Magic the Gathering/TCG thread: Secret Lairs and Oko scares

~Beyond the Border~ > Akyuu's Arcade

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Framboise:
Commander inherently has more interesting features to it, imo. There's a lot more room for creativity when you're not forced to put in a bunch of 4-ofs into a 60-card deck-- and there's a lot of charm in the 4 player system. Games can be intense and extremely interactive and that's also probably the biggest draw.

Not only that, but it eliminates all power level arguments, which is my biggest quibble with EDH at large-- no one can agree on what is "fair". Some people think infinite combos are okay, others will throw a fit. Some people throw fits if you cast counterspells or kill spells. Some people throw fits if you play blue at all. In cEDH, everything is okay-- outside of the banlist there's nothing that isn't allowed-- and the philosophy of the subformat is that you should be playing as optimally as possible and there's no hard feelings if you lose-- in fact it's more insulting to your opponent for you to hold back. People incorrectly seem to think that cEDH players are a bunch of pubstompers and that couldn't be farther from the truth-- the vast majority of us don't even want to play our decks against casual decks because the power level is too different and it won't be as fun for anyone involved.

So basically, it's vintage-legacy-lite, but in singleton which means you only ever have to buy one copy of a card, 100 card decks which provides more variance and thus more interesting games, and the commander concept lends itself to a lot of interesting combos and strategies.

Don't get me wrong, I can play lower power levels too and have some decks built for that purpose! It's just the really slow battlecruiser EDH that doesn't interest me much.

cEDH even has a solid, strong meta too, though with the printing of Thassa's Oracle the Flash Hulk combo kind of has the format "solved". A lot of us are calling on the RC to ban Flash since it's not really played casually but it's kind of homogenizing the tippy-top of the format, but Sheldon isn't a fan of agreeing with the way we see things.

My main deck is the "Opus Thief" deck-- running Tymna the Weaver and Kraum, Ludevic's Opus as commanders and seeks to gain the most brutal form of card advantage: it plays things like its commanders, Rhystic Study, and Mystic Remora to draw cards earlier on in the game, then drops cards like Smothering Tithe and Notion Thief (the other namesake of the deck) and throws down cards like Windfall, Wheel of Fortune, etc. Wheel and Thief together basically say "all of you discard your hands, and I draw 28". Then it finishes off the game with a Demonic Consultation or Tainted Pact line, obliterating what is left of my deck and then finishing with Laboratory Maniac or War of the Spark!Jace (and more recently Thassa's Oracle).

In cEDH the archetypes of aggro, tempo, control, and midrange aren't really a thing-- it's more "Proactive", "Reactive", or "Adaptive". My deck is in the Adaptive line-- I can take charge and try to combo off into a win (proactive), or I can sit back and throw down stax pieces and hold off opponents' combos before going off myself (reactive)-- and can pivot in either direction if needed.

T-A-C:
You might be interested in learning about the Canadian Highlander format which is a similar high-power 100-card singleton format, but uses a points list to limit extremely high-power cards rather than relying on outright bans. I hear about it a lot because I follow a lot of LoadingReadyRun's MTG content and they're one of the huge proponents of the format.

Framboise:
I've heard of Canadian Highlander, except no one around here plays it. EDH is huge here and because of that, it's rare I can't find some cEDH folks around in my area.

commandercool:
I'm sure this isn't a hot take, but it seems like a lot of it just comes down to why you're playing Commander. What you're describing with competitive Commander sounds like poison to me, but I don't care if I win so much as if I have a dynamic game where everyone gets to do something crazy and that makes a good story. "Win with Thassa's Oracle" isn't an especially interesting story, so it sounds like it would bore me to tears. But if you want to win then the way my group and I play Commander would probably frustrate you quite a lot. I would make rather put 72 +1/+1 counters on all of my hydras with Strength of the Tajuru and lose than just combo off the same way I've already won twenty times and win, but I'm sure that's not the way everyone feels, and fair enough.

I'm still not sure I understand why Commander over Legacy if you want to be competitive aside from the multiplayer aspect (which does count for a lot I guess) but it's probably a matter of degrees. It doesn't sound to me like you're getting much of the variance that makes Commander so much fun if you play a ton of tutors and try to end every game with Thassa's Oracle, but relative to a Legacy deck maybe you do.

Framboise:
We're clearly in two different psychographics, then. I'm a Spike/Melvin through and through, so my core motivation is to win while appreciating the level of detail and intricacies of the gameplay mechanics offered in MtG. cEDH is a fantastic environment for that.

It's got far, far, far more variance than Legacy or Modern does-- yeah, we use tutors, but you'd be surprised at how inconsistently you get what you need and it forces you to come up with a different plan on how to survive before someone else goes off. We still get our interesting stories, too-- except... you could say ours are more like epic sports moments than long narratives. We're hyper-interactive and it all really happens on the stack.

You're also selling it short-- "win with Thassa's Oracle" is an end, just like "swing 10 72/72 hydras for the win" is an end-- the means is much more interesting. And that's not the only win condition, even though it's one of the most popular-- though admittedly, games are rarely won on the combat step and game-winning combos are typically the go-to. cEDH is a haven for people who love combos and the concept of having a 100-card singleton deck with a commander. You get to play so many more combinations that aren't legacy viable. And contrary to popular belief, cEDH decks don't HAVE to be expensive-- there's plenty of primers out there with budget suggestions-- not all of us have Timetwister and the ABUR duals and a bunch of Reserve List staples. Those definitely improve a deck but it's the concept of low-curve high-impact cards that are at the heart of cEDH-- trimming the fat and finding the cream of the crop. Some people even find nifty pet cards that, in most cases, aren't ideal but work splendidly in their meta.

Think of it this way. A typical EDH game can create a rich story akin to an RPG quest leading up to a big battle to see who has the biggest dudes in the end. In cEDH, think of it more like a contest of "who can build a doomsday device* the fastest while everyone's out to sabotage each other's construction"?

*may or may not actually use the card Doomsday

And there's a whole bunch of different archetypes in the subformat as well. If you're interested I can explain more. But believe me when I say that it's not as cut and dry and simple and boring as you think.

You'd still probably not enjoy it as much since it's not your playstyle, but it scratches all the right itches for me. I'm a disaffected modern player who got sick of the rock-paper-scissors feel of a format that became very toxic and not-fun to play, especially when all your decks want to do is push out the same 4-ofs over and over and over. There's a lot less... artistic freedom in building 60-card constructed decks than you get in EDH. So EDH also allows more for personal expression a lot more. You don't actually HAVE to play the top of the top commanders. In fact I'm in the planning phase of a commander that I rarely see and that's a big reason why I want to use it, because I'd probably be the only one in my meta playing it. (It's Alela, Artful Provacateur. She's far from what a typical cEDH commander wants, but there's a few... cruel ways to use her. >:D Stax. It's a stax deck.)

And again, I have other EDH decks that are far more casual.

Queen Marchesa: A pillow fort deck-- the slow paced "if you mess up my plans I'm gonna throw a fit" battlecruiser EDH is something I don't enjoy at all, so that's what I whip out against those to spice things up. You wanna win? Come at me! I'll win by turning your creatures against you.

Karlov-- mostly just a bunch of cheap lifegain cards that make Karlov big and beefy with a hatebears subtheme.

Zada, Hedron Grinder-- a bit more aggressive; focuses on exploiting Zada's ability to pump up other creatures and draw a TON of cards. It's probably too aggressive for a very casual table, but it gets blown out way too easily against high-powered decks or cEDH decks.

My other cEDH decks:
Chain Veil Teferi-- focuses on stopping other people from going off with counterspells and stax pieces while using enormous artifact ramp to push out Teferi and The Chain Veil to generate unbounded planeswalker triggers and mana and draw my deck to finish people off with Stroke of Genius/Blue Sun's Zenith or unbounded Ugin, the Spirit Dragon triggers to just bolt everyone to death.

Anje Falkenrath-- the definition of glass cannon. Anje comes out early and I can draw out a huge portion of my deck rummaging out Madness pieces with the core goal of discarding a Worldgorger Dragon and reanimating it with one of three Animate Dead effects to generate unbounded mana and ETBs-- or to be able to cycle through my whole deck with Anje on the battlefield as she has haste and gets reset every WGD cycle-- and then basically burning everyone to death with Fiery Temper, then discarding Ulamog, the Infinite Gyre to reshuffle my graveyard, draw those two cards again, burn again, reshuffle, etc. Can also use the unlimited mana to win with Avacyn's Judgment. I don't use this deck much because it crumples to any kind of graveyard hate and the alternate wincon is Dualcaster Mage + Twinflame or Heat Shimmer which is so much slower.

Before I tuned my Tymna/Kraum deck to be the "Opus Thief" build, I actually ran a different build. The core combo is super spicy-- there was only 2 creatures in the deck: Spellseeker and Swans of Bryn Argoll. What you do is get the commanders on the board (or use a card that generates some tokens) and cast Divergent Transformations to sacrifice two creatures and cycle through the deck to put Spellseeker and Swans on the battlefield. Spellseeker tutors up Chain of Plasma. I cast Chain of Plasma to deal 3 damage to Swans-- which is prevented and I draw 3 cards. I discard one to copy Chain of Plasma, and loop this to draw out my deck and throw down a win condition.

Ultimately I feel the combos in cEDH are super interesting and fun to play and honestly the more interesting bit than just the win condition itself. The wincon just ends the game-- the fun lies in building your perpetual motion device or death ray or doomsday machine and making it work and surviving the fight to sabotage each other. It allows us to skip the power level conversation and allows us to play the cards we actually want to play without anyone getting fussy about it. It's very liberating to be able to build what I want without anyone saying "that's not fair"-- because here, everything is fair.

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