Greetings! I notice that I haven't posted in this thread in nearly two years. Well, I recently pulled Edgar Markov out over a three day weekend and wanted to see what I have missed while in that time.
Regarding my personal deck, I have been able to add cards here and there thanks in part to Time Spiral remastered and Battlebond coming to Peru and delivering quality reprints such as Minion's Murmurs and Diabolic Intent.
Something which I did a search for and saw we haven't talked about through 22 pages of this thread is Reforge the Soul. Yes, it is not as good as Wheel of Fortune. I am not advocating it be placed in the most optimal version of the deck. However, for those playing on a budget, it is a fantastic card which can be tutored up to the top of the deck to force Miracle. Moreover, and let us be honest here, a true Wheel is worth the 5 mana if/when you have to hard cast it. I would rather see RtS than the bidding war Wheel. Finally, just like with Wheel of Fortune, you can draw into free mana and keep casting spells that same turn with your new grip of 7.
I haven't checked in for some time, so here I am. Over the Covid 19 global crisis and beyond, I have been updating my build and playing through Skype when I can. I always come back to this list to see what is going on and if there is any cool tech to plunder. I am glad that this thread has not been abandoned. As always, this is an inspiration for my budget build.
My best friend has a Scion of the Ur Dragon deck and it is imperative that I have ways of removing and/or blocking his dragons, or I just lose. Scion can ramp into play by the 4th turn and knock me out through the air on turn 5. Based on the turn order, that gives me 4-5 turns to have an answer or scoop. Similarly, my wife plays Inalla which can ramp on turn two, cast Trophy Mage on turn three and combo on turn 4... in addition to other paths to victory. The best I can do is attack Inalla and try to have removal in the form of Path or StP or something for the Scion.
You know how much I respect your build, but against the decks I face, I find it better to have some interaction (instant speed removal) and some more anthems such as Glory of Warfare and combat modifiers like Dolmen Gate or Cover of Darkness which were both older tech you had shared before. In my games, it has been less about the fast initial rush as it has been about being mana efficient and having individually strong attacks that go in as unblocked as possible.
I really feel like the wonderful thing about Edgar Markov is that, depending on your budget and meta, it can be a "Your millage may vary" kind of a deck, and this is a wonderful starting place to see how it fits with your meta. Never stop updating and improving it. I deeply appreciate it.
Maybe nobody cares or maybe we are not allowed to talk about it here, but I wonder where better than the Commander forums is a better place to address topics related to The Command Zone episodes? Specifically, I wanted to dive deeper into episode #335 which came out a few days ago (June 11, 2020).
Link: https://youtu.be/rtfqJjLbADA
To begin, even they admit to a small sample size. So, is the whole episode a waste of time as a result?
Secondly, I feel in many ways it has some confirmation to things we have written about for years and have had some interesting back and forth talks on.
I, for one, have a pet peeve about how often preview cards and spoilers are often dismissed and a caveat added on "but it will be good in Commander" while I am sitting here thinking, "No. Just because a big splashy creatures or spell costs 6+ doesn't mean it will be good in Commander." I know it doesn't matter and I can dismiss the card, but it bothers me that it is said and influences how people evaluate cards and perpetuate these myths.
I'm the video there are some key talking points that I remember and wanted to address: How often do you cast your commander?
They claim the number is an average of less than twice per game and even low cmc commanders are far under 3 times peer game.
I agree with this and have found that interesting when talking about building around one's Commanders.
Lowcmc Commanders are often not worth paying the tax for a third time or more (6 generic Mana). High cmc Commanders are often too expensive to cast a third time, let alone more. Even middle of the road CMC Commanders (say 4-6 Mana?) Are not worth paying 10-12 on even if you get that late in the game.
This is why having ways to get your commander back from the graveyard or to return it to your hand is far better than letting it return to the command zone after you have cast it a second time... assuming you have in the first place.
How many board wipes are played in a game?
Again, they say somewhere more than one and less than two on average and almost never three or more.
This is close to my heart as someone who owns an Edgar Markov deck and am sick of hearing how that deck folds to a board wipe. Not to get off topic, but a well built Edgar deck can easily rebuild from a wipe or two, and rarely does one ever see a third. If any deck would, it is an Edgar deck, and with all of the card draw mine has, even a third wipe is just a speed bump which forces everybody else to reset as well.
Asin any game of magic, you never want to over extend, but if there ever was a time to, it would be after a second wipe, as the chances of a third are slim to none.
How many turns does a game last?
They found the range of 8-12, with more ending at 9 than any other turn.
I tend to agree with this data point as well. Some games will take longer but are the exception.
I find that turns 1-3 are where we fix our Mana, cast ramp and utility.
Turns 4-6 are where threats, answers, and card draw is cast.
I have found turns 7-9 are when the explosive plays are made. The punches and counter punches. Attempts at combo and stopping said attempts. Players end to get knocked out and the game swings on a key choice of who to take out and how the following turn goes.
How many attacks are made in a game? How many by a single player?
I found it interesting and also a confirmation that many decks don't attack at all or might make as few as two attack in an entire game, while the "beat down" deck attacks as many (or few) times as 6 per game.
What can we learn, if anything, from this?
How manny spells which cost 6+ are cast by a player or in the while game?
This was another low number, and the sample size was not looking at cEDH games.
As has been said on The Command Zone many times and I agree with deeply, it is far better to chain together multiple lowered cmc spells than it is to cast most single haymakers. Sure, there are some very powerful high cmc spells, but many are cheated into play rather than cast... often by said cheaper cmc spells you chain together.
I have looked up rulings for Gadwick and something I don't feel was ever covered, or at least not easily found, was how a token copy is treated.
I assume that once Gadwick is in play that means it is no longer on the stack and X doesn't mean anything... HOWEVER, I have read that Panharmonicon and Naban do allow you to draw X, as X is a set value. So, when does it stop being a set value? Essentially, if I pay 1 for Inalla's trigger, does the copy come in with that set X value, or will that copy set X to zero?
I am trying to help my wife with her Inalla deck and we want to keep it a fun Wizard tribal deck that tries to win through value more than a cutthroat combo deck.
Turn 3 Urza's Incubator into turn 4 Gadwick where X=2 and that cost is reduced by Urza's Incubator, then should the 4th Mana be spent to make a token and draw 4 cards... or do you draw zero and should have set X=3?
This very subforum has important posts pinned as well for good reason. Use the bottom and locked one titled:
Official Threads and Commander Resources.
Within it, you will find countless resources. The two most important ones are probably:
•Big guide to building your EDH / Commander Deck
•Playing Commander to Win
They bith give advice on the format as a whole.
Also, a deck is never finished. Build something and play with it. Note its flaws and how you want to improve it. Winning is not the end game. Having a fun experience with friends is.
Some generic advice?
Ramp is important. Magic is a game of resource development. Spells are not free and the tempo of the game is bottlenecked by the casting cost of spells and your limit of one land per turn. Ramp allows you to break this parity, and trust me when I say that your opponents are going to use ramp. If you do not, or are not using enough, you will fall behind.
Card draw is also very important. While duels can be and are won with little to no card draw, they also end with the winner at zero cards in hand or very few. In multiplayer, if you beat one opponent down and used all of your respurces to do so like in a duel, you will be left dead in the water with two or more other opponents who are ready to finish you off.
Just as with ramp, card draw helps break the parity of only drawing once on your turn. Ramp will exhaust your rescources in hand, and card draw will replinish them.
In competitive games, decks try to win on turn 4 or so. In casual games, turns 1-4 are often kmown as the development stage. Turns 5-8 are when threats and answers are exchanged. Turns 9-12 are when Most players hit their end game. Sure, some groups and games go longer, but at that stage, players tend to get knocked out and the end game is reached.
Finally, and has been touched on by FunkyDragon, it helps to have plenty of low and mid cost spells. Sure, this is a format with big splashy plays, but as you will hear on The Command Zone, some of the most powerful turns are NOT those which one big spell was cast, but rather when multiple small spells were chained together.
Lol, the topic of the thread is "infinite mana combos" and reiterate + song + goggles doesn't generate infinite mana, in fact it consumes it. Even with cloud key it doesn't generate infinite mana (infinite storm, granted, but that's not the topic). With semblance anvil it does, though. Or arcane melee for that matter. So...why are we still talking about cloud key? Why are we *still* talking about goggles?
Sure, it's possible that your opponents won't have 7 tapped lands between them, but it's really unlikely, let alone for multiple turns (If no one is casting anything you're probably doing alright, and if they're all draw-go control you were never resolving this combo anyway). And it's actually a straightforward 2-card infinite-mana combo, unlike whatever seething song + reiterate + cloud key(?) + goggles(???) + storm card monstrosity you're trying to construct. Which is *still* not an infinite mana combo.
I mean, if it were me, I'd say "oops, my bad, I thought I had a combo when I didn't" rather than double-down, avoid the advice that would actually make the combo at least semi-work, and try to poke holes in other much-more-functional (and admittedly well-known) combos. But to each his own, I suppose.
Also, dammit, this topic is from 2012. Freaking necromancers on this forum, man.
Well, even without Mizzix in play or any experience, Thousand-Year Storm is another way to go off.
If TYS makes it around the table, then it is easy to cast a cantip into a ritual. Let the the copy of the ritual resolve and use that mana to feed half the cost of Reiterate and then you will get two extra copies of reiterate which will result in infinite mana + infinite storm + infinite access to reiterate (though it does not matter). You can keep the cantrip on the stack as well and target it as needed with reiterate to draw as much from your deck as you desire without fear of decking yourself in a stupid suicide misplay.
With a deck full of forks and rituals, I have been able to just jam TYS into play with counter backup and power out wins in a single turn. While Reiterate makes infinite mana, it is also not too difficult to chain enough spells together and get enough storm triggers to just go "big" but not infinite and still win. remember that Mizzix's Mastery and Past in Flames can help you recast from the yard and reuse rituals and untap effects. With a yard full of cantrips and dig spells, it is easy to chain enough free gas to ensure a win and cause the table to acknowledge the inevitable. None of this needing Mizzix to be your commander or in play to go off, so feel free to use any and all of it in any deck you like.
Edit: hit post by accident. I was not finished. I will keep editing and adding to this.
Thanks for the reply umtiger. While I do not agree with everything and do not have the energy to explain where and why, I do appriciate the feedback.
I do not know how to organized my thoughts and feeling about the Magic. I love the art, flavor text, mechanics, rules and how the card bend and break them. Theory crafting and evaluating cards is lots of fun as well.
Actually playing? Rock-paper-scissors gets old after while, and tutors accelerate that process.
If you are playing for prizes, then you want your deck to go off as quickly and consistantly as possoble. If we are playing for fun and just enjoying the interactions of decks and cards, then tutors get in the way of the random nature of the format.
I am going to assume that you have never played Vintage. Every tutor is a copy of your best cards.
I have played in tournaments in 2008 where I have cast:
Dark ritual - Dark Ritual - Dark ritual - demonic tutor for YawgWill - Cast YawgWill - do it again from the graveyard to then find and cast Tendrills of Agony as the 10th spell and win.
Demonic Tutor for Lotus or Time Vaul or Flash or Gifts Ungiven - which ends up being a Demonic Tutor for 6 cards because one pile is to get YawgWill + Recoup + Lotus + Dark Ritual. No matter what they give you, you win.
I played and won a mox ruby in a 30 man event with mono black null rod agro. Leyline of the void, duress, Hymn to tourach, hypnotic spector, phyrexian negator, dark confidant, wasteland, stripmine, sink hole, amd a suite of Demonic Tutor, Vampiric, Imperial Seal, YawgWill, one tendrils, 4 rituals, Mox Jet and a pile of swamps. The main plan was to play resource denial and finish hard. Open the game with leyline, Turn 1 ritual into duress and Demonic tutor for null rod, then win through attrition.
The lists and examples go on and on.
That colorless and a black makes a difference when you can fetch an underground sea, cast a mana crypt or off color mox (red/green/white) and tutor up a combo card or force of will or whatever is strong.
But in Commander? Ome reason why I am "burnt out" on the format is how leniar my decks become with tutors.
Personal tutor for merchant scroll, maybe cast a can trip to draw it; merchant scroll for Intuition; Intuition into a game winning pile, of which there are many.
I was thinking to myself: How good or useless is any given commander if it is not trying to combo?
I love Breya and how we got an esper commander with red which can use Goblin Welder, Deretti, Scrap Mastry, Shaali and all of those fun cards. I live the idea of looting and rummaging through my deck on the cheap and then reanimating artifacts. However, I must explain each time I play with new people that it is a red esper artifact goodstuff deck and not a fast 4 color combo with cheap tutors.
If I play Mizzix, only combo is viable. I do not buy into the Earthquake game plan and relying on X spells and Mizzix surviving. Without tutors, it is trash. With it, it is versitile and strong. Not cEDH strong, but it can defend itself and has many play lines to end games with different synergystic combos... but strugles without a boat load of obvious tutors.
The list goes on and on as well. I found many decks I love leaned on tutors to carry tye deck to victory in games it would have otherwise had no business winning if tutors were cut from the deck. That is why I began to question if the concepts were even good, or if I was just leaning on a powerful game mechanic - tutors - in a game and format designed around variance and the mistery of the draw.
It is interesting to see where these threads go, which is why I brought it up.
ilovesaprolings is wasting their time, as Macabre is using the false equivalence logical fallacy. Just because Demonic Tutor and Rampant Growth both cost two mana and search a library does not make them equal. Either Macabre is blind to their own rhetoric, or is being facetious. Either way, those posts cannot be taken seriously.
In my Edgar Markov deck I tutor for Necropotence, so I still have variance for cards that I draw.
I am not sure what style your Edgar Markov deck is, but if it is anything like mine - which I stole/copy from ISBPathfinder - then you are kind of proving my point rather than refuting it. In a "go-wide" Edgar deck, it doesn't matter what you draw with Necro... simply that your hand remains full. that brings up the whole debate about whether a deck is inherently good, or simply good because it has a collection of the most degenerate cards in Magic's history.
I am not calling for a ban or a house rule of anything. Instead, as somebody who has played this game at a high level in my 20's and now only plays casually in my mid 30's, I find myself questioning game balance, game theory, card design, deck construction and so forth... rather than how to make the most powerful and consistent decks.
I do not care if other players want to use tutors or not, but in my older age, I find myself agreeing with the tutor-less/tutor free crowed more.
We have not had a thread about tutors in a while, so I wanted to start a new one.
To begin with, I do not have a problem with any tutors in principle; I own many myself; and I think trying to regulate and control them within a playgroup can be rather futile. Despite this, I find myself wanting to tune down the power level of my decks by reducing or outright removing tutors in favor of more card draw and/or redundant effects.
Aaron Forsythe elegantly explained "the problem with tutors" in one of his old random card of the day entries on Planar Portal. I will put in bold the parts which really caught my attention and have never forgotten:
Aaron's Random Card Comment of the Day #29, 11/4/10
The structure of (Planar Portal) is based on that of the oft-reprinted original card advantage machine Jayemdae Tome. Replace the 4’s with 6’s and change “draw” to “tutor” and there you have it.
As a designer, I like this card about a tenth as much as I like Jayemdae Tome. As designers, we strive to make sure the game has the right amount of variance in it; variance leads to replayability and it keeps the outcomes of individual games in doubt longer. Players, at least those whose primary goal is winning, strive to reduce the variance in the game as much as possible. Things like tutors, scry, and card drawing are used to make sure the same spells come up in essentially the same order--or at the very least at close to the right time--game after game. If a deck can consistently assemble a game-winning combo on turn two, players will do that over and over and over. Games like that get really boring really fast, so we need to fight back against that. The mystery of the draw is a vital part of the game.
Tutoring every single turn has the potential to remove all the variance from at least one player’s part of the game. Once Planar Portal is up and running, assuming its controller isn’t under significant pressure, the outcome of the game is a foregone conclusion.
Not only does Planar Portal eliminate variance, it adds shuffling, which is another way to make a game consistently less fun.
The only thing that makes the card printable are the high costs associated with using it; you have to spend 12 mana to get the first benefit out of it. The mere act of surviving long enough to activate it is a feat in itself. It’s okay for us to print cards like this that do powerful-but-bad things at high costs once in a while, but personally I’d rather focus our efforts on powerful-and-fun.
The key words and bits being: "Variance" & "The mystery of the draw is a vital part of the game."
In 2014, Jason Alt coined the term "75%" to describe a style of deck building that many of us are familiar with by now. One constant theme within 75% is the topic of tutors. In an early article, he directs readers to Bennie Smith's 2012 article, Letting go of tutors in Commander, wherein we find the following quotes of interest:
Commander's singleton format and 100-card deck size often cause people to instinctively stuff as many Tutor spells into their deck as they possibly can. Sometimes it's necessary—perhaps your Commander needs a boost to be really good or you're trying to assemble some sweet off-the-wall haymaker play that requires a couple specific cards. Or maybe you're trying to be a control deck which is quite the high-wire act in multiplayer where you can't always rely on pure card drawing to have the right answer in your hand.
But I think all the Tutor power that is readily available for just about every Commander deck you build takes away a bit from the enjoyment of the game. Today I want everyone to take a few minutes to think about letting go of Tutors in Commander or at least minimizing the quantity you use.
(...)
Embrace the Chaos!
There's a reason why this is Sheldon Menery's catchphrase for Commander and it's the reason why it's a singleton format with 100-card decks. One of the joys of playing a Commander deck without Tutors is that each game is going to play out differently keeping the experience fresh and fun. If you've tuned your deck into a machine that kills the same way each game not only will your opponents quickly tire of playing against you but you're going to tire of playing it yourself.
Jason Alt does not directly respond to the article, but rather veers off into his second rule: Always start weak and improve the deck & never weaken a better deck. Instead, Jason address tutors more directly in his article 75% – Homogeneity, wherein he defines/refers to "face up" and "face down" tutors.
When Bennie Smith wrote his article about letting go of tutors in Commander, I thought the argument against having players search through their decks in secret and pull something out while laughing maniacally was a compelling one. You make the entire table wait for you, and they don’t get to know what you’re doing. It makes them a bit nervous, and they may have a tendency to want to attack you because of your secret shenanigans. I thought at the time that my objection to face-down tutors may have stemmed from not wanting to inflict that kind of game experience on the group I was playing with. I think now, although my gut instinct to shy away from face-down tutors was correct, that I may not have interpreted my aversion to them properly in a 75% context. I think trying to come up with a Zegana deck may have given me the proper context to evaluate what I really don’t like about face-down tutors and what other things I’d like to avoid in 75% decks.
As much as I’m averse to face-down tutors, I find myself partial to face-up tutors.
(snip)
But why are face-up tutors better? Is it because your opponents don’t like to see you root around in your deck in secret? I thought about it seriously and asked a lot of players, and that’s really a small part of it. But the more I think about it, the more I realized that face-up tutors work better in a 75% context because they’re narrow. And narrow tutors are very, very 75%. A face-down tutor finds you a card face-down because your opponent doesn’t need to see it. You can grab anything. You can fetch a Swamp. You can find a Steamflogger Boss. It could be anything; it could even be a boat. A face-up tutor needs to be face-up so you don’t Wizardcycle a Vedalken Aethermage and grab a Force of Will. Face-up tutors need oversight because everyone needs to verify you found something legal. Narrow tutors not only give away information, which puts you at a competitive disadvantage compared to face-down tutors, but they force you to derive your answers from a smaller pool of cards. And I think that there is an inherent danger in this and requires a little vigilance on your part. I’m suggesting there are situations in which you might want to voluntarily remove tutors from your deck.
(snip)
While narrow tutors are good because they have limitations and are therefore more 75%-friendly because they cause you to be a bit more creative in deck-building they can lead to homogeneity in game experience. If your one tutor target with Worldly Tutor is going to be It That Betrays all the time, you might as well just play Demonic Tutor. You might as well not tutor face-up if you’re fetching the same thing every time. If your tutors allow you to create a path of least resistance and homogenize the game experience, they need to be re-evaluated.
(snip)
• Try to vary the game experience, and build with multiple paths to victory in mind.
• Play tutors or card-draw, but not both.
At the risk of piling on, one of the things which has caused me to want to start this thread was how on Saturday I re-watched an older episode of The Command Zone with special guests Graham and Kathleen from Loading Ready Run in which they discussed building EDH decks without tutors and going so far as to play decks blind.
So, as I have said, the topic of tutors in commander is one with a lot of history. I wanted to know your thoughts. For example, do you use tutors? Face down and/or face up? Why? Do you run decks of different power levels based on what you are trying to do and who you are facing? What do you think of the various quotes I provided?
This always come back to "budget vs competitive". you can get back in without having to spend a ton, but it will not be very competitive.
The staples ofthe format are simply having ramp, draw, a core concept to play with and some cards to interact with the table. Competitive decks will go for fast mana, fast tutors, low cost utility cards and most will have combo win conditions that they go for. Budget games look to just get value each turn and play until it comes to a natural (dropping to zero life, 10 poison or something like that). Combo just gets there in one resolution, typically hitting every opponent at once.
(snip)
Seems pretty straightforward to me and not "mental gymnastics".
Thank you for the reply. I disagree and find that the logic which begins with "turn 5 Sorin" and concludes with "an arms race" is ridiculous and requires such mental gymnastics to pull off.
After setting a player to 10, Sorin is left at one loyalty and needs three undisturbed rounds at the table to be ready to do it again. If that causes the table to panic, then we are saying a lot more about the EDHRC and what Sheldon thinks of the community as a whole than we are of thevampire planeswalkerin question.
Setting a player to 10 does not knock them out of the game. Additional setup is still required to deal that 10 damage and finish the job. If a player leaves themselves completely open to such an attack, then they need to improve. Otherwise, the player casting Sorin Markov has to have worked together with others and established a plan,which is table politics and good for the game. For example: "Look, Player X is way ahead and needs to be taken out before they can kill the rest of us. I cannot do it alone, but I can set them to 10 with Sorin Markov. Can you (singular or plural, as we lack such a distinction in English) finish the job?" Which, in this case, the person being targeted is the one who has failed to live up to Sheldon's "theory of being second best", not the person casting Sorin.
How does this, in any way, lead to an arms race?
In a 75% deck, tutors are not banned, but discouraged, and Sheldon promotes that we "embrace the chaos" of singleton by using as few and narrow tutors as possible. To insist that the threat of turn 5 Sorn Markov is grounds to start an arms race also implies any sense of consistency at achieving such a play line. The fact is that "Turn 5 Sorin" does not win the game, did not win the game in his example, nor does/did it threaten to win the game any time soon.
Who is honestly going into game two thinking, "We had all better gang up on the deck with Sorin Markov before they cast it on turn five and lowers one player to 10 life and then... um, I dunno, kills that player on turn 7 and then we still keep playing until turn 14! Get him!"??? Is that the arms race one fears? Is that the instigation to use an infinite combo to kill the table? Is this all a big troll job that I fell for?
Sigh.
Warnings against arms races seems to be Sheldon's kick right now, as it was also the main point of the article which sparked this thread.
You need to wait long enough for Floral Spuzzem to make a decision?
You got it. Show it to players who have never seen it before and see how they react.
In my experience, anybody who has never seen it before will stare at it for a while and not get it. I have had crowds try to figure out what is wrong with it because of how easily we as magic players read things and errata it in our heads.
This is why Demigod of Revenge as to be explained with the stack. This is why it took the community a while to realize Mangara of Corondor did not exile himself as part of the cost, but rather part of the resolution and could be saved with the likes of Momentary Blink and flicker effects.there are other examples, but you get the point. Now back to the main topic...
... seriously, Sheldon doesn't even understand 75% magic, does he? Neither does the RC it seems. Sorin on turn 5 that doesn't even kill one player is over powered? Do they also want the NFL to become flag football?
Regarding my personal deck, I have been able to add cards here and there thanks in part to Time Spiral remastered and Battlebond coming to Peru and delivering quality reprints such as Minion's Murmurs and Diabolic Intent.
Something which I did a search for and saw we haven't talked about through 22 pages of this thread is Reforge the Soul. Yes, it is not as good as Wheel of Fortune. I am not advocating it be placed in the most optimal version of the deck. However, for those playing on a budget, it is a fantastic card which can be tutored up to the top of the deck to force Miracle. Moreover, and let us be honest here, a true Wheel is worth the 5 mana if/when you have to hard cast it. I would rather see RtS than the bidding war Wheel. Finally, just like with Wheel of Fortune, you can draw into free mana and keep casting spells that same turn with your new grip of 7.
My best friend has a Scion of the Ur Dragon deck and it is imperative that I have ways of removing and/or blocking his dragons, or I just lose. Scion can ramp into play by the 4th turn and knock me out through the air on turn 5. Based on the turn order, that gives me 4-5 turns to have an answer or scoop. Similarly, my wife plays Inalla which can ramp on turn two, cast Trophy Mage on turn three and combo on turn 4... in addition to other paths to victory. The best I can do is attack Inalla and try to have removal in the form of Path or StP or something for the Scion.
You know how much I respect your build, but against the decks I face, I find it better to have some interaction (instant speed removal) and some more anthems such as Glory of Warfare and combat modifiers like Dolmen Gate or Cover of Darkness which were both older tech you had shared before. In my games, it has been less about the fast initial rush as it has been about being mana efficient and having individually strong attacks that go in as unblocked as possible.
I really feel like the wonderful thing about Edgar Markov is that, depending on your budget and meta, it can be a "Your millage may vary" kind of a deck, and this is a wonderful starting place to see how it fits with your meta. Never stop updating and improving it. I deeply appreciate it.
Link:
https://youtu.be/rtfqJjLbADA
To begin, even they admit to a small sample size. So, is the whole episode a waste of time as a result?
Secondly, I feel in many ways it has some confirmation to things we have written about for years and have had some interesting back and forth talks on.
I, for one, have a pet peeve about how often preview cards and spoilers are often dismissed and a caveat added on "but it will be good in Commander" while I am sitting here thinking, "No. Just because a big splashy creatures or spell costs 6+ doesn't mean it will be good in Commander." I know it doesn't matter and I can dismiss the card, but it bothers me that it is said and influences how people evaluate cards and perpetuate these myths.
I'm the video there are some key talking points that I remember and wanted to address:
How often do you cast your commander?
They claim the number is an average of less than twice per game and even low cmc commanders are far under 3 times peer game.
I agree with this and have found that interesting when talking about building around one's Commanders.
Lowcmc Commanders are often not worth paying the tax for a third time or more (6 generic Mana). High cmc Commanders are often too expensive to cast a third time, let alone more. Even middle of the road CMC Commanders (say 4-6 Mana?) Are not worth paying 10-12 on even if you get that late in the game.
This is why having ways to get your commander back from the graveyard or to return it to your hand is far better than letting it return to the command zone after you have cast it a second time... assuming you have in the first place.
How many board wipes are played in a game?
Again, they say somewhere more than one and less than two on average and almost never three or more.
This is close to my heart as someone who owns an Edgar Markov deck and am sick of hearing how that deck folds to a board wipe. Not to get off topic, but a well built Edgar deck can easily rebuild from a wipe or two, and rarely does one ever see a third. If any deck would, it is an Edgar deck, and with all of the card draw mine has, even a third wipe is just a speed bump which forces everybody else to reset as well.
Asin any game of magic, you never want to over extend, but if there ever was a time to, it would be after a second wipe, as the chances of a third are slim to none.
How many turns does a game last?
They found the range of 8-12, with more ending at 9 than any other turn.
I tend to agree with this data point as well. Some games will take longer but are the exception.
I find that turns 1-3 are where we fix our Mana, cast ramp and utility.
Turns 4-6 are where threats, answers, and card draw is cast.
I have found turns 7-9 are when the explosive plays are made. The punches and counter punches. Attempts at combo and stopping said attempts. Players end to get knocked out and the game swings on a key choice of who to take out and how the following turn goes.
How many attacks are made in a game? How many by a single player?
I found it interesting and also a confirmation that many decks don't attack at all or might make as few as two attack in an entire game, while the "beat down" deck attacks as many (or few) times as 6 per game.
What can we learn, if anything, from this?
How manny spells which cost 6+ are cast by a player or in the while game?
This was another low number, and the sample size was not looking at cEDH games.
As has been said on The Command Zone many times and I agree with deeply, it is far better to chain together multiple lowered cmc spells than it is to cast most single haymakers. Sure, there are some very powerful high cmc spells, but many are cheated into play rather than cast... often by said cheaper cmc spells you chain together.
Gadwick, the Wizened
I have looked up rulings for Gadwick and something I don't feel was ever covered, or at least not easily found, was how a token copy is treated.
I assume that once Gadwick is in play that means it is no longer on the stack and X doesn't mean anything... HOWEVER, I have read that Panharmonicon and Naban do allow you to draw X, as X is a set value. So, when does it stop being a set value? Essentially, if I pay 1 for Inalla's trigger, does the copy come in with that set X value, or will that copy set X to zero?
I am trying to help my wife with her Inalla deck and we want to keep it a fun Wizard tribal deck that tries to win through value more than a cutthroat combo deck.
Turn 3 Urza's Incubator into turn 4 Gadwick where X=2 and that cost is reduced by Urza's Incubator, then should the 4th Mana be spent to make a token and draw 4 cards... or do you draw zero and should have set X=3?
Official Threads and Commander Resources.
Within it, you will find countless resources. The two most important ones are probably:
•Big guide to building your EDH / Commander Deck
•Playing Commander to Win
They bith give advice on the format as a whole.
Also, a deck is never finished. Build something and play with it. Note its flaws and how you want to improve it. Winning is not the end game. Having a fun experience with friends is.
Some generic advice?
Ramp is important. Magic is a game of resource development. Spells are not free and the tempo of the game is bottlenecked by the casting cost of spells and your limit of one land per turn. Ramp allows you to break this parity, and trust me when I say that your opponents are going to use ramp. If you do not, or are not using enough, you will fall behind.
Card draw is also very important. While duels can be and are won with little to no card draw, they also end with the winner at zero cards in hand or very few. In multiplayer, if you beat one opponent down and used all of your respurces to do so like in a duel, you will be left dead in the water with two or more other opponents who are ready to finish you off.
Just as with ramp, card draw helps break the parity of only drawing once on your turn. Ramp will exhaust your rescources in hand, and card draw will replinish them.
In competitive games, decks try to win on turn 4 or so. In casual games, turns 1-4 are often kmown as the development stage. Turns 5-8 are when threats and answers are exchanged. Turns 9-12 are when Most players hit their end game. Sure, some groups and games go longer, but at that stage, players tend to get knocked out and the end game is reached.
Finally, and has been touched on by FunkyDragon, it helps to have plenty of low and mid cost spells. Sure, this is a format with big splashy plays, but as you will hear on The Command Zone, some of the most powerful turns are NOT those which one big spell was cast, but rather when multiple small spells were chained together.
If I could favorite a post, this would be it.
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In other news, while not the most powerful, my backup plan in Mizzix is to use Thousand-Year Storm.
Mizzix allows one to use the likes of Firemind's Foresight which can find you to find Reiterate + a ritual such as Desperate Ritual or Pyretic Ritual or an untap effect like Reset or Reality Spasm + a one mana spell that can win for you like Gut Shot or simply a cantrip to draw your deck and find a different win condition you want.
Well, even without Mizzix in play or any experience, Thousand-Year Storm is another way to go off.
If TYS makes it around the table, then it is easy to cast a cantip into a ritual. Let the the copy of the ritual resolve and use that mana to feed half the cost of Reiterate and then you will get two extra copies of reiterate which will result in infinite mana + infinite storm + infinite access to reiterate (though it does not matter). You can keep the cantrip on the stack as well and target it as needed with reiterate to draw as much from your deck as you desire without fear of decking yourself in a stupid suicide misplay.
With a deck full of forks and rituals, I have been able to just jam TYS into play with counter backup and power out wins in a single turn. While Reiterate makes infinite mana, it is also not too difficult to chain enough spells together and get enough storm triggers to just go "big" but not infinite and still win. remember that Mizzix's Mastery and Past in Flames can help you recast from the yard and reuse rituals and untap effects. With a yard full of cantrips and dig spells, it is easy to chain enough free gas to ensure a win and cause the table to acknowledge the inevitable. None of this needing Mizzix to be your commander or in play to go off, so feel free to use any and all of it in any deck you like.
Thanks for the reply umtiger. While I do not agree with everything and do not have the energy to explain where and why, I do appriciate the feedback.
I do not know how to organized my thoughts and feeling about the Magic. I love the art, flavor text, mechanics, rules and how the card bend and break them. Theory crafting and evaluating cards is lots of fun as well.
Actually playing? Rock-paper-scissors gets old after while, and tutors accelerate that process.
If you are playing for prizes, then you want your deck to go off as quickly and consistantly as possoble. If we are playing for fun and just enjoying the interactions of decks and cards, then tutors get in the way of the random nature of the format.
I have played in tournaments in 2008 where I have cast:
Dark ritual - Dark Ritual - Dark ritual - demonic tutor for YawgWill - Cast YawgWill - do it again from the graveyard to then find and cast Tendrills of Agony as the 10th spell and win.
Demonic Tutor for Lotus or Time Vaul or Flash or Gifts Ungiven - which ends up being a Demonic Tutor for 6 cards because one pile is to get YawgWill + Recoup + Lotus + Dark Ritual. No matter what they give you, you win.
I played and won a mox ruby in a 30 man event with mono black null rod agro. Leyline of the void, duress, Hymn to tourach, hypnotic spector, phyrexian negator, dark confidant, wasteland, stripmine, sink hole, amd a suite of Demonic Tutor, Vampiric, Imperial Seal, YawgWill, one tendrils, 4 rituals, Mox Jet and a pile of swamps. The main plan was to play resource denial and finish hard. Open the game with leyline, Turn 1 ritual into duress and Demonic tutor for null rod, then win through attrition.
The lists and examples go on and on.
That colorless and a black makes a difference when you can fetch an underground sea, cast a mana crypt or off color mox (red/green/white) and tutor up a combo card or force of will or whatever is strong.
But in Commander? Ome reason why I am "burnt out" on the format is how leniar my decks become with tutors.
Personal tutor for merchant scroll, maybe cast a can trip to draw it; merchant scroll for Intuition; Intuition into a game winning pile, of which there are many.
I was thinking to myself: How good or useless is any given commander if it is not trying to combo?
I love Breya and how we got an esper commander with red which can use Goblin Welder, Deretti, Scrap Mastry, Shaali and all of those fun cards. I live the idea of looting and rummaging through my deck on the cheap and then reanimating artifacts. However, I must explain each time I play with new people that it is a red esper artifact goodstuff deck and not a fast 4 color combo with cheap tutors.
If I play Mizzix, only combo is viable. I do not buy into the Earthquake game plan and relying on X spells and Mizzix surviving. Without tutors, it is trash. With it, it is versitile and strong. Not cEDH strong, but it can defend itself and has many play lines to end games with different synergystic combos... but strugles without a boat load of obvious tutors.
The list goes on and on as well. I found many decks I love leaned on tutors to carry tye deck to victory in games it would have otherwise had no business winning if tutors were cut from the deck. That is why I began to question if the concepts were even good, or if I was just leaning on a powerful game mechanic - tutors - in a game and format designed around variance and the mistery of the draw.
ilovesaprolings is wasting their time, as Macabre is using the false equivalence logical fallacy. Just because Demonic Tutor and Rampant Growth both cost two mana and search a library does not make them equal. Either Macabre is blind to their own rhetoric, or is being facetious. Either way, those posts cannot be taken seriously.
Moving on...
I am not sure what style your Edgar Markov deck is, but if it is anything like mine - which I stole/copy from ISBPathfinder - then you are kind of proving my point rather than refuting it. In a "go-wide" Edgar deck, it doesn't matter what you draw with Necro... simply that your hand remains full. that brings up the whole debate about whether a deck is inherently good, or simply good because it has a collection of the most degenerate cards in Magic's history.
I am not calling for a ban or a house rule of anything. Instead, as somebody who has played this game at a high level in my 20's and now only plays casually in my mid 30's, I find myself questioning game balance, game theory, card design, deck construction and so forth... rather than how to make the most powerful and consistent decks.
I do not care if other players want to use tutors or not, but in my older age, I find myself agreeing with the tutor-less/tutor free crowed more.
To begin with, I do not have a problem with any tutors in principle; I own many myself; and I think trying to regulate and control them within a playgroup can be rather futile. Despite this, I find myself wanting to tune down the power level of my decks by reducing or outright removing tutors in favor of more card draw and/or redundant effects.
Aaron Forsythe elegantly explained "the problem with tutors" in one of his old random card of the day entries on Planar Portal. I will put in bold the parts which really caught my attention and have never forgotten:
The key words and bits being: "Variance" & "The mystery of the draw is a vital part of the game."
In 2014, Jason Alt coined the term "75%" to describe a style of deck building that many of us are familiar with by now. One constant theme within 75% is the topic of tutors. In an early article, he directs readers to Bennie Smith's 2012 article, Letting go of tutors in Commander, wherein we find the following quotes of interest:
Jason Alt does not directly respond to the article, but rather veers off into his second rule: Always start weak and improve the deck & never weaken a better deck. Instead, Jason address tutors more directly in his article 75% – Homogeneity, wherein he defines/refers to "face up" and "face down" tutors.
At the risk of piling on, one of the things which has caused me to want to start this thread was how on Saturday I re-watched an older episode of The Command Zone with special guests Graham and Kathleen from Loading Ready Run in which they discussed building EDH decks without tutors and going so far as to play decks blind.
So, as I have said, the topic of tutors in commander is one with a lot of history. I wanted to know your thoughts. For example, do you use tutors? Face down and/or face up? Why? Do you run decks of different power levels based on what you are trying to do and who you are facing? What do you think of the various quotes I provided?
The MtG community is simultaneously the best in all gaming and also painfully toxic and everything in between.
Your deck looks awesome and like a lot of fun. I am going to bookmark it and steal the idea for later.
The staples ofthe format are simply having ramp, draw, a core concept to play with and some cards to interact with the table. Competitive decks will go for fast mana, fast tutors, low cost utility cards and most will have combo win conditions that they go for. Budget games look to just get value each turn and play until it comes to a natural (dropping to zero life, 10 poison or something like that). Combo just gets there in one resolution, typically hitting every opponent at once.
How does this, in any way, lead to an arms race?
In a 75% deck, tutors are not banned, but discouraged, and Sheldon promotes that we "embrace the chaos" of singleton by using as few and narrow tutors as possible. To insist that the threat of turn 5 Sorn Markov is grounds to start an arms race also implies any sense of consistency at achieving such a play line. The fact is that "Turn 5 Sorin" does not win the game, did not win the game in his example, nor does/did it threaten to win the game any time soon.
Who is honestly going into game two thinking, "We had all better gang up on the deck with Sorin Markov before they cast it on turn five and lowers one player to 10 life and then... um, I dunno, kills that player on turn 7 and then we still keep playing until turn 14! Get him!"??? Is that the arms race one fears? Is that the instigation to use an infinite combo to kill the table? Is this all a big troll job that I fell for?
Sigh.
Warnings against arms races seems to be Sheldon's kick right now, as it was also the main point of the article which sparked this thread.
You got it. Show it to players who have never seen it before and see how they react.
In my experience, anybody who has never seen it before will stare at it for a while and not get it. I have had crowds try to figure out what is wrong with it because of how easily we as magic players read things and errata it in our heads.
This is why Demigod of Revenge as to be explained with the stack. This is why it took the community a while to realize Mangara of Corondor did not exile himself as part of the cost, but rather part of the resolution and could be saved with the likes of Momentary Blink and flicker effects.there are other examples, but you get the point. Now back to the main topic...
... seriously, Sheldon doesn't even understand 75% magic, does he? Neither does the RC it seems. Sorin on turn 5 that doesn't even kill one player is over powered? Do they also want the NFL to become flag football?