, I would rather have a game on the terms that other players want to have one, rather than surprise people. EDH is different than other games that way, you have to avoid arms-races.
And for whether to just pack a non-combo deck in the first place, I guess I dread the worst case a lot more than others. I don’t mind losing a game, but I also think of the deck building process as part of the game. I really don’t like building decks that all they can do is sit by and watch if other players have decided to build a certain way. I want to respect that this is a valid way to build, by building a deck myself that has a plan for when I see it.
(3) if it's only a secondary avenue to victory, then that's at least a little bit better, because at least you can be reasoned with - full combo basically has to kill or be killed, and there's no dealmaking, which is both boring and lame.
That said, DO NOT hold back your combo if you have it. Nothing is more obnoxious than the guy who could have won 5 turns ago but "only uses his combo as a last resort". If you think your combo is a dumb boring way to win, then DON'T PUT IT IN THE DECK. I plan to play as well as I can to win because I want to test my deck and skills - don't insult me by playing badly on purpose.
I’m not sure I agree with these two points. The first, plenty of counterplay goes on down the stretch, given that you know or can suspect a combo in someone’s deck. Most tables smartly hold removal through the middle turns in case someone just drew into it. Also if someone has tutored, you either know they have it in the case of a face-up tutor, or will just hold answers in case of multiple face-down tutors. There are also plenty of before-the-fact things that are in the card pool to deal with things – whether Leyline of the Void type effects, tax, effects that turn off library searching, or effects that extract cards from libraries.
The second one, I am known to often carry decks that are capable of some abrupt wins, but are also playable in a casual type game. I do this for public groups, because I don’t like wasting my time knowing that it’s legal for someone to just have a Survival-based combo deck, if that’s what they want to play. I don’t like being hopeless to what I know the format’s capable of, but I don’t want to play over the top of a grindy Meren v Myael v Atraxa game with a combo either. If I bring my deck and that’s what I play against, I will happily D-tutor for Metallurgic Summonings rather than Intuition. In that setting though, I’ve been good at identifying what game is going on and using the combo pieces for other things. Other players, I am not sure.
It would make brawl a lot more atractive if they would make it some sort of semi-eternal format in the sense that if a brawl deck was legal at one point in time, it will remain legal. This would allow for some flexibility if you build a deck around a set's theme since you can pick either the sets before it or afterwards to pick your own standard so to speak. So you have a period where you csn "tune" a deck but after a whilemit leaves standard so the active tuning period is somewhat over but since it was legal at some point, you can still legally play your Dino's against whatever they bring out 3 years from now.
The idea is that you would be able to convert a Brawl deck that rotated into a Commander deck.
Now the 60-card limit and the Planeswalker as commander rules evidently weigh more heavily, but that's the idea.
After 18 turns, there are dozens of one card win conditions at anyone's disposal, (Exsanguinate comes to mind), so the idea that a win condition that requires more than one card to end the game is unfair is rather silly to me. I like to win with stax/pillowfort/denial decks, and I absolutely thrive on winning by scoops before an actual win condition has even materialized, through the creation of board states where opponents aren't allowed to do anything. I'm an emblem-o-holic. I wouldn't complain one single bit if I lost to a combo deck. I wouldn't complain if it were on turn 2-4, though if such happened consistently, I'd congratulate the opponent on such an amazing deck that's so out of my league, and probably hold off on further games until I upped my game. I'm a firm believer in never expecting an opponent to lower himself to me. Bring your A-game, show no mercy, and I want to see how I fare.
I think Exsanguinate illustrates perfectly this idea, and similar like Debt to the Deathless and Torment of Hailfire. With Cabal Coffers, Primal Amulet and other such, there is a good possibility that late of being able to dome the table with only lands. So, it doesn’t even fit the literal definition of “combination”, at least no more than any other card in the game needs a combination of lands to cast it.
But, I once pumped 2-3 Vizkopa Guildmage activations into an Exsanguinate, and another player announces to the table that I combo’ed off. Also Molten Psyche and Increasing Vengeance has been called a “signature combo” of mine. Non-infinite, and even vulnerable to artifact removal, but I suppose still considered a combo.
I need no more evidence than this that the people who consider combo as “winning from nowhere” are really only asking for a creature-combat only game. Not only do I think EDH can do better, I think this style of game is highly prone to stalling out by hate cards like Humility, Peacekeeper, Constant Mists, Meishin, the Mind Cage, so on. Not a great table to be sitting at where a game goes on for 2+ hours because of all the combat hate, then the moment someone assembles some non-combat synergy the outcry is “No Fair!”.
Still, as Jusstice pointed out, cards like Carnage Tyrant could end up being difficult to answer "Oops, I win" threats that could make the format stagnate around them. Maybe the format will be self-regulating like EDH, but if it really becomes an FNM format with modest prize support there's no excuse to have a terrible banlist like EDH does.
Carnage Tyrant doesn't even make my Brawl Dinosaur Tribal deck, I think it's not synergistic enough. I get it though, I guess he/she was just suggesting an example of a card that might be overpowered, but waaaay off on the suggestion. There is a lot more going on in the format than simply getting over run by a single creature.
These examples of Carnage Tyrant and Rekindling Phoenix were more pointed at the problem of the Standard card pool not being deep enough to deal with certain things, rather than things that win games out of nowhere. The mechanics of Magic are generally threat, then answer. The way the game still builds to a conclusion through this process is that certain threats are worthwhile, even when answered.
But the dynamic is different when the threat justifies itself because it dodges the answer. A resilient threat requires a more tailored answer, like Edict effects, so on. If your EDH group has a specific problem, there are things like graveyard hate, tax effects, Rule of Law type effects, so on, that deal very specific things. The Standard card pool just isn’t deep enough to consistently provide multiple levels of counterplay like this. Particularly given that they will foreseeably want to print Legendaries that shake things up a bit in Commander, this issue will rear its head all the time. Imagine if Brawl came out during Khans block, with Narset running around. That card is hard enough to deal with in regular EDH.
I mean, Humility doesn’t destroy EDH, but it is a very annoying card to deal with. Like that, there are certain cards like that are obscenely overpowered like Mana Crypt, which won’t be an issue in Brawl. But, there are also cards like Humility that you really don’t want to see because of how hard they are to deal with. Way more cards fit into this category in Brawl. And also, there are cards like PoK, Sylvan Primordial, and Prime Time that just show up way too often and pull people into those colors. That will also be an issue in Brawl. And between those types of cards, EDH has banned the hard to deal with and unbalancing ones way more often than just the overpowered ones.
I really don't understand how someone can say "but what if a commander is busted in brawl?" while not seeing the glaring fact that there are LOADS of busted commanders in EDH. If a commander ends up being totally busted, then casual players will either avoid it or build it badly, just like in commander. Duh. Food chain tazri isn't exactly ruining commander for the kitchen table. But also I think all of that is very unlikely given the power level of standard cards.
On the balance question, I do still think that it will be an issue because it’s yet to be seen whether the community can check itself the way that the Commander community arguably has. If you build Food Chain Tazri, to borrow the example, you are aware that you are crossing into a certain type of territory. If it just turns out that Rashmi, Eternities Crafter or something like that is just the best general in the format, by far, then nobody who sets out to build it will really be on notice that they’re about to ignite an arms race.
It’s the story of the Commander format. What should be banned on balance is Mana Crypt. What does get banned in practice are Primeval Titan and Prophet of Kruphix. Then, week after week of philosophy articles are how Commander players deal with the issues caused by cards like Crypt. There are no Crypt-level cards in Standard, but there are plenty of cards that would be so powerful that they draw players into those colors and turn games into races to get the same cards and engines online. Much worse still with the shallower card pool and 60-card limit making sure that any card you do loathe seeing, you are sure to see it game after game.
Good idea to start adding limits to the card pool in Commander, but I will continue to be suspicious how much they actually play-tested this format until I see for a rotation or two that it actually works.
The standard rotation is way too short for me to want to invest in Brawl. It’s a little easier to swallow since you’re only buying 1x of each chase rare, but I still really don’t want to start shelling out $15 a pop for cards like Vraska’s Contempt that I know are sub-par in the overall scheme of things.
I don’t even think it’s a good comparison to EDH, obvious similarities notwithstanding. The gameplay will be entirely different given the dearth of good mana production, draw, and removal. Basically the game goes to whoever resolves the first threat that the format is manifestly unequipped to deal with – like Carnage Tyrant or Rekindling Phoenix. On top of the investment volatility, these obvious shortcomings with the card pool are another thing that pull people into Commander from Modern and Standard.
Maybe a few years down the line, WOTC would create a new format similar to Extended where there wasn’t a rotation every single year. Maybe every 2-3 years. I could see that being driven in part by or primarily by Brawl. Also, there is the question of how MTG Arena will play out, and whether or not it will support Multiplayer games to any degree. If Arena does take off, I will certainly be playing it regardless of my investment in paper Magic. And, so I answer a “maybe if it gets popular” on the survey.
The above is a good example of how bad threat assessment and spite plays get started.
Targeted with an Oblivion Sower? That doesn’t set someone behind at all. The top card of their deck is still random. It does make sense for an opponent to target that player over two other players that somehow have about 1/3 of their deck’s total land count in play, but no, your deck does not “owe” you those three lands from off the top. And knowing after the fact that 3 cards off the top are land is of Zero predictive value before the fact. The average number of lands hit by that trigger is still between 1 and 2, and so that opponent’s information at the time the decision is made is that it will affect whether that player’s next card is land or non-land by a little over 1%. Even having hit 3 land, it affected chances of drawing land by less than 5%.
The emotional impact though is huge. You get targeted with something. How could they when you are behind on land? And hey… you just knew that your deck was going to bail you out of this, and sure enough, there it was. If it only weren’t for that Oblivion Sower. That’s what put you out of the game, for sure.
This is just too great of an example of a player being affected very little by something (here it’s even something random), and then scapegoating the blame for the game state onto that thing. You might as well blame the person who attacked you with Burnished Hart early rather than passing for why your life total is low enough now to get attacked for lethal. I actually see this happening all the time in EDH.
To summarize on what you are asking, the state of the game will nearly always (or ought to) ensure that decisions whether to hold back are rarely arbitrary like this. For other examples, if two players each have a Xenagos, God of Revels, then the one with the biggest creature will probably get theirs eaten first. If two players have a big threat, the one with the most mana will get targeted. If two players have a draw source (say Arena) or a mana source (say Sol Ring), then otherwise equal, the one with the most other stuff will get the removal.
The examples with Annex are a little bit more complex. On the one hand, lands like Ancient Tomb are the reason that you run Annex. But, I think it boils down to how you want to direct the table’s attentions. The player who is behind and has Tomb will notice that you took something else, and might want to cooperate with you. One mana is one mana, but an ally against the leading player can be worth more. That’s the benefit there, and even if it does end up weighing more heavily than other considerations, then it’s not because of some cosmic sense of fairness. It’s because it was the better play in the game, those factors considered.
Also FYI, it’s a rule that whenever a player leaves the game all of the permanents that they own cease to exist on the battlefield. So, there is no difference between scooping on the spot to an Oblivion Sower trigger and scooping after it resolves. Any lands that player got are gone.
Different strokes, different folks. For me, I am uncomfortable with playing a deck where I know that the only way for me to win is attacking once at a time with creatures like Sun Titan, or Sphinx of Uthuun. Other players, they are uncomfortable putting something as tame as Wake Thrasher and Basalt Monolith in the same deck, because they are afraid they will just try to sit by the whole game and sneak it in.
Honestly the way that the game is played now, matches are rarely decided by laying down a fattie or two, passing to three players in line who each have no answer or bigger threat, untapping, attacking, then passing orbit after orbit until players are knocked down from 40 life. For that to ever happen, the other players’ decks need to be missing something. Maybe this would happen if they don’t have enough draw and they are top-decking land, or maybe lacking life-gain or any way to mitigate chip damage and they eventually go down. But in my view, decks just aren’t built this way anymore that they sit around and wait to lose to the last person who resolves a 5/5 flying.
That being the case then, what you have ending the game is either a “combo” or a very strong synergy. A token maker doesn’t win sitting around for 3-4 orbits, but then that player casts Triumph of the Hordes. Or Craterhoof Behemoth gets cast, or Avenger of Zendikar with a ramp spell pumping the tokens, or both. Maybe someone flashes in something like Samut, Voice of Dissent or Blightsteel, has a few pumps, and nobody has a maze effect (something which just about every deck runs now).
The questions I after these scenarios are - what’s the difference, and why limit yourself? What is the difference between a combo and synergy that ends the game by combat? You need a counterspell to stop a Craterhoof trigger, you also need a counterspell to stop a Sanguine Bond combo. And as I hope these examples illustrate, you are seriously narrowing the list of cards that are capable of winning games if you impose the combat-only restriction on your group. And why make everyone run Green and push all those other decks out of your group? It will get stale quickly.
b. Do you think winning with a combo in turn 10-18 is unfair or unfun?
People will consider “unfair” anything that their deck can’t interact with, maybe rightly so. But, most combo’s can be interacted with, and mostly by decks of all colors, not necessarily Blue. The list of combo’s people run that can’t be stopped by an Anguished Unmaking or Beast Within is extremely short. And a lot of cards that can’t be stopped with removal (Craterhoof, Avenger) are often on people’s list of completely fair, and are run precisely because they can’t be interacted with.
In your example, Sanguine Bond dies to removal. It doesn’t even win the game right away, besies. If it were something like Storm, or Reset-Reiterate combo where you are asking the table for a Blue-only answer, then that’s one thing. But people should run removal, then not be surprised that the game ends somehow once everyone is out of it.
c. Do you think control/combo player doesn't 'work their way' to the victory (remember I am talking about casual stuff, no T3 combos, no deck with black tutors)
As far as I am concerned, people worked for it if they built a deck that is capable of producing a win. Not everything in a game can go your way. There is no obligation to at some point have been the prime target of the table, or to expose your winning material to multiple orbits of possible answers.
d. Do you think winning with a combo in T10-18 is 'out of nowhere'?
Well, this just further reveals this “creatures only” mentality. They have summoning sickness, so can’t win “out of nowhere”. Of course, numerous exceptions exist, and are played precisely because they are the exception. But the player who would say that is the player who never expects any other permanent type to do damage. Obviously, the game would be much more stale if it were strictly true that creatures were the only way to damage opponents.
Highly synergistic, snowball general gets printed (e.g. The Locust God) – “Ugh, this general builds the deck for you. Everyone will be running X, Y and Z card in this, and games will basically play out the same every time. What a broken, kill-on-sight addition to the game.”
Highly linear, open-ended general like this one gets printed (e.g. Keranos, God of Storms or Jhoira) – “Ugh, lackluster and mediocre. Why would I run this over such and such? This doesn’t fill any role that we don’t have filled already.”
You can’t have your cake and eat it too. It seems like players expect a general that explodes off of the table, is a valid pick competitively, and yet somehow flies under the radar and lets you put anything you want in your deck and still function. Do I really need to say that not all of these boxes will be checked by one general?[...]
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Newsflash: different folks want different things. Not sure why this concept is so hard to grasp for some people here.
Somepeople want cards like The Locust God, different people want cards like Keranos, God of Storms.
Other people don't like either and look for something else entirely.
For some people that is Jhoira, Weatherlight Captain. Other find her boring. Wow those must be horrible people.
Sorry for attacking your post specifically, but the complaints about "you people" as if we're some kind of giant hive mind here always piss me off.
I'd be interessted to see how your equipment approach works out. Nonwhite equipment decks are a rare thing.
The problems come because no one is saying, "hmm, this just isn't for me". The opinions come in the form of "how could they have designed this?", "So and so can already to this better...", and so on.
I get that there is something of a bias for negative opinion in a forum such as this, but still I get the idea that EDH players are just incredibly hard to please anyway.
Highly synergistic, snowball general gets printed (e.g. The Locust God) – “Ugh, this general builds the deck for you. Everyone will be running X, Y and Z card in this, and games will basically play out the same every time. What a broken, kill-on-sight addition to the game.”
Highly linear, open-ended general like this one gets printed (e.g. Keranos, God of Storms or Jhoira) – “Ugh, lackluster and mediocre. Why would I run this over such and such? This doesn’t fill any role that we don’t have filled already.”
You can’t have your cake and eat it too. It seems like players expect a general that explodes off of the table, is a valid pick competitively, and yet somehow flies under the radar and lets you put anything you want in your deck and still function. Do I really need to say that not all of these boxes will be checked by one general?
If you ask me, I would rather get the support-type general in these colors. I am not fond of developing decks like the Locust God, Arjun, Melek, Niv-Mizzet or Mizzix where the table can immediately identify your win condition and expect the same set of 40+ cards out of your deck right as you sit down. Those generals got stale very quickly because there was little territory left to explore with them, and you just put the question to the table whether or not they can kill a creature, and win shortly after if they can’t. Not a lot of back and forth, and not the best in the game at putting the question to your opponents, besides.
In the support role, I see Jhoira as a great alternative to decks that might have gone with something like Keranos or Nin before. Nin is great on volume as a Braingeyser in the Command Zone, but is very slow on tempo. On the other hand, Keranos is a flat 5 mana investment that you will rarely have to pay for twice in a game, but is quite slow at what it does. Niv Mizzet 2.0 is decent, but somewhat mana intensive as well, or reliant on combat. And, people still think you are playing combo. Jhoira doesn’t seem to me to be as much of a general that wants you to get 10 artifacts and Darksteel Forge on the table, but just a general who draws you cards. Every UR deck will want to develop its mana base, and the only option really to do that are artifacts.
Also nice to have the draw effect on PW’s and legendaries as well. Niv-Mizzet, Melek, Daretti, and the Locust God are cards that I want to be running in most of the URx decks that I make, but running legendaries in the 99 that are known to be powerful commanders just feels odd to me. With Jhoira, it makes sense to be running them, and you finally get to see what they do in isolation rather than as build-around-me.
The draw with this type of general is that you can build your deck how you want, and players won’t grow weary of what you are doing. For me, I have always wanted to go beatdown with UR creatures like Djinn Illuminatus, Niv-Mizzet and Hypersonic Dragon all equipped up with Swords, and not really any of the current UR options were going that route. Jhoira seems nice for that, and also a bit of beatdown with some artifact creatures like Precursor Golem.
Depending on the power level and meta you're going for, Laccolith Rig can do a lot of work. It lets you turn any large creature into repeatable political removal and the turn you play it to kill something, it only costs you 1 mana. You can also plop it on an opponent's large creature which is pseudo removal as long as anyone can block the large creature since you still control the enchantment.
+1 Along those lines also, I have seen Farrel's Mantle do work in Bruna, Uril, so on.
In this Teferi v Jhoira example, I wouldn’t take that much of an issue with it, given no other facts. I would actually take issue with the Teferi player if they had possibly built their deck just to shut off Jhoira, given that it is 75% EDH (whatever that means to people these days). It’s just not fun to be in jail all game, especially like this where you know all this player needs to do is leave mana up 4 turns down the line.
That said, I can’t honestly think of another scenario where one Commander shuts down the functionality of another this way. The closest I can think of is Anafenza, the Foremost and any graveyard-loving general (Chainer, Karador, BUG Sidisi, Scarab God, etc). That discussion has been had before, and it tends to be drawn along the lines of which groups are ok generally with high volumes of hate cards. And particularly, graveyard strategies are more accustomed to dealing with hate. Maybe Kataki, War’s Wage against Breya, Etherium Shaper? I’ve yet to see anybody play Kataki.
What I’d be wary of for this question really is an unrestricted right to change decks whenever a player feels like it. These extreme examples are one thing, but it’s not too far from situations like putting away an elf-ball deck just because someone sees a deck they know has a lot of Wraths in it.
Also, what’s stopping that player from switching deck’s in reaction to the first player’s switch, and so on and so on? Do all players need to agree on what the others are playing before the game starts? Maybe this isn’t a problem for some groups, but most players would be turned away from the game generally if they’d understood that their development of decks will always be up to their opponents to ban out by fiat.
I know this concept gets repeated a lot, but I think the playgroups that are good at managing this already are, and for those that aren’t there is little that we can offer them to help out. The cards are legal, so you will have a bad time now and then. Try not to invest 2+ hours in these instances of bad times you are bound to have in this format, and brush yourself off from time to time.
Debt of Loyalty – For metas where games play out along traditional lines (build up, wipe, repeat), this card is a blowout in response to a wipe. Its conditions are usually much easier to satisfy than Second Sunrise and Faith’s Reward also, because you don’t need your own board. It’s also friendly with Sunforger on the timing aspect, while other similar options are not.
Mudslide – This tends to be a slightly slower but broader Propaganda effect, since it doesn’t care who is attacked and also affects creatures with tap abilities.
Energy Flux – This is a really solid card for land-ramping UGx decks to pick on other color combinations that need artifacts to ramp, or for just bringing the player on a Sol Ring/Mana Crypt draw back down to earth. Also goes a long way in equipment-saturated metas.
It sounds like you are thinking of a game where one out of the four players is “combo player”, and then the other three are ostensibly not. Agree, that would not be a fun game, and a bit painful to ask the table to hold up answers for the combo player in the middle of having a game on board. But, really no different than any other game where the power-level of decks is out of whack.
Take something like Mimeoplasm reanimator deck that makes Jin-Gitaxias consistently early on, then the rest of the table with slow-developing decks that play cards like Sandwurm Convergence. I’m fairly certain the same feeling results. Hold removal, or watch the game blow up abruptly out of your control.
Two points. One, this game will either be a slow-roll while you are playing or while you are building your deck. As a TCG, engaging with the game through your deck-building skill is just a resonant a touchstone as your in-game skills. It’s hard to ask players to stagger their deck’s power behind their actual knowledge of how to build decks. Since somebody could just claim something is a Ferrari when you still consider it a go-kart, besides, what should ultimately guide you is what you consider fun to play with and against.
Second point, I like an analogy a lot that I heard from an old poster here, Phil – EDH is a racing car club. Everyone loves checking out what is under the hood, but if you want to race you are a jerk.
Problem is, I don’t know how to play with cards like Mana Drain and Survival of the Fittest when all I am allowed to do with them is cast Siege Behemoth and pray that all the chip-damage will eventually eat through players starting at 40 life. It is one thing to limit the size of your engine. Another thing entirely to haul around a turbocharged V-8 under your hood, and then intentionally lay enough issues into the same chassis you installed it on so the car’s top speed is 50mph.
I’m picking up your sarcasm, but it is actually really hard for me to sleeve up 2 decks. One, collection issues. Two, I go maybe 1-2 weeks between play sessions, and if I am brainstorming tweaks and improvements in the meantime, I have limited mental energy to invest.
Yes, asking people whether the meta is competitive is impossible. Some people think their Unesh, Criosphinx Sovereign deck is competitive, and other people might think it’s reasonable to expect the table to stop a 5-part station combo with the Fifth Dawn pieces.
Losing a fast combo game won’t kill you, but playing Thrun, the Last Troll into it is a waste of time. The worst part isn’t losing, it’s having nothing to do in the game. Same goes for playing a combo to beat a combo. You can tutor for the 1x counterspell in your deck once you smell combo, but I am assuming that you actually want to play a straight-up game instead of just rallying the table to stop a combo before you go back to doing whatever. From the above also, it seems like a fair back and forth seems to be the kind of game you’re wanting to play.
Well to your point, I am not sure that I’ve seen a deck that all it does is combo off. I am not sure it would be a successful deck playing against a field of decks that had win conditions of similar power-level. The “competitive” decks are usually 2-3 combos, as many tutors as are in color, some premium draw cards, then the rest stuffed full of counterplay. So, it wouldn’t really be the case that the only thing they can do to fight is wipe out the table. I understand that this is the impression drawn, but a lot of decision-making goes into how the counterplay cards are expended, just like a board-oriented game.
Whose tutor/draw do I counter? Is this the right time for a hate card like Cursed Totem? A lot of politics and table-talk go into those decisions. And yes, it’s usually in teaming up to stop the stronger player, as measured by some strong engine online like Necropotence. A few players might agree to team up, and it might ends up that somebody just had their own combo the whole time and were waiting for the table to run out of answers. Maybe kingmaking to some, but sounds like politics to me.
I do understand the perspective because things like board position and life-totals are not very big influencers. I do see it as a matter of perspective though, because things like deck access and disruption take their place instead.
I think the key is that I usually only do this for public or online games, and so people don’t know at the end that a combo was in my deck. I also usually only run one combo in a deck with this approach, which is something that I’d never do if I’m actually building a competitive deck. And, I’d never say that I’d have won if I tutored for something else, because really that defeats the whole purpose. Why I do that, I would rather have a game on the terms that other players want to have one, rather than surprise people. EDH is different than other games that way, you have to avoid arms-races.
And for whether to just pack a non-combo deck in the first place, I guess I dread the worst case a lot more than others. I don’t mind losing a game, but I also think of the deck building process as part of the game. I really don’t like building decks that all they can do is sit by and watch if other players have decided to build a certain way. I want to respect that this is a valid way to build, by building a deck myself that has a plan for when I see it.
I’m not sure I agree with these two points. The first, plenty of counterplay goes on down the stretch, given that you know or can suspect a combo in someone’s deck. Most tables smartly hold removal through the middle turns in case someone just drew into it. Also if someone has tutored, you either know they have it in the case of a face-up tutor, or will just hold answers in case of multiple face-down tutors. There are also plenty of before-the-fact things that are in the card pool to deal with things – whether Leyline of the Void type effects, tax, effects that turn off library searching, or effects that extract cards from libraries.
The second one, I am known to often carry decks that are capable of some abrupt wins, but are also playable in a casual type game. I do this for public groups, because I don’t like wasting my time knowing that it’s legal for someone to just have a Survival-based combo deck, if that’s what they want to play. I don’t like being hopeless to what I know the format’s capable of, but I don’t want to play over the top of a grindy Meren v Myael v Atraxa game with a combo either. If I bring my deck and that’s what I play against, I will happily D-tutor for Metallurgic Summonings rather than Intuition. In that setting though, I’ve been good at identifying what game is going on and using the combo pieces for other things. Other players, I am not sure.
The idea is that you would be able to convert a Brawl deck that rotated into a Commander deck.
Now the 60-card limit and the Planeswalker as commander rules evidently weigh more heavily, but that's the idea.
I think Exsanguinate illustrates perfectly this idea, and similar like Debt to the Deathless and Torment of Hailfire. With Cabal Coffers, Primal Amulet and other such, there is a good possibility that late of being able to dome the table with only lands. So, it doesn’t even fit the literal definition of “combination”, at least no more than any other card in the game needs a combination of lands to cast it.
But, I once pumped 2-3 Vizkopa Guildmage activations into an Exsanguinate, and another player announces to the table that I combo’ed off. Also Molten Psyche and Increasing Vengeance has been called a “signature combo” of mine. Non-infinite, and even vulnerable to artifact removal, but I suppose still considered a combo.
I need no more evidence than this that the people who consider combo as “winning from nowhere” are really only asking for a creature-combat only game. Not only do I think EDH can do better, I think this style of game is highly prone to stalling out by hate cards like Humility, Peacekeeper, Constant Mists, Meishin, the Mind Cage, so on. Not a great table to be sitting at where a game goes on for 2+ hours because of all the combat hate, then the moment someone assembles some non-combat synergy the outcry is “No Fair!”.
These examples of Carnage Tyrant and Rekindling Phoenix were more pointed at the problem of the Standard card pool not being deep enough to deal with certain things, rather than things that win games out of nowhere. The mechanics of Magic are generally threat, then answer. The way the game still builds to a conclusion through this process is that certain threats are worthwhile, even when answered.
But the dynamic is different when the threat justifies itself because it dodges the answer. A resilient threat requires a more tailored answer, like Edict effects, so on. If your EDH group has a specific problem, there are things like graveyard hate, tax effects, Rule of Law type effects, so on, that deal very specific things. The Standard card pool just isn’t deep enough to consistently provide multiple levels of counterplay like this. Particularly given that they will foreseeably want to print Legendaries that shake things up a bit in Commander, this issue will rear its head all the time. Imagine if Brawl came out during Khans block, with Narset running around. That card is hard enough to deal with in regular EDH.
I mean, Humility doesn’t destroy EDH, but it is a very annoying card to deal with. Like that, there are certain cards like that are obscenely overpowered like Mana Crypt, which won’t be an issue in Brawl. But, there are also cards like Humility that you really don’t want to see because of how hard they are to deal with. Way more cards fit into this category in Brawl. And also, there are cards like PoK, Sylvan Primordial, and Prime Time that just show up way too often and pull people into those colors. That will also be an issue in Brawl. And between those types of cards, EDH has banned the hard to deal with and unbalancing ones way more often than just the overpowered ones.
On the balance question, I do still think that it will be an issue because it’s yet to be seen whether the community can check itself the way that the Commander community arguably has. If you build Food Chain Tazri, to borrow the example, you are aware that you are crossing into a certain type of territory. If it just turns out that Rashmi, Eternities Crafter or something like that is just the best general in the format, by far, then nobody who sets out to build it will really be on notice that they’re about to ignite an arms race.
It’s the story of the Commander format. What should be banned on balance is Mana Crypt. What does get banned in practice are Primeval Titan and Prophet of Kruphix. Then, week after week of philosophy articles are how Commander players deal with the issues caused by cards like Crypt. There are no Crypt-level cards in Standard, but there are plenty of cards that would be so powerful that they draw players into those colors and turn games into races to get the same cards and engines online. Much worse still with the shallower card pool and 60-card limit making sure that any card you do loathe seeing, you are sure to see it game after game.
Good idea to start adding limits to the card pool in Commander, but I will continue to be suspicious how much they actually play-tested this format until I see for a rotation or two that it actually works.
I don’t even think it’s a good comparison to EDH, obvious similarities notwithstanding. The gameplay will be entirely different given the dearth of good mana production, draw, and removal. Basically the game goes to whoever resolves the first threat that the format is manifestly unequipped to deal with – like Carnage Tyrant or Rekindling Phoenix. On top of the investment volatility, these obvious shortcomings with the card pool are another thing that pull people into Commander from Modern and Standard.
Maybe a few years down the line, WOTC would create a new format similar to Extended where there wasn’t a rotation every single year. Maybe every 2-3 years. I could see that being driven in part by or primarily by Brawl. Also, there is the question of how MTG Arena will play out, and whether or not it will support Multiplayer games to any degree. If Arena does take off, I will certainly be playing it regardless of my investment in paper Magic. And, so I answer a “maybe if it gets popular” on the survey.
Targeted with an Oblivion Sower? That doesn’t set someone behind at all. The top card of their deck is still random. It does make sense for an opponent to target that player over two other players that somehow have about 1/3 of their deck’s total land count in play, but no, your deck does not “owe” you those three lands from off the top. And knowing after the fact that 3 cards off the top are land is of Zero predictive value before the fact. The average number of lands hit by that trigger is still between 1 and 2, and so that opponent’s information at the time the decision is made is that it will affect whether that player’s next card is land or non-land by a little over 1%. Even having hit 3 land, it affected chances of drawing land by less than 5%.
The emotional impact though is huge. You get targeted with something. How could they when you are behind on land? And hey… you just knew that your deck was going to bail you out of this, and sure enough, there it was. If it only weren’t for that Oblivion Sower. That’s what put you out of the game, for sure.
This is just too great of an example of a player being affected very little by something (here it’s even something random), and then scapegoating the blame for the game state onto that thing. You might as well blame the person who attacked you with Burnished Hart early rather than passing for why your life total is low enough now to get attacked for lethal. I actually see this happening all the time in EDH.
To summarize on what you are asking, the state of the game will nearly always (or ought to) ensure that decisions whether to hold back are rarely arbitrary like this. For other examples, if two players each have a Xenagos, God of Revels, then the one with the biggest creature will probably get theirs eaten first. If two players have a big threat, the one with the most mana will get targeted. If two players have a draw source (say Arena) or a mana source (say Sol Ring), then otherwise equal, the one with the most other stuff will get the removal.
The examples with Annex are a little bit more complex. On the one hand, lands like Ancient Tomb are the reason that you run Annex. But, I think it boils down to how you want to direct the table’s attentions. The player who is behind and has Tomb will notice that you took something else, and might want to cooperate with you. One mana is one mana, but an ally against the leading player can be worth more. That’s the benefit there, and even if it does end up weighing more heavily than other considerations, then it’s not because of some cosmic sense of fairness. It’s because it was the better play in the game, those factors considered.
Also FYI, it’s a rule that whenever a player leaves the game all of the permanents that they own cease to exist on the battlefield. So, there is no difference between scooping on the spot to an Oblivion Sower trigger and scooping after it resolves. Any lands that player got are gone.
Different strokes, different folks. For me, I am uncomfortable with playing a deck where I know that the only way for me to win is attacking once at a time with creatures like Sun Titan, or Sphinx of Uthuun. Other players, they are uncomfortable putting something as tame as Wake Thrasher and Basalt Monolith in the same deck, because they are afraid they will just try to sit by the whole game and sneak it in.
Honestly the way that the game is played now, matches are rarely decided by laying down a fattie or two, passing to three players in line who each have no answer or bigger threat, untapping, attacking, then passing orbit after orbit until players are knocked down from 40 life. For that to ever happen, the other players’ decks need to be missing something. Maybe this would happen if they don’t have enough draw and they are top-decking land, or maybe lacking life-gain or any way to mitigate chip damage and they eventually go down. But in my view, decks just aren’t built this way anymore that they sit around and wait to lose to the last person who resolves a 5/5 flying.
That being the case then, what you have ending the game is either a “combo” or a very strong synergy. A token maker doesn’t win sitting around for 3-4 orbits, but then that player casts Triumph of the Hordes. Or Craterhoof Behemoth gets cast, or Avenger of Zendikar with a ramp spell pumping the tokens, or both. Maybe someone flashes in something like Samut, Voice of Dissent or Blightsteel, has a few pumps, and nobody has a maze effect (something which just about every deck runs now).
The questions I after these scenarios are - what’s the difference, and why limit yourself? What is the difference between a combo and synergy that ends the game by combat? You need a counterspell to stop a Craterhoof trigger, you also need a counterspell to stop a Sanguine Bond combo. And as I hope these examples illustrate, you are seriously narrowing the list of cards that are capable of winning games if you impose the combat-only restriction on your group. And why make everyone run Green and push all those other decks out of your group? It will get stale quickly.
b. Do you think winning with a combo in turn 10-18 is unfair or unfun?
People will consider “unfair” anything that their deck can’t interact with, maybe rightly so. But, most combo’s can be interacted with, and mostly by decks of all colors, not necessarily Blue. The list of combo’s people run that can’t be stopped by an Anguished Unmaking or Beast Within is extremely short. And a lot of cards that can’t be stopped with removal (Craterhoof, Avenger) are often on people’s list of completely fair, and are run precisely because they can’t be interacted with.
In your example, Sanguine Bond dies to removal. It doesn’t even win the game right away, besies. If it were something like Storm, or Reset-Reiterate combo where you are asking the table for a Blue-only answer, then that’s one thing. But people should run removal, then not be surprised that the game ends somehow once everyone is out of it.
c. Do you think control/combo player doesn't 'work their way' to the victory (remember I am talking about casual stuff, no T3 combos, no deck with black tutors)
As far as I am concerned, people worked for it if they built a deck that is capable of producing a win. Not everything in a game can go your way. There is no obligation to at some point have been the prime target of the table, or to expose your winning material to multiple orbits of possible answers.
d. Do you think winning with a combo in T10-18 is 'out of nowhere'?
Well, this just further reveals this “creatures only” mentality. They have summoning sickness, so can’t win “out of nowhere”. Of course, numerous exceptions exist, and are played precisely because they are the exception. But the player who would say that is the player who never expects any other permanent type to do damage. Obviously, the game would be much more stale if it were strictly true that creatures were the only way to damage opponents.
The problems come because no one is saying, "hmm, this just isn't for me". The opinions come in the form of "how could they have designed this?", "So and so can already to this better...", and so on.
I get that there is something of a bias for negative opinion in a forum such as this, but still I get the idea that EDH players are just incredibly hard to please anyway.
Highly linear, open-ended general like this one gets printed (e.g. Keranos, God of Storms or Jhoira) – “Ugh, lackluster and mediocre. Why would I run this over such and such? This doesn’t fill any role that we don’t have filled already.”
You can’t have your cake and eat it too. It seems like players expect a general that explodes off of the table, is a valid pick competitively, and yet somehow flies under the radar and lets you put anything you want in your deck and still function. Do I really need to say that not all of these boxes will be checked by one general?
If you ask me, I would rather get the support-type general in these colors. I am not fond of developing decks like the Locust God, Arjun, Melek, Niv-Mizzet or Mizzix where the table can immediately identify your win condition and expect the same set of 40+ cards out of your deck right as you sit down. Those generals got stale very quickly because there was little territory left to explore with them, and you just put the question to the table whether or not they can kill a creature, and win shortly after if they can’t. Not a lot of back and forth, and not the best in the game at putting the question to your opponents, besides.
In the support role, I see Jhoira as a great alternative to decks that might have gone with something like Keranos or Nin before. Nin is great on volume as a Braingeyser in the Command Zone, but is very slow on tempo. On the other hand, Keranos is a flat 5 mana investment that you will rarely have to pay for twice in a game, but is quite slow at what it does. Niv Mizzet 2.0 is decent, but somewhat mana intensive as well, or reliant on combat. And, people still think you are playing combo. Jhoira doesn’t seem to me to be as much of a general that wants you to get 10 artifacts and Darksteel Forge on the table, but just a general who draws you cards. Every UR deck will want to develop its mana base, and the only option really to do that are artifacts.
Also nice to have the draw effect on PW’s and legendaries as well. Niv-Mizzet, Melek, Daretti, and the Locust God are cards that I want to be running in most of the URx decks that I make, but running legendaries in the 99 that are known to be powerful commanders just feels odd to me. With Jhoira, it makes sense to be running them, and you finally get to see what they do in isolation rather than as build-around-me.
The draw with this type of general is that you can build your deck how you want, and players won’t grow weary of what you are doing. For me, I have always wanted to go beatdown with UR creatures like Djinn Illuminatus, Niv-Mizzet and Hypersonic Dragon all equipped up with Swords, and not really any of the current UR options were going that route. Jhoira seems nice for that, and also a bit of beatdown with some artifact creatures like Precursor Golem.
+1 Along those lines also, I have seen Farrel's Mantle do work in Bruna, Uril, so on.
That said, I can’t honestly think of another scenario where one Commander shuts down the functionality of another this way. The closest I can think of is Anafenza, the Foremost and any graveyard-loving general (Chainer, Karador, BUG Sidisi, Scarab God, etc). That discussion has been had before, and it tends to be drawn along the lines of which groups are ok generally with high volumes of hate cards. And particularly, graveyard strategies are more accustomed to dealing with hate. Maybe Kataki, War’s Wage against Breya, Etherium Shaper? I’ve yet to see anybody play Kataki.
What I’d be wary of for this question really is an unrestricted right to change decks whenever a player feels like it. These extreme examples are one thing, but it’s not too far from situations like putting away an elf-ball deck just because someone sees a deck they know has a lot of Wraths in it.
Also, what’s stopping that player from switching deck’s in reaction to the first player’s switch, and so on and so on? Do all players need to agree on what the others are playing before the game starts? Maybe this isn’t a problem for some groups, but most players would be turned away from the game generally if they’d understood that their development of decks will always be up to their opponents to ban out by fiat.
I know this concept gets repeated a lot, but I think the playgroups that are good at managing this already are, and for those that aren’t there is little that we can offer them to help out. The cards are legal, so you will have a bad time now and then. Try not to invest 2+ hours in these instances of bad times you are bound to have in this format, and brush yourself off from time to time.
Slaughter – I don’t know how many Black decks there are that can gain tons of life, but they should all be playing this card. I rarely see it, though.
Tilling Treefolk – It should be a solid inclusion behind Crucible of Worlds, Life from the Loam and Ramunap Excavator.
Debt of Loyalty – For metas where games play out along traditional lines (build up, wipe, repeat), this card is a blowout in response to a wipe. Its conditions are usually much easier to satisfy than Second Sunrise and Faith’s Reward also, because you don’t need your own board. It’s also friendly with Sunforger on the timing aspect, while other similar options are not.
Mudslide – This tends to be a slightly slower but broader Propaganda effect, since it doesn’t care who is attacked and also affects creatures with tap abilities.
Energy Flux – This is a really solid card for land-ramping UGx decks to pick on other color combinations that need artifacts to ramp, or for just bringing the player on a Sol Ring/Mana Crypt draw back down to earth. Also goes a long way in equipment-saturated metas.