Something I totally forgot was that staff of domination was banned for a couple years there.
That's probably the most comparable card to PE except it's *far* more widely played than PE and significantly easier to go off with, and does very similar stuff. So there is at least some precedent for a contemporary combo enabler being banned just for being an annoying combo enabler that sees lots of play (though it did subsequently get unbanned).
Changing to 30 life will change the format far more than banning even a large number of combo cards.
They already moved it down once, and it was not the end of the world. The original rules was 200/(#of players). Yes I think it would have a strong affect, but so would a reversal on combo. They have been more permissive of the archetype, not less, the last few years. Reversing course and upsetting the idea of 'play good cards responsibly' takes a hit.
Again, 30 also lightly disrupts the ramp into infinity games. And helps people team up to kill established threats.
That was before I started playing EDH and I've been playing since 2012. From what I can tell from the changelog, that was before they even started keeping a changelog in 2009 (http://mtgcommander.net/EDH_Root/changelog.php)
I don't think it's comparable at all. The population is wildly different.
If the perceived problem is that people are actively trying to combo out every game... and not that they have combos in their deck that they sometimes draw into.... then the obvious answer is that low cmc tutors need to be banned.
I have always said that I dislike tutors. This format is singleton, and there are enough tutors in a 3 colour deck to effectively play the same win condition in every game. Doesn't feel like singleton.
Sure, some people tutor out their jank synergies. Those decks can settle for less aggressive tutors, especially if that also means that combo decks are much weaker.
The issue isn't that people are playing scepter and reversal. It is that there are so many ways to tutor it that they may as well go for it every game.
I treat Chord of Calling like a toolbox card. But I am not getting an Acidic Slime to blow up a Cradle if I can get a Protean Hulk and win the game right away. This is the issue. Once you have the tutors, it is usually correct to tutor the combo. So you either restrict yourself by not including tutors or not including combos or you end up comboing out consistently.
The problem with this is that it--
1) is a *massive* change to the format, touching basically half of all decks if not more and requiring a banlist addition of at least 10 cards that all have broad fair uses outside of combos
2) would necessitate banning several additional generals
3) would just be replaced with filtering and cantrips immediately
4) has an extreme financial implication; it would likely cause a swing of billions in the value of cards. Billions.
Sure, but if you play it turn 1 or 2 it's far more impactful. Hence "arguably." And nobody ever worries about SA as a topdeck. The complaint is always turn 1.
Really a footnote in the discussion. If this ever happens I would be very surprised. The fundamental change to the format is way too drastic.
I suspect they may come out with some semi-official game options or something at some point ( e.g. 30 life, no commander damage, etc.). But the more I think on it the more I think the life total change is way too drastic at this point.
Good catch. Man, that replacement effect stuff is really sloppy. My quick reading of it was it was triggered like the Koz.
regardless, i don't think this thread goes anywhere without a comparison to the banlist criteria. That's pretty much the baseline for every ban discussion.
I guess that all of the "negatives" that you listed are things that I see as positives.
I agree that most people don't play combos [or combo decks] and, like you, I don't see combos as a problem. They don't make for the best games but they are going to exist. However, I believe that issues with combo are more a structure of the format (i.e. 40 life, multiplayer) rather than a function of the banned list (i.e. you can't possibly have a palatable banned list that eliminates it).
Fetches/Shocks, Night's Whisper, and Mana Crypt should all have meaningful costs/downsides/drawbacks. I don't understand how that is a negative. You said that all people build with 40 life in mind...but are you going to ignore that almost every magic card is designed with 20 life in mind? Having an extra 20 life to buffer fetch->shock is ridiculous.
Serra Ascendant would be weaker. At 30 starting life, a fetch on turn 1 (or any chip damage) would stop it from entering as 6/6. Lower life total would probably lead to more early creatures and more early removal spells. How does lower life make it better?
Instead of banning every single "pay life" card printed, it's just cleaner to have life start at 30 instead of 40. There's a lot of "pay life" cards that are fair but just get too much juice at 40 life.
Turn one plays being a critical part of the game is a good thing. Explain why it shouldn't be the case? Come into play tapped lands are mostly bad, but there are many tools available for deck builders besides fetch->ABUR dual to fix mana. Are they not as good? Sure, but I think almost every single deck builder worth his salt would tell you that $$$-to-effectiveness, ABUR duals offer the worst return over any other upgrade. Lower life total doesn't pressure players into feeling like they "have to" buy duals. That's just a non-sequitur.
You're suggesting banning Kiki-Jiki? That's ridiculous. More people would dislike not being able to play their cards than starting out at 30.
I've played in so many games where players with creatures on boards, facing no blockers, still skip attacking. "Don't want to make enemies." There is truth in that. But the complete answer is just that in the face of 3/4 other players with 40 life, chip damage feels meaningless.
You keep reading negatives somehow despite me saying differences and consequences, and I'm really confused by that so I'll take one more stab and then check out.
Changing to 30 life will change the format far more than banning even a large number of combo cards.
I do think that downward curve pressure is potentially very bad for casual deck construction and budget manabases.
Lower life total -> faster games -> more non-games for slow manabases -> pressure to improve manabases
The nature of this format is that it's really not implicit that all of those things are good. Lots of people like the slower games you malign.
I don't actually know what the preference is broadly, but I wouldn't pretend to know best in that respect - just say that it's a concern.
Saying things like "Turn one plays being a critical part of the game is a good thing" makes me really question your motivation. That's the type of "efficiency is king" statement that is making a lot of assumptions about how people "should" play magic that may not apply to EDH.
Kiki-Jiki was just a hypothetical as a "random combo card" you could ban. I'm not saying you should. I said you *could* and it would impact the format less than changing the life totals.
Serra Ascendant is arguably a far more powerful turn one play with 30 life. it's a 5 turn clock instead of 7 and good luck ever coming back from those life swings if people's decks are built for 30 life
I don't know that i think lowering life totals is necessarily bad but it would easily impact the game more than banning say the top 20 combo enablers.
Most people don't play combos but everyone has a life total and their decks are built with that in mind.
Fetches and shocks change. Night's whisper is worse. Mana crypt can become a death sentence. Sweepers have to be player more and cheaper.
So many impacts it's hard to even guess at. Go find every card in edh that says pay life and think on it. Serra ascendant actually gets better by a lot because now its a 5 turn clock instead of 7.
Turn one plays become way more critical. Bad manabase with tons of etb tapped lands become waaaaay worse.
The consequence are wildly unpredictable but it's far more likely to kill the format than banning kiki and ashnods altar or whatever.
I think the worst consequences I can think of relate to the pressure to play expensive manabase.
If games are 2 turns shorter on average your early turns are even more important. So there's a lot of pressure to lower curve, play expensive cheap ramp, mulligan aggressively and so on.
The gulf between cheap and expensive decks could widen significantly just by the casual consequences on manabase further stratifying the community by budget. That's already a thing but more so when the games are faster.
I'm not sure it's worth a separate thread but I've been noodling on it in the other thread about Sheldon being grumpy about combos, and I'd like to have a brief, focused discussion on the cost-benefits of banning a number of the most efficient combo enablers. This would be sort of stemming from the phrase in the current banlist document of:
Creates Undesirable Game States. Losing is not an undesirable game state. However, a game in which one or more players, playing comparable casual decks, have minimal participation in the game is something which players should be steered away from. Warning signs include massive overall resource imbalance, early-game cards that lock players out, and cards with limited function other than to win the game out of nowhere.
This phrase can be broadly or narrowly interpreted of course, but suppose you took a pretty aggressive look at this and some of the proposals people have floated to fix this problem.
* Lower the stating life total to 30 or 20 to create more pressure on combo decks
* Ban all tutors other than those on lands and for basic lands
* Ban all the broken tutors
* Ban all fast mana (at minimum sol ring, mana crypt and mana vault)
All of these approaches present a major change to the format. Deck construction changes mightily, many playstyles and cards are invalidated, most combo decks, black and green take a serious beatin depending on how hard you go at it, cantrips get over-represented potentially encouraging blue. All of the changes fundamentally shift the balance of the game in major ways.
These things also cost people absolutely absurd amounts of money. Tutors are all worth quite a lot, some of the mana rocks are worth hundreds of dollars. People have to take apart entire decks worth thousands.
Assuming that reigning in combo in the format is something you want, wouldn't it be significantly lower risk to ban a few combo cards and see if it makes an impact? Most of these types of cards have reasonable replacements for their fair utility (ex. Ashnod's altar has a number of alternative open sac outlets for most decks; Food Chain has basically no fair uses except in token decks who have Earthcraft and Cryptolith Rite as an alternative).
The people who get upset are CEDH players, whose decks are often close to interchangeable - the decks are so staple driven that your deck is rarely going to suddenly be worthless, other than the combo cards themselves. Gaea's Cradle isn't going to tank if Food Chain gets banned because there's a long line of cradle decks right behind FC.
I'm not going to make a list yet, but I wanted to see what people think? Is that completely ridiculous?
I can't say enough that I don't think we necessarily need to do anything, but I think *if we did* there isn't really another rational thing to do but ban some combo cards. Everything else is just extreme as heck.
Follow me on the hypothetical here and assume that as the format police you actually want to do something about "rampant combo" or whatever. Don't get mired in whether we should or should not care about combo. Assume you run the format and you do want to curtail combo.
I think lowering starting life totals is the least "exotic" suggestion. For anyone wanting to keep the starting totals at 40, how come? How does giving 4 players such high life totals make games better than having them start at 30 instead?
Banning cards is a massive feel bad. Like you said, Isochron Scepter was okay for years until Dramatic Reversal. In fact, it was dismissed as actively bad for a long time.
A lot of the discussion has gone far off the path/problem that Sheldon laid out. He's not talking about cEDH combo decks or decks built entirely around combos. He talked about how decks too often pack some type of infinite loop to end games "just in case." However, the "just in case" scenario just happens to become every game. There's no amount of bannings that can eliminate theses types of "just in case" combo packages.
Games where all previous interactions are deemed meaningless through an out of nowhere infinite occurs are not satisfying. How many times do you sweat leaving someone at 4-5 life because you just know that everyone packs "infinites?" Lowering life totals just helps games end faster and more games will end organically.
And for the types of games Sheldon's referring to, most of the infinites are out of nowhere. The infinities have no synergy with the rest of the deck. They are simply "oopsies" I have the loop. And they're incredibly unsatisfying because the game and board-state never built up for the game to end that way.
He's not discussing cEDH battles where there are stacks that go 6-7 spells deep, where passing priority properly is important. When combos end those games, they are satisfying because the entire game was fought back and forth along that axis (card draw, counter-magic, decks with only 1v1 instant speed disruption).
One archetype that hasn't been discussed so far is Ramp. Lower life total definitely helps aggro vs ramp.
Lowering life totals is pretty format defining change. It'd make a huge impact. I think it's far more risky than banning and unbanning personally. You could ban 20 or 30 cards and it would be less impactful than changing the life totals to how the game fundamentally plays--if they were the right 20 or 30 cards.
I'm not saying it's wrong, but banning a few cards that are only really impactful in CEDH and the upper end of casual would be far less of a change.
I'm not going to get deep into banning discussions or anything but I've heard this same thing from a bunch of players who play the traditionally powerful foodchain generals (before FS was printed) - maelstrom wanderer, prossh, and momir vig.
"Yeah, food chain's in there, it's just so good, but I don't really go for it."
I have heard the exact same thing re: Paradox engine from a guy who made a really cool Urza equipment deck and then paradox engine'd us - like why man? "It's just too good."
As much as people like to pretend it doesn't, CEDH *does* trickle down to normal CEDH. There has been downward pressure on curves in EDH for years now. I'd bet if you could plot the average curve over the last say, 5 years, it's gone from probably 3.5+ to 3 if not a little lower.
I think the CEDH scene is a huge driver toward normalizing both combo and stax play in non-CEDH playgroups; people run into guys running pubstomp decks, they take ideas from CEDH decks, etc. [card}Winter Orb[/card] isn't quite mainstream but Urza has done a lot to make it acceptable in casuals -- hey, it's just soooo good with my general man!
Other than "do nothing" there isn't a lower risk proposal than to start banning the egregious combo cards. tutors have been a pillar of EDH for so long that if you start banning Demonic tutor you're going to impact more decks than if you banned PE, Food Chain and Isochron Scepter combined.
If you ban the top 5 egregious tutors, you'd hit nearly 25% of decks in the game, vs. probably 4%.
Fast mana is even more impactful. You're talking about every single deck being impacted and then a huge portion of others even more.
Again, I don't want to get into the merits of the bans themselves because this isn't the place for it, but if you want to talk simple, low risk solution, nothing comes close to banning some combo cards and seeing what happens. Again, assuming you think there is a problem, which I am not personally convinced of.
Just wanted to say this deck is frigging great. Good design man. not very often I see something in CEDH forum that strikes me as really cool, and this is super cool. Nice to see something than the same pile of 30 cantrips, tutors and mana rocks with the same suite of removal spells, and then a different combo.
Yeah and I'm not really convinced it's a problem personally. I think some of the combos are a bit too easy and powerful and resilient, but there really is a huge variety of combo decks.
I have a control-combo deck (inalla), an aggro-control deck with a combo finisher (ephara), and a couple weird ramp decks (gitrog and maelstrom wanderer). All of my decks play pretty differently, despite there being combos in some.
I keep hearing a lot of tutors and ramp are the problem but I see lots of people using those responsibly and in fun ways, but there are an awful lot of "must include" combo cards like food chain, isochron scepter and paradox engine that are independently very strong cards and also combo engines. I think those cards are more likely the problem than tutors and fast mana or even life totals.
Back when I got into EDH the go to mana combo was Basalt Monolith with rings or power artifact. These cards were all pretty clunky and awkward to find and half the combo didn't do much by itself. Almost no one used food chain really until well after Prossh was printed and popularized it by being a one-card combo basically (and then Eternal Scourge getting printed did not help. Isochron scepter didn't really see much play until Dramatic Reversal either, and of course Protean Hulk was banned.
Storm decks also have come a really long way since the earlier ones, with reservoir and some of the new nutterbutter enchantments (for casuals) and reversal/scepter and dark petition, etc.
Now combo packages are super dense, stronger, and faster. It's crazy to me how much faster and tighter decks have gotten even on the less than CEDH side. And it's mostly related to cards printed in the last few years.
I'm not really sure what to make of it to be honest but I would not shed any tears if a couple of the more degenerate pieces went away. I think that could be done with a lot less impact than some of the more exotic suggestions I've heard, if it were even warranted.
yeah, I think I am going to pick one of those up just to have it in the arsenal, but That opens a lot of doors. Deck has a number of potential mana dumps.
Altar actually goes infinite with reveillark/guide/venser or reveillark/body double/venser as well, and recruiter can start many chains for infinite mana and finish anything starting with Lark -- Recruiter + Lark is a combo with trophy mage.
That in essence makes intuition a 1 card combo (intuition for sun titan/reveillark/recruiter of the guard). It kinda is now but Phyrexian Altar is about 2-3 mana more efficient than the Blasting Station chains.
Something I totally forgot was that staff of domination was banned for a couple years there.
That's probably the most comparable card to PE except it's *far* more widely played than PE and significantly easier to go off with, and does very similar stuff. So there is at least some precedent for a contemporary combo enabler being banned just for being an annoying combo enabler that sees lots of play (though it did subsequently get unbanned).
Food for thought anyway.
That was before I started playing EDH and I've been playing since 2012. From what I can tell from the changelog, that was before they even started keeping a changelog in 2009 (http://mtgcommander.net/EDH_Root/changelog.php)
I don't think it's comparable at all. The population is wildly different.
The problem with this is that it--
1) is a *massive* change to the format, touching basically half of all decks if not more and requiring a banlist addition of at least 10 cards that all have broad fair uses outside of combos
2) would necessitate banning several additional generals
3) would just be replaced with filtering and cantrips immediately
4) has an extreme financial implication; it would likely cause a swing of billions in the value of cards. Billions.
Really a footnote in the discussion. If this ever happens I would be very surprised. The fundamental change to the format is way too drastic.
I suspect they may come out with some semi-official game options or something at some point ( e.g. 30 life, no commander damage, etc.). But the more I think on it the more I think the life total change is way too drastic at this point.
regardless, i don't think this thread goes anywhere without a comparison to the banlist criteria. That's pretty much the baseline for every ban discussion.
You keep reading negatives somehow despite me saying differences and consequences, and I'm really confused by that so I'll take one more stab and then check out.
Changing to 30 life will change the format far more than banning even a large number of combo cards.
I do think that downward curve pressure is potentially very bad for casual deck construction and budget manabases.
Lower life total -> faster games -> more non-games for slow manabases -> pressure to improve manabases
The nature of this format is that it's really not implicit that all of those things are good. Lots of people like the slower games you malign.
I don't actually know what the preference is broadly, but I wouldn't pretend to know best in that respect - just say that it's a concern.
Saying things like "Turn one plays being a critical part of the game is a good thing" makes me really question your motivation. That's the type of "efficiency is king" statement that is making a lot of assumptions about how people "should" play magic that may not apply to EDH.
Kiki-Jiki was just a hypothetical as a "random combo card" you could ban. I'm not saying you should. I said you *could* and it would impact the format less than changing the life totals.
edit: corrected, I didn't realize that it was a replacement effect and worked like that! But yeah.
Most people don't play combos but everyone has a life total and their decks are built with that in mind.
Fetches and shocks change. Night's whisper is worse. Mana crypt can become a death sentence. Sweepers have to be player more and cheaper.
So many impacts it's hard to even guess at. Go find every card in edh that says pay life and think on it. Serra ascendant actually gets better by a lot because now its a 5 turn clock instead of 7.
Turn one plays become way more critical. Bad manabase with tons of etb tapped lands become waaaaay worse.
The consequence are wildly unpredictable but it's far more likely to kill the format than banning kiki and ashnods altar or whatever.
I think the worst consequences I can think of relate to the pressure to play expensive manabase.
If games are 2 turns shorter on average your early turns are even more important. So there's a lot of pressure to lower curve, play expensive cheap ramp, mulligan aggressively and so on.
The gulf between cheap and expensive decks could widen significantly just by the casual consequences on manabase further stratifying the community by budget. That's already a thing but more so when the games are faster.
This phrase can be broadly or narrowly interpreted of course, but suppose you took a pretty aggressive look at this and some of the proposals people have floated to fix this problem.
* Lower the stating life total to 30 or 20 to create more pressure on combo decks
* Ban all tutors other than those on lands and for basic lands
* Ban all the broken tutors
* Ban all fast mana (at minimum sol ring, mana crypt and mana vault)
All of these approaches present a major change to the format. Deck construction changes mightily, many playstyles and cards are invalidated, most combo decks, black and green take a serious beatin depending on how hard you go at it, cantrips get over-represented potentially encouraging blue. All of the changes fundamentally shift the balance of the game in major ways.
These things also cost people absolutely absurd amounts of money. Tutors are all worth quite a lot, some of the mana rocks are worth hundreds of dollars. People have to take apart entire decks worth thousands.
Assuming that reigning in combo in the format is something you want, wouldn't it be significantly lower risk to ban a few combo cards and see if it makes an impact? Most of these types of cards have reasonable replacements for their fair utility (ex. Ashnod's altar has a number of alternative open sac outlets for most decks; Food Chain has basically no fair uses except in token decks who have Earthcraft and Cryptolith Rite as an alternative).
The people who get upset are CEDH players, whose decks are often close to interchangeable - the decks are so staple driven that your deck is rarely going to suddenly be worthless, other than the combo cards themselves. Gaea's Cradle isn't going to tank if Food Chain gets banned because there's a long line of cradle decks right behind FC.
I'm not going to make a list yet, but I wanted to see what people think? Is that completely ridiculous?
I can't say enough that I don't think we necessarily need to do anything, but I think *if we did* there isn't really another rational thing to do but ban some combo cards. Everything else is just extreme as heck.
Follow me on the hypothetical here and assume that as the format police you actually want to do something about "rampant combo" or whatever. Don't get mired in whether we should or should not care about combo. Assume you run the format and you do want to curtail combo.
What else would you do?
Lowering life totals is pretty format defining change. It'd make a huge impact. I think it's far more risky than banning and unbanning personally. You could ban 20 or 30 cards and it would be less impactful than changing the life totals to how the game fundamentally plays--if they were the right 20 or 30 cards.
I'm not saying it's wrong, but banning a few cards that are only really impactful in CEDH and the upper end of casual would be far less of a change.
I'm not going to get deep into banning discussions or anything but I've heard this same thing from a bunch of players who play the traditionally powerful foodchain generals (before FS was printed) - maelstrom wanderer, prossh, and momir vig.
"Yeah, food chain's in there, it's just so good, but I don't really go for it."
I have heard the exact same thing re: Paradox engine from a guy who made a really cool Urza equipment deck and then paradox engine'd us - like why man? "It's just too good."
As much as people like to pretend it doesn't, CEDH *does* trickle down to normal CEDH. There has been downward pressure on curves in EDH for years now. I'd bet if you could plot the average curve over the last say, 5 years, it's gone from probably 3.5+ to 3 if not a little lower.
I think the CEDH scene is a huge driver toward normalizing both combo and stax play in non-CEDH playgroups; people run into guys running pubstomp decks, they take ideas from CEDH decks, etc. [card}Winter Orb[/card] isn't quite mainstream but Urza has done a lot to make it acceptable in casuals -- hey, it's just soooo good with my general man!
Other than "do nothing" there isn't a lower risk proposal than to start banning the egregious combo cards. tutors have been a pillar of EDH for so long that if you start banning Demonic tutor you're going to impact more decks than if you banned PE, Food Chain and Isochron Scepter combined.
If you ban the top 5 egregious tutors, you'd hit nearly 25% of decks in the game, vs. probably 4%.
Fast mana is even more impactful. You're talking about every single deck being impacted and then a huge portion of others even more.
Again, I don't want to get into the merits of the bans themselves because this isn't the place for it, but if you want to talk simple, low risk solution, nothing comes close to banning some combo cards and seeing what happens. Again, assuming you think there is a problem, which I am not personally convinced of.
What kinda stuff does that do to the format? Things are far more complicated than they are often made out to be.
I have a control-combo deck (inalla), an aggro-control deck with a combo finisher (ephara), and a couple weird ramp decks (gitrog and maelstrom wanderer). All of my decks play pretty differently, despite there being combos in some.
I keep hearing a lot of tutors and ramp are the problem but I see lots of people using those responsibly and in fun ways, but there are an awful lot of "must include" combo cards like food chain, isochron scepter and paradox engine that are independently very strong cards and also combo engines. I think those cards are more likely the problem than tutors and fast mana or even life totals.
Back when I got into EDH the go to mana combo was Basalt Monolith with rings or power artifact. These cards were all pretty clunky and awkward to find and half the combo didn't do much by itself. Almost no one used food chain really until well after Prossh was printed and popularized it by being a one-card combo basically (and then Eternal Scourge getting printed did not help. Isochron scepter didn't really see much play until Dramatic Reversal either, and of course Protean Hulk was banned.
Storm decks also have come a really long way since the earlier ones, with reservoir and some of the new nutterbutter enchantments (for casuals) and reversal/scepter and dark petition, etc.
Now combo packages are super dense, stronger, and faster. It's crazy to me how much faster and tighter decks have gotten even on the less than CEDH side. And it's mostly related to cards printed in the last few years.
I'm not really sure what to make of it to be honest but I would not shed any tears if a couple of the more degenerate pieces went away. I think that could be done with a lot less impact than some of the more exotic suggestions I've heard, if it were even warranted.
Altar actually goes infinite with reveillark/guide/venser or reveillark/body double/venser as well, and recruiter can start many chains for infinite mana and finish anything starting with Lark -- Recruiter + Lark is a combo with trophy mage.
That in essence makes intuition a 1 card combo (intuition for sun titan/reveillark/recruiter of the guard). It kinda is now but Phyrexian Altar is about 2-3 mana more efficient than the Blasting Station chains.