Was anyone really saying legends is a bad set? It's iconic as hell and has tons of powerful cards, maybe only second to alpha (although urza's saga puts up a good fight).
Not sure I'm convinced the legends rule is good (I don't even really see an argument that it is). Flavor-wise, it is (or at least used to be) a big win. These days...idk man. Having both versions of jhoira is fine, but having 2 of the same version isn't? Maybe it's supposed to be a multiple timelines thing, but then why can you and your opponent have one, but one poofs as soon as one switches sides? It feels like a top-down rule that's proven to be bad for gameplay, and at this point wotc is just trying to pay lip service to the flavor motivations while essentially destroying everything mechanically important about it.
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- DirkGently
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Member for 12 years, 10 months, and 3 days
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If a card like demonic consultation got added to the banlist, which has very little application in regular EDH but is nasty in cEDH, I wouldn't mind that much - depending on the specific card. But stripping everything off the banlist? No. Adding cards that are fun in normal commander, like Thrasios? No.
I disagree very strongly with this logic. Tazri was, for a time, among the strongest - if not the strongest - cEDH deck because she provided a reliable wincon for food chain combo with as few cards as possible. Does that mean Tazri was broken? Should we take away tribal ally decks from commander players for playing a "broken" commander?
Thrasios's ability is really not that strong in a vacuum. 4 mana is a lot for that effect. He's an outlet for infinite mana that lets you play a lot of colors, and sometimes he generates incremental advantage, but to my understanding the most important part of him for cEDH purposes is that he provides an outlet for infinite mana and a lot of colors. In normal commander, that's not really a problem, and besides, infinite mana also wins with completely innocuous cards that no one would call broken.
Nothing is broken in a vacuum. It depends on the cards around it. Thrasios in a cEDH deck with infinite mana combos might be broken, but in a normal deck where he's just a decent draw engine, he's not even close.
And we're all just magic players, and we're all just people, and we're all just vertebrates, and we're all just animals, and we're all just carbon-based objects. We've got plenty of things in common, yes, but we've also got some pretty important differences that have a pretty profound impact on how we'd like to shape the format.
I don't have any problem with people playing cEDH in their own isolated bubble - that doesn't bother me at all. But that's not how the world works. cEDH players talk online with other commander players, they play at their LGSs. cEDH players want their format to grow, the same as any player, but the spaces they take up are often the same ones other commander players use. When a new commander player goes online to see how to improve their deck, the information they get - through EDHrec, through forums, through posted decklists - will often include cEDH.
Let's say a new player, excited about the Otrimi deck they picked up and looking to improve it after losing at their LGS, goes online for advice. And they happen to see a Cazur + Ukkima cEDH decklist that looks very strong. They might not have the experience to understand the difference between commander and cEDH. They might even get excited at the strategy of the deck, and want to show it off to their friends. Most other games and formats don't have this self-regulating aspect that commander does. Someone fresh off hearthstone - where sure, there are better and worse decks, and there are dumb meme decks, but everything has to withstand the power of the standard meta, there is no true "casual" - may not understand where the line is between improving a deck and what's pushing it too far.
So when they get this cEDH information, they consume it uncritically, and push their deck to the limit. And then they show up to their LGS and play this deck. And some people, the veterans, might say "hey, that's a bit too cEDH, can you play something else?" But the other newer players, in the same boat as the Cazur player without a good grasp of the separation between cEDH and commander, might think "wow, that deck was really strong, I should look up ways to make my deck stronger to compete". It doesn't always happen that way, of course. But it rarely goes back the other direction, from more competitive to less competitive. cEDH is entropy, slowly decaying what it touches.
This is why I dislike cEDH more than standard or modern or legacy or vintage or any other format. Because those other formats stay in their own lane. If someone wants to play standard, then I might not join them, but they're not affecting the culture around my format. cEDH - online and in person - has done permanent harm by insinuating their format with commander, and I suspect a lot of that is intentional to draw more players in. And while there are no doubt plenty of noble cEDH players who try avoid blurring the line between cEDH and commander, there are many more who are happy to spread their format around at the expense of commander. I see the entire format of cEDH as an existential threat to the future of commander and I wish it could be scrubbed off the face of the earth.
And on the flip side, I've played a very fun casual Thrasios deck and I'd be profoundly annoyed if he was banned just to suit the cEDH crowd. Because in an LGS environment, people are going to follow the letter of the law, so if he's banned, he's banned.
Basically what you're saying is "instead of trying to have a banlist for the casual format which is the vast majority of the target of commander, let's completely disregard that and instead have a banlist whose only goal is to appeal to the small percentage of cEDH players."
I'll say what I always say in these circumstances - if cEDH dislikes the banlist so much, then they should just make their own.
When you choose the least important part of my argument and only reply to that bit while ignoring the much more important parts, do you actually feel like you're making a good counter? Genuinely curious.
Your statement implied that the mulligan rule never changed, and only changed once into the London mulligan. Maybe that's not what you meant, but that's how someone who's unfamiliar with the history of the mulligan rule would have read what you wrote. That's the actual problem. 18 years vs 20 years is only relevant because you also weren't factually correct either - but the much more important element is what you incorrectly implied, not what it literally meant in the strictest possible reading.
But all of that is just a backdrop to explain why the changes to the mulligan rule can't be compared to changing deck construction rules - especially for a format like commander where people get very attached to their decks. Changing the deck size would be incredibly disruptive to every player. Changing mulligan rules has very little impact and isn't remotely comparable.
Phelddagrif is tricky to make a good primer for because, at the end of the day, it's very depending on how your opponents respond to it. I've had tables that ignored me the whole time and I won easily. I've had tables that gunned for me way harder than seemed reasonable. And everything in between. But there's no telling what's going to set people off. Lower power level tables might see an ABU dual and go for the throat, while others might expect that lack of budget.
And of course, it's also dependent on you as a player, and whether people perceive you as a threat and in what way. I've tried as hard as I can to keep the threat level as low as possible while being as functional as possible, but someone else's experience might be different.
Anyway, one difficulty with building a deck like Phelddagrif is that there's sort of a narrow ledge you have to walk between being strong enough to control the game but weak enough to avoid looking too threatening. And if you push it too far and start drawing hate, it's easy to keep pushing the deck into heavier and heavier control to fix the problem - "if I'd just had another board wipe, I would have survived" mentality.
And that's what it LOOKS like has happened to your list, from my experience. You've got WAY too many wipes. If you're wiping frequently, you can expect your opponents to exercise some pattern recognition and start targeting you to either force the wipe ASAP, or kill you before you draw it. I count 19 wipes, depending on definition. I think running more than 9 is a mistake that will get you targeted.
The second problem is that you've got a LOT of what I call neutralization removal - usually enchantment-type removal designed to remove someone's commander permanently or at least semi-permanently. I would run 1, or 2 on the outside. Neutralization is a last resort solution for commanders that are too dangerous to let live, or for the 1v1 game. If you're firing them off all the time, you can bet that's going to motivate people to kill you so they can get their commanders back. The situation you want to be employing them in is when everyone agrees that X commander is way too scary and wants to defend YOU to keep that commander neutralized (or when it's 1v1). With this many of them, you're bound to end up firing them off on less threatening targets and just pissing people off. Cut it down to 1-2.
I think lands like maze of ith and island of wak-wak (are you seriously running this?) are more symptoms of pushing your threat level too far. You shouldn't need them. You shouldn't be attacked in the first place - people shouldn't want to hurt you that much, and you've got block + bounce to dissuade them - and you should have more targeted instant-speed removal to deal with someone who's really going after you. On-board answers like ith makes people think "uh oh he's building a wall of protection I might not be able to assail if I don't start targeting him ASAP" You want to look vulnerable so that people don't worry about their ability to deal with you later.
Finally, and this is more a matter of personal preference, I don't think we get enough value off single-shot draw spells like ponder, or borrowing 10,000 arrows. I'd pick out your favourite repeatable CA engines and pack in some tutors for them. Playing a bunch of small scry/draw spells makes it look like you're sculpting yourself into something nasty. I'm less confident about this, because I think you COULD make a good Phelddagrif list with single-shot draw, but I don't think it's as reliable as hitting something repeatable and just relying on that. Don't forget [[bonder's enclave]]!
As far as replacements - more targeted instant-speed removal, more counterspells, more tutors for your favourite repeatable draw engines, and probably more land - ZNR is going to make a big splash here with the DFC lands, so don't forget about those.
I find it quite easy, but I do have big ol' hands.
This is one of the funniest things you've said.
The mulligan rule has changed TWICE since I started playing - first to the vancouver mulligan and then to the london mulligan. And there was an earlier change to the mulligan rule as well, though that was a few years before I started playing. Commander also changed their mulligan rule from being different (partial paris) to conforming to other formats (iirc this was when the vancouver mulligan was introduced). The mulligan rule has changed quite a lot, not just once (and the longest gap was 18 years so don't pretend you're right on a technicality).
You know why the mulligan rules have changed while the deck construction rules have been consistent since the early days of magic?
Because changing the mulligan rule doesn't force EVERY PLAYER to drastically modify EVERY DECK - not to mention rendering every precon unplayable out of the box, all deck boxes to be the wrong size, etc etc etc...it would be a massive upheaval that would absolutely lose a ton of players and piss of nearly everyone.
But y'know, your hands hurt.
I've been playing the same sol ring and command tower in almost every commander deck (or multicolor deck, for the tower) I've played since 2013 (2011 for the tower). Without removing them from the sleeve and holding them up to the light, they look mint fresh. Even in the light, if I don't hold them at exactly the right angle, they look mint fresh. When you get them at that exact right angle, there's a few tiny scratches. And these are cards I've played over and over and over, in decks packed with fetches and tutors. Week in, week out, for years and years.
Cards are meant to be played. I'm sure my collection has lost a little value from me not double sleeving (luckily my most valuable cards - tabernacle, timetwister, workshop, etc all are too niche to be regularly played. My duals see plenty of use, but they were never in mint condition so a few tiny scratches makes little difference).
But you know what I've gotten in return for that tiny degradation of value (besides saving hundreds of dollars on perfect fits)? A decade of playing a game I love without hating shuffling. I call that an easy win.
Plus it means I don’t make silly threads hoping for an unlikely fix to a problem I created myself - just saying.
What does that have to do with the topic of this thread exactly?
There are more 5G towers than last year, and we didn't have any coronavirus last year ... 5G towers cause coronavirus!
Correlation is not causation.
I don't know how popular commander would be without direct wotc support, and neither do you. Until you can produce some sort of evidence to back up your point - perhaps a graph showing the number of commander players jumping up with commander product releases? - you've got nothing but an opinion.
But really, this argument is stupid and I'm not sure what the point is. The original topic of the thread is that the RC is out of touch - presumably with the implication that their handling of the banlist is detrimental to the format. I don't know about that - there are certainly some cards I'd like banned, and a couple I'd like unbanned (c'mon, gifts). There's room for improvement, sure, but you can't please everyone.
But even if Sheldon was divine will made manifest, and he could craft a perfect banlist and ruleset that pleased every commander player present and future, it'd still be stupid to compare the RC to wotc. Wotc is responsible for making every card in the format. Every fun deck you love was built with 100% wotc produced cards. How the hell is managing a banlist going to compete with that? The RC is responsible for the early growth of commander by getting the word out, but at this point their impact - for good or ill - is pretty minor, unless they went absolutely nuts and started banning hundreds of cards, or drastically changed the rules. Whatever reach they could possibly have is dwarfed by the large corporation of WotC, and there's just nothing sexy about a banlist compared to making whole new cards to get people hyped up - especially in a format where the banlist isn't particularly important.
We could could argue about whether early growth or sustained popularity is harder to cultivate, but really it's all moot because the original topic was "does the RCs approach hurt the format", and that conversation has nothing to do with that topic - and honestly I'm not sure what the point of that conversation would even be. I do think the RC's approach probably encourages more casual players to join, and pushes away more competitive ones - and personally I am 100% on board for that, even if I might quibble over the details.
1) as I said, popularity is everything and tiny leaders never got that popular, at least where I was playing.
2) it didn't do anything novel that commander didn't already do - the core commander concept scratched an itch people didn't know they had, TL just tried to ape that same success (much the same as brawl did, although at least brawl brought some better ideas to the table imo).
Can you please show me what your evidence for this timetable is?
I do find it kind of silly that, whatever growth the format experienced between 2013 and now was a "boom"...whereas growing from basically nothing to nationwide popularity over the course of a couple years wasn't a "boom" for some reason.
Oh, I don't think the RC has done anything super important for the format in the past 10 years tbh. I think having no banlist at all, the format still would have grown just fine. I also think it would have grown just fine without wotc support. I put the vast majority of the credit to the core idea by Adam Staley, and the initial spark that got it going from Sheldon and the other early RC members.
Unlike TL, commander didn't have competition. Nobody said "why would I play commander when I could just play X"...which is exactly what people say when something like TL comes along, where X = commander. And since commander was the first to market, it's got the popularity and momentum on its side against any newcomers like TL or OB or brawl of whatever other thing people come up with. Until someone has a truly novel great idea, like commander was to begin with, I doubt it'll be unseated as the king of casual - no matter what wotc or the RC do to help or hinder it.
New sets inject new material for commander, just the same as they did in 2009. If wotc closed their doors, maybe the format would stagnate - if that's even a thing commander can do - but with or without official commander products the format is consistently fresh, primarily because it's a casual format that doesn't revolve around solving a metagame, which keeps the pool of decks all-but-limitless. Sure, commander needs wotc - without wotc mtg wouldn't exist after all - but their ongoing support isn't crucial imo.
I'm not sure what that last sentence is in reference to.
In 2009 commander was, to my knowledge, already a major up-and-coming popular new format that took over my playgroup by storm. In mid 2009 none of us had heard of it. By late 2009, we were all playing it. By 2010, we were hardly playing anything else. All of this was before wotc was directly involved. I don't have a graph of "number of commander players over time" but, from my experience, the format did a very good job of promoting itself without any interaction from wotc. Without a parallel universe in which wotc never prints commander products, there's no way to determine how important their role has been. But it's worth remembering that wotc started printing cards for commander because it was already popular, and becoming more popular, and they wanted to promote it and make more money off it. Who knows what would have happened without them, but I think it's very likely that commander would have continued to become more popular without wotcs direct support, because that's what it was already doing.
At the end of the day, unless you're about to reveal that you're actually part of wotcs market research team, neither of us have evidence beyond our personal experiences about (1) how the popularity of commander has increased over time (although maybe this info is available somewhere?), and (2) what is responsible for that popularity (which is essentially unknowable and also not even a reasonable question because, without both parties, commander wouldn't even exist).
Personally, I suspect that the #1 thing that contributed to commander's success is simply that the basic rules are super fun. When we all first started playing the format, it wasn't because we cared about the banlist, and no commander product has really made me think "oh boy, if I wasn't sold on commander already, THIS is the thing that would get me excited!" It was because the core concept, putting a face on a deck and building around a card you thought was cool, was such a neat idea, and a departure from the normal "build 60 card jank until you're good enough to play standard" track that was the dominant way to play before commander existed. The RC and WotC have both presumably contributed to that popularity - and FWIW I don't think the ongoing management of the banlist is terribly important, as I've said - but I think that initial spark of an idea was EVERYTHING. You can say "without wotc, commander would only have half as many players" or whatever, and maybe you'd be right, but without that initial idea NOBODY would be playing commander. And probably a lot fewer people would be playing magic at all.
EDIT: while it's not really relevant, for my money:
Rotates - I'd argue as a positive since it prevents the same cards from dominating in perpetuity and keeps the metagame from becoming stale
Requires constant investment - so does commander, at least the way I play
Covers a fraction of a player's collection - sure, it's nice to have someplace to use older cards, but that doesn't preclude it from existing alongside commander.
Suffers from a significant lack of diversity and customization - There's still a lot of options, we've got 17 commander choices just in ZNR.
2) Double sleeving is a waste of time and money and makes the experience of playing the game worse YEAH I SAID IT. I'll single-sleeve my timetwister until the day I die.
3) Fetching can be annoying but (1) nobody is making you play fetchlands and (2) you can just say "I'm getting X, then playing this card" and pass turn while you search/shuffle and (3) it's not like searching through 85 cards is that much better than 100. Unless you're complaining about the shuffling, in which case stop double sleeving your cards, duh. All my cards look great and I've been single-sleeving them since 2009.
In order to kill the format and/or make everyone mad, they'd have to make a bunch of really haphazard bans, which isn't likely to happen based on past performance. Until that time, they'll have a few detractors and a few supporters when they ban contentious cards like Iona or PE, and most of the format won't really care.
This isn't standard where a mismanaged banlist is going to destroy the format. Commander is all but unkillable.
And is wotc responsible for the ruleset of commander, the thing that has apparently made it so popular?
(btw I actually like brawl quite a bit, but popularity is sort of everything. I'm not going to play a format if I can't find games)
You're free to like partner with more, but personally I think it's more fun to allow for more discovery and personalization. Some things partner is better with, some things partner with is better with. Don't know why partner with would be "surely better". If you like it more, cool. Personally there are some partner withs that I like and some that I don't. But I don't mind any of the regular partners, even if I'm not rushing out to build all of them.
What's so terrible about baron? I mean he doesn't interest me personally, but I'm usually only interested in a couple legends per commander set release. I'm not losing sleeping of it.
"A lot of them will be completely irrelevant and will be ignored, while a couple of them will be liked because they are broken."...sounds exactly like every other set release? Again, I don't see what would actually make you happy. You've set yourself up to be angry no matter what the result is. And I wouldn't call any existing partners broken whatsoever, like honestly not even close to broken. So I'm dubious that any new ones will prove to be problematic, though time will tell.
So again, EDHrec, 2 years, yadda yadda. People are still playing the original partners, even the really boring ones. But also I have absolutely no clue where this hipster rant is coming from. You do realize it's 2020 and no one has complained about hipster subculture for years, right? I've never heard of someone claiming that anyone ever built a deck out of "hipsterism", but you sure seem to want to crap on people who genuinely enjoy the mechanic for some reason. If you don't like it, that's fine, you don't have to. But acting like no one really likes them is some narcissistic BS. I've enjoyed the partner decks I've made immensely, in fact my 98 land Thrasios is one of my favourite decks I've built. And dismissing my enjoyment as "just for the sake of hipsterdom" is the worst take I've heard in a long time.
Legendary slots don't get "wasted". There isn't some divine law that we only get so many legends per year. These 40 legends "slots" only exist because of commander legends (ugh, overloaded terms...), and having tried to draft commander without partners and it being kinda disappointing, I think partners is definitely a smart solution to making the draft work. Using non-partner legends is pretty difficult because it really limits draft flexibility, which is key to making the draft a fun experience. Without partner this product likely wouldn't exist, and we wouldn't get any new legendaries at all.
"Some legends will be popular and some won't be very popular. Feel free to mock me if my prediction will be wrong."
Nah, pretty sure you nailed it buddy. All you had to do was make your prediction so open-ended that it could apply to every set release since homelands.
The fact is, commander has become extremely popular while the RC was managing it AND while wotc was supporting it. There's no way to tell "how much popularity" each was responsible for, but going off the brawl example it's pretty clear that there's something about the commander format itself that works for people, and which wotc can't take credit for. Anyone who claims to know whether wotc or the RC is responsible for the popularity is deluding themselves.
It'a also worth noting that commander went from absolutely nothing to being very popular with absolutely zero support. Percentage-wise, guaranteed the RC can claim more based on that alone. By late 2009 most magic players at my uni were playing commander and wotc wasn't directly supporting the format at all.
Personally I think commander is TOO popular at this point. I kinda wish whoever was making is so popular would dial it back a bit.
Partners ARE pretty popular overall. It's just hard to compare to other non-partner commanders because, depending how you look at it, there's hundreds of combinations. Tana, while not someone that catches my eye particularly, has ~1300 decks where she's one of the commanders. That's roughly in the top 100 - popular but not omnipresent.
What numbers do you want here? If they were super high, it'd be because they're too powerful and broken. If they're too low, it's because they're boring and nobody likes them. No matter what the numbers are, you'll try to twist them to proving your point - even though they're pretty much in the middle, right where presumably you'd like them to be. What would make you happy?
Getting to mix commanders together inherently provides more directions - Tana as a standalone commander is kinda boring, but mix her together with sidar kondo and now you've got an evasive commander that makes evasive tokens. Or with Ravos makes more tokens which are bigger, but lack evasion. You get more options for customization, which I think makes it a lot more interesting. Besides which, it gives nearly every color combination quite a few more options, at the cost of relatively few cards. So maybe you want to do an archetype that isn't really supported by a commander in those colors - there's probably some partners that will at least give you a few decent creatures in the command zone. I've used partners quite a few times, sometimes synergizing around both commanders (sidar + tymna), sometimes around just one (reyhan + kraum), sometimes mostly just for the colors (silas + sidar). For just 15 cards with pretty simple abilities they give a ton of depth to the format.
And honestly, even Tana isn't that bad. Sure, she's not my cup of tea, but honestly no token commanders really are. It's still a unique effect for a commander that pushes her in a different direction than other token decks. If you don't like her, then that's fine. You probably don't like most of the non-partner commanders either - I know I don't. But I don't worry about it, especially if that commander isn't particularly powerful and won't make games miserable in the future (and none of the partners are particularly scary). Just pick something else, like you do whenever any other non-partner commander comes along that doesn't interest you.