Quote from Negator_402 »You need to learn to write without personal attacks or invectives. Your voice is so weak.
No, the 4th Amendment applies to government search and seizure. However, absent a burden of proof, the public opinion pillory becomes a witch hunt. Gee, did we ever have a history of people being black-balled due to empty allegations on a sensitive subject? Oh yes, the MCCARTHY ERA!
I ask you, on the topic of harassment: who marches in our streets and claims to punch people who are "Nazis"? Is it the "Alt-Right?" No sir, its the Alt-Left. There is no "Punch A Communist" or "Punch A Mujahideen" movement in the US, is there?
It's funny, because your posts include plenty of personal attacks directed at other posters, which I have avoided. Why are you so triggered by this?
By the way, there IS proof, which is why the offending video got taken down by Youtube for violating ToS.
The Iona/Painter switch was one of the few things I've thought was clearly in need of a change, and it's nice to see it's been made.
I'll be digging into the philosophy document later. While I'm sad to see the categories go, because I thought they provided some valuable insight into the thought process used when deciding whether cards where problematic enough to be banned, I agree that people sometimes missed the nuances, and missed the forest through the trees (that the categories meant nothing by themselves, but where ways that cards went against the RC's vision for what kind of experience people should have with EDH)
Well, once again, I'm not designating them anything, I'm calling it as I see it, and I don't see Ad Nauseum being problematic in casual games. I almost never see it there, and when I do its not doing anything broken. I rarely hear it complained about outside of cEDH either, except for you, right now, as it suits your point. Even the point you try to make acknowledges that when these cards do get ran in more casual settings, its not in the same kind of all in way that would make them problematic. And calling me a liar is, as is so often your style, a baseless personal attack. I mean, maybe you've seen differently in your meta and that's why you are saying it, but if I wanted to be a jerk I could call you a liar and say you are making it up to suit your argument because I have not seen it. That would be asinine, because I have no proof that you have seen it, and that's a reasonable explanation for you insisting that its a problem. But unfortunately for your argument Ad Naus is not something that's running around ruining casual games of commander to any degree that would make it hit the banlist criteria, nor is Doomsday. They are cEDH cards simply because that is where they are ran. Should they actually spread out to casual and start making a splash in a problematic way, then they would cease to be cEDH cards. Then they would be relevant to the conversation on rules changes. And all this would be possible while still ignoring cEDH. We aren't ignoring the CARDS, we're ignoring the cEDH meta, and thus the impact that ANY card has in it. This also works for cards that are problematic in casual but bad in cEDH, as "it isn't in tier 1 decks" isn't an argument against banning.
Saying its a cEDH card isn't ignoring the card, its ignoring its impact on cEDH. The impact of the card on casual is still considered (as I do in my posts) and I don't believe those cards to be problematic in casual, or even prolific there. In order to argue that Ad Naus and Doomsday are significant in the format, you need to bring in cEDH, and that is irrelevant to rules discussion.
I'm not quarantining card to cEDH, I'm noting that if a card is really only seen in cEDH then it is not an issue because cEDH is irrelevant to the banlist and rules making. A big reason that certain cards get played a lot in cEDH but see little play in more casual settings is because they just aren't as good for casual. Doomsday is a classic example: if you are playing Doomsday you are trying to win on the spot, and you also have to both dedicate a few deckslots to the combo. It puts you on the path of aiming directly for that combo, but unlike other combo cards this is a turn off for more casual players, because it's also a high risk card that is also fairly skill intensive. The best Doomsday lists have a couple different packages they can grab in case one won't work because of the board state. Ad Nauseum meanwhile is awesome when you build your deck to win if it resolves, and super risky and not particularly great otherwise. Again, this makes it less of a fit in more causal decks where instead of a 5 Mana sorcery that wins the game it's a 5 Mana sorcery that draws 5-7 cards for a decent chunk of life, which starts competing with cards like promise of power, which is a 5 Mana draw five lose five life with flexibility (ok, even in casual decks Ad Naus can draw a lot more, but it's highly variable, sometimes you hit a couple six drops right away and you aren't going to be able to dig too deep without getting yourself in range of attacks).
As for the "what's good about leaving it at 40" question, read the thread. It's disingenuous to dismiss the arguments as to why 30 life would be bad, as their mirror is often why 40 life is good. For instance, one complaint about 30 life is that it would push out battle cruiser decks, but the other way of looking at that argument is that it's saying that 40 life is good because it allows battle cruiser decks to happen. On the other side, you see people saying 30 life would be good because it would make aggro more viable, but that could also be rephrased as an argument saying that 40 life is bad because it makes aggro too weak. It doesn't take much thinking to figure that out.
And none of them need to be reigned in. Which is what I said. Is Fire Covenant a problem? Does Ad Naus see play outside of cEDH (remember, being good in cEDH is irrelevant to rules decisions)? Citadel has more life to work with than in other formats, but is also going to cause more life loss because its also going to be dealing with higher casting costs, especially in non cEDH metas, so it largely balances out (like Bob or similar cards).
To Dirk: I never said it was your main argument, but I've already said what I would say to dispute your other arguments, so no sense rehashing it. In fact, you actually replied to those posts. I hadn't went to deep into the life payment and life matters cards so that's what I focused on.
I also don't really agree that ignorance is what drives people to play suboptimal decks. Its actually probably quite low on the list of reasons because of how easy it is to net deck. No, I do really think that some people like a jankier environment, whether because they want slower games, or want to play with oddball cards, or want to play unique strategies, or want to play a vorthos deck, or even want to set up janky combos. This is going to be less evident in pick up games at events because the social contract is weaker and even many people who prefer weaker metas will build one or two "pimp" decks they can pull out when they sit down with try hards, but those situations aren't the norm. Even on mtgo, where cards are cheap and you play with strangers, I rarely see people plop down outright cEDH decks, because thats ******* boring when nobody else is playing at that level. So I think the number one reason you don't see everyone gravitate to the best strategies built optimally is because most people simply do not want that. After that, for paper magic I'd say price would be the next most important reason, precluding some who would want the most optimized decks from getting them because they don't want to pay that much. But ignorance? Only the spikiest noobs are held back from tier 1 play by ignorance.
I actually had to look it up and check before I posted, its very confusing and counter-intuitive.
I reject the argument that life pay and life matters cards need to be nerfed by lowering the total from 40 to 30, with the exception of necro. Necro is absurdly good at 40 but at 30 you are looking at 10 fewer cards, and it's easy to get into situations where you must be judicious with you draws (it starts becoming a liability at 15 life because of how easy it is to deal big chunks of damage in this format). You tend to overdraw with Necro to ensure you get cards you can play, because you have to wait until end of turn to get them,which means that they both aren't immediately available AND you can't tell how many you'll need to draw to have things to play. That makes necro more vulnerable to lowering the starting life total. Other life pay cards are either not a problem, or less vulnerable for a variety of reasons. 30 life would not make unbanning Yawgs Bargain or Grislebrand ok for instance, as both get you cards immediately, while Grisle can gain you the life back and with Yawgs Bargain you never have to overdraw, and with both you can abuse spells that care about card draw (necro doesn't actually draw cards). Sylvan Library otoh will only draw 2.5 fewer cards with this change, a small difference that will only really matter in more competitive settings. Greed, Erebos etc are already restricted by having to pay Mana. These, as well as the vast majority of life payment spells, are also completely fine and not problematic in how they play. They get better because of the higher starting life total, but they are far from overpowered because of it and their core function is unchanged. Other than necro, only Aetherflux strikes me at first glance as needing a Nerf, but 30 life ain't gonna do it. Aetherflux gains you plenty of life on its own, so it's a triflingly small speed bump to start at 10 fewer life. It will make it a bit more difficult to use to take out the last opponent, but that's it.
Meanwhile, the cards that care about life total aren't a problem. Felidar Sovereign is a trap card, if it has a chance at winning early it's getting killed. It's subpar card that may occasionally steal a win but really should not be ran outside of a dedicated lifegain control deck as an alt wincon. Serra Ascendant is by far the best of the lot and not a problem. It's a bit cheesy when someone drops it turn 1, and can get in lots of early damage, but usually eats removal as soon as it attacks anyone holding it. Late game it generally sucks outside of dedicated life gain. Even when it's a 6/6 late game it's still just ok because it's often outclassed by more expensive creatures. Dropping the starting total to 30 makes it easier to make it a 1/1 and harder to cast off of shocks and fetches, but it's still perfectly able to come down turn 1 as a 6/6 and then start swinging turn 2 and giving you enough extra life to play those shocks and fetches. Meanwhile, not it has a faster clock because everyone else starts at 10 less life.
The only real benefit I'm seeing is that it weakens necro. If that is something that is so desperately needed, then the better answer is to ban necro. It scores high on an number of the ban criteria as it is, and banning a single, clearly bonkers card is a much more reasonable course of action than changing a fundamental rule of the format.
As for fair play, I think it's one of the best extra turn spells for that. It's one extra turn and cannot be recurred so unlike time warp it doesn't push you to run more spell recursion to make it better. But it also does have the chance of coming back, so you can double dip if you get lucky. It does get better with tutors, but that's a lot of Mana to pull off.
I really don't think any rule changes should be made to the format to shake up cEDH at all. Aggro isn't bad in more casual settings, neither is midrange. Earlier in the thread someone mentioned a lowering the life total as a way to solve certain problems with EDH, and named Ad Naus as one. I can't remember the last time I saw Ad Naus outside of cEDH, so it shouldn't be relevant at all to the conversation. Meanwhile, playing shocks untapped shouldn't be considered a problem either, being able to do so helps smooth play in a format that by design can be somewhat clunky (100 card singleton).
Lowering the life total to 30 would certainly hurt Rube Goldberg machine combos and anything that relies on life payment (or high life totals), but it won't stop T&N from being a thing. 30 life in a multiplayer format is still a lot and T&N wins out of nowhere, so what is everyone gonna do, just swing out at the green player if they ramp at all? Because if you're splitting damage, he's still going to be able to survive until 9 mana, and if he has a bit of interaction he'll do so even if you target him. 30 life is not going to close out 4+ player games before someone hits 9 mana, when all these single card bombs that win the game hit at the latest. Its certainly not going to infringe on Hoof's place as a finisher, if anything Hoof gets even better because it needs even less of a board state to get you to swing for lethal, and by its very nature of wanting you to have creatures in play it means that you will have a built in defense against aggro just by playing into Hoof. As for the more competitive combos, the sort that try to get out their combo ASAP and aim to go off turns 3-5, which is going off fast enough that aggro isn't going to be able to reliably kill them before they go off, and those decks are already packing answers to deal with other combos and protect their own, so when they aren't going off that early they have ways to play control.
30 life WOULD give aggro better positioning in 75% metas, which is where it currently struggles yet isn't a lost cause (its fine in more casual metas, which can't answer threats as reliably, and probably beyond hope in cEDH unless life totals go to 20). I'm not so sure its worth it though. Aggro is more difficult to play correctly in multiplayer than midrange, combo, or control, because of the importance of proper threat assessment before you have a lot of information means that the decisions you make early have a lot more weight in determining whether you win or hit a wall than with other archetypes. Its already pretty easy to kill one person with aggro and then get shut down by the other 2 or 3, and lowering the life totals to 30 won't really change that situation. Sure, its going to be more punishing to the person who spends their early turns ramping instead of holding up answers or establishing a board state, but that just means that person is going to have a bad night while the control players get to hold their answers for the aggro player once he's done doing their dirty work. Games play out better when threats are answered by answer cards rather than getting preemptively answered by taking a player out of the game. Sometimes that can be necessary, like when someone is showing a clearly OP commander or is known to be playing a deck you can't otherwise answer, but it sucks when someone just gets jumpy and decides to come for someone's throat because they played a nature's lore and a cultivate. What would really suffer are Battlecruiser decks, as they are the least able to deal with aggro (control is probably best positioned because shutting down aggro is what control is all about, combo can still outrace aggro at 30 life often enough, and midrange wins out by being a step slower and a head taller which is where you always want to be). Aggro has its place in a variety of formats, Battlecruiser only has EDH, so if it comes down to allowing Battlecruiser to exist or making aggro better I'll choose allowing Battlecruiser to exist every time. If you are determined to play aggro, you can make it work (except in cEDH, though hatebears use aggro as a backup to its main combo line), though it may look different than it does in other formats (a bit more evasive, a half step slower, prioritizing abilities more and raw stats a bit less, more fish less sligh).
The issue is that as time goes on, more and more cards are printed that don't combo with but synergize with PE, and more commanders are printed for which PE is an auto include. It is the increasing number of worthwhile synergies that most concerns me, since as these cards get added to decks they increase the value of adding PE, which in turn increases PEs metagame presence. It is when decks start including PE because it is going to be a great value engine whenever they play it, even if they only cast a couple spells, that it becomes dangerous, both because it starts behaving more like Prophet and Primetime in being a source of low efforts overwhelming value, and because it will lead to more accidental combos where there will be decks that can't reliably combo with it but can do so when they get lucky (a deck with 5 rocks will not reliably hit enough to include PE for a combo, but if it's adding PE as a value engine it will have access to it when it does actually hit enough to do so). But let's not discount that more and more commanders are being printed that can combo with it. Food Chain gets a pass because it only combos with a couple commanders and is generally a cEDH card that doesn't see much casual play, but PE, while not strictly being a 2 card combo, effectively becomes "play a normal game then win when you play PE and your commander" like Urza and that new Robot Scout.
Thats far from enough data to make the sort of closing statement you just did.
First of all, though somewhat unrelated to my other points, more people are playing edh today than when prophet was legal, so comparing raw numbers without adjusting for this inflation would be disingenuous. More people could theoretically be playing PE while it still being played in a lower percentage of total decks.
But relevant to the point that the data you provide doesn't back up your assertion: you make a lot of guesses based on other cards being similarly ranked but with no data showing that this is a valid correlation. There may, for instance, be more spread between places today while the places could have been more clustered when prophet was legal. To be more clear, the difference between tenth place and twentieth today could be (and this is pulled from my ass as I'm not actually looking it up) 4,000 decks, while in Prophets day it may have been 1000. The 20th most played creature today could be ran in a significantly lower percentage of decks than the 20th most played creature 8 years ago. In order to compare Prophet to cards that have similar rankings today and have it be relevant, you'd have to show that the deck percentages are about the same for each ranked place as they were in Prophets day.
More glaringly, you haven't actually shown what percentage of decks run PE, so you only provide half the answer (and based on flawed data at that). I did do the homework on this though, and I'm seeing it as being in 6 percent of listed decks.
Further, there is a severe problem with the way EDHrec ranks creatures. Xenagod, ranked 20th in the past 2 years, appears in fewer decks than Zegana, ranked 23rd. Despite this he makes up a larger share of decks that could run him, because there are fewer RGx decks than UGx decks. Zegana is also more narrow that Prophet (she wants decently sized creatures so she can draw lots of cards, whereas Prophet wants things that can be cast at instant speed, which includes any creature due to its ability, and/or activated abilities that require taps or mana. It's good everywhere, and it's a massive bomb.
It's a shame I can't find data from back then, I'd really like to see the numbers. I'd also like to see the top commanders list. For PE it's a who's who of broken artifact commanders and cEDH perennials, with it's more casual guys being legendary eldrazi, Seton, and Memnarch. Prophet, otoh, was showing up under more casual commanders. That's an important difference, problematic casual omnipresence doesn't look at cEDH numbers.
Thats a pretty fair selection of excerpts. Your right that the difference is that it is both a bit narrower and has significantly less of a centralizing effect on the format (as it isn't prompting people to run steal/reanimate effects more often like Prophet did). That lowers its rating for me (compared to Prophet) on problematic casual omnipresence (especially since the decks that do use it skew more competitive while things like Prophet, Prime Time, and Sylvan got jammed in casual decks at a higher rate). Needing to have a critical mass of mana rocks to work effectively puts significant downward pressure on stealing it, its one thing that it requires you to build around it more for your own deck but its even more significant in that its unlikely your opponents can take advantage of it without a similar deck. Prophet at least was Seedborn Muse in its fail state (getting stolen by a straight up creatureless deck) and Seedborn Muse is a great card.
My issue is that as more and more cards that synergize with PE get printed, the number of decks it should be an auto include in increases, and the greater likelihood it will find its way to more and more casual tables and start ruining games. It seems like this is inevitable at some point, but I'm not sure what the tipping point is, and I'd rather wait until its reached than preemptively ban it.
CV is the poster child for "this will never be unbanned". This has been discussed to death tbh.