Sol Ring is the flagship of the format. It's completely reasonable to say that if you don't think Sol Ring should be allowed then maybe you should be playing a variant or another format entirely. I know it's not what people want to hear but it's kind of how it is.
People who continue to advocate for Sol Ring's ban are doing so despite pages upon pages of explanation of why exactly that would not be the correct decision for EDH. Banning Sol Ring is a change in the format's philosophy.
Nah, you're missing the correct option here. Wanting to ban Sol Ring isn't necessarily a divergence from the philosophy of the Rules Committee. I agree with the philosophy that the format is designed around. I want the same style of play that those in charge of the format want. I just know the people attempting to implement that philosophy are fallible human beings capable of making decisions that don't best encourage the type of games they desire.
I played 2 games yesterday. The first one had a turn 1 Sol Ring, and with a Yeva, a Sword of Feast and Famine, and a Kalonian Hydra I was dead before my 5th turn and the 3rd player was dead before their 6th. The second game, a player had Sol Ring in their opening hand and chose to hold back out of courtesy, but it still ultimately decided the game by pushing them up to Ugin at the right time.
Today I played a lot more. Not an early Sol Ring in sight, and every single game was a big swingy affair except for one game where Zedruu drew the whole library on turn 6 and it turned into 4 people sitting around trying to solve the puzzle of how it would actually win.
I have no problem with the big silly games with big silly board states philosophy. I can just promise, at least based on my experiences, you get those big silly boardstates a lot more consistently when you take away the "I'm 2 turns ahead of everyone else" lottery.
Yeah this was explored. I'm sure there's a way to pursue the concept with a Jeskai commander or even a 5 color one. I'm just not sure it's worth it over whatever else you can do in those colors.
I play in a group where people do use those things and we still have hours-long games full of plays like that. There's a very stark difference between playing a deck using fast mana and tutors to put a combo or controlling board state together faster and more reliably to win, compared to using those to play other things like Mirrorweave onto a Master of Cruelties.
I'm sure you do, and I've done that as well. I'm not suggesting the broken cards prohibit fun games, just that they occasionally disrupt them. Just throwing out made up numbers, I think playing with things like Sol Ring and Demonic Tutor around but with a group of well matched players looking to have fun, any random game probably has like a 90+% chance of being a fun, exciting game of magic with an unpredictable outcome. I just think that if you take those cards out, you have more like a 95+% chance of that, and the improvement seems worth it to me, especially since removing them from the format doesn't take away the awesome plays people want to do, it just makes them a little slower and less consistent, which opens up more opportunities for unique interactions.
Another realization I'm coming to is just how mana hungry this deck is. Signets and stuff that taps for one colored mana are fine in the early game, but once I start drawing 2-4 extra cards per turn one land drop per turn just isn't cutting it. There isn't a whole lot to be done about not having Explosive Vegetation in a Jeskai deck, but it's got me thinking about Burnished Hart. Are there any other playable cards that let me ramp for 2+ colored mana at a time?
Gilded Lotus is the playable card that ramps for 3 colored mana at a time.
And if your hand gets as fat as mine, Mind Over Matter might work for you as well since it optionally makes all your cards in hand into rituals (or Black Lotus if you have Gilded Lotus), and it's obviously a lot more powerful and versatile than that, but it is incredibly resource hungry (in both casting cost and activation) and might not perform for you like it does for me since my Zedruu deck is practically dedicated to drawing every card in the deck and can really pull the trigger when MOM lands. It really powers things out, but it is not the cutting edge of efficiency.
Gilded Lotus though, that is the card you're describing.
A handful of tutors lets you run more, tighter packages of cards that can actually increase gameplay variety.
I don't think this is true. If we simplify a game of magic down to a flow chart of actions, the possibilities all turn out the same when you have the optimal card but will spread out quickly when you don't have the optimal card and are left to play out your preference from what you have available. If you have a tutor, you always have the optimal card. Just because you have other options in your deck, it doesn't add to variety if you still always play a board wipe exactly when you need it. Like, you just described the benefit of tutors as having more redundancy in your deck, it's clearly the opposite of increasing variety. And a lot of the most interesting games I've played are the ones where I don't have the right answer in hand and I had to struggle like a champ to stay alive long enough to do something about the problem. Not that I'm advocating banning all the tutors or anything like that, the only ones I feel are a problem are the ones that let you play a consistent game plan by turn 3, but I definitely don't think people having tutors in their deck leads to less consistent experiences.
I know I feel pretty happy when I have one in my opening hand.
So you like winning, congratulations.
If you're the kind of person who is convinced these are intolerable, and chooses not to play them, you'll probably get pretty annoyed when someone else chooses to.
You've got it backwards. I'm convinced they are a detriment to the format, and I choose not to play them, so I get excited when someone else also chooses not to. I've played plenty of bad games of magic, and it's not as though I regret them. I'd far rather play bad magic than no magic at all. But when I play with people who are also playing decks without the most unbalanced cards available, there's a definite increase in the possibility of a good game of magic, and I'm overjoyed by that. I've played with people where nobody was using fast mana or cheap tutors and the only time a game wasn't a nice long adventure was when Zedruu tripped backwards into some stupid jank like Mirrorweave at someone's Master of Cruelties.
This is also why Mirrorweave will not do what most people want it to do with Noyan. You'll just temporarily turn everything into land, not 0/0's.
But that's a fine effect anyway. It makes Mirrorweave potentially into a fog and potentially into "all your land creatures are unblockable". These are fine additions onto an already very versatile card. And if you attack wide with like 5 animated lands with Mirrorweave in hand, it's a combat nightmare for the opponent. Let's imagine they have a Woolly Thoctar for whatever reason. If they decide to take the 15, Mirrorweave suddenly makes it 40, and if they try to block, they lose every single trade. It's definitely a powerful tool for the deck.
Awaken Contested War Zone, use Mirrorweave to turn all creatures into a non-animated Contested War Zones and then punch the player to take control of all of their creatures.
I love the way you think. The same idea can technically turn all creatures into Dark Depths, which (in new legend rule) only one Avatar token per player will be standing, you can then bounce them. A little tedious but it would entertain the table, probably more for 1v1 than a multiplayer.
EDIT: Hm, come to think of it, you might end up being the only person without an Avatar token, damn...
Don't think too hard about what happens here, since once Dark Depths is a creature, it's a legendary creature, and that makes it a non-target for Mirrorweave. If you'd like to sacrifice all your creatures for a Marit Lage, you'll have to use Infinite Reflection.
If this is just another one of those "Ban Sol Ring and Mana Crypt and Demonic Tutor" type of positions, go away. Playing good cards is fun.
Playing good cards is fun! Mirrorweave, that's a good card! Or Repercussion is a good card. Genesis Wave is an awesome card, or maybe Choice of Damnations is super cool. These things are good cards. Sol Ring and Mana Crypt and Demonic Tutor? Those aren't good cards, those are mistakes, the design failures of the past from before they understood the consequences of printing them.
I agree that the idea of making a "balanced" ban list based entirely on power level is a backwards idea for this format, but your post just seemed to me the perfect illustration of the failure of the banlist. The whole philosophy is "fun = good, terribly unfun = banworthy", and yet even the people defending the banlist cannot detach themselves from concept that powerful is good.
If fun is good, than overly powerful cards are bad. There should be no joy in winning a game on the back of Sol Ring, only shame; we know it's broken, it's like playing sports with steroids. And usually, people recognize the unfun of their overpowered decks and move on, and if they don't, social pressures can apply that shame. Someone playing Hermit Druid combo? They'll get bored, and if they don't get bored people will convince them to stop, and if they can't be convinced, they won't get played with because the format isn't for them. I've seen this play out well on many occasions, and it often as easy as saying "your tooth and nail combo is boring and it's the only way you win anymore" and then they agree and move on to new things. But for whatever reason, this principle doesn't apply to Sol Ring and Mana Crypt and Demonic tutor. I assume it's because those cards aren't themselves the win condition, but something doesn't have to end the game to be unfun. When it's turn 2 and I'm using a couple lands for Howling Mine, and one of my opponents is already planning out their win condition (either because with Sol Ring or Mana Crypt they're already ramping to the top of their curve, or because with Demonic Tutor or Vampiric Tutor they're picking the perfect card out of their deck), that's incredibly deflating and leads to games that all play out the same way even if the actual kill condition is something different.
But people will not be convinced of the problem because apparently "playing good cards is fun." Sigh.
Hi, tstorm! I'm currently testing this deck and was wondering, has anything from Battle for Zendikar caught your eye? I haven't noticed anything in particular that would slot in effectively, and would love to hear your thoughts on how the set contributes, or doesn't contribute, to the deck.
It very much doesn't contribute so far as I can tell. Brutal Expulsion is an interesting card in the right colors, but it's definitely not for this deck. Big mana colorless things are nearly useless since bulk mana isn't this decks game and free spells happen when they have a color. Rally is obviously pretty useless as well since it would take a whole pile of allies to really accomplish anything (not to mention there's only really one I find interesting). Awaken is kind of lame when you put that much mana into something to essentially destroy one of your lands when the next board wipe hits; it could be interesting if it was cheap and repeatable since there are some cute interactions, but the only one with an effect I care about is an extra turn, and I would never use the awaken cost anyway.
So the only card I'd even consider testing from BFZ is Noyan Dar, Roil Shaper. He triggers off of instant and sorcery casts, so Eye of the Storm/ Knowledge Pool/ Possibility Storm can go from zero to lethal pretty darn fast, he animates lands which can do the cute combo with Jeskai Ascendancy where each noncreature spell nets mana, and animated lands can make Mirrorweave into fogs. And he'd sort of be like the Living Plane that I can't play because I'm not green enough. At any rate, this deck is to the point where if everything else is working, the 99th card can be any win condition I feel like, so I'll probably take him for a test ride or two just because I can but not bother to adjust the thread for it.
I second the opinion of MRHblue. I've also done it, and the deck you're describing gets really boring really quickly. It's a deck concept that is disproportionately powerful against goofy casual decks and really bad against more competent opponents, so you become either the game ruining jerk or the joke of the table every single game. There is no middle ground.
I don't think the problem with PS is with the person choosing to run it. It's the opposing player that decides to all is dust the board or drop Iona. So billy bob plays PS for cool interactions and bobby joel casts all is dust ruining the game. At least with stuff like lattice and enchanted evening.... it's pretty obvious why you would use it. It's a minor difference, but a crucial one in my opinion. Lattice is pretty much "I'm going to wreck the board and blow up the game." Where as PS is more like "I can create cool interactions, but someone else can wreck the board and blow up the game." I've just never seen anyone run lattice and not try to use sydri or vandal blast to wipe the board. Same with enchanted evening. I have seen players try to legitimately use PS only to have someone else drop Iona.
Is it a perfect comparison? No. I just don't see people flipping tables over lattice. I did over PS.
I don't buy this at all. I've wanted to run Lattice and Enchanted Evening on many occasions for variable purposes. I've seen other people run the cards many times, and none of them ever planned to destroy everything (except for Karn, Silver Golem spot removing lands for one mana). If you haven't seen someone try to alpha strike with Megatog and Atogatog with Mycosynth Lattice in play, I really don't know what format you're playing.
Meh. I've pumped 200+ mana (non-infinite) into a Chameleon Colossus before. Come talk to me about big creatures when you get another dozen orders of magnitude.
I recently broke my previous record and made someone draw 2^40 cards non-infinitely. The sad part was that the victim was the only person in the room that didn't understand that he was dead. It's still a good number though, cause it turns out to be just over 1 trillion.
I mentioned the Golgari reanimation and Sygg aggro decks because they are the ones that have synergistic creatures rather than just good stuff. I'm never going to add an eldrazi to the Golgari deck, I get nervous enough as it is running Loaming Shaman.
Ahhh, that makes a lot more sense then the way I interpreted your post the first time. My bad.
Nah, you're missing the correct option here. Wanting to ban Sol Ring isn't necessarily a divergence from the philosophy of the Rules Committee. I agree with the philosophy that the format is designed around. I want the same style of play that those in charge of the format want. I just know the people attempting to implement that philosophy are fallible human beings capable of making decisions that don't best encourage the type of games they desire.
I played 2 games yesterday. The first one had a turn 1 Sol Ring, and with a Yeva, a Sword of Feast and Famine, and a Kalonian Hydra I was dead before my 5th turn and the 3rd player was dead before their 6th. The second game, a player had Sol Ring in their opening hand and chose to hold back out of courtesy, but it still ultimately decided the game by pushing them up to Ugin at the right time.
Today I played a lot more. Not an early Sol Ring in sight, and every single game was a big swingy affair except for one game where Zedruu drew the whole library on turn 6 and it turned into 4 people sitting around trying to solve the puzzle of how it would actually win.
I have no problem with the big silly games with big silly board states philosophy. I can just promise, at least based on my experiences, you get those big silly boardstates a lot more consistently when you take away the "I'm 2 turns ahead of everyone else" lottery.
Zedruu is considering Noyan Dar. The deck already has Jeskai Ascendancy, Eye of the Storm, Knowledge Pool, Possibility Storm, and Mirrorweave that can put this guy in the red zone fast. It even used to run Vanish Into Memory if I felt like sticking that back in.
I'm sure you do, and I've done that as well. I'm not suggesting the broken cards prohibit fun games, just that they occasionally disrupt them. Just throwing out made up numbers, I think playing with things like Sol Ring and Demonic Tutor around but with a group of well matched players looking to have fun, any random game probably has like a 90+% chance of being a fun, exciting game of magic with an unpredictable outcome. I just think that if you take those cards out, you have more like a 95+% chance of that, and the improvement seems worth it to me, especially since removing them from the format doesn't take away the awesome plays people want to do, it just makes them a little slower and less consistent, which opens up more opportunities for unique interactions.
Gilded Lotus is the playable card that ramps for 3 colored mana at a time.
And if your hand gets as fat as mine, Mind Over Matter might work for you as well since it optionally makes all your cards in hand into rituals (or Black Lotus if you have Gilded Lotus), and it's obviously a lot more powerful and versatile than that, but it is incredibly resource hungry (in both casting cost and activation) and might not perform for you like it does for me since my Zedruu deck is practically dedicated to drawing every card in the deck and can really pull the trigger when MOM lands. It really powers things out, but it is not the cutting edge of efficiency.
Gilded Lotus though, that is the card you're describing.
Just out of curiosity, have you tried playing in a meta without Sol Ring? I really do find games to be much happier without it.
I don't think this is true. If we simplify a game of magic down to a flow chart of actions, the possibilities all turn out the same when you have the optimal card but will spread out quickly when you don't have the optimal card and are left to play out your preference from what you have available. If you have a tutor, you always have the optimal card. Just because you have other options in your deck, it doesn't add to variety if you still always play a board wipe exactly when you need it. Like, you just described the benefit of tutors as having more redundancy in your deck, it's clearly the opposite of increasing variety. And a lot of the most interesting games I've played are the ones where I don't have the right answer in hand and I had to struggle like a champ to stay alive long enough to do something about the problem. Not that I'm advocating banning all the tutors or anything like that, the only ones I feel are a problem are the ones that let you play a consistent game plan by turn 3, but I definitely don't think people having tutors in their deck leads to less consistent experiences.
So you like winning, congratulations.
You've got it backwards. I'm convinced they are a detriment to the format, and I choose not to play them, so I get excited when someone else also chooses not to. I've played plenty of bad games of magic, and it's not as though I regret them. I'd far rather play bad magic than no magic at all. But when I play with people who are also playing decks without the most unbalanced cards available, there's a definite increase in the possibility of a good game of magic, and I'm overjoyed by that. I've played with people where nobody was using fast mana or cheap tutors and the only time a game wasn't a nice long adventure was when Zedruu tripped backwards into some stupid jank like Mirrorweave at someone's Master of Cruelties.
Sol Ring! Ban it! Roar!
But that's a fine effect anyway. It makes Mirrorweave potentially into a fog and potentially into "all your land creatures are unblockable". These are fine additions onto an already very versatile card. And if you attack wide with like 5 animated lands with Mirrorweave in hand, it's a combat nightmare for the opponent. Let's imagine they have a Woolly Thoctar for whatever reason. If they decide to take the 15, Mirrorweave suddenly makes it 40, and if they try to block, they lose every single trade. It's definitely a powerful tool for the deck.
Don't think too hard about what happens here, since once Dark Depths is a creature, it's a legendary creature, and that makes it a non-target for Mirrorweave. If you'd like to sacrifice all your creatures for a Marit Lage, you'll have to use Infinite Reflection.
Playing good cards is fun! Mirrorweave, that's a good card! Or Repercussion is a good card. Genesis Wave is an awesome card, or maybe Choice of Damnations is super cool. These things are good cards. Sol Ring and Mana Crypt and Demonic Tutor? Those aren't good cards, those are mistakes, the design failures of the past from before they understood the consequences of printing them.
I agree that the idea of making a "balanced" ban list based entirely on power level is a backwards idea for this format, but your post just seemed to me the perfect illustration of the failure of the banlist. The whole philosophy is "fun = good, terribly unfun = banworthy", and yet even the people defending the banlist cannot detach themselves from concept that powerful is good.
If fun is good, than overly powerful cards are bad. There should be no joy in winning a game on the back of Sol Ring, only shame; we know it's broken, it's like playing sports with steroids. And usually, people recognize the unfun of their overpowered decks and move on, and if they don't, social pressures can apply that shame. Someone playing Hermit Druid combo? They'll get bored, and if they don't get bored people will convince them to stop, and if they can't be convinced, they won't get played with because the format isn't for them. I've seen this play out well on many occasions, and it often as easy as saying "your tooth and nail combo is boring and it's the only way you win anymore" and then they agree and move on to new things. But for whatever reason, this principle doesn't apply to Sol Ring and Mana Crypt and Demonic tutor. I assume it's because those cards aren't themselves the win condition, but something doesn't have to end the game to be unfun. When it's turn 2 and I'm using a couple lands for Howling Mine, and one of my opponents is already planning out their win condition (either because with Sol Ring or Mana Crypt they're already ramping to the top of their curve, or because with Demonic Tutor or Vampiric Tutor they're picking the perfect card out of their deck), that's incredibly deflating and leads to games that all play out the same way even if the actual kill condition is something different.
But people will not be convinced of the problem because apparently "playing good cards is fun." Sigh.
It very much doesn't contribute so far as I can tell. Brutal Expulsion is an interesting card in the right colors, but it's definitely not for this deck. Big mana colorless things are nearly useless since bulk mana isn't this decks game and free spells happen when they have a color. Rally is obviously pretty useless as well since it would take a whole pile of allies to really accomplish anything (not to mention there's only really one I find interesting). Awaken is kind of lame when you put that much mana into something to essentially destroy one of your lands when the next board wipe hits; it could be interesting if it was cheap and repeatable since there are some cute interactions, but the only one with an effect I care about is an extra turn, and I would never use the awaken cost anyway.
So the only card I'd even consider testing from BFZ is Noyan Dar, Roil Shaper. He triggers off of instant and sorcery casts, so Eye of the Storm/ Knowledge Pool/ Possibility Storm can go from zero to lethal pretty darn fast, he animates lands which can do the cute combo with Jeskai Ascendancy where each noncreature spell nets mana, and animated lands can make Mirrorweave into fogs. And he'd sort of be like the Living Plane that I can't play because I'm not green enough. At any rate, this deck is to the point where if everything else is working, the 99th card can be any win condition I feel like, so I'll probably take him for a test ride or two just because I can but not bother to adjust the thread for it.
I don't buy this at all. I've wanted to run Lattice and Enchanted Evening on many occasions for variable purposes. I've seen other people run the cards many times, and none of them ever planned to destroy everything (except for Karn, Silver Golem spot removing lands for one mana). If you haven't seen someone try to alpha strike with Megatog and Atogatog with Mycosynth Lattice in play, I really don't know what format you're playing.
I recently broke my previous record and made someone draw 2^40 cards non-infinitely. The sad part was that the victim was the only person in the room that didn't understand that he was dead. It's still a good number though, cause it turns out to be just over 1 trillion.
Ahhh, that makes a lot more sense then the way I interpreted your post the first time. My bad.