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Power isn't the same as prevalence. Just by being widespread there can be an issue, or even simply a perceived issue, even if the raw power wouldn't seem to indicate it. EDHRec isn't perfect but it's better than simple anecdotes, and I don't think it's controversial to say that EDHRec is a fairly solid gauge at how common a card is at-large. Land ramp is a common mechanic, and at lower power/experience levels there aren't many obvious, cheap, and effective cards that a player could include to keep their deck's identity while upping it's win percentage a point or two against heavy ramp decks. Having an entire counter-argument boil down to "just play different and faster decks" isn't really a good answer. It's technically correct in the worst way for casual play.
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Apr 11, 2024 14:16
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orangelex44 posted:EDHRec isn't perfect but it's better than simple anecdotes, and I don't think it's controversial to say that EDHRec is a fairly solid gauge at how common a card is at-large. EDHREC is a deck scraper for decklist sites for decks that most often have never been played at a table. I don't know what part of that gives you confidence in any of its data as a representative of reality. It's not even like MTGGoldfish that aggregates tournament results. orangelex44 posted:Having an entire counter-argument boil down to "just play different and faster decks" isn't really a good answer. It's technically correct in the worst way for casual play. I'd argue it's absolutely a great statement to be made for casual play because faster games make the format more accessible.
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Apr 11, 2024 14:22
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orangelex44 posted:Having an entire counter-argument boil down to "just play different and faster decks" isn't really a good answer. It's technically correct in the worst way for casual play. Advising people to do their due diligence to improve their deckbuilding is a great answer because it makes the game better for everyone, including the person playing that deck. Like it's not just knowing what cards to put or not put in a deck, it's why those cards should or should not be put in a deck. EDHREC can give some ideas for the former, but does nothing for the latter. Case and point, I built my first few edh decks using EDHREC. They sucked. Turns out loading your deck with just cards you thought were cool and not building in enough interaction and support is not good. It also turns out that putting in cards when you're not sure why they'd be included just leads to you wondering what they're even for. It also does not help that EDHREC will often make new players think that cards are good when they simply will not get them anywhere toward a win. Framboise fucked around with this message at 14:41 on Apr 11, 2024 |
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Apr 11, 2024 14:37
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Framboise posted:Advising people to do their due diligence to improve their deckbuilding is a great answer because it makes the game better for everyone, including the person playing that deck. When I used to play at my LGS, there was legitimately somebody who would not cut Azami from his Derevi deck with like three other wizards because "it's the top card on EDHREC!" He also perpetually fell behind other creature decks but wouldn't put in board wipes because "they interfere with my combo!" (Deadeye Navigator + Palinchron, and I don't even remember what he did with the mana anymore.)
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Apr 11, 2024 14:53
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I like land ramp as opposed to mana rocks/dorks because it's a little more stable where you won't be sent back to the stone age by a farewell or fade from history. In the long run, an actually good land base and sufficient card draw are way better.
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Apr 11, 2024 14:54
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Framboise posted:Landwipes are valid cards and it is a fault of the casual perception of EDH that building decks without a focus on a balanced manabase that they get shunned. There are plenty of good cheap mana rocks and dorks these days, and every color has at least some way to pump out treasures. Having lands be some kind of sacred no-touchy space has always been very weird to me especially when this concept lets one color absolutely run away with games because they know they'll never be interacted with on that axis. For an example of mana rocks and other sources in action, there are some interesting plays from Dylan here on Atraxa, who misses his first few turns of land drops, but still manages to stay in the game https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yf84Vxx7di4
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Apr 11, 2024 15:02
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Toshimo posted:Yes, but EDHREC, while a useful tool, is bith meaningless as a gormat barometer, lmao gormat
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Apr 11, 2024 15:16
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Toshimo posted:I'd argue it's absolutely a great statement to be made for casual play because faster games make the format more accessible. Faster games happen because people know their decks and other cards. Fewer turns doesn't necessarily fewer game actions, and more impactful decisions means more time in the hole for newer players.
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Apr 11, 2024 15:39
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Land ramp is among green's most played cards because if you don't use it green is even worse.
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Apr 11, 2024 15:45
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land ramp isn't a threat to a deck built efficiently but also this means there should be way less bellyaching around land destruction and it is absolutely weird to have a portion of the game treated as uninteractable by devs and players for feelbad reasons, and demarcating certain legal strats as "allowed but unsporting" is absolutely how you end up with a community as whiny as a lot of casual edh. e: like if MLD is bad for the format it should just be banned, but really why shouldn't it be a rite of passage to get annoyed and make an MLD deck only to realize it actually just helps the ramp player? the meta will settle and you'll avoid teaching people that it's actually bad and wrong for their opponent to interact with their game plan. Valentin fucked around with this message at 15:53 on Apr 11, 2024 |
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Apr 11, 2024 15:48
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It's funny that even wizards commented a little about edh players' attitudes with Crimes in thunder junction
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Apr 11, 2024 15:50
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Green's land ramp is really only super bad in Simic decks. Nothing like getting a billion lands, and also drawing a ton of cards, ending with a huge board, a fist full of counterspells, and bouncing everyone else's nonlands. But yeah armageddon seems reasonable. I'm not to sad about losing my 6-7 lands when the simic value pile just lost like 15
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Apr 11, 2024 15:51
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People hate [mass] land destruction because 98% of the people that have ever played it did not win the game shortly thereafter. It's kind of like playing against a Tergrid deck that isn't allowed to keep Tergrid on the board.
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Apr 11, 2024 15:53
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The way people itt talk about what's good in the game is more thought given to it than 95% of commander players, please try to remember that. Land ramp is extremely prevalent at casual tables where people aren't playing threats early or winning games for a while, and the large accumulation of "uninteractable" resources is what ends up winning in a lot of those metagames. Telling those people to just build better decks is not really going to change them because it's a fundamentally different way of looking at and interacting with the game.
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Apr 11, 2024 15:56
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Batterypowered7 posted:People hate [mass] land destruction because 98% of the people that have ever played it did not win the game shortly thereafter. "people are bad and slow at magic" isn't unique to anything in magic. if a rando destroys everyone's lands and you have no plans or responses in casual play, you can scoop and move on, it literally doesn't matter (and if it does matter, you're not complaining about someone who didn't have a plan to win, you're complaining about someone disrupting your plan to win, because blowing up the board just to hang on for another turn is a totally valid move if winning matters and you see no lines to victory). if your buddy is doing it in the pod, you can talk to them or tech around it. informal agreements to denigrate certain lines of play because they tend to result in slow moments just create a stupid culture. e: ^^^ also the usual response to casual edh players complaining about other decks winning too fast is that they need to pack more board wipes, which has the knock-on effect of...favoring land ramp because it survives board wipes. if you tell people to respond to voja with wipes and then those wipes result in the voja player still having a better table state, most people's response will not be "ah clearly i just have to learn how to interact in a favorable way" it will be "this is bullshit, voja is bullshit, ramp is bullshit, green itself is bullshit." Valentin fucked around with this message at 16:11 on Apr 11, 2024 |
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Apr 11, 2024 15:57
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Batterypowered7 posted:People hate [mass] land destruction because 98% of the people that have ever played it did not win the game shortly thereafter. It's kind of like playing against a Tergrid deck that isn't allowed to keep Tergrid on the board. It's kinda like how people hate wheel effects because the majority of people who play them use them in lieu of actual card draw, rather than as efficient methods of force discard or with draw punishers. A friend of mine has an elenda and azor deck that's a shitload of wheels because that's what his commander wants to do. It's a silly deck
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Apr 11, 2024 17:00
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Framboise posted:Advising people to do their due diligence to improve their deckbuilding is a great answer because it makes the game better for everyone, including the person playing that deck. I don't want to get sidetracked into EDHRec-bashing, that's not my goal with bringing them into it, but I do want to pull out the "loading your deck with just cards you thought were cool and not building in enough interaction and support is not good" part of this because it directly relates to my argument. For people trying to approach the game - and EDH has a ton of newer players - there's a very high learning curve. Land ramp is widespread among precons and shows up all over the most common places people are going to go when making/improving decks. At the same time, when a player wins from having a poo poo-ton of mana it's a very obvious correlation for newer players to make where "they had 30 lands, I had 8, and I got toasted". What is the first action that newer or casual player will take? Not should take, but actually do? Maybe they go hunt down someone to ask for advice, but there's also a very good chance they go hunting for a magic bullet card that will shut down the land ramp... and that card just doesn't really exist. Yeah there are some more obscure or older cards that can partially answer the problem but they aren't nearly as telegraphed as "pick this to fix your problem" as, for example, cards that literally say "cannot be countered" vs. a blue player or "players cannot gain life" versus the lifegain deck. Even if they do go looking for help, it's extremely off-putting when the question starts as "I'm looking for ways to stop land ramp" and the answer comes back "welp first off your deck has a lovely slow gameplan, you need to cut these 20 cards and then you won't care anymore because you'll just be faster than the other player". That's talking to a timmy as a spike, it's not the "right" answer even if it's the right answer. People want to play with their fun toys, they don't want to hear that their toys are poo poo and they should go buy new ones. There's a gap for simple, efficient-enough cards that equalize land counts or mana generation. It doesn't need to be a dominant strategy (and honestly probably shouldn't be), but a couple cards hovering at fringe-playability would go a long way towards making it feel like there's answers in casual play without said answers having an outsized impact on the overall meta.
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Apr 11, 2024 18:09
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Make the entire table mad by playing Mana Barbs and Burning Earth while you cast all your spells off artifacts, obviously!
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Apr 11, 2024 18:19
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Spanish Manlove posted:It's funny that even wizards commented a little about edh players' attitudes with Crimes in thunder junction Armageddon is not a crime.
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Apr 11, 2024 18:26
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Just play mana breach
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Apr 11, 2024 18:26
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Batterypowered7 posted:Make the entire table mad by playing Mana Barbs and Burning Earth while you cast all your spells off artifacts, obviously! This works really well, especially in my Ojer burn deck. People really do not like taking 4 damage everytime they tap a land.
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Apr 11, 2024 21:46
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White Noise Marine posted:This works really well, especially in my Ojer burn deck. People really do not like taking 4 damage everytime they tap a land. I like the UR guy from the Warhammer set for this as well.
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Apr 11, 2024 22:04
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I'm tempted to put mana barbs in my magda deck. i just need to get her down and I'm golden
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Apr 11, 2024 23:50
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Unban Limited Resources, cowards.
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Apr 12, 2024 02:21
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orangelex44 posted:I don't want to get sidetracked into EDHRec-bashing, that's not my goal with bringing them into it, but I do want to pull out the "loading your deck with just cards you thought were cool and not building in enough interaction and support is not good" part of this because it directly relates to my argument. For people trying to approach the game - and EDH has a ton of newer players - there's a very high learning curve. Land ramp is widespread among precons and shows up all over the most common places people are going to go when making/improving decks. At the same time, when a player wins from having a poo poo-ton of mana it's a very obvious correlation for newer players to make where "they had 30 lands, I had 8, and I got toasted". What is the first action that newer or casual player will take? Not should take, but actually do? Maybe they go hunt down someone to ask for advice, but there's also a very good chance they go hunting for a magic bullet card that will shut down the land ramp... and that card just doesn't really exist. Yeah there are some more obscure or older cards that can partially answer the problem but they aren't nearly as telegraphed as "pick this to fix your problem" as, for example, cards that literally say "cannot be countered" vs. a blue player or "players cannot gain life" versus the lifegain deck. I'm actually not bashing EDHREC. I actually think the site's fine if you want to get some ideas for cards you may not have thought of for a deck you're building, sometimes there's a diamond in the rough that you just didn't think about. I'm just saying that as a tool, it's not a complete answer to deckbuilding. Again, it can tell you what people are putting in their decks, but not why. Never mind that it's just a mindless data scraping site as it stands, so it's going to be pulling cards from bad/unplayed lists to begin with, so it's not reliable in that sense and it requires a player to understand why a card is good or bad in a deck. Which it doesn't and won't teach. It's fine to use as a reference or for getting ideas, but it's awful as a resource for building a deck from the ground up. And I get it. I'm actually a fairly new MTG player compared to a whole lot of people here-- I've only been playing since 2016. I know what it's like to be the new player who builds lovely decks and leaves the LGS frustrated because not only did I not win, my deck wasn't able to even Do The Thing I wanted it to do to begin with. It's discouraging! And you know what? I was told my deck had a lovely and slow game plan. I was told I needed to cut a bunch of cards and put in better support cards. I was told that I needed to learn the game better. And I did. I did my research. I asked a bunch of questions. I tweaked and left things to trial and error. What worked? What didn't? What cards did cool things? What fell flat? What could I not even cast to begin with and was left stuck with in my hand? Why did that happen? What can I do to have a better game next time? And so on. Maybe I'm just an oddball who doesn't mind getting some criticism now and then, but it feels like a lot of casual EDH players only want to have a good time specifically on their own terms, in a social game where everyone wants to have fun. So I feel like it's important to be willing to learn. Yes, Magic is hard. Yes, it's got a steep learning curve. And that's okay! You don't need to engage with the complex stuff right away-- let it come with time. But it's important to learn good fundamentals in gameplay and deckbuilding so you don't get stuck in bad habits later and need to unlearn them. Some people never choose to learn or unlearn and just want to play the game on their own terms, everyone else's experience be damned, and I think that's a crappy attitude to have, too. No one wants to hear someone piss and moan about how their deck wasn't able to Do The Thing because the deck wasn't built efficiently, or because someone dared to try to interact with their plan. If you want to improve your time playing the game, it's inevitable that you'll need to engage with critique, learn from mistakes and take advice when you can. That's really all there is to it. People are gonna play cards that hose strategies and blow people out, because that's their brand of fun. You gotta learn to go with the flow or roll with the punches. As far as MLD goes, it's a good lesson that you need to diversify mana sources in EDH and have a good amount of them. But it's a lesson a lot of people never learn, because MLD is treated as this forbidden act and will focus more on lands instead since people are less likely to interact with them. Or they can continue spending their time loudly complaining about how "XYZ thing sucks and is broken and is unfair!" and find a small like-minded group of people to play Magic Calvinball with. But it's definitely an attitude to keep away from rando tables. Honestly, it was that kind of attitude that drove me away from casual EDH. Wanna talk about off-putting? Try doing your best to improve your deck and gameplay skills, only for someone to complain that you're not playing fair because you played an oh-so broken Sol Ring on turn 2. Or because you're playing blue and countered a spell. Or because you're playing red/black and killed their expensive dude. And heaven forbid you build a repeatable combo. (I had set up a combo of Sydri, Galvanic Genius and Staff of Nin to kill a single creature every turn, at the grand cost of 6UWB and UWB every turn to do.) That was more discouraging than losing has ever been for me. It's what pushed me toward cEDH, and while I've cooled off on that as of late (it's just way too much effort and mental bandwidth to keep up with the meta while we're under this fire hose of constant new content), it's what keeps me more in that niche, where the mentality is "anything goes" and people are much more open to discussing strategies and critiquing one another, and taking critique in turn. (Most of the time, at least.) Framboise fucked around with this message at 03:56 on Apr 12, 2024 |
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Apr 12, 2024 03:45
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Aniodia posted:Unban Limited Resources, cowards. 
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Apr 12, 2024 04:20
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I have no issue with MLD as a concept, I think it's just weak. Unless you very specifically are making a play to bring back your own stuff immediately, MLD accomplishes very little other than soft-resetting the game except now everyone wants you dead. I also don't have any personal issues with not knowing how or whether to deal with land ramp: kill the player, and try to encourage the entire table to do so as well. It often doesn't play out that smoothly depending on the exact composition of the table but that's not a rabbit hole worth going down right now. No, my concern is on the game-design level. There's no real reason not to have some land ramp hosers, and several reasons to have them. Limited (and Standard, for that matter) include silver-bullet cards in many sets to be a safety valve if some new mechanic ends up being too good; the same logic can and should apply to EDH. These counter-meta cards are generally very obvious, generally at least one mana overcosted, and most of the time aren't really played... but they're available as a teaching tool to new players (change your deck to Beat The Thing!) and as a low-investment (both in money and in consideration) option for enfranchised players on tilt or running some silly off-meta bullshit. Sure, there are some adjacent-hoser options for someone who goes looking (mostly in negating deck searching, although that doesn't stop multiple land drops per turn), but I don't see an immediate reason why there isn't some artifact that enforces one-land-per-turn, or that taxes a player for being too far ahead on lands. Perhaps they're afraid of some hard lock situation but those already exist with current cards (at least in eternal formats), they have a lot of design experience at this point to work around it.
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Apr 12, 2024 04:34
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Aniodia posted:Unban Limited Resources, cowards. Whoa, what a cool card. The art is great too in that frame. Love how clean the cards were back then.
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Apr 12, 2024 05:23
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 +  If I'm reading this right, this card quadruples the tokens made since Hazezon's ETB trigger then creates a second (delayed) trigger, yeah? One becomes two becomes four?
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Apr 12, 2024 06:30
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Zechariah posted:
603.2e Some effects refer to a triggered ability of an object. Such effects refer only to triggered abilities the object has, not any delayed triggered abilities (see rule 603.7) that may be created by abilities the object has.
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Apr 12, 2024 09:18
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I think the most damning thing that can be said about EDHRec is that one of the 'high synergy' cards for Chainer, Nightmare Adept is Flayer of the Hatebound, a card that does not actually work with him because of rules bullshittery. Of course, it's only listed so high because people THINK it works with him. Like others have said, EDHRec is a tool, and like only tool, what you get out of it can only ever be as good as what you put into it. If you offload the entire deck building process to randoms, well, of course you're going to be subject to the errant whims of the masses.
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Apr 12, 2024 11:52
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orangelex44 posted:I have no issue with MLD as a concept, I think it's just weak. Unless you very specifically are making a play to bring back your own stuff immediately, MLD accomplishes very little other than soft-resetting the game except now everyone wants you dead. Land Tax is a card
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Apr 12, 2024 12:09
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serefin99 posted:I think the most damning thing that can be said about EDHRec is that one of the 'high synergy' cards for Chainer, Nightmare Adept is Flayer of the Hatebound, a card that does not actually work with him because of rules bullshittery. Of course, it's only listed so high because people THINK it works with him. One of the things you have to learn about EDHRec is all the weird ways that cards might be spiking that aren't actually because it's good in that specific deck. My favorite example is the 'precon problem'. If you're using a commander that was in a precon, a bunch of the cards will also be from that precon, and you have to figure out yourself if that's because they actually synergize really well, or if that number is just from other precon-based brews that just didn't take that deck out. Is Run Away Together popular for Tegwyll because it's good with Tegwyll, or because it came with Tegwyll?
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Apr 12, 2024 12:34
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I just discovered an infinite drain combo +  + any version of  Edit: if this isn't in every single Dina deck by the end of the week I'll be shocked Silhouette fucked around with this message at 13:09 on Apr 12, 2024 |
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Apr 12, 2024 13:07
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I can't believe someone found an infinite with pitiless plunderer
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Apr 12, 2024 13:15
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Wouldn't you need haste to be able to sac the new treasure creatures as they need to tap to sac?
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Apr 12, 2024 13:56
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No, the green enchantment makes them into 0/0s that die as a state based action, making another token that is also a 0/0. It's an infinite loop with no escape, and if you don't have a drain effect in play before you play the other two pieces, you draw the game. Titania's song removes their ability to tap for mana anyways.
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Apr 12, 2024 13:59
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Wurzag posted:Wouldn't you need haste to be able to sac the new treasure creatures as they need to tap to sac? Their power and toughness are equal to their CMC, which is 0.
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Apr 12, 2024 14:00
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serefin99 posted:I think the most damning thing that can be said about EDHRec is that one of the 'high synergy' cards for Chainer, Nightmare Adept is Flayer of the Hatebound, a card that does not actually work with him because of rules bullshittery. Of course, it's only listed so high because people THINK it works with him. They also came in the same precon.
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Apr 12, 2024 14:07
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Kurieg posted:No, the green enchantment makes them into 0/0s that die as a state based action, making another token that is also a 0/0. It's an infinite loop with no escape, and if you don't have a drain effect in play before you play the other two pieces, you draw the game. "poo poo, I think my opponent wins on their next turn. Better draw the game than lose!"
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Apr 12, 2024 17:49
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