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Quote from Xeruh »

I mean, honestly she feels like Sarkhan to me, just Green not Red. Not a great PoV and goals that are maybe on some level understandable but also very much works as a villain.


Though other than killing hunters I’m not sure how Vivien would be a villain. She doesn’t hate humans. She hates poachers/people killing for purposes other than survival.

"Hate" maybe not, but she makes her absolute *disdain* for humanity very clear.

Sure, but disdain for humanity doesn’t make someone a villain. It could help them become one but there is plenty to be disdainful of.

This isn't a hypothetical, we have her last actions to go on. And her past actions include destroying a city and murdering thousands of innocents to save a few dinosaurs. She may not be actively trying to wipe out humanity, but she smiles when thousands of people die because of her actions. That's completely fine by her. She had a reason to get back out the vampire nobles that tortured her, but she went there looking for trouble in the first place and started the fight. But whatever, they tortured her so **** them. But to destroy the whole city, and be cool with people who were completely uninvolved with her treatment getting eaten by dinosaurs and killed in the flood and city's collapse? That's just insanely evil.

Viv is an absolute piece of trash. Throughout the guide she looks down on people trying to defend themselves. This is a plane where monsters constantly kill people, and she's upset that humans kill monsters, mostly in self defense. Basically what I expected from the lady who destroyed an entire city just to free a dinosaur. She's a monster.

Quote from CrimsonWings_3689 »

Quote from Carthage »

I run between 6 and 12 decks at any given time, but overall I've probably made more than 30 commander decks.

Not really, I've had a store group that is not fixed, and groups of friends that eventually stop meeting up over the years. Right now I have a sort of stable group but they have one deck each and the power level is very out of balance.

For the first few years of edh, pretty substantial. Lately? Almost no variance. Broken cards are stronger than general synergy, so the list rarely changes.

It sounds like we have a similar enough experience to compare notes.
~14-15 decks currently, Built/co-built a ton more for friends and ended up retiring ~10 of my own decks along the way to get where I am.

As others have mentioned, unfortunately, the nature of the game is such that stronger cards or functional reprints of worthwhile ones (ex. Cultivate and Kodama's Reach) need to occur to incentivize people purchasing the new products. Sometimes people chase new arts, foils, promos, alt. languages, etc. But the act itself of "Upgrading" one's deck, whether it's strictly on a power level basis or for the sake of a theme, it's a completely natural part of the game and the deckbuilding process.

Some people happen to have more disposable income than others and it allows them to circumnavigate the trials of saving up, trading, cracking, etc. It's unfortunate when it allows for a larger power jump than a playgroup is ready for, because the arms race often follows.

I won't claim to know what the financial circumstances are like for you or those around in your current group, but I'd like to try to recommend a few things.

1. Try to get the group to be on board with a different deck idea with a budget of $30-50 ($100 if everyone's down) and see what they say. Obviously exclude foil costs if people have them and cut the cost for basic lands out entirely.
2. Try to get your LGS to run a Commander League with points. They often have merits/demerits for playing fast mana early, knocking people out before a certain turn, looping a combo more than a few times in a turn, etc.
3. Maybe offer up one of your other decks for them to run instead of the one they have. They might be curious about running a different archetype (ex. Voltron, tribal, lifegain, etc.), but lack the funds or card collection to make one they think would have a shot in the current meta there. This goes back to the TL;DR I mentioned - Budget, CMC average, No cards over a certain CMC in deck, Color restrictions, Less popular theme, Play bigger games with more people and opportunity for interaction, etc. Get them to give something like that a shot?
4. Try a game type variant. Planechase, Star Magic, Cowboy/Bang, King (whatever you want to call it), something.

Rules
The game needs 5-7 people total.
Cards to denote the given roles are sleeved and shuffled face down and picked at random.
Plains = Sheriff/King (There's only ever 1)
Island = Deputy (starts at quantity 1 and then gets another at odd player intervals - 5, 7, 9, etc.)
Swamp = Outlaw/Assassin
Mountain = Renegade/Usurper (There's only ever 1)

The Sheriff is the only role to be revealed at the start of the game.
Sheriff starts with 20 life + 10 for each other player. Everyone else is at 40.
Sheriff goes first (and draws)
If anyone kills an outlaw, they get to draw 3 cards as a bounty.
If the Sheriff kills their Deputy, they discard their hand.
The Renegade often plays the fence.
Everyone is trying to convince the Sheriff that they are the Deputy, until they aren't.

Win conditions:
Sheriff and Deputy(s) win when the Outlaws and the Renegade are dead.
Outlaws win when the Sheriff dies.
Renegade wins when they and the Sheriff are the last 2 standing and the Sheriff dies.
**Alternate win conditions don't function at all**

It adds a very political element to the game, and it helps muddy the waters for power levels.
The King variant just has the Usurper take the King's place as King if they manage to kill them.

We play the Bang variant probably 75% of the time with the other 25% being a mix of free-for-all and 2-headed giant.

I suggest these things because I have had to do the same at the request of my play group. I have some 8-9's in my collection that positively go nuts, but I only break them out every once in a while, because of how degenerate they can get. Maybe get a couple lower power games in before breaking out the haymakers for a quick game at the end of the night?

I really, really like option 3 and have used it to great effect. I've actually taken it a step further in the past, where each member of the playgroup builds enough decks for each other member to use, and builds them the way they like. Then each night the group uses a different members decks. The member that built them explains the concept of each deck and everyone gets a chance to look through the deck they get to familiarize themselves with it before playing. The only rule is that each deck built by the same member should be around the same power level as the others, so they are evenly matched. Once you don't have to worry about the arms race, you feel comfortable building wonkier decks with sub optimal choices, because you can ensure its going up against decks built the same way. Some players will build a set of 75% decks of different archetypes, some will build upgraded precons, some will build theme decks, some tribal, some a mix, some will build niche archetypes, some will build a battlecruiser meta, some will build a cut throat meta, some will build an intentionally jank meta. Everyone gets a chance at their preferred meta having it's day in the sun, and the card and deck variety goes way up. The downside is you need a consistent playgroup, and most of the players need some disposable income (though slightly upgraded precons, intentionally jank, and battlecruiser metas can be built on the cheap).

Quote from Carthage »

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Chronic misanthropic contrarian yells at cloud, the thread, part 27: "knowing how to build decks ruins the game" edition.

Indeed. I feel like this thread should be exhibit A on adding downvotes to the forum.

The forums has an ignore function if you care, I have had onering on it for years.

This is pretty funny. Until the post describing this thread, I haven't done anything to this guy. I've disagreed with him, but that probably describes 90% of this forum. I think that about sums him up.

Chronic misanthropic contrarian yells at cloud, the thread, part 27: "knowing how to build decks ruins the game" edition.

Quote from Gruul Storyteller »

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Quote from Perkunas687 »

Hello all,

Can anyone confirm for me what happened to Dovin Baan, and whether Kaya can now planeswalk with non-walkers?

I saw it mentioned in the original synopsis, but it seemed to have limited info. I don't know if Dovin is dead-dead, or 'dead . . . . ? '.

Thanks in advance.

Dovin is dead dead. Killed on screen and his body was found by a reliable narrator.

Kaya can planeswalk with essentially anyone. It's just 'harder'. This is part of her ghost power. Which is bull because Jaya straight up tells her before she tries that even ghosts die in the blind eternities.

These are the two worst developments to come out of Forsaken. I don't know why these are glossed over and the status of ships is hotly discussed.

Mostly what Ree Wicker already said, so no use in retreading that ground.

As for the Kaya plot point, can't speak for Weisman, but other writers seem tired with the post-mending limitations.

Negatives:
Venser tried inventing a plane-traveling ship like the Weatherlight to help rescue Mirrans, but he died before he could complete his work.
The Weatherlight is essentially landlocked on Dominaria and can't be used for its intended purpose.
The portals that connected Wildfire - Rabiah - Dominaria for travel and commerce no longer work.

Positives:
Nicol Bolas's Lazotep Gateway
Jiang and his dog Mowu
Kaya and Rat

Because you fall in one of two camps for planar travel:
1) Post-mending
2) Pre-mending

Personal headcanon: The mending is unraveling and that the efforts that took place to fix it were merely a temporary solution.

I personally have my bias and fall in the pre-mending category. Because the stories told then are impossible feats now, like the story of Belbe for example from the Phyrexia arc can never happen. You don't get a moving piece like the artwork for Belbe's Portal in a post-mending world for non-walkers when the default answer is to make everyone a walker.

That the only way they could even come close to this same type of storytelling was when Dack Fayden couldn't walk away when the Immortal Sun was active which resulted in his untimely death.

If the rules of the mending become so screwed up that it effectively undoes it, I'm all for that. The mending was always a mistake, from the start, it ruined Magic story's most unique facet, the Planeswalkers. Instead of focusing on plane bound characters that could only go to other planes with help from magical machines and planeswalkers, with those planeswalkers being larger than life demi gods looming over the story and occasionally interacting in cool ways, we've gone to focusing on planeswalkers all the time but taking away most of what made them a cool concept. When most planeswalkers are no different than any other regular character then they just aren't any more interesting than any other regular character, because being able to hop planes was never the interesting thing about planeswalkers (especially when the planes are usually just worlds of hats). In fact, it makes them LESS interesting than other characters, because they have an innate bug out button they can push when ***** goes sideways, whereas plane bound characters are much more invested in and connected to their planes, and thus face higher stakes and more compelling motivations.

As a side note, the world of hats model combined with following neowalkers around everywhere has had the effect of making the multiverse seem much smaller. When the world of hats model started pre mending, each world was occupied by unique characters you were just meeting and would leave when you left the world. There could be some connections to other worlds via planeswalkers, like Karn on Mirrodin or Bolas being involved with Kamigawa, but again those connections involved god like figures who were for the most part in the background. The result was that the worlds felt truly cut off from each other, even when we had the Weatherlight and planar portals, because without those contrivances we weren't following characters from plane to plane (Weatherlight again is the major exception, but that was basically putting a crew on the Enterprise). With neowalkers, you just have superheros that you follow from story to story, so when they hop from Ixalan to Innistrad to Kaladesh you don't get the feel that they are going to different universes, but just different continents on the same world that have different kinds of magic. Typing it out right now, I realize that the only difference between a story where Ixalan, Kaladesh, Tarkir, Theros and Innistrad are different worlds vs one where they are distant continents on the same world is that the former actually has LESS potential, because if they were on the same world you'd be able to set up a story where all those places find each other and interact.

But yeah, rambling aside, the god like immortal shapeshifting (often mad) beings that were oldwalkers were always more interesting than the superhero neowalkers. We already had superhero type characters in the old story, they were just plane bound characters. Oldwalkers were something that tied Magic closer to fantasy and gave Magic something that other properties didn't have. Neowalkers just don't stand out from the crowd, which is why the Gatewatch was immediately, derisively, and correctly labeled the Jacetus League. And all this was supposedly done so that the story could focus on the characters and spin better stories than in the past. Well, after almost 15 years I'd say that's failed miserably. Nothing that's been put out since then has been as good as the Thran, Kamigawa, Urza's Saga, or even the pretty paint by numbers Weatherlight saga or the intentionally pulpy Ravnica block. There's been a few great web stories, but overall the arcs have been pretty meh. And that's just quality, the creativity has been way down as well. The most outside the box flat out awesome thing has been Bolas' eternals plot, which can be described as a dragon wizard enslaves an Egypt plane to farm warriors to turn into zombies with which to attack a city world via stargate. Unfortunately, it falls apart for being a letdown in practice and serving the ultimate and tired motivation of Bolas wants to nom nom nom sparks so he can become a god like being again, which is honestly why I was rooting for him to succeed because its almost like meta commentary that Bolas realized how much neowalkers sucked and wanted to kill them off as a concept so Oldwalkers could come back. Compare that to the insanity of Invasion, which featured as a subplot 9 insane god wizards strapping into mechs to nuke Robot Hell with a bomb powered by the souls of gods. That's so over the top 90's metal its a statue of Jack Black made out of 70's vans with murals painted on their sides. I'd rather see confusing cluster****s that shred the continuity like Scourge than confusing cluster****s that shred the continuity like Scars of Mirrodin, because at least the former is a weird mescaline trip while the latter is some banal nonsense.

Quote from Gruul Storyteller »

Quote from 5colors »

Quote from user_938036 »

Quote from Perkunas687 »

Hello all,

Can anyone confirm for me what happened to Dovin Baan, and whether Kaya can now planeswalk with non-walkers?

I saw it mentioned in the original synopsis, but it seemed to have limited info. I don't know if Dovin is dead-dead, or 'dead . . . . ? '.

Thanks in advance.

Dovin is dead dead. Killed on screen and his body was found by a reliable narrator.

Kaya can planeswalk with essentially anyone. It's just 'harder'. This is part of her ghost power. Which is bull because Jaya straight up tells her before she tries that even ghosts die in the blind eternities.

These are the two worst developments to come out of Forsaken. I don't know why these are glossed over and the status of ships is hotly discussed.

People have complained about those points, how Chandra and Nissa where handled,as DJK3654 said, hits on sociopolitical issues that have more real life meaning to people and thus its getting the bigger focus.

Also I'd add more people had been writing off Dovin as dead, just took the sequel to kill him.

Quote from Gruul Storyteller »

As for the Kaya plot point, can't speak for Weisman, but other writers seem tired with the post-mending limitations.

Negatives:
Venser tried inventing a plane-traveling ship like the Weatherlight to help rescue Mirrans, but he died before he could complete his work.
The Weatherlight is essentially landlocked on Dominaria and can't be used for its intended purpose.
The portals that connected Wildfire - Rabiah - Dominaria for travel and commerce no longer work.

Positives:
Nicol Bolas's Lazotep Gateway
Jiang and his dog Mowu
Kaya and Rat

Because you fall in one of two camps for planar travel:
1) Post-mending
2) Pre-mending

I think you just help realized why the Kaya thing is so bothersome to me. With Bolas bridge he need to have an undead army coated in magical rock to keep them safe so, Mowu seems to be a living statue and can survive by becoming inorganic and Wrenn bounding with tree folk most likely has them become a part of her body so her spark can protect them both. With Kaya she can take anyone with her with almost no limit (just a risk which we will most likely never see) and nothing about her ghost powers ever screamed she could take people with her on walks.

Which creates a fairly relevant plothole.

Question: If Kaya can just shepherd the dead across planes, why did Nicol Bolas need a planar gate to shepherd the dead from Amonkhet to Ravnica? Such as quietly sending small insurgent groups of elite lazotep forces into abandoned districts.

Answer: That wasn't originally a power Kaya had. Her abilities were assassinating ghosts and phasing through walls.

If her abilities have been turned into "she can turn into a ghost and do ghost *****" then I'll approve of it if we get to see her possess a villain and make them punch themselves in the nads. We're already at that level of camp, they might as well embrace it.

The biggest strike against RN is that it is extremely repetitive. It creates a loop that does not go arbitrary (without other chicanery in the mix anyway), which isn't ideal. If RN is working, you are just repeatedly casting RN for the rest of the game until you no longer need to, and usually cycling through the same 2-3 creatures.

I don't think that this is enough to keep it banned any longer. We already have Meren being repetitive graveyard city and Whisper can pull of an RN impression easily enough, when she doesn't obsolete it that is.

Im fine with Chandra being bi in the future, but I always hated Chandra/Nissa shipping. They had no chemistry,and the only thing their relationship offered was being a lesbian relationship. A lot of that comes from Nissa being boring as hell though, so there's no reason that Chandra can't be shipped with another woman down the road and have it actually work (and they really should keep her bi).

General Jarkeld is pretty bad.

Ishi-Ishi, Akki Crackshot basically does nothing except weakly hate on a tribe that isn't overly common.

He triggers off of a hell of a lot. In a normal black deck, he'll trigger off of your sacrificed, creatures you return from the yard with reanimation effects or phyrexian reclamation, triggers off discard, triggers off if gy hate like bojuka big, triggers off of self mill, etc. In more dedicated decks he'll also trigger off milling your opponents, off of dredge (both the self mill aspect and the creature being put into your hand), and off of delve and other exile from the yard as a cost effects. And that's all before getting into his own activated ability Mana outlet. He's a nice way to sap life totals in more casual metas that actually impacts the board and can get things going on his own if the game is stalled, and he shines as a fun commander. Great design, and his flexibility means he should see extensive play in everything but cEDH.

Carthage has a bit of a point, unlike many other commanders that can be run a bunch of different ways but provide a path to something degenerate, the way Anje works really pushes you down that path. The bonus for playing madness cards is that you get to untap her and thus dig deeper. If you only run the good madness cards, this doesn't come up often and rarely gets you multiple untaps. You want to be able to take advantage of the bonus, but that means you have to run a bunch of weaker cards that you don't really want to play. Then, even if your intention is to use her as a CA machine than let's you cast madness spells as cantrips, you soon realize that you only have so much Mana and the weakness of many of the madness cards means you'd rather not waste your Mana on them, as you get to the untap anyway. So now you realize the payoff is really to cycle through all those bad cards to the good ones, which means you need to run some things worth spending all that time digging for. It's still an extra step to get from there to Worldgorger combo, but it's not much. And in any case, she's not really supporting madness.

She'd have worked better if she triggered off casting madness spells to cut off the temptation to cycle through all your madness cards. What would have worked even better though would have been to have her give all cards with madness Madness 0 instead of her untap ability. That would have supported actually playing those madness cards (because turning them into free cantrips once a turn, and free period if you have other discard options) makes even the weak ones a lot better.

Quote from Anachronity »

Quote from Macabre »

I am a little sad that the beautiful boarder of some of these new cards didn't translate to any legendary creature. The cast-for-discount to exile thing would have been interesting for a commander.

I'm actually pretty baffled about us not getting any legends with adventure in a set made for Brawl.

I like Questing Beast though; vigilance+haste+evasion at that CMC is unique to it, and it just sort of passively wrecks superfriends and planeswalker commanders as a bonus.

There's an adventure commander in the bant Brawl deck, Chulane, Teller of Tales. He doesn't have an adventure or directly reference it, but he's sort of an adventure lord that can operate more broadly (which is a good thing). Like, he's generally good for rewarding you for casting creatures and being able to get them back to your hand to do it again, but he really makes adventure creatures a lot better by giving you a reliable way to get them back in hand to recast their adventures. He lets you cycle the same adventures over and over again if need be, and he gives the otherwise generally tiny creatures some more oomph by having them draw you a card and sometimes ramp you when you cast them. He's in the colors with the payoffs, and you really need to be able to recycle adventure creatures because there are too few to actually make a deck with them otherwise, even in brawl.

Quote from Buffsam89 »

Really, the cause of repetitiveness with tutors is the opponents, not the pilot. If you are routinely playing the same deck(s), of course the tutor targets are going to be close to the same ever time. The only time I ever see tutoring as a problem is if it’s only used to end the game. There are exceptions to this, but “fair” tutoring is grabbing a tool to help you survive, not to end the game. So, if you are experiencing a high number of games where players are tutoring to win, then that’s a player problem and not a tutor problem. No matter what action gets taken against tutors, you’re going to experience games with players that are just going to do whatever it takes to win.

No doubt tutors reduce variance, but sometimes there is minimal amount of available redundancy in an effect *cough*Doubling Season*cough*, and without the tutor, you’d never be able to play it in the format on a consistent basis. I’d rather tutors exist to ensure obscure strategies can exist.

Personally, I’d rather slam my head against the wall than attempt to persuade those 2 individuals to “see it your way”, but fight on, brother.

Well, one is impossible to deal with, but Carthage is polite. I'm always fine with having a conversation with someone I disagree with when they aren't a dick.

Quote from Carthage »

Quote from umtiger »

Quote from Impossible »

I mean... what colors are we and what is our definition of "tutor"? Enlightened Tutor, Idyllic Tutor, Open the Armory, Steelshaper's Gift, Recruiter of the Guard, Stonehewer Giant, Thalia's Lancers, Plea for Guidance
Mystical Tutor, Personal Tutor, Fabricate, Trinket/Trophy/Treasure mages, Muddle the Mixture, Tezzeret the Seeker, Whir of Invention, Merchant Scroll, Spellseeker, Long-Term Plans
Demonic Tutor, Vampiric Tutor, Grim Tutor, Imperial Seal, Diabolic Tutor, Buried Alive, Rune-scarred Demon, Entomb, Diabolic Intent, Dark Petition, Razaketh, the Foulblooded, Beseech the Queen, Increasing Ambition, Ad Nauseam, Mausoleum Secrets, Tainted Pact, Demonic Consultation, Insidious Dreams, Diabolic Revelation, Mastermind's Acquisition
Gamble, Godo, Bandit Warlord. Imperial Recruiter
Green Sun's Zenith, Worldly Tutor, Chord of Calling, Birthing Pod, Tooth and Nail, Eldritch Evolution, Protean Hulk, Woodland Bellower, Summoner's Pact, Primal Command, Natural Order, Fauna Shaman, Survival of the Fittest, Finale of Devastation, Defense of the Heart, Wild Pair
I got bored before I got to the multicolor ones like Eladamri's Call, but I think I proved the point. There are roughly a bajillion tutors in EDH.

Depending on the colors and how much disposable income one has access to (I see you, Imperial Seal), it's pretty easy to end up running maybe a dozen tutors. Even if one tries to avoid the "broken" tutors, there are still the "not-good-enough-for-cEDH-but-still-pretty-powerful" tutors like T&N and Diabolic Revelation that can end up warping more casual metas when every game ends with double-tutoring for a combo or something.

You listed many, many options. And some aren't even worth playing. I love Diabolic Revelation. Honestly, why would anyone bring that up as a problem?
And, if someone wants to play Wild Pair or Thalia's Lancers? What do you have against them?

I'm also sure that my question was facetious. I can count to ten and use gatherer as well + not many or any good decks will waste 10 slots on a pure tutors. Using gatherer or edhrec to stuff your deck full of tutors will not build a good deck.

Also, many of the tutors you list also support weaker decks. There's also a case to be made that tutoring allows weaker decks to compete with stronger decks. and once again, where you might see T&N as a problem card in casual, I see T&N as the epitome of being a Timmy in EDH. Doing powerful things is fun.

Competitive edh decks run TONS of tutors

Here's a sample of the tutors that are run in a teferi cedh deck, which is mono blue so they don't even go into other colors:
intuition
muddle the mixture
mystical tutor
whir of invention
spellseeker
trinket mage
fabricate
merchant scroll
reshape
transmute artifact
tezzeret the seeker
inventor's fair

This is not out of place at all for more competitive decks.

Yes, competitive decks, which is why the core of your argument that "It hurts variety in a casual format which makes decks and games go stale earlier than they should" is bull. cEDH doesn't count when discussing casual, just like Modern tournament diversity doesn't count when discussing 60 card casual. When playing at the highest levels, decks streamline and the number of viable decks inevitably decreases. And more importantly, its not something that defines the casual meta. lack of diversity and variance in cEDH does nothing to casual games. Even trying to argue about it as a problem is foolish. cEDH is a Spike meta. Its for people who want to challenge their skill with the best decks against the best decks. Yeah, competitive Teferi is going to have more tutors than a casual deck and play with far less variance than a casual deck, because that's the play experience cEDH players WANT. If you're arguing that its a problem, you're arguing that they shouldn't play the way they like. If you're arguing that its harming casual, you've got nothing to back it up.

Most of those cards from that list, for instance, aren't going to be issues outside of cEDH where they are searching up combos in a streamlined list as soon as possible. Is Trinket Mage typically a problem? How often does Transmute Artifact pop up outside of tuned lists? How about Muddle the Mixture, is that causing tons of problems when it pops up?

The biggest issue with this argument is that I can see where people are coming form when they say we should ban the fast universal tutors. Demonic, Vampirirc, and Imperial Seal are cheap, have little to no opportunity cost (2 life is negligible), and do the most to streamline even casual decks. But tutors exist on a continuum, two actually, from universal to highly specific, and from efficient to crap. Demonic is both highly efficient and universal, Urborg Panther is both extremely narrow and extremely crap. In between there is a wide variety of tutors, and you have to draw the line somewhere on where they become problematic. No reasonable person should argue that Rampant Growth or Muddle the Mixture are hurting the format, just as no reasonable person can argue that Demonic Tutor doesn't have an impact on variance. I disagree that the tutors should be banned, but I concede there are issues with Demonic, Vampiric, and Imperial Seal and can understand the argument for banning them despite disagreeing with it. Once you get to something like Diabolic Tutor I start doubting the relevance of your opinion, because Diabolic Tutor is not a good card and a sure sign that the pilot is working on a tight budget at best. When someone starts bringing up absolute garbage like Tainted Pact or Insidious Dreams, I have stifle laughter.