There's a history behind the 100-card limitation, and I don't know what it is. I like that Commander is 100 cards. The expanded deck size and the singleton nature of the format lead to more varied games. That's a net positive. From a design perspective though, I cannot see why the minimum deck size ought to also be the maximum one. Sure, I suppose it makes the rules marginally easier to explain, but for what other reason should players not be allowed to include more cards in their decks if they want to? It isn't obvious to me, and I suspect that Commander might be better off if players could do so.
The best reason I can present for abandoning the 100-card limit is that doing so would allow new decks to enter the format. Aside from the obvious Battle of Wits, consider the "alternate win cons" deck, a deck whose goal is to stuff every card with an alternate win condition into it. That's a relatively interesting premise. A deck featuring an abundance of ways to win could lead to some memorable games of Magic. Constructing such a deck is difficult given the format's current 100-card restriction though. That's because, after including lands, axle grease, and the 20 different alternate win cons available (I'm not counting Battle of Wits, Hedron Alignment, Coalition Victory, or any of the Un-cards in this number), there's barely any room for deck left in the deck.
How am I supposed to fit in 20+ creatures for Mortal Combat? Where will I find the support for Chance Encounter? Or Helix Pinnacle? Or Darksteel Reactor? Sure, some cards like Approach of the Second Sun don't need any additional support, but most alternate win cons don't do anything intrinsically useful and require a multitude of other cards to support them. Fitting all of that into one deck is extremely challenging. That's not to say it can't be done. Perhaps this deck can be made given the format's current limitation on deck size. Making this kind of deck viable though is another story. And I don't mean competitively viable. I mean functionally viable. For some premises, 100 cards might not be enough to make things work.
Consider also a deck that I own, a Rube Goldberg machine called Mr. Bones' Wild Ride. It's goal is to stop the game by assembling an intricate 23-card contraption. I would love to include more than 100 cards for several of the same reasons I outlined above. After allocating space for lands, axle grease, and the aforementioned 23 cards, I'm left with precious little room to actually build a functional deck, especially given the fact that most of these combo pieces aren't terribly useful on their own. And considering the fact that it's virtually impossible to assemble these cards naturally, I also need to make space for an assembly combo, something that will allow me to assemble these cards together without having to outright cast each of these pieces.
There are quite a number of fun assemblers out there, — I'm particularly partial to Pyxis of Pandemonium — but because space is limited, I'm highly incentivized to play "compact" assemblers, things like OmniscienceEnter the Infinite, because I'm pressed on deck space. These compact assemblers tend to be brutally efficient and much less fun as a result, typically invalidating the rest of the cards to come. (Everyone is ready to pick up their cards after something like Enter the Infinite resolves.) Because of the 100-card limit, I'm not given much of a choice though. If I want to make this kind of deck work, I either have to resort to these assemblers or play a nonfunctional deck. There isn't enough space to play the cards I might like to.
Now, I don't want to sound like I'm blowing this out of proportion. The 100-card deck limit isn't a serious issue. Changing the rule from "must be 100" to "100 or more" wouldn't even phase the vast majority of Commander players though; folks are just going to keep playing the minimum number of cards anyway. But for special cases like me, I would very much like the option to play additional cards, and there's little recourse I can take if this rule isn't explicitly changed. House rules cannot adequately solve this problem. While many players would happily allow the Brothers Yamazaki to have partner or for Ink-Treader Nephilim to be a Commander, players are much less likely to allow 100+ card libraries since the reasons why one might want to do such a thing aren't immediately obvious. That creates suspicion, and where there's suspicion, players are unlikely to be generous.
And the likelihood that Wizards will print something that ignores the 100-card deck limitation is also slim. In almost all other formats, players can already choose to include any number of cards they want above the specified minimum. As such, rules text like "If CARDNAME is your commander, your library may include any number of cards" isn't applicable anywhere outside of Commander, assuring such a card would never see print outside of something like a Commander product. And even there the chance is slim. A design like that would almost certainly be five-color, meaning only five-color decks would be able to feature it, and what sort of 100-card preconstructed deck could justify that? It would be a dubious inclusion.
A counterargument to my proposal is that restrictions breed creativity, that decks are more interesting when players are limited in their ability to construct them, and that those imperfect decks help enrich Commander. While I don't deny this to be true, I would also posit that freedoms breed creativity too. It is because cards like Phelddagrif even exist that entire archetypes can be built around it. And while players could certainly build Phelddagrif-style decks without the card, allowing players the opportunity to use it makes Commander richer, not poorer. Not a perfect analogy, I know, since what I'm talking about is changing a game rule and not including/excluding a given card, but I still feel the comparison is applicable. The potential for further creative deckbuilding exists when players are given more tools with which to work with, and lifting the 100-card limit would add another tool to players' toolbelts without also adding any significant consequences.
That's not to say that there aren't any consequences. Mill based strategies would certainly become hampered to the extent which players choose to include extra cards. The negative effects of tutors would also become exacerbated as cards would take longer to search for and decks would be harder to shuffle. (A Battle of Wits deck chalk full of tutors isn't exactly a strong sell either.) But generally speaking, I believe the positives outweigh the negatives. Granting players the ability to include more than 100 cards would help strengthen the success of the format, if only by a little bit.
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WUBRGMr. Bones' Wild RideGRBUW Trap your friends in an endless game with this 23-card combo!
I have given this matter a bit of thought, specifically for some of the reasons you mention. Ultimately I don't think it's a good idea, but I think it is one worth discussing.
The main reason I think it is a bad idea is that every format is defined in part by its limitations. Usually that limitation refers to the card pool, but that is less of an issue for EDH than for any other format, even Vintage and Legacy, because while both can theoretically draw from among almost everything ever printed for the game, in reality only a fairly narrow range of cards ever see play in those formats, whereas EDH plays cards that no Legacy or Vintage player would ever consider viable. When the card pool is close to limitless, the three limiting factors EDH is defined by are color identity, singleton nature and deck size, and I believe all three are important.
Limiting deck size is important for several reasons. Some are just practical. People have enough trouble adequately shuffling 99-card decks as it is; make them larger and it's going to be a mess. Tutoring and things like Bribery just slow down the game more when the decks are larger. More importantly, though, this limitation limits the power of the deck. When you can choose from among virtually all of the good cards in the history of the game (save the fairly small banned list), one way to keep them all from showing up in decks is to limit deck size. Limiting deck size causes one to have to make tough decisions which I think make for better, more streamlined decks.
Also, larger deck sizes would further marginalize some strategies, such as mill, which are hard to do as is.
All in all, I think the potential downside of this change would outweigh the possible benefits, but I am open to being convinced otherwise, and hope the discussion will be had.
I'm gonna have to agree with JWK. To me, asking to change the 100 card limit is akin to asking to open up the color identity rules. Sure, it will open up more deck building possibilities, but at that point are we really still playing EDH? You're kind of defeating the purpose of playing EDH in the first place.
JWK, I agree on your points about increased deck size making tutors and shuffling take longer, although I don't think they provide a significant enough reasson to keep the maximum deck size stuck at 100. You're losing me on how by keeping the maximum deck size imited, that the power level is limited. If anything allowing decks to go over 100 cards would drop the power level of decks since you're making your 1% chance to get an specific card a little bit harder with each card you add above 100.
Every 110 deck would just be a worse version of a 100 card deck.
@Impossible The RC has made many changes to EDH core rules over the years. You used to have to use a legends elder dragon, but they opened it up to all legendary creatures. You used to have to care specifically about card color, then they invented CI to allow for Memnarch to work. There is a small but growing list of cards that allowing us to break the highlander rule.
Does anyone think that most players are going to suddenly make 250 card decks if they get rid of the 100 card limit? I doubt you'd intentionally see a deck over 100 cards ever, unless it was Battle of Wits.
It's also worth noting that you probably play with and against decks that are over 100 cards already and on a regular basis too, assuming you play paper magic. Everybody buys their sleeves in 100 count boxes, but those boxes always have some extra sleeves, usually 103-108. You're going to run into players who just kept putting cards in sleeves until they ran out and didn't count them exactly.
My personal opinion is that the reasons to keep the maximum deck size locked to 100 don't carry that much weight, so it should be changed to 100 minimum, anysize maximum; even if that maximum size increase only ends up benfiting Battle of Wits decks.
JWK, I agree on your points about increased deck size making tutors and shuffling take longer, although I don't think they provide a significant enough reasson to keep the maximum deck size stuck at 100. You're losing me on how by keeping the maximum deck size imited, that the power level is limited. If anything allowing decks to go over 100 cards would drop the power level of decks since you're making your 1% chance to get an specific card a little bit harder with each card you add above 100.
Every 110 deck would just be a worse version of a 100 card deck.
I think it a very real risk that people would just add more "power" stuff to their decks and also add more tutors to get what they need in the moment. Just like when one allows sideboards to allow for "wish" cards, almost invariably people pack those with specialized answers and/or extra threats to be fetched as needed.
It's also worth noting that you probably play with and against decks that are over 100 cards already and on a regular basis too, assuming you play paper magic. Everybody buys their sleeves in 100 count boxes, but those boxes always have some extra sleeves, usually 103-108. You're going to run into players who just kept putting cards in sleeves until they ran out and didn't count them exactly.
I suppose that might occasionally happen, but most people I play with are careful enough about their deck construction that I rather doubt it happens on a regular basis.
My personal opinion is that the reasons to keep the maximum deck size locked to 100 don't carry that much weight, so it should be changed to 100 minimum, anysize maximum; even if that maximum size increase only ends up benfiting Battle of Wits decks.
Since a Battle of Wits deck would almost certainly involve tutors intended to grab this win condition and flash it into play, I don't see how changing the rules to allow it into the format would actually give us anything that's worth having.
@Impossible The RC has made many changes to EDH core rules over the years. You used to have to use a legends elder dragon, but they opened it up to all legendary creatures. You used to have to care specifically about card color, then they invented CI to allow for Memnarch to work. There is a small but growing list of cards that allowing us to break the highlander rule.
Comparing the rules from when EDH was a small group of friends sharing their created format with the world to the rules as they exist now isn't really helpful. Removing the Elder Dragon restriction was just common sense if you ever wanted more than 5 people to be able to play without repeating decks. The CI rule just codified what everyone already knew, which is that Memnarch is a blue card. As far as I am aware, there is exactly one card that doesn't work in EDH because of the size of your library, and that's Battle of Wits. I don't see a reason to change the rules to accommodate a single, pretty terrible card. Which is kind of amusing to me, because I just started theory-crafting a Nicol Bolas, the Ravager theme deck that will use Battle of Wits as it's primary win-con. You know... because Bolas is so smart.
The OP's statement that being able to play more cards would lead to more creative decks is, to my mind, another way to say that person builds bad decks. If you cannot fit your theme into 100 cards, it probably shouldn't be your theme to begin with. There is no reason to change the rules to accommodate someone that wants to jam literally every alternate win-con card into a single deck. Simply cut a few of them. To me that is like saying "I want to play horse tribal but there aren't enough horses so please remove the singleton rule so that I can play 10 Crested Sunmare." There is just no reason for it other than to cover for your own inability to craft a workable deck for your theme.
The main reason I think it is a bad idea is that every format is defined in part by its limitations. Usually that limitation refers to the card pool, but that is less of an issue for EDH than for any other format, even Vintage and Legacy, because while both can theoretically draw from among almost everything ever printed for the game, in reality only a fairly narrow range of cards ever see play in those formats, whereas EDH plays cards that no Legacy or Vintage player would ever consider viable. When the card pool is close to limitless, the three limiting factors EDH is defined by are color identity, singleton nature and deck size, and I believe all three are important.
I agree with basically everything you're saying here. Formats are defined by their limitations, and Commander's limitations have helped shape it into the format we love today. Having said that, I do not think setting the cap at 100 cards is an important, relevant, or interesting limitation. Virtually every deck can already play the theme it wants to with less than 100 cards, so almost no themes are affected by this limitation as is. The few decks that are, however, are especially creative in my mind, and Commander has something to gain by letting them in, especially given how little the format has to lose by doing so.
Limiting deck size is important for several reasons. Some are just practical. People have enough trouble adequately shuffling 99-card decks as it is; make them larger and it's going to be a mess. Tutoring and things like Bribery just slow down the game more when the decks are larger. More importantly, though, this limitation limits the power of the deck. When you can choose from among virtually all of the good cards in the history of the game (save the fairly small banned list), one way to keep them all from showing up in decks is to limit deck size. Limiting deck size causes one to have to make tough decisions which I think make for better, more streamlined decks.
I'm not convinced that bulky decks are detrimental enough to forbid players from using them. If excessively large decks were a problem, I think we would see this addressed at the competitive level where matches are timed and having a difficult deck to shuffle/search through matters a whole lot more.
As for limiting power, I'm really not following you here. While you're not wrong that removing the 100-card limit won't decrease the power ceiling, it's realistically not going to increase the power ceiling either. As Zygous already mentioned, every 110 card deck is usually just a worse version of a 100 card deck. Even when you have all of Magic's history to pull at your disposal, putting all the best cards into one deck is still just going to result in a worse deck than if you stopped making additions after 100.
Also, larger deck sizes would further marginalize some strategies, such as mill, which are hard to do as is.
This is true. There are certainly consequences to removing the 100-card limit, but I think it's also worth mentioning that these kinds of consequences are only detrimental to the extent that players choose to play decks greater than 100 cards in size.
Given the opportunity, what percentage of the Commander playerbase do you think would choose to do that? 10%? 5%? Less than 1%? I have reason to believe that, whatever the number, it would be incredibly small, and that even when players do choose to include more than 100 cards in their deck, they likely wouldn't include all that many more anyway. In fact, I suspect the most common reason why players would end up playing 101+ cards is because some would want to put a new card in their deck, but they wouldn't know what to take out, so they would just sleeve up the new card without replacing anything. I think we might see a non-zero amount of 102/103 card decks for that reason, but the effects of allowing larger decks in general won't be felt if players seldom choose to play them anyway.
I'm gonna have to agree with JWK. To me, asking to change the 100 card limit is akin to asking to open up the color identity rules. Sure, it will open up more deck building possibilities, but at that point are we really still playing EDH? You're kind of defeating the purpose of playing EDH in the first place.
Playing a 101 card deck would defeat the purpose of playing EDH in the first place? How would that be any different than playing with more than one commander? Or playing with multiple copies of the same card?
I see the 100-card deck size as arbitrary and not as a defining feature of the format. The number 100 has no more relevance than if the format were 75, 80, or 120 cards. Sure, 100 is a nice, clean number, but there isn't any particular reason why Commander ought to be a 100-card format beyond the fact that 100 is a sufficiently large (but not too large) number.
If I had to rank the core identities of Commander, their importance would look something like this:
Having a Commander = Color Identity > Singleton > Having Exactly a 100-Card Deck > Multiplayer
My personal opinion is that the reasons to keep the maximum deck size locked to 100 don't carry that much weight, so it should be changed to 100 minimum, anysize maximum; even if that maximum size increase only ends up benfiting Battle of Wits decks.
This is basically where I stand. There have been times in the past where I've wanted to build decks with more than 100 cards, and I cannot devise a compelling argument for why I should be unable to do so.
I think it a very real risk that people would just add more "power" stuff to their decks and also add more tutors to get what they need in the moment. Just like when one allows sideboards to allow for "wish" cards, almost invariably people pack those with specialized answers and/or extra threats to be fetched as needed.
This strikes me as a very strange fear, in part because I don't understand where it's coming from. Other formats have already demonstrated that very few (experienced) players will willingly exceed the minimum deck size because they understand that doing so almost always makes decks worse in the process. If you're concerned about players stuffing their decks full of uber powerful cards, players can already do this. Is the 101st next most powerful card really the dealbreaker?
Since a Battle of Wits deck would almost certainly involve tutors intended to grab this win condition and flash it into play, I don't see how changing the rules to allow it into the format would actually give us anything that's worth having.
I'm not stoked about Battle of Wits either. Granted, I don't think it would be terrible for the format, but the public's lack of interest for building Battle of Wits decks would keep the number of copies running around at a minimum even if it were a nuisance.
Comparing the rules from when EDH was a small group of friends sharing their created format with the world to the rules as they exist now isn't really helpful. Removing the Elder Dragon restriction was just common sense if you ever wanted more than 5 people to be able to play without repeating decks. The CI rule just codified what everyone already knew, which is that Memnarch is a blue card. As far as I am aware, there is exactly one card that doesn't work in EDH because of the size of your library, and that's Battle of Wits. I don't see a reason to change the rules to accommodate a single, pretty terrible card.
So, I take it you didn't find any of the reasons I outlined in my opening post compelling?
I agree that the removal of the elder dragon rule isn't a great example, but the point Zygous is making here is that the rules are not immutable. The Rules Committee has historically modified them to better improve the format. I've been playing Commander long enough to remember when color identity wasn't a thing and when players could still tuck their opponents' commanders. Changing those rules was an improvement, and removing the 100-card cap seems like it would be an improvement too.
Also worth mentioning is that there are other cards that care about deck size that aren't Battle of Wits. Invincible Hymn, for example.
Which is kind of amusing to me, because I just started theory-crafting a Nicol Bolas, the Ravager theme deck that will use Battle of Wits as it's primary win-con. You know... because Bolas is so smart.
Out of curiosity, how do you attempt to do this? To my understanding, it's impossible to pad one's library without resorting to wishboard-style cards or silver borders. If this sort of thing were possible within the rules already, I might never have made this thread in the first place.
The OP's statement that being able to play more cards would lead to more creative decks is, to my mind, another way to say that person builds bad decks.
Depends on what you mean by "bad decks." If you mean that I build competitively unviable decks, that's true. If you mean that I build low-powered decks, that isn't true. If you mean that I'm a poor or inexperienced deckbuilder, that's extremely untrue.
If you cannot fit your theme into 100 cards, it probably shouldn't be your theme to begin with.
Why? For what reason should players not be free to build larger decks if they want to? People build decks of all sorts of themes in Commander, and the way I see it, there are themes that could exist but simply don't because the rules obliquely prohibit them. 100 cards is enough for almost every deck to work, but it isn't enough for some.
There is no reason to change the rules to accommodate someone that wants to jam literally every alternate win-con card into a single deck. Simply cut a few of them. To me that is like saying "I want to play horse tribal but there aren't enough horses so please remove the singleton rule so that I can play 10 Crested Sunmare." There is just no reason for it other than to cover for your own inability to craft a workable deck for your theme.
I think you have this backwards. Wanting to remove the 100-card limit isn't about enabling underprivileged decks. That's just a really cool side-effect of doing so. The point of changing the 100-card limit is about removing a pointless and unnecessary rule. You may not see a reason to accommodate 100+ card decks, but to the best of my ability, I cannot see a compelling reason for this rule to even exist in the first place.
So, I take it you didn't find any of the reasons I outlined in my opening post compelling?
I agree that the removal of the elder dragon rule isn't a great example, but the point Zygous is making here is that the rules are not immutable. The Rules Committee has historically modified them to better improve the format. I've been playing Commander long enough to remember when color identity wasn't a thing and when players could still tuck their opponents' commanders. Changing those rules was an improvement, and removing the 100-card cap seems like it would be an improvement too.
Also worth mentioning is that there are other cards that care about deck size that aren't Battle of Wits. Invincible Hymn, for example.
No I did not find any of your opening points particularly compelling.
I never said the rules were immutable. I made the point that the rule changes that have taken place have done so to promote an obvious benefit to the format. Allowing 100+ card decks is not an obvious benefit to the format. Sure, it would allow people to do whacky things, but what exactly are you trying to accomplish that cannot be done with 100 cards? You opened the thread with an example of jamming literally every alternate win-con into a deck, and frankly that just sounds awful. Awful to pilot. Awful to play against. And functionally no different than if you just done the same thing with a 100 card deck.
Invincible Hymn still works with the 100 card limit it just has a cap. As opposed to Battle of Wits, which does literal nothing.
Out of curiosity, how do you attempt to do this? To my understanding, it's impossible to pad one's library without resorting to wishboard-style cards or silver borders. If this sort of thing were possible within the rules already, I might never have made this thread in the first place.
Infinite wishes. My plan is to assume the flavor of Nicol Bolas winning a Battle of Wits will outweigh any complaints. Besides the deck is pretty terrible so I assume it'll only happen once in a blue moon.
Why? For what reason should players not be free to build larger decks if they want to? People build decks of all sorts of themes in Commander, and the way I see it, there are themes that could exist but simply don't because the rules obliquely prohibit them. 100 cards is enough for almost every deck to work, but it isn't enough for some.
Again, there is exactly Battle of Wits. Excluding that, what theme are you so dead set on that cannot be done in 100 cards?
I think you have this backwards. Wanting to remove the 100-card limit isn't about enabling underprivileged decks. That's just a really cool side-effect of doing so. The point of changing the 100-card limit is about removing a pointless and unnecessary rule. You may not see a reason to accommodate 100+ card decks, but to the best of my ability, I cannot see a compelling reason for this rule to even exist in the first place.
Honestly, I'm mostly playing Devil's Advocate here. If the RC changed the rule to 100+ tomorrow, I frankly wouldn't care. I don't think it will lead to a degradation of the format or anything like that. There's an extremely high chance I would never see a deck with more than say 105 cards (because someone couldn't decide on the last few cuts for example). But ultimately the change seems completely unnecessary, and I tend to favor the inertia of precedent in these kinds of situations. To me it feels like arguing that the opening hand size should be changed to 8. In the long run, it would probably be a fairly inconsequential change, but why bother?
Seems like a good idea. I know I am sometimes struggling with finding cuts whereas if I could have run 101 or 102 cards I would just do that.
@JWK and Impossible: The notion that it would allow for more power is false: when building decks, if you play the best top X cards adding more cards means adding cards of equal or lesser quality: if they are better you should be running them instead of what you were running in the first place! There's a reason all the standard decks are always 60 cards even though more is allowed.
I see no real reason to be against it. If you don't want to run more than 100 you don't have too. But why deny others that option when it can't possibly hurt you? (I'm sure i'd much rather play against arrogantAxolotl altwin deck then a 100 card Derevi stax deck).
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The secret to enjoyable Commander games is not winning first, but losing last.
If my post has no tags, then i posted from my phone.
This would make weak players become bad players. Every time they find a new card to add, they'd just throw it in without cutting something else. Over time, their decks would expand into sprawling monstrosities with no clear strategy or win condition. They would lose incentive to weigh cards against each other and just mash them all together. This would magnify mana issues, and games would stretch on longer and longer. Decent to good players would be less affected, as they understand that running the minimum makes for the cleanest gameplay, but releasing this restriction would hurt those who need it the most.
Not trying to say you didn't. Just wanted to point out that this was the point Zygous was trying to convey, and that it wasn't clear to me from your previous post that you picked up on it.
I made the point that the rule changes that have taken place have done so to promote an obvious benefit to the format. Allowing 100+ card decks is not an obvious benefit to the format.
Allowing 100+ card decks is definitely not an obvious benefit to the format. It's for exactly that reason that I find it so difficult to talk others into letting me play with a fatter deck (as opposed to bending the rules in other ways, like using a wishboard). Most players can't see why anyone would want to do such a thing. It's also for that reason why virtually no one is asking to change this rule. There's little motivation to play with fatter decks, so few people are inclined to ask for the opportunity.
With all of that said, I still assert there are reasons, even if they aren't apparent. The best, I believe, is simply because I want to. I want to build decks with more than 100 cards, and to my knowledge, there is no compelling reason for why I shouldn't be able to. Commander, more so than any other format, is built on player expression. Nowhere else do we see such a wide variety of decks, and the format as a whole is richer because of it. That intense vibrancy is one of Commander's greatest features, and further expanding upon the kinds of decks players can build will only help make the format more vibrant. That seems like a plus in my book.
Sure, it would allow people to do whacky things, but what exactly are you trying to accomplish that cannot be done with 100 cards? You opened the thread with an example of jamming literally every alternate win-con into a deck, and frankly that just sounds awful. Awful to pilot. Awful to play against. And functionally no different than if you just done the same thing with a 100 card deck.
Me, personally? I'd like to make Mr. Bones' Wild Ride a deck instead of the motley assortment of cards it currently is. You may not like the alternate win-con example, but that's all that it is. An example. I'm not interested in building that deck. I just knew someone who was. When they approached me with the idea, I had to tell them that it probably wouldn't work. And not because it wasn't possible, but because the arbitrary deck limit would hamper it too much. There wouldn't be enough space after including everything he wanted for the deck to be functionally viable. And sure, this person could have easily cut down on the number of alternate win-cons, but that's not what they wanted to do. They wanted to play with all of them. They wanted to have the chance for one deck to win in as many different ways as possible. That might sound awful to you, but I can see it being fun.
Currently, with the 100-card limit, I can play with Mr. Bones, but as I've expanded the combo over time, it's barely functional now. For all the ingenuity that I possess, there just isn't a way to make it play the way I want to without access to additional card slots. And believe me. For the last two or so years, I've tried. Besides, what more reason do you need than that it would further allow people to do whacky things?
Invincible Hymn still works with the 100 card limit it just has a cap.
It does. You just mentioned that you didn't see a reason to change the rules to accommodate a single, pretty terrible card, so I thought I'd provide another example of a card's whose functionality is changed.
As a side note: Let's not say something we might regret later. I am still firmly convinced changing the tuck rule was a mistake.
I'd be interested in hearing why, but this isn't really the place for that. If you'd like to talk about it, we could move that discussion to PM, or maybe you could make a thread.
I don't see adding Battle of Wits as a negative. I mean, sure, some people are going to build miserable Battle of Wits decks, but that argument extends to just about any deck one can build. There's nothing I find intrinsically terrible about Battle of Wits to make me say that the card is always rotten to play against even if I probably wouldn't enjoy playing against it myself. I think there are some players that might like to play with Battle of Wits, and I believe some of them are going to build fun decks that incorporate it.
Honestly, I'm mostly playing Devil's Advocate here. If the RC changed the rule to 100+ tomorrow, I frankly wouldn't care. I don't think it will lead to a degradation of the format or anything like that. There's an extremely high chance I would never see a deck with more than say 105 cards (because someone couldn't decide on the last few cuts for example). But ultimately the change seems completely unnecessary, and I tend to favor the inertia of precedent in these kinds of situations. To me it feels like arguing that the opening hand size should be changed to 8. In the long run, it would probably be a fairly inconsequential change, but why bother?
A fair enough stance to take. Precedence just tends to mean very little to me, and the designer in me favors things like simplicity, cleanliness, and elegance, especially when it comes to game rules. Cutting away rules to further expand freedoms seems like a win-win to me. Not to say that I don't value structure either though. I wouldn't, for example, ever advocate changing the color identity rule.
@JWK and Impossible: The notion that it would allow for more power is false:
I disagree. Allowing players to include more cards in their decks can only increase the power ceiling.
To illustrate, imagine if Commander were a 5-card format instead of a 100-card format. Perhaps players could still build powerful decks in this 5-card format, but do you know what they wouldn't be able to do? Play 6 lands. Because players are capped on the number of cards they can include, it would be nearly impossible to do something like, say, have 10 different cards in play with different effects. The potential for such an event basically can't exist given 5-card decks, but it could exist if decks were greater in size. This potential for new and more powerful events can occur at any deck size. My brawl deck is a great example.
Currently, I play Nissa, Vital Force in Brawl. Something that happens surprisingly often during my games is that I happen to get all of my lands onto the battlefield. If I were capable of playing 100 cards, my power ceiling would increase because, despite making my best draws more inconsistent, I would now be able to generate more mana than I possibly could if my deck were 60 cards. And that's something I certainly have a use for.
Now, to be clear, I get what you're trying to say here. Giving players the chance to play more cards isn't going to change the average power level of decks. The potential power ceiling, on the other hand, will definitely increase though, not that that matters.
This would make weak players become bad players. Every time they find a new card to add, they'd just throw it in without cutting something else. Over time, their decks would expand into sprawling monstrosities with no clear strategy or win condition. They would lose incentive to weigh cards against each other and just mash them all together. This would magnify mana issues, and games would stretch on longer and longer. Decent to good players would be less affected, as they understand that running the minimum makes for the cleanest gameplay, but releasing this restriction would hurt those who need it the most.
The Rules Committee is not responsible for teaching players good deckbuilding practices.
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This would make weak players become bad players. Every time they find a new card to add, they'd just throw it in without cutting something else. Over time, their decks would expand into sprawling monstrosities with no clear strategy or win condition. They would lose incentive to weigh cards against each other and just mash them all together. This would magnify mana issues, and games would stretch on longer and longer. Decent to good players would be less affected, as they understand that running the minimum makes for the cleanest gameplay, but releasing this restriction would hurt those who need it the most.
The Rules Committee is not responsible for teaching players good deckbuilding practices.
True. But try to extrapolate what happens in that situation. Decks bloat and lose their focus, leading to worse gameplay. Power level is diluted further, with weak players struggling even more to close out a game. The gap between good players who keep the 100-card limit and bad players who don't widens even further, leading to frustration for all parties - the bad players never win, and the good players never enjoy a challenge. It's every situation you can imagine now but worse. The format gains a stigma, weak players give up rather than getting better, and the format crumbles from within. Hyperbole? Perhaps, but it would magnify problems we already have. By keeping all decks at the same size, the rules committee keeps all players on somewhat more level ground.
Do you draft? Is it in your best interest most of the time to build exactly a 40-card deck with the best cards you pulled, or is it better to throw in all the cards, even the weaker ones, thereby diluting the deck and reducing the average power level of the cards you are going to draw? Having to make the hard choices and cut down to the minimum increases the viability of a deck.
I feel like the argumeent that by increasing deck size, it makes bad players worse is a slippery slope.
If you have a bad player sit down with a larger then noramal deck size deck in a game of paper magic and it's going to be obvious and it takes very little effort for one of their opponents orheck any other maic player at the LGS to say something like "You're deck would be better uf ut were 100 cards." to get the point across. Heck, even if you find a player who insists their 150 card beast is better, try and persuade them to cut it doen to 100 for a few games and they'll see it perfofm better themselves.
To add an example to two decks AA listed. I think a 5-color modal theme deck would be totally happy to go over 100 cards; you've got multible cycles of charms, 2 and 3 color, 5 commands and 5 confluences, you'd want to include creatures that could do multible things, like all the Morphling varients, Zacama, Primal Calamity, and Deathrite Shaman. We didn't even get to split cards yet and you'd want some support cards for the high numbsr of instants and sorceries you'd be playing. That's the kind of over 100 card deck I'd like to see.
I want to put two copies of Sol Ring in my deck. Why should you let me? Because I want to.
"You may have 100 cards" is simpler, cleaner, and more elegant than "You may have 100 or more cards."
This is not an argument to cut away any rules. This is an argument to change a rule.
Regular constructed and limited magic has always used a minimum deck size, but there is no maximum limit. It's a change that makes the commander rules consistent with the rules of normal magic.
I want to put two copies of Sol Ring in my deck. Why should you let me? Because I want to.
That's a terrible argument. And if you believe it's your best argument, then this discussion is over before it began.
Okay. There are a few hidden qualifiers that prop up my argument. I thought that by this point anyone following me along closely enough would understand the point I was trying to make. My bad. That was obviously a mistake, and I should have been more careful with my words. I'm sorry.
Yes, "just because I want to" is a terrible argument. That's not the argument I'm trying to make though. The argument I'm trying to make is that I want to AND the 100-card limit isn't core to Commander's identity AND there's no compelling reason for why this rule should exist AND changing this rule would cause virtually no harm to the Commander format.
Imagine if Commander had a rule where if your deck included any cards with hybrid mana costs that it also couldn't include any cards that were illustrated by Noah Bradley. Now, we can see that this rule is totally arbitrary, but why should players be able to include Noah Bradley cards in the same deck as hybrid cards? Well, because they want to. Players want to sometimes include cards illustrated by Noah Bradley even when their decks also happen to sometimes contain hybrid cards. There isn't a compelling reason for why that rule should exist, it isn't a core facet of what Commander is, and changing that rule would cause almost no harm to the format, so there's little reason to not allow players to just do it. It's something they want to do, and they ought to have that freedom. If nobody wanted to, there wouldn't be an impetus to change the rule.
In the case of duplicate Sol Rings, the singleton nature is core to Commander's identity (much like the 100-card minimum deck size is). Players shouldn't be able to include more than one copy of Sol Ring because that delineation makes Commander Commander. It's what separates it from other formats, makes it unique and interesting, and contributes towards why we love this format so much. The same can't be said for the 100-card maximum. Had the 100-card maximum never existed in the first case, we'd never see people clamoring to reduce the max size down to 100.
This is not an argument to cut away any rules. This is an argument to change a rule.
I'll admit fault here. I was looking at this from the perspective of there being two rules, one that indicated minimum deck size and one that indicated maximum deck size. Removing an entire rule typically simplifies things, but when all it takes is for one sentence to clarify the two, that doesn't carry much weight. I guess I should have called these limitations rather than rules.
But not the rules printed in the past 7 years of boxed Commander product that arguably served to get the most number of people into the format.
If somebody reads the rules inserts and makes an exactly 100 card deck, their deck will still be legal. If they think a player using a larger then normal deck is cheating, then it's easy to explain that the rules were changed to allow for larger decks.
Do you draft? Is it in your best interest most of the time to build exactly a 40-card deck with the best cards you pulled, or is it better to throw in all the cards, even the weaker ones, thereby diluting the deck and reducing the average power level of the cards you are going to draw? Having to make the hard choices and cut down to the minimum increases the viability of a deck.
That's a bit of a strawman argument. Tossing everything in is almost never better... the exception being in the original Conspiracy drafts, whenever I drafted the Conspiracy that lets all lands produce any color of mana. I played my whole draft pool in those drafts, and almost never lost.
But outside a very special situation like that, while playing everything you draft is a bad idea, sometimes playing a 41 or 42 card deck can work out very well. There have been times I drafted solid decks with good creature curves and had more strong non-creature spells - especially fairly efficient removal - than would fit in a standard 40 card deck with 17 creatures. Breaking the 40-card rule to toss in a third copy of something like Lightning Strike has never turned out badly for me, honestly. In RtR draft, whenever I drafted Boros, the low mana curves allowed me to play 42 card decks pretty easily and constantly keep up the pressure with threats and answers. So, there are exceptions, even though sticking to exactly 40 is the correct move at least 90% of the time (probably more than 95%, actually).
That said, I still think it best to stick with the 100 card rule in Commander.
Not trying to say you didn't. Just wanted to point out that this was the point Zygous was trying to convey, and that it wasn't clear to me from your previous post that you picked up on it.
I made the point that the rule changes that have taken place have done so to promote an obvious benefit to the format. Allowing 100+ card decks is not an obvious benefit to the format.
Allowing 100+ card decks is definitely not an obvious benefit to the format. It's for exactly that reason that I find it so difficult to talk others into letting me play with a fatter deck (as opposed to bending the rules in other ways, like using a wishboard). Most players can't see why anyone would want to do such a thing. It's also for that reason why virtually no one is asking to change this rule. There's little motivation to play with fatter decks, so few people are inclined to ask for the opportunity.
With all of that said, I still assert there are reasons, even if they aren't apparent. The best, I believe, is simply because I want to. I want to build decks with more than 100 cards, and to my knowledge, there is no compelling reason for why I shouldn't be able to. Commander, more so than any other format, is built on player expression. Nowhere else do we see such a wide variety of decks, and the format as a whole is richer because of it. That intense vibrancy is one of Commander's greatest features, and further expanding upon the kinds of decks players can build will only help make the format more vibrant. That seems like a plus in my book.
Sure, it would allow people to do whacky things, but what exactly are you trying to accomplish that cannot be done with 100 cards? You opened the thread with an example of jamming literally every alternate win-con into a deck, and frankly that just sounds awful. Awful to pilot. Awful to play against. And functionally no different than if you just done the same thing with a 100 card deck.
Me, personally? I'd like to make Mr. Bones' Wild Ride a deck instead of the motley assortment of cards it currently is. You may not like the alternate win-con example, but that's all that it is. An example. I'm not interested in building that deck. I just knew someone who was. When they approached me with the idea, I had to tell them that it probably wouldn't work. And not because it wasn't possible, but because the arbitrary deck limit would hamper it too much. There wouldn't be enough space after including everything he wanted for the deck to be functionally viable. And sure, this person could have easily cut down on the number of alternate win-cons, but that's not what they wanted to do. They wanted to play with all of them. They wanted to have the chance for one deck to win in as many different ways as possible. That might sound awful to you, but I can see it being fun.
Currently, with the 100-card limit, I can play with Mr. Bones, but as I've expanded the combo over time, it's barely functional now. For all the ingenuity that I possess, there just isn't a way to make it play the way I want to without access to additional card slots. And believe me. For the last two or so years, I've tried. Besides, what more reason do you need than that it would further allow people to do whacky things?
Invincible Hymn still works with the 100 card limit it just has a cap.
It does. You just mentioned that you didn't see a reason to change the rules to accommodate a single, pretty terrible card, so I thought I'd provide another example of a card's whose functionality is changed.
As a side note: Let's not say something we might regret later. I am still firmly convinced changing the tuck rule was a mistake.
I'd be interested in hearing why, but this isn't really the place for that. If you'd like to talk about it, we could move that discussion to PM, or maybe you could make a thread.
I don't see adding Battle of Wits as a negative. I mean, sure, some people are going to build miserable Battle of Wits decks, but that argument extends to just about any deck one can build. There's nothing I find intrinsically terrible about Battle of Wits to make me say that the card is always rotten to play against even if I probably wouldn't enjoy playing against it myself. I think there are some players that might like to play with Battle of Wits, and I believe some of them are going to build fun decks that incorporate it.
Honestly, I'm mostly playing Devil's Advocate here. If the RC changed the rule to 100+ tomorrow, I frankly wouldn't care. I don't think it will lead to a degradation of the format or anything like that. There's an extremely high chance I would never see a deck with more than say 105 cards (because someone couldn't decide on the last few cuts for example). But ultimately the change seems completely unnecessary, and I tend to favor the inertia of precedent in these kinds of situations. To me it feels like arguing that the opening hand size should be changed to 8. In the long run, it would probably be a fairly inconsequential change, but why bother?
A fair enough stance to take. Precedence just tends to mean very little to me, and the designer in me favors things like simplicity, cleanliness, and elegance, especially when it comes to game rules. Cutting away rules to further expand freedoms seems like a win-win to me. Not to say that I don't value structure either though. I wouldn't, for example, ever advocate changing the color identity rule.
@JWK and Impossible: The notion that it would allow for more power is false:
I disagree. Allowing players to include more cards in their decks can only increase the power ceiling.
To illustrate, imagine if Commander were a 5-card format instead of a 100-card format. Perhaps players could still build powerful decks in this 5-card format, but do you know what they wouldn't be able to do? Play 6 lands. Because players are capped on the number of cards they can include, it would be nearly impossible to do something like, say, have 10 different cards in play with different effects. The potential for such an event basically can't exist given 5-card decks, but it could exist if decks were greater in size. This potential for new and more powerful events can occur at any deck size. My brawl deck is a great example.
Currently, I play Nissa, Vital Force in Brawl. Something that happens surprisingly often during my games is that I happen to get all of my lands onto the battlefield. If I were capable of playing 100 cards, my power ceiling would increase because, despite making my best draws more inconsistent, I would now be able to generate more mana than I possibly could if my deck were 60 cards. And that's something I certainly have a use for.
Now, to be clear, I get what you're trying to say here. Giving players the chance to play more cards isn't going to change the average power level of decks. The potential power ceiling, on the other hand, will definitely increase though, not that that matters.
This would make weak players become bad players. Every time they find a new card to add, they'd just throw it in without cutting something else. Over time, their decks would expand into sprawling monstrosities with no clear strategy or win condition. They would lose incentive to weigh cards against each other and just mash them all together. This would magnify mana issues, and games would stretch on longer and longer. Decent to good players would be less affected, as they understand that running the minimum makes for the cleanest gameplay, but releasing this restriction would hurt those who need it the most.
The Rules Committee is not responsible for teaching players good deckbuilding practices.
From a purely statistical standpoint, removing the maximum limit allows for more powerful decks. Its counter intuitive, as the vast, vast majority of decks will be worse for adding cards, but the thing is no deck HAS to add cards. If there is even one deck that benefits from the removal of the 100 card maximum, then removing the maximum increases the possible power of decks overall, because no deck that does not benefit from the extra cards needs to run them, while the decks that do can.
As for my thoughts on removing the limit, I don't think either side really has good arguments, simply because its such an unimportant aspect of the rules that there isn't really a good argument for or against. The format would be so little changed without the maximum that its fairly arbitrary whether it exists or not. I don't think its worth the change just to get Battle of Wits, a few corner case card power boosts, and some wacky decks, but if it were the other way around, and there was no cap, I wouldn't think that it would be worth it to institute the cap either. Of course, some people seem to think it matters more than half of the ban criteria, so there's that.
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Step 1: Identify the problem. What aspect of Magic don't you like? Step 2: Find out how others deal with the problem. How do players deal with this aspect of the game when they run into it? Step 3: Do what those players do. Step 4: No more problem. Bonus: You are now better at Magic. Enjoy those extra wins!
Hey AA: I ready your OP, but I cannot read the whole conversation.. not a lot of time.
My first thought is that it should be allowed. It is the only format that tells you how many cards you can play.
Then I thought about my decks and if there are any decks that would get more cards. I suppose I could squeeze more answers into tutor-heavy decks, but then... I'm diluting my deck. I think, like in other formats, it would be very rare that someone would play more than the minimum number of cards. With a graveyard-based deck with a lot of self-mill, I could see the argument that you see a lot more cards so the "dilution" of the deck is unlikely to make a difference. This makes me worry about some decks having answers to everything while being very potent in comboing off. All I could see this doing is pushing people into having more graveyard hate or more tutor hate, which is fine with me.
I'm for it. Is there a petition on Change.org I can sign?
If people are sick of reading about stuff just stop taking part. You have 100% control over what you read. Simic Ascendancy isn't going to get banned just because you didn't tell someone to shut up on the internet.
I'm for it. Is there a petition on Change.org I can sign?
No.
When it comes to these kinds of threads, my motivation is 1.) to have a good faith conversation and 2.) to bring to attention something the RC might not have considered recently. I'm not interested in rallying support for a cause so much as I am interested in trying to realize what could be a better implementation of the Commander format.
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Every single alternate wincon you mention in the OP is easily built aroundable in 100 card singleton it just requires hard cuts and tough choices, running 20 creatures and an enchantment as a reason to want to increase the limit is laughable in that it is supremely easy to make that work already within the limitations of Commander.
Sure there are dumb decks that could be made were it gone but this thread hasn't really done a good job of showing positives or reasons for this beyond a "I really want to do it" sense, and I doubt that is going to get you there.
Also it has become what people are used to and I find MtG to be a slow turning stick to the course kind of product generally.
Also it has become what people are used to and I find MtG to be a slow turning stick to the course kind of product generally.
Given how long it took to get rid of mana burn specifically, you have a point. On the flip side, the same point shows what you are likely silently acknowledging...anything is possible in the future.
The best reason I can present for abandoning the 100-card limit is that doing so would allow new decks to enter the format. Aside from the obvious Battle of Wits, consider the "alternate win cons" deck, a deck whose goal is to stuff every card with an alternate win condition into it. That's a relatively interesting premise. A deck featuring an abundance of ways to win could lead to some memorable games of Magic. Constructing such a deck is difficult given the format's current 100-card restriction though. That's because, after including lands, axle grease, and the 20 different alternate win cons available (I'm not counting Battle of Wits, Hedron Alignment, Coalition Victory, or any of the Un-cards in this number), there's barely any room for deck left in the deck.
How am I supposed to fit in 20+ creatures for Mortal Combat? Where will I find the support for Chance Encounter? Or Helix Pinnacle? Or Darksteel Reactor? Sure, some cards like Approach of the Second Sun don't need any additional support, but most alternate win cons don't do anything intrinsically useful and require a multitude of other cards to support them. Fitting all of that into one deck is extremely challenging. That's not to say it can't be done. Perhaps this deck can be made given the format's current limitation on deck size. Making this kind of deck viable though is another story. And I don't mean competitively viable. I mean functionally viable. For some premises, 100 cards might not be enough to make things work.
Consider also a deck that I own, a Rube Goldberg machine called Mr. Bones' Wild Ride. It's goal is to stop the game by assembling an intricate 23-card contraption. I would love to include more than 100 cards for several of the same reasons I outlined above. After allocating space for lands, axle grease, and the aforementioned 23 cards, I'm left with precious little room to actually build a functional deck, especially given the fact that most of these combo pieces aren't terribly useful on their own. And considering the fact that it's virtually impossible to assemble these cards naturally, I also need to make space for an assembly combo, something that will allow me to assemble these cards together without having to outright cast each of these pieces.
There are quite a number of fun assemblers out there, — I'm particularly partial to Pyxis of Pandemonium — but because space is limited, I'm highly incentivized to play "compact" assemblers, things like Omniscience Enter the Infinite, because I'm pressed on deck space. These compact assemblers tend to be brutally efficient and much less fun as a result, typically invalidating the rest of the cards to come. (Everyone is ready to pick up their cards after something like Enter the Infinite resolves.) Because of the 100-card limit, I'm not given much of a choice though. If I want to make this kind of deck work, I either have to resort to these assemblers or play a nonfunctional deck. There isn't enough space to play the cards I might like to.
Now, I don't want to sound like I'm blowing this out of proportion. The 100-card deck limit isn't a serious issue. Changing the rule from "must be 100" to "100 or more" wouldn't even phase the vast majority of Commander players though; folks are just going to keep playing the minimum number of cards anyway. But for special cases like me, I would very much like the option to play additional cards, and there's little recourse I can take if this rule isn't explicitly changed. House rules cannot adequately solve this problem. While many players would happily allow the Brothers Yamazaki to have partner or for Ink-Treader Nephilim to be a Commander, players are much less likely to allow 100+ card libraries since the reasons why one might want to do such a thing aren't immediately obvious. That creates suspicion, and where there's suspicion, players are unlikely to be generous.
And the likelihood that Wizards will print something that ignores the 100-card deck limitation is also slim. In almost all other formats, players can already choose to include any number of cards they want above the specified minimum. As such, rules text like "If CARDNAME is your commander, your library may include any number of cards" isn't applicable anywhere outside of Commander, assuring such a card would never see print outside of something like a Commander product. And even there the chance is slim. A design like that would almost certainly be five-color, meaning only five-color decks would be able to feature it, and what sort of 100-card preconstructed deck could justify that? It would be a dubious inclusion.
A counterargument to my proposal is that restrictions breed creativity, that decks are more interesting when players are limited in their ability to construct them, and that those imperfect decks help enrich Commander. While I don't deny this to be true, I would also posit that freedoms breed creativity too. It is because cards like Phelddagrif even exist that entire archetypes can be built around it. And while players could certainly build Phelddagrif-style decks without the card, allowing players the opportunity to use it makes Commander richer, not poorer. Not a perfect analogy, I know, since what I'm talking about is changing a game rule and not including/excluding a given card, but I still feel the comparison is applicable. The potential for further creative deckbuilding exists when players are given more tools with which to work with, and lifting the 100-card limit would add another tool to players' toolbelts without also adding any significant consequences.
That's not to say that there aren't any consequences. Mill based strategies would certainly become hampered to the extent which players choose to include extra cards. The negative effects of tutors would also become exacerbated as cards would take longer to search for and decks would be harder to shuffle. (A Battle of Wits deck chalk full of tutors isn't exactly a strong sell either.) But generally speaking, I believe the positives outweigh the negatives. Granting players the ability to include more than 100 cards would help strengthen the success of the format, if only by a little bit.
Trap your friends in an endless game with this 23-card combo!
The main reason I think it is a bad idea is that every format is defined in part by its limitations. Usually that limitation refers to the card pool, but that is less of an issue for EDH than for any other format, even Vintage and Legacy, because while both can theoretically draw from among almost everything ever printed for the game, in reality only a fairly narrow range of cards ever see play in those formats, whereas EDH plays cards that no Legacy or Vintage player would ever consider viable. When the card pool is close to limitless, the three limiting factors EDH is defined by are color identity, singleton nature and deck size, and I believe all three are important.
Limiting deck size is important for several reasons. Some are just practical. People have enough trouble adequately shuffling 99-card decks as it is; make them larger and it's going to be a mess. Tutoring and things like Bribery just slow down the game more when the decks are larger. More importantly, though, this limitation limits the power of the deck. When you can choose from among virtually all of the good cards in the history of the game (save the fairly small banned list), one way to keep them all from showing up in decks is to limit deck size. Limiting deck size causes one to have to make tough decisions which I think make for better, more streamlined decks.
Also, larger deck sizes would further marginalize some strategies, such as mill, which are hard to do as is.
All in all, I think the potential downside of this change would outweigh the possible benefits, but I am open to being convinced otherwise, and hope the discussion will be had.
Every 110 deck would just be a worse version of a 100 card deck.
@Impossible The RC has made many changes to EDH core rules over the years. You used to have to use a legends elder dragon, but they opened it up to all legendary creatures. You used to have to care specifically about card color, then they invented CI to allow for Memnarch to work. There is a small but growing list of cards that allowing us to break the highlander rule.
Does anyone think that most players are going to suddenly make 250 card decks if they get rid of the 100 card limit? I doubt you'd intentionally see a deck over 100 cards ever, unless it was Battle of Wits.
It's also worth noting that you probably play with and against decks that are over 100 cards already and on a regular basis too, assuming you play paper magic. Everybody buys their sleeves in 100 count boxes, but those boxes always have some extra sleeves, usually 103-108. You're going to run into players who just kept putting cards in sleeves until they ran out and didn't count them exactly.
My personal opinion is that the reasons to keep the maximum deck size locked to 100 don't carry that much weight, so it should be changed to 100 minimum, anysize maximum; even if that maximum size increase only ends up benfiting Battle of Wits decks.
I think it a very real risk that people would just add more "power" stuff to their decks and also add more tutors to get what they need in the moment. Just like when one allows sideboards to allow for "wish" cards, almost invariably people pack those with specialized answers and/or extra threats to be fetched as needed.
I suppose that might occasionally happen, but most people I play with are careful enough about their deck construction that I rather doubt it happens on a regular basis.
Since a Battle of Wits deck would almost certainly involve tutors intended to grab this win condition and flash it into play, I don't see how changing the rules to allow it into the format would actually give us anything that's worth having.
The OP's statement that being able to play more cards would lead to more creative decks is, to my mind, another way to say that person builds bad decks. If you cannot fit your theme into 100 cards, it probably shouldn't be your theme to begin with. There is no reason to change the rules to accommodate someone that wants to jam literally every alternate win-con card into a single deck. Simply cut a few of them. To me that is like saying "I want to play horse tribal but there aren't enough horses so please remove the singleton rule so that I can play 10 Crested Sunmare." There is just no reason for it other than to cover for your own inability to craft a workable deck for your theme.
I'm not convinced that bulky decks are detrimental enough to forbid players from using them. If excessively large decks were a problem, I think we would see this addressed at the competitive level where matches are timed and having a difficult deck to shuffle/search through matters a whole lot more.
As for limiting power, I'm really not following you here. While you're not wrong that removing the 100-card limit won't decrease the power ceiling, it's realistically not going to increase the power ceiling either. As Zygous already mentioned, every 110 card deck is usually just a worse version of a 100 card deck. Even when you have all of Magic's history to pull at your disposal, putting all the best cards into one deck is still just going to result in a worse deck than if you stopped making additions after 100.
This is true. There are certainly consequences to removing the 100-card limit, but I think it's also worth mentioning that these kinds of consequences are only detrimental to the extent that players choose to play decks greater than 100 cards in size.
Given the opportunity, what percentage of the Commander playerbase do you think would choose to do that? 10%? 5%? Less than 1%? I have reason to believe that, whatever the number, it would be incredibly small, and that even when players do choose to include more than 100 cards in their deck, they likely wouldn't include all that many more anyway. In fact, I suspect the most common reason why players would end up playing 101+ cards is because some would want to put a new card in their deck, but they wouldn't know what to take out, so they would just sleeve up the new card without replacing anything. I think we might see a non-zero amount of 102/103 card decks for that reason, but the effects of allowing larger decks in general won't be felt if players seldom choose to play them anyway.
Playing a 101 card deck would defeat the purpose of playing EDH in the first place? How would that be any different than playing with more than one commander? Or playing with multiple copies of the same card?
I see the 100-card deck size as arbitrary and not as a defining feature of the format. The number 100 has no more relevance than if the format were 75, 80, or 120 cards. Sure, 100 is a nice, clean number, but there isn't any particular reason why Commander ought to be a 100-card format beyond the fact that 100 is a sufficiently large (but not too large) number.
If I had to rank the core identities of Commander, their importance would look something like this:
Having a Commander = Color Identity > Singleton > Having Exactly a 100-Card Deck > Multiplayer
This is basically where I stand. There have been times in the past where I've wanted to build decks with more than 100 cards, and I cannot devise a compelling argument for why I should be unable to do so.
This strikes me as a very strange fear, in part because I don't understand where it's coming from. Other formats have already demonstrated that very few (experienced) players will willingly exceed the minimum deck size because they understand that doing so almost always makes decks worse in the process. If you're concerned about players stuffing their decks full of uber powerful cards, players can already do this. Is the 101st next most powerful card really the dealbreaker?
I'm not stoked about Battle of Wits either. Granted, I don't think it would be terrible for the format, but the public's lack of interest for building Battle of Wits decks would keep the number of copies running around at a minimum even if it were a nuisance.
So, I take it you didn't find any of the reasons I outlined in my opening post compelling?
I agree that the removal of the elder dragon rule isn't a great example, but the point Zygous is making here is that the rules are not immutable. The Rules Committee has historically modified them to better improve the format. I've been playing Commander long enough to remember when color identity wasn't a thing and when players could still tuck their opponents' commanders. Changing those rules was an improvement, and removing the 100-card cap seems like it would be an improvement too.
Also worth mentioning is that there are other cards that care about deck size that aren't Battle of Wits. Invincible Hymn, for example.
Out of curiosity, how do you attempt to do this? To my understanding, it's impossible to pad one's library without resorting to wishboard-style cards or silver borders. If this sort of thing were possible within the rules already, I might never have made this thread in the first place.
Depends on what you mean by "bad decks." If you mean that I build competitively unviable decks, that's true. If you mean that I build low-powered decks, that isn't true. If you mean that I'm a poor or inexperienced deckbuilder, that's extremely untrue.
Why? For what reason should players not be free to build larger decks if they want to? People build decks of all sorts of themes in Commander, and the way I see it, there are themes that could exist but simply don't because the rules obliquely prohibit them. 100 cards is enough for almost every deck to work, but it isn't enough for some.
I think you have this backwards. Wanting to remove the 100-card limit isn't about enabling underprivileged decks. That's just a really cool side-effect of doing so. The point of changing the 100-card limit is about removing a pointless and unnecessary rule. You may not see a reason to accommodate 100+ card decks, but to the best of my ability, I cannot see a compelling reason for this rule to even exist in the first place.
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I never said the rules were immutable. I made the point that the rule changes that have taken place have done so to promote an obvious benefit to the format. Allowing 100+ card decks is not an obvious benefit to the format. Sure, it would allow people to do whacky things, but what exactly are you trying to accomplish that cannot be done with 100 cards? You opened the thread with an example of jamming literally every alternate win-con into a deck, and frankly that just sounds awful. Awful to pilot. Awful to play against. And functionally no different than if you just done the same thing with a 100 card deck.
Invincible Hymn still works with the 100 card limit it just has a cap. As opposed to Battle of Wits, which does literal nothing.
As a side note: Let's not say something we might regret later. I am still firmly convinced changing the tuck rule was a mistake.
Infinite wishes. My plan is to assume the flavor of Nicol Bolas winning a Battle of Wits will outweigh any complaints. Besides the deck is pretty terrible so I assume it'll only happen once in a blue moon.
Again, there is exactly Battle of Wits. Excluding that, what theme are you so dead set on that cannot be done in 100 cards?
Honestly, I'm mostly playing Devil's Advocate here. If the RC changed the rule to 100+ tomorrow, I frankly wouldn't care. I don't think it will lead to a degradation of the format or anything like that. There's an extremely high chance I would never see a deck with more than say 105 cards (because someone couldn't decide on the last few cuts for example). But ultimately the change seems completely unnecessary, and I tend to favor the inertia of precedent in these kinds of situations. To me it feels like arguing that the opening hand size should be changed to 8. In the long run, it would probably be a fairly inconsequential change, but why bother?
@JWK and Impossible: The notion that it would allow for more power is false: when building decks, if you play the best top X cards adding more cards means adding cards of equal or lesser quality: if they are better you should be running them instead of what you were running in the first place! There's a reason all the standard decks are always 60 cards even though more is allowed.
I see no real reason to be against it. If you don't want to run more than 100 you don't have too. But why deny others that option when it can't possibly hurt you? (I'm sure i'd much rather play against arrogantAxolotl altwin deck then a 100 card Derevi stax deck).
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Spot on.
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Allowing 100+ card decks is definitely not an obvious benefit to the format. It's for exactly that reason that I find it so difficult to talk others into letting me play with a fatter deck (as opposed to bending the rules in other ways, like using a wishboard). Most players can't see why anyone would want to do such a thing. It's also for that reason why virtually no one is asking to change this rule. There's little motivation to play with fatter decks, so few people are inclined to ask for the opportunity.
With all of that said, I still assert there are reasons, even if they aren't apparent. The best, I believe, is simply because I want to. I want to build decks with more than 100 cards, and to my knowledge, there is no compelling reason for why I shouldn't be able to. Commander, more so than any other format, is built on player expression. Nowhere else do we see such a wide variety of decks, and the format as a whole is richer because of it. That intense vibrancy is one of Commander's greatest features, and further expanding upon the kinds of decks players can build will only help make the format more vibrant. That seems like a plus in my book.
Me, personally? I'd like to make Mr. Bones' Wild Ride a deck instead of the motley assortment of cards it currently is. You may not like the alternate win-con example, but that's all that it is. An example. I'm not interested in building that deck. I just knew someone who was. When they approached me with the idea, I had to tell them that it probably wouldn't work. And not because it wasn't possible, but because the arbitrary deck limit would hamper it too much. There wouldn't be enough space after including everything he wanted for the deck to be functionally viable. And sure, this person could have easily cut down on the number of alternate win-cons, but that's not what they wanted to do. They wanted to play with all of them. They wanted to have the chance for one deck to win in as many different ways as possible. That might sound awful to you, but I can see it being fun.
Currently, with the 100-card limit, I can play with Mr. Bones, but as I've expanded the combo over time, it's barely functional now. For all the ingenuity that I possess, there just isn't a way to make it play the way I want to without access to additional card slots. And believe me. For the last two or so years, I've tried. Besides, what more reason do you need than that it would further allow people to do whacky things?
It does. You just mentioned that you didn't see a reason to change the rules to accommodate a single, pretty terrible card, so I thought I'd provide another example of a card's whose functionality is changed.
I'd be interested in hearing why, but this isn't really the place for that. If you'd like to talk about it, we could move that discussion to PM, or maybe you could make a thread.
I don't see adding Battle of Wits as a negative. I mean, sure, some people are going to build miserable Battle of Wits decks, but that argument extends to just about any deck one can build. There's nothing I find intrinsically terrible about Battle of Wits to make me say that the card is always rotten to play against even if I probably wouldn't enjoy playing against it myself. I think there are some players that might like to play with Battle of Wits, and I believe some of them are going to build fun decks that incorporate it.
A fair enough stance to take. Precedence just tends to mean very little to me, and the designer in me favors things like simplicity, cleanliness, and elegance, especially when it comes to game rules. Cutting away rules to further expand freedoms seems like a win-win to me. Not to say that I don't value structure either though. I wouldn't, for example, ever advocate changing the color identity rule.
I disagree. Allowing players to include more cards in their decks can only increase the power ceiling.
To illustrate, imagine if Commander were a 5-card format instead of a 100-card format. Perhaps players could still build powerful decks in this 5-card format, but do you know what they wouldn't be able to do? Play 6 lands. Because players are capped on the number of cards they can include, it would be nearly impossible to do something like, say, have 10 different cards in play with different effects. The potential for such an event basically can't exist given 5-card decks, but it could exist if decks were greater in size. This potential for new and more powerful events can occur at any deck size. My brawl deck is a great example.
Currently, I play Nissa, Vital Force in Brawl. Something that happens surprisingly often during my games is that I happen to get all of my lands onto the battlefield. If I were capable of playing 100 cards, my power ceiling would increase because, despite making my best draws more inconsistent, I would now be able to generate more mana than I possibly could if my deck were 60 cards. And that's something I certainly have a use for.
Now, to be clear, I get what you're trying to say here. Giving players the chance to play more cards isn't going to change the average power level of decks. The potential power ceiling, on the other hand, will definitely increase though, not that that matters.
The Rules Committee is not responsible for teaching players good deckbuilding practices.
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Do you draft? Is it in your best interest most of the time to build exactly a 40-card deck with the best cards you pulled, or is it better to throw in all the cards, even the weaker ones, thereby diluting the deck and reducing the average power level of the cards you are going to draw? Having to make the hard choices and cut down to the minimum increases the viability of a deck.
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If you have a bad player sit down with a larger then noramal deck size deck in a game of paper magic and it's going to be obvious and it takes very little effort for one of their opponents orheck any other maic player at the LGS to say something like "You're deck would be better uf ut were 100 cards." to get the point across. Heck, even if you find a player who insists their 150 card beast is better, try and persuade them to cut it doen to 100 for a few games and they'll see it perfofm better themselves.
To add an example to two decks AA listed. I think a 5-color modal theme deck would be totally happy to go over 100 cards; you've got multible cycles of charms, 2 and 3 color, 5 commands and 5 confluences, you'd want to include creatures that could do multible things, like all the Morphling varients, Zacama, Primal Calamity, and Deathrite Shaman. We didn't even get to split cards yet and you'd want some support cards for the high numbsr of instants and sorceries you'd be playing. That's the kind of over 100 card deck I'd like to see.
That's a terrible argument. And if you believe it's your best argument, then this discussion is over before it began.
"You may have 100 cards" is simpler, cleaner, and more elegant than "You may have 100 or more cards."
This is not an argument to cut away any rules. This is an argument to change a rule.
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Regular constructed and limited magic has always used a minimum deck size, but there is no maximum limit. It's a change that makes the commander rules consistent with the rules of normal magic.
Yes, "just because I want to" is a terrible argument. That's not the argument I'm trying to make though. The argument I'm trying to make is that I want to AND the 100-card limit isn't core to Commander's identity AND there's no compelling reason for why this rule should exist AND changing this rule would cause virtually no harm to the Commander format.
Imagine if Commander had a rule where if your deck included any cards with hybrid mana costs that it also couldn't include any cards that were illustrated by Noah Bradley. Now, we can see that this rule is totally arbitrary, but why should players be able to include Noah Bradley cards in the same deck as hybrid cards? Well, because they want to. Players want to sometimes include cards illustrated by Noah Bradley even when their decks also happen to sometimes contain hybrid cards. There isn't a compelling reason for why that rule should exist, it isn't a core facet of what Commander is, and changing that rule would cause almost no harm to the format, so there's little reason to not allow players to just do it. It's something they want to do, and they ought to have that freedom. If nobody wanted to, there wouldn't be an impetus to change the rule.
In the case of duplicate Sol Rings, the singleton nature is core to Commander's identity (much like the 100-card minimum deck size is). Players shouldn't be able to include more than one copy of Sol Ring because that delineation makes Commander Commander. It's what separates it from other formats, makes it unique and interesting, and contributes towards why we love this format so much. The same can't be said for the 100-card maximum. Had the 100-card maximum never existed in the first case, we'd never see people clamoring to reduce the max size down to 100.
I'll admit fault here. I was looking at this from the perspective of there being two rules, one that indicated minimum deck size and one that indicated maximum deck size. Removing an entire rule typically simplifies things, but when all it takes is for one sentence to clarify the two, that doesn't carry much weight. I guess I should have called these limitations rather than rules.
For what it's worth, I don't think most players read the rules inserts. I'd wager most players just end up having their friends teach them the rules.
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If somebody reads the rules inserts and makes an exactly 100 card deck, their deck will still be legal. If they think a player using a larger then normal deck is cheating, then it's easy to explain that the rules were changed to allow for larger decks.
That's a bit of a strawman argument. Tossing everything in is almost never better... the exception being in the original Conspiracy drafts, whenever I drafted the Conspiracy that lets all lands produce any color of mana. I played my whole draft pool in those drafts, and almost never lost.
But outside a very special situation like that, while playing everything you draft is a bad idea, sometimes playing a 41 or 42 card deck can work out very well. There have been times I drafted solid decks with good creature curves and had more strong non-creature spells - especially fairly efficient removal - than would fit in a standard 40 card deck with 17 creatures. Breaking the 40-card rule to toss in a third copy of something like Lightning Strike has never turned out badly for me, honestly. In RtR draft, whenever I drafted Boros, the low mana curves allowed me to play 42 card decks pretty easily and constantly keep up the pressure with threats and answers. So, there are exceptions, even though sticking to exactly 40 is the correct move at least 90% of the time (probably more than 95%, actually).
That said, I still think it best to stick with the 100 card rule in Commander.
From a purely statistical standpoint, removing the maximum limit allows for more powerful decks. Its counter intuitive, as the vast, vast majority of decks will be worse for adding cards, but the thing is no deck HAS to add cards. If there is even one deck that benefits from the removal of the 100 card maximum, then removing the maximum increases the possible power of decks overall, because no deck that does not benefit from the extra cards needs to run them, while the decks that do can.
As for my thoughts on removing the limit, I don't think either side really has good arguments, simply because its such an unimportant aspect of the rules that there isn't really a good argument for or against. The format would be so little changed without the maximum that its fairly arbitrary whether it exists or not. I don't think its worth the change just to get Battle of Wits, a few corner case card power boosts, and some wacky decks, but if it were the other way around, and there was no cap, I wouldn't think that it would be worth it to institute the cap either. Of course, some people seem to think it matters more than half of the ban criteria, so there's that.
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My first thought is that it should be allowed. It is the only format that tells you how many cards you can play.
Then I thought about my decks and if there are any decks that would get more cards. I suppose I could squeeze more answers into tutor-heavy decks, but then... I'm diluting my deck. I think, like in other formats, it would be very rare that someone would play more than the minimum number of cards. With a graveyard-based deck with a lot of self-mill, I could see the argument that you see a lot more cards so the "dilution" of the deck is unlikely to make a difference. This makes me worry about some decks having answers to everything while being very potent in comboing off. All I could see this doing is pushing people into having more graveyard hate or more tutor hate, which is fine with me.
I'm for it. Is there a petition on Change.org I can sign?
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That will not matter, the RC makes the rules. You can contact Sheldon or papa_funk here or on their site.
When it comes to these kinds of threads, my motivation is 1.) to have a good faith conversation and 2.) to bring to attention something the RC might not have considered recently. I'm not interested in rallying support for a cause so much as I am interested in trying to realize what could be a better implementation of the Commander format.
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Sure there are dumb decks that could be made were it gone but this thread hasn't really done a good job of showing positives or reasons for this beyond a "I really want to do it" sense, and I doubt that is going to get you there.
Also it has become what people are used to and I find MtG to be a slow turning stick to the course kind of product generally.
Given how long it took to get rid of mana burn specifically, you have a point. On the flip side, the same point shows what you are likely silently acknowledging...anything is possible in the future.
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