Quote from Cereberus632 »Quote from plushpenguin »I've played my fair share of goodstuff decks and I have nothing against anyone who wants to build something of the sort.
However, you just gotta have some kind of plan for a Bribery and a Knowledge Exploitation targeting you. And if the opponent knows that you are playing a goodstuff deck, they are more likely to target you because you are more likely to have something relevant to the current situation.
Which I have talked about already in my first post above. I know there are answers (Homeward Path for one). But telling someone “they shouldn’t build an EDH deck filled with stompy things so they don’t get briberied” is actively against the spirit of the format. Which is why I am posting this thread.
And for the reanimate strategy is distinctly different from telling someone “they cannot/shouldn’t play x which format design to enable you to play because it could cheated out on you by your opponent”.
Nah, not really. Not running such creatures is a way to avoid bribery, but when someone says something like "if you don't want to get your blightsteel taken by bribery, don't run blightsteel" they are also implicitly saying "if you want to run blightsteel, be prepared to see it grabbed by bribery effects." Basically, if you want to run big, stompy, game winning fatties, don't complain when someone else steals them. You've already decided that it's ok to run those creatures so you have no room to complain when they get used against you. Is it a bit of a feel bad to get killed by your own blightsteel? Of course, but no more than it's a feel bad to get killed by someone else's. Heck, it's a feel bad to get your wincon creature exiled by STP as well. These are pretty low level feel bad that are impossible to remove from the game without ruining the game. This isn't a case of locking people out or pulling off a cheesy combo or just targeting on person, it's just a player not having something go well for them, which is going to happen at some point to all but one player at most in any game.
What's actively against the spirit of the format is the attitude that you should be able to run what you want without your opponents being able to take advantage of that in any way. Bribery is as much an EDH card as blightsteel, a fun splashy card that only gets to shine in this format. You think it's fun to run blightsteel, they think it's fun to use bribery to grab it from your deck. If that is really so problematic for you, then you should cut blightsteel because that prevents it, otherwise stop complaining and deal with the fact that it gets stolen sometimes. You know that in addition to counter magic there are other options for dealing with that. You can exile blightsteel, you can hit it with an aura that prevents it from attacking, you can steal it back, etc. If someone manages to stick boots on it oh well, too bad, they got a 2 card combo that needed a card from your deck to work. If that's something they are gunning for every game, taking out blightsteel would be worth it for the look on their face when it's not there, while if it's just something that happens occasionally oh well, sometimes you don't win. You should run some artifact removal to deal with the boot up anyway, it's an equipment that shouldn't be allowed to stick. Throw in homeward path and some tutors for it to turn their bribery in your favor. Through in brand if your red. Through in that mass path to exile spell from Ixalan that exiles all attackers. Use mass sacrifice spells.
Btw, blightsteel is more problematic than bribery, it's a cheesy one hit kill. Its not banworthy, but it checks more boxes than bribery. It's a classic centralizing card whose existence in a game results in it being fought over, it's just not prevelant enough to spur people to run steal effects just to get it. If you consistently include it in your decks, you'll sleep your meta into running more steal effects as it's such a juicy target. That's a problem caused by blightsteel. What you are doing is complaining that the other players want a chance to benefit from you running such a swingy card that can end them out of nowhere. You should also consider that if blightsteel gets hit with bribery and thrown directly at your face rather than used to take out the table first, then perhaps your opponents don't like playing against blightsteel and using it only to take you out as a way to remove it from the game (and send you a message, which they also sent by literally telling you to stop running it). People don't like getting one hit killed by a surprise blightsteel, as you seem to be figuring out.
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Again, not seeing the upside here.
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This could produce obscene amounts of mana in my Jhoira deck if it came down early, and even though my Brudiclad and Rashmi decks aren't quite optimized for it, it would still be easily the best land in either of those decks.
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On the positive side, pretty much everyone in the local meta who has been playing for more than a few months now also recognizes Paradox Engine as a "kill on sight" card.
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I would personally laugh my ass off to see Sir Shandlar kill anyone ever. Not exactly relevant to your point, but still.
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Vandalblast to blow up everyone's rocks? They use their lands to cast more rocks and other stuff and keep playing.
Wrath effects to zap all the creatures? Players use lands to cast more creatures and other stuff, the game moves on.
Blow up all the lands? Most of the players, save those (including, non-coincidentally, the one who played the MLD) who are prepared for this, draw cards hoping to draw into something that might put them back into the game. Most of the time they draw and go. Even if they draw a land, they mostly draw and go until they do that a couple of times. The game crawls to the stall, unless the MLD guy can pull off a win pretty much immediately.
People who don't see the difference in these conditions either should play only with people who like the same thing, or maybe just stick to playing competitive formats. Or playing with themselves, I suppose.
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At the game shop where I most often play EDH, there is a fairly large group of players who are less competitive, and a smaller but very active group of players into a more competitive version of the format. The cEDH people are cool with MLD, hard stax, fast combo and so forth. The other players mostly tend to not be into those things. Neither group is wrong, they just have different preferences and different expectations as to what they want their games to be like. It works best if the more cEDH people play with likeminded players, and the less competitive players also play with more likeminded players. The guy who brings the MLD or the Stasis lock deck to play with the less competitive players is not really following the social contract.
Also, again, the idea that MLD really controls ramp well is largely fallacious. MLD is a control strategy, focused on limiting resources. I have a friend who calls MLD "lazy stax." It attempts to do a lot of what stax decks do, but in an easier manner and one harder for most decks to interact with.
Those who advocate for MLD aren't really so much wanting to control ramp so much as they are advocating for a more competitive version of the game which allows them to utilize a strategy not favored by the majority of the format's players to control the board in a manner favorable to the way they have designed their decks. That's fine that they want that, but it's also fine that most of the player base doesn't want that.
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Big props for Gishath. No, he's not good in cEDH. That strikes me as a feature, not a bug.
In my opinion, if a big stompy dinosaur deck doesn't have a place at the table, then maybe you should be playing Vintage, Legacy or Modern rather than Commander.