The Problem with "Budget" Cards
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- Опубликовано: 3 июн 2024
- sol ring bad or something idk
Written and edited by Alex Hutchinson
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0:00 Sol Ring
4:03 The Framing Effect
11:00 Deck Inconsistency
18:50 Conclusion
'powerful cards should be expensive' instead of 'building decks should be affordable' is for sure a hot take
Definitely favors the collectors perspective, and people who like Magic cards as a sort of investment.
The casual player, and social player, or just altruistic power gamer, want the fun parts of the game more accessible
@@landonstout3649 theres ways to sort out issues. just have functionally identically cards that can be reprinted into the ground. it allows poeple to spend a fortune on a single copy of the card while the player can use a functionally identical card for deck building.
@@landonstout3649 who says "powerful" is synonymous with "fun"? The games where I've played Sol Ring haven't actually been more fun than the games where my opponents played it, or nobody dropped one. they've just led to a higher power variance game.
Not exactly a fair read of the actual take, but it's not wrong either. Sol Ring doesn't belong in most commander decks, because cards have a cost beyond mana, card slots, and money, and even though Sol Ring is cheap and only costs (1), those other costs are really high outside of cEDH.
There are powerful cards that are auto-includes, like the original dual lands or 1-mana tutors etc, where the only reasons they're not in every single commander deck in those colors are 1: they're expensive, and 2: they're scarce. Having them in every deck doesn't improve the format. In fact, for the reasons in the video (novice deckbuilders falling into the "it makes my deck stronger" trap, etc) it would harm the format. But there's always the option of proxies.
Not really the point he was going after. The point was that "generically powerful cards make deckbuilding less interesting, because it rarely feels like there's any reason to run a different card instead". He'd rather ban them, but he knows sol ring won't be banned.
There's a reason that Innistrad is considered a great draft format - becuase few cards are "generically powerful" and archetypes rely far more on getting their power through synergies. This makes each deck feel more unique. If he was designing a commander-like format for his preferences, he'd not want to include Sol Ring or other generically powerful cards. Budget serves as a "soft ban list" for cards like mana vault, but most extremely powerful budget options are so good that it feels silly to include strictly worse but more varied options. If you're someone that just wants to build a few commander decks, this isn't an issue - you get enough variety from the color combinations and commander themes. If you're someone that wants to build lots and lots of interesting decks, generically powerful card choices feel very limiting.
TLDR: Sol Ring being so cheap means that you have effectively 98 deck slots to work with instead of 99. If Jeweled Lotus was a $2 card, it'd also be an auto-include for most decks - effectively lowering the unique deck slots further. Do this too many times and the decks start to get samey.
Fun hack, you can actually print out any card you like and play it for free!
You would be very welcome at a cedh table with that mentality
No seriously half of us have fully proxied decks
it's almost as if... people want to play and have fun instead of share money troubles among friends!
my basics are proxied in my cedh decks 💀
At this point, I don't get why people give their money to Wizards still..
Hubby and I just made full "buff" decks and I'm eager to see how they play. Amongst friends, proxy is the best ❤❤❤
I just don't think we should be relying on secondary market prices to do the balancing instead of, y'know, the actual design of the game.
Luckily I have a decent sublimation printer to get my cards from.
There is truth to this, but at the same time, the biggest strength of EDH is that it's a big tent format. This is worth maintaining, even if it makes the format more unwieldy. If we were to go down the path of very aggressive bannings, either across the board or in lieu of splitting it into several formats with different ban lists to enable different levels of play, the format as a whole would suffer.
See Duel Commander, an offshoot of EDH that use a modified ban list to limit the power discrepancy that can happen in a blind pod of EDH, to make it more akin to legacy and modern. I'm sure it's a fine format, with a lot of thought having gone into shaping that new ban list, but the reality of it is that only isolated pockets of players engage in it presently. Compare that to regular EDH: You can go to virtually any LGS with a playing space, on any night, and have a good chance of finding a pod.
And there are more facets to the price argument than just making it unaffordable. It's very easy to add cards to your decks that you have stacks and stacks of (as in my case, I have bought a lot of collections and precons, and have roughly 70 sol rings in and out of decks). It's a lot harder if you don't have stacks of said card, generally leading to more deliberate deck construction. The price is secondary to lower supply producing lower deck inclusion.
@@pikapika4208it shocks me how rare it is to hear that. Then again, I'm the kind of person who sees a player with all full art foils and the most expensive cards and I'm like don't you have other things to do with your money? I'm trying to make sure I can pay my rent
@@cass6020 Why don't you worry about your finances and let people spend their money on what they want?
There's this disturbing trend of wishing harm on people with valuable cards, hoping Hasbro robs them of their card value. It's petty and speaks to a bad character.
@@Syne111 I don't want people to get screwed over, and I wouldn't wish harm on people who collect or go all out on their decks. I understand getting excited and investing in something you love.
I don't think a game is the right place to be investing though. I'd rather see more people having the opportunity to play the game. Games like this are meant to be shared.
I just don't see a good reason why you should hundreds to thousands of dollars for one deck when most of the cost is arbitrary.
I'm sorry that my comment was phrased a bit callously, but I'm also not thrilled to have what I said interpreted as malicious towards peoples' well-being
Make the expensive cards cheaper, not the other way around...
Simple fix play mono blue add 19 counter spells to your commander deck and boom
That was my gripe at the beginning of the video. The market value of an existing card should not be of consideration when you, as WotC, reprint or redesign cards. The old versions will still have their collector value. But increasing the pricetag of building competetive MtG decks , a hobby that is expensive enough as is, by limiting the number of reprints is just plain stupid.
I play basically only Commander, so running 4 of something isn't even an option. I HAVE to pick worse than ideal options to get the card effects that I need, which is what makes Singleton such a beautiful format.
What I don't agree with is the increased set-size over the years. It makes you have to buy more packs to get a specific card you want, and it also inflates the price on the secondary market, since other people have the same problem.
Yeah my hot take is that mana crypt, mox diamond, mox opal, og duals etc etc should be printed into the ground and all game pieces should be accessible to all players.
If you don't like the cards, rule 0 them. Should some be banned? Maybe, maybe not. But "price" isn't a justifiable pseudoban. "A toy for the power gamers only" just makes the game pay to win. Nobody should have an advantage because of their bank account.
@@SporePunchnobody has an advantage because of their bank account
The power levels that actually use these cards are proxy enthusiasts
What the current market state DOES do, is limit the commander arms race so the format doesnt kill itself because only people that WANT to sweat are sweating
@@V2ULTRAKill My point stands. Put those cards in everyone's hands and make the problems of the format laid bare.
I guess I got lost in the shuffle of this video, it started with a odd statement, that sol ring being cheap was somehow a bad thing, I was curious so kept watching and the reason its bad is because... cheap powerful cards is bad for low power level decks. The example given about the swords making your meme equipment deck too good is kinda crazy to me, was getting a land with sword of the animist every turn really such a game warping effect? and if the sword of forge and frontier was such a threat did no one play a naturalize effect at the table?
Maybe your just playing at power levels way lower then I have ever played but to me playing edh is about doing fun and interesting things and some of those things are powerful, your argument seems to be keep the deck full of cards with equal power level and I just don't agree, I have many fun low power level decks, but like the consecrated sphinx example, I might have a big powerful card or 2, that I think fit the deck well and I like to use. Especially think about new players who might have pulled a big powerful exciting card and then telling them not to play it because its to powerful.
And the final point, it would be a good thing for sol ring to not be printed in commander and thus be legal but super costly is insane to me, maybe the format would be better with it banned but if its not I don't agree that it being legal and affordable is a bad thing.
I've rewatched this like 3 times and I feel like I don't understand the true thesis of this video.
@@ShynyMagikarp What he is saying, and i totally agree with that, is that putting cheap cards in your deck that are waaay more powerful than the rest of your deck is a bad thing.
That is because it creates huge power swings depending if you get to draw those super powerful cards or not. These power swings would make your game experience much worse. Players would think it is more RNG based whether they win or lose
@@blubbel222 Good summary. But if people decide that it's bad that everyone has a Sol Ring and that Sol Ring is incredibly swingy, then the solution should be to ban Sol Ring. Not have it so that Sol Ring type of cards are so expensive only a few people can play them.
@@lightworker2956 Oof, that's a hard one to fix. Generally people don't like when things they own get taken away. Especially if those things are what they are used to already. Since Sol Ring has been so cheap for so long (and reprinted so often) basically every one would have it in their deck already. Banning the card after wizards of the coast has been doubling down on its existence for so long would make a lot of people REALLY unhappy.
Can't really fix that. And besides Sol Ring is just a small example. The problem lies here:
On the one hand you have the quality of cards. Generally speaking, the better the card, the more it costs.
On the other hand there is supply and demand that dictates the price of things.
Now imagine there is a really good card that SHOULD be very expensive but due to the large amount of prints and reprints PLUS the format of edh (you can only have one copy of each card) there just isn't as much demand on that card. That pushes the price way down. So much so that it's a must have (especially for its low price).
That's what makes decks like this so inconsistent. If all the cards would have the same amount of prints, you could see the quality of them reflected in their price. But for some reason wizards of the coast chooses to have some cards (like Sol Ring) punching way above their weight class (price to performance).
Banning it is not the answer. Nor is artificially increasing the card price (which is impossible btw again, because of supply and demand).
I think it's up to the players to see what these cards do to the overall play experience of their play group.
There’s a lot to go over here, but to put it simply you missed the point a bit.
Cards like Sword of the Animist and Forge and Frontier aren’t busted, but they also don’t fit within mid-low power decks either. In Snail’s case, they made the deck less enjoyable when he DIDN’T have them out because they’re so much better than the alternatives within the deck, like Explorer’s Scope.
The power those cards provided also didn’t jive with the power of the pods he was playing the deck in.
For those couple of reasons, the deck felt better to play without those cards in it.
Snail includes this as an example for how budget decks would feel better to play if they weren’t using hyper-efficient cards that just so happen to be budget friendly, like Sol Ring.
Snail’s take about Sol Ring being better if it was expensive seems ridiculous, except nobody would really care if WotC didn’t reprint it 13 years ago. Just look at Mana Crypt. Most folks don’t have issues with it because it’s priced out of more budget and casual groups.
The answer is reprint duel lands so I can stop playing taps and shocks.
I can understand taps, but what's wrong with shocks?
@@PhoenicopterusR nothings wrong with them they are just bad duels :)
@@floridaman6982shocks are literally the best non true dual multicolored mana lands in the game are you high rn?
@@V2ULTRAKill it was joke. Did u watch the video?
What is a duel land?
I'm still a little confused on the conclusion a bit. More than budget cards being the problem, its more of a warning to be more thoughtful of what you want your deck to do and its power level and build it with those factors in mind. Which is pretty good, but i don't see how the cards themselves effect the perceptions of your deck more than the people at the table.
Agreed, great video and it presents some really interesting points, but I don't think at all that the conclusion follows the arguments made in the rest of the video. Especialy since non-budget cards (including some examples in this video) are much more problematic than the budget options.
To use examples from this video, I'd rather everyone at the table have Sol Ring than everyone at the table have Torment of Hailfire, and it's not even close.
The mistake being made is that you don't connect sol ring to letting you get to the point that cards like torment 'ruin' games
@@yugioh1870 Yup. Powerful budget cards like Sol Ring is deceptively powerful, apparently so much that people don't notice how having it turn 1 will make a deck look dramatically higher-tier than it is in any game they don't start with it. The fact that Sol Ring costs $2, would be by far the strongest card in any casual deck, and fits in any deck of its color(s), makes it incredibly tempting to slot into every single deck.
The title is almost clickbait, but the argument is that just because a card is "budget" doesn't mean it fits into budget decks. The fact that they're so cheap while being so powerful ends up not being great, because they wind up in a lot of decks they don't belong in, and trick novices into building decks that are wildly inconsistent form game to game.
He spends 22 minutes not actually stating a problem.
@@niedudehes new to this youtube thing. take the videos with a grain of salt
Cards used in "current" formats should only be expensive because they're a rare variant of a popular card (old printing, promo, foil), or they're a powerful card from a new set. A card shouldn't be expensive because its a competitive staple that hasnt been printed in 5+ years.
Explain me how a card from a new set could ever be more expensive than a card from an older set lmao do you even grasp how offer and demand works at all?
And unless you want every magic set to be the exact same forever, no they can't "just reprint old cards reeee". At some point, the designer are trying to come up with new cards and they don't want to constantly have to balance them against older reprints. You babies were not around when Thoughtseize was in standard, it was horrible and nobody wants that ever again.
@@garak55 They do reprint old cards with new rarities. Look at thunder junction.
@@mr.mechanacus162 Yes and ?
My point is that cards who are not currently in print will always be less expensive than cards who are not in print. It's not that hard to understand.
But really, you're just telling on yourself that you never played standard and probably haven't played for that long because if you did, you'd know that reprinting modern/legacy staples just makes standard prohibitively expensive and unfun. Trust me, I was there when they reprinted fetchlands. Standard decks were 5 color bring to light or gideon tribal and costed 1000 $ pre inflation.
Also, this idea that Magic RnD is somwhow capable of predicting what cards will be competitive staples is asinine. Friendly reminder that they printed delver as a random common thinking it'll only be good in limited, they're that incompetent. They're also responsible for orcish bowmasters, the card that basically rotated out every x/1 card in legacy and modern. I wouldn't trust them to know what a broken card looks like.
I wouldn't go so far as to say playing good cards ruins a deck or makes it worse but especially when playing on a budget you have to be incredibly deliberate with how you build.
Technically a more powerful card makes the deck more powerful, but practically, I took Smothering Tithe out of my mono white because I got tried and being targeted. It didn't even really do anything for deck, at least not consistently. Most of the time, the extra treasure tokens didn't really matter because my deck had zero synergy with it other than occasionally having some extra mana, which was nice but not a game changer. Plus, when it did really help me, I just felt bad for the other players. It was complete luck either way. I'll put Smothering Tithe in my future Urza deck.
@@punkypinko2965 That's because Smothering Tithe isn't a good card...
the inherent issue is equating $cost$ with power, i mostly play cedh but people at the shop like to play games with me but they don't like cedh so they tasked me with making a deck sub 100$ so i did and it consistently wins by turn 8 if not faster even when i'm hard targeted 3v1 archenemy style. so now i just play 'flesh and blood' with the store owner.
Sure it does champ @@WarbossMorgorTeefsmasha
@@WarbossMorgorTeefsmasha they should have tasked you with making something less strictly Spike rather than worry about cost.
Possibly a hot take. I find a degree of inconsistency in casual formats to be a good thing. It helps ensure some degree of randomness to make each game feel a little different. More importantly, though, I absolutely disagree with the idea that high power cards should only be for fat wallet players. Everyone should be able to build the deck they want to without having to shell out thousands of dollars for high-priced cards that are either on the reserve list or were only printed once for some reason. Having access to high power cards doesn't mean people always only want high power decks. That's why we have formats like Pauper and why we have a loose separation between casual and competitive edh. That's just my opinion though.
a high degree of inconsistency makes games more fun.
@@wesleywyndam-pryce5305 This is all entirely subjective. In my eyes, inconsistency is far less fun to me. I lived and breathed it when I first started EDH 15 or so years ago when inconsistency was basically a feature of the game due to the card pool at the time. Games were slogs. They were fun at the time, but not having access to the same tools then as I do now? I'd probably never play EDH if I had to go back to how it was back then. It was good times, fond memories but hindsight is 20/20.
That's not the kind of Magic I want to play anymore. I want good, more efficient games of Magic. EDH of yesteryear was like 40k is to me now. I switched to One Page Rules because, like Magic nowadays, it's good and efficient. Playing MORE games in the same time it took to play just one game of old is far more exciting and a better use of my gaming time.
Cedh players advocate for proxies
What these cards being high dollar DOES do is limit the edh arms race so all the players who want to build casual meme decks get to play the game, and don't have to deal with the spike army
Because reducing the price wouldnt make it easier to access cedh, that just requires a printer
It would bring the AVERAGE closer to cedh which is bad for the format according to all the casuals who hate cedh
@V2ULTRAKill your point assumes that every playgroup is ok with proxies, which isn't true. And in a tournament setting, you can't use proxies anyway. At that point. The only people who benefit from game pieces being expensive are the people who already have them and therefore have a smaller pool of players they have to beat.
So explain to me how it's fair to the average magic player who wants to play at a tournament to say "you can't play here because you're not fortunate enough to be able to spend $2-3k on cards"?
there are no EDH tournaments from Wizards. The CEDH tournaments that exist sometimes allow the use of proxies. Depends on the tournament. If a playgroup doesn't allow proxies, I question their intents.
I do agree with you that having pricy cards is never good.@@DanAllen117
honestly, I think we'd be better served by going back in time and preventing the reserved list from being created.
also try and have wizards take the konami route in reprinting expensive cards.
low-power gameplay would just take a very extensive banlist but that's more OK by me then the inaccessibility of certain cards and strategies.
Having a proper banlist would go a long way
Magic would not exist without the reserve list. It may not be needed now, but for those of us who were there enough to know, the reserve list is what gave a stupid cardboard waste of money legitimate holding value. Not personal value, but the kind of value that lasts generations.
The expensive cards that aren't on the reserve list would still be valuable if there was no reserve list. Wizards holds onto reprint equity, sometimes less sometimes more. They have had pseudo-reserve lists of cards they don't reprint for several years, but who knows how that will look with the ramp up of releases. I don't think it would be much different with or without a true reserve list. At least we could reasonably play Legacy.
@@Lodosswar100 bs. People buy cards for the game.
The monkey paw curls, wizard now more aggressively reprints cards of value. But they add super mythic a rarity higher then mythic and every obviously pushed super card in now in that rarity.
I think the real solution here is for everybody to mind their own business and let my Jodah live his best life
Jodah knows what he did, he’s got it coming.
Hey I just built Jodah as tuned as possible with what I had around, leaning heavily on 5c value. Mind sharing your list if you’re happy with it?
Same.
Jodah cannot be allowed to live, even if he's immortal
the jodah player at my local store knows what he did, i will not let him play solitaire on commander night.
Staples are staples for a reason. I don't think it's entirely bad for undeniably worse options to be less played. You're not running more and worse counterspells than Counterspells because they're all you got. You're running them because they're still good enough to be efficient and impactful. And blue removal is so limited, you're kinda simply stuck to cedh staples like Into the Roil, Blink of an Eye, Run Away Together, Reality Shift, Pongify, Rapid Hybridization, and Chain of Vapor. Which to me sounds like a really strong suite, it's a shame it sets you back like $25 but you can drop like Chain to bring that down $10. Open up to more colors, and even mana acceleration isn't that bad. Really the issue is that this is the sneaky way of bringing up a deck's budget. 60 cards with an average of $3 is still $180. Bring the average up even more with some $10, or open up colors so even your land base starts raising the budget and well... Woops, I guess consistent edh decks with string bases just suddenly cost $300-500.
My man actually just said into the roil and blink of an eye are cedh staples
@@yanjia1777 I guess it depends on the decks, but cedh lists of Nymris and similar lower color lists run them.
@@ebbandfloatzelnot sure what drugs youre on but
Nymris isnt cedh, and even URZA a mono blue cedh list with a total of T W O creatures doesnt run roil, its not a thing in cedh period
Same with blink of an eye
We dont run removal, we run 31 flavors of counterspell and what removal we do run gets used on our own shit more than opponents shit
*shrugs* I dunno. I'd run 3 mana Counterspell
@@deejayf69 you definitely dont play blue then
“Good cards shouldn’t be affordable”
And
“Only people with alot of money should be able to use good cards” are good alternate titles.
My suggestion would be: "Magic should be more pay to win but WotC shouldn't benefit from it" or "Oh i have these cards already so f everyone who doesn't"😅
"This product is not for you" still rings in my ears.
did you even watch the video?
How do you wake up in the morning and say, "You know, I'm going to make a video about how printed pieces of cardboard for this card game should not be affordable"?
Lose to a Krenko Mob Boss player with a turn one sol ring?
I haven't gotten very far in, no way does someone say magic cards should cost more!?
he is using the tabernacle argument. it is a op card that warps the format. you would hate to see it at every game. but because of the cost, it is only played at cedh were proxying is not only allowed but encouraged
I inherently disagree with the argument that *price* should be the factor used to prevent everyone from running ultra-powerful cards. Standard, for all its latent and its modern-day faults, solved this problem decades ago; rotating set legality ensures that the format can't be overrun by best-of-the-best cards and forces people to change up their gameplay every now and again. Back when set releases were a lot more spaced out (and, as a result, GENERALLY more well-balanced), this meant that even if there was a card or two dominating the meta for a while, it would only prompt people to look for answers to it that would have been otherwise overlooked. It also gave people time to, y'know, actually trade for once to try and obtain the cards they were looking for, or at least gave them enough time to buy enough packs to find those cards themselves without going bankrupt. Of course, the problem with Standard -- even at its best -- is that you have to continuously buy into the format if you wanna keep playing it, so most people only play for a few rotations before they decide to move on to Commander, Modern, Pioneer, etc. (or just give up the game entirely).
But I digress. What Standard does particularly well is the exclusion of vast swaths of cards from format legality. This prevents the reliance on Moxin and the like that you see in formats like Vintage or Legacy, simply because you aren't allowed to play them there. Likewise, Pioneer and Modern limit the power level of their ecosystems by benchmarks on the Magic timeline. Notably, this presents people with lots of options on what format they can play in depending on what power-level they actually want to play in. If price was not limiting who could play Vintage or Legacy, it's not like everyone would suddenly do so en masse just because it's the highest level of play -- lots of people don't enjoy playing with Moxin all the time, or worrying about getting Time Walked every turn, and even more people only enjoy playing that way on occasion and would like to be able to do so without either having to proxy their entire deck or shelling out the equivalent of a down payment on a house. Price -- especially secondhand price -- simply should not be used to gatekeep older, broader formats; just ban the problem cards or exclude their sets from legality in newer, narrower ones.
Sure wizards retort is strictle worse then counterspell, but you can only play 1 counterspell. With the retort you have a second general countzerspell. This is part of EDH/comanders appeal that you so many cards see play here, that would never see play otherwise, since there is strictly better cards
That's exactly what this entire video is about :D
@@TheMattmatic NO he is claiming playing wizards retort ruins your deck. I am explaining why it absolutely makes sense to play it.
@@daftwulli6145 The whole point of this video is that a card like Counterspell is incredibly good, so playing a strictly worse version of it (which Wizards retort is, except for very narrow situations) is still fine for decks that want several versions of a certain effect.
This video honestly hit me way too close to home because I was that guy at my brand new to EDH playgroup who would throw flashy and expensive cards into my custom made deck just because they're cool, or they're powerful... all while my friends were still using precons, or slightly upgraded precons. To be fair, we all had equal EDH playtime, but I knew mtg much more than them. So instead of making less powerful decks that were more on line with their precons, I used a custom made Izzet deck with nasty combos (even accidentally including that Niv-Mizzet/Curiosity combo because I didn't even know it was a thing), so I set the bar and expectations way too high with my playgroup.
Thankfully, instead of quiting EDH, they all actually came to me for help on building decks, and we ended up making brand new and similarly powered custom decks that we were all proud of. So it wasn't entirely a bad story. But man do I feel bad for beating them with a $150 custom deck while they were using $50 precons
Thats really how the game should go. If people feel the deck is too much they need a new strategy. My buddy made a $20 ,000 ur dragon deck I didn't run I simply made yarok more powerful and destroyed his little 20k deck
@@leaveemfaceless9629 no better feeling than winning with decks that are significantly cheaper. Lathiel is my pride and joy. A budget tempo deck that works in commander.
@@samnorman2307share plz. I can only build massive value boring decks. I need a tempo deck.
There’s a magic in sharing combos with friends, and managing to still have fun when winning isn’t the whole point of playing.
I love my expensive decks because it let me feel like I’m making “cool” decisions with my hand and having choices the synchronize. I don’t love my expensive decks because I’m more likely to win 😂
This. This whole situation right here. Good on you and I'm glad it came out in your favor and everyone was happy in the end. But if you're playing a Precon know that you are playing the lowest power level and you shouldn't make others feel bad for playing their good decks/cards.
I had a random guy blow up on me bc i sat down to play and i won on turns 6 and 7 consecutively. No one was playing any removal. No one was doing anything momentous except for me. My deck wasn't even that strong and no one tried to stop me.
I'm sorry but if you're playing a precon, prepare to get wrecked i guess. At the very least, understand you are string YOURSELF up for a bad time/failure. Dont take it out on others for your incompetence.
"Ink is almost free, print your favourite deck, try it with your friends and if you want to take it to a tournament you can still buy it" my local pokemon community sentiment. I think the real problem is that a lot of commander playgroups take themselves too seriously. You´re playing with friends, for fun/practice. You *virtual* budget limitations as a means of keeping a certain powerlevel, you can exclude certain playstyles if they are little aprechiated in the group, you can set or not set whatever rules, just pleas uncouple them from your ego and personal budget
Or just get the counterfeit cards so u have the cards for a fraction of the price.
It's also amusing that this is less a game balance problem and more a commander as a format problem. In 1v1 magic its a given that you're gonna know what's strong and choosing not to play that is a concession. In Commander players are trying to play things they find fun but if your fun thing is stronger sometimes they'll up the ante on you and play higher power level decks.
The solution is to proxy everything and play turbo food chain decks against one another.
Or set a max budget, like $100.
@@mildtotemperate yeah except with $100 someone can still cram in smothering tithe, ranger captain of eos, and esper sentinel.
@@mopanda81 still, 3 powerful cards in a 100 card deck is much better than no limit at all. You'd still be limiting the options greatly. The rest of the deck would need to be super inexpensive.
@@mildtotemperate If the rest of the deck was just ways to filter/tutor for those three pieces (as quite a few CEDH lists are now due to the power of white hatebears) it would still be annoying and oppressive without some kind of rule zero talk. People at every power level below cedh complain when someone gets a sol ring start, this would be similar.
In my LGS they solved this issue by making a point system.
Win by infinite combo?
Less points.
Win before turn 5?
Less points.
In theory a man with an all creature aggro deck can win by killing a few opponents by combat damage even if he loses the overall match to infinite combos.
Edh as a format should be fun for everyone.
And CEDH should be able to partake too.
With this point system both can actually play the game.
That said.
My completely noncompetitive human tribal performs well even against CEDH decks.
I just need to put on the pressure and do table politics.
This whole video I feel like your trying to find deeper meaning in a puddle.
I like playing good cards in commander, it feels good
Playing good cards feels good in any game. I'm just baffled so many people roll eyes when good cards are played.
Wow the SoL ring reprint take has to be the worst I’ve heard yet
The problem with sol ring isn't that it's cheap - making the game pieces easier to afford is always a good thing. The problem tends to be that feeling that it's a "must include." The idea that every deck should have a sol ring in it and the same for other relatively powerful cards is what creates the issues, not the price itself.
....It's a must include in Very large part due to it being cheap.
@@FinetalPiesYeah, the reason Sol Ring is in every deck but Mana Crypt is not is not because Mana Crypt is a worse card, it's because Mana Crypt is $180 for a cheap +2 mana boost and Sol Ring is $2 for a +2 mana boost
See, my thoughts on Sol Ring being a "Must include" card, is that it happened because of necesity, not choice. Sol ring is realistically the only "Budget" way that people who don't play green keep up with green decks. At least for me, when I started playing Magic, I would go against a lot of green, and 7/10 times I would run into people that would get Elven Mystic/Exploration turn 1, and then have 4-5 mana on turn 2. And having Commanders that gave them card advantage by turn 2 or 3 made it so that I would lose games before I would even have chance to really play. I was usually 3 or 4 turns behind because I could not keep up with their ramp. With Sol Ring however, I could match at least the 4 mana at turn 2, and at least it gave me a chance to hold my own and actually play the game.
biorhythm has the same face the playgroup gives you when you play it
just play creatures lol
@@alexanderficken9354No. I don't think I will.
**counters the Biorythm**
There just has to be a distinction between playing casual and budget. Our friend group plays a fifty dollar version of edh, and many of those decks hang with 8 out of 10 power edh decks no problem. But we also play with decks where some people have a 1000 dollar deck thats just entirely a meme. The biggest thing to understand is that thought budget can limit the power level of a given deck, budget does not determine power level
yep, budget is almost irrelevant to power.
I made a teysa envoy if ghosts deck that has no win con and instead plays dress up with equipment that is also jewelery or fancy clothes.
its nearly $3,000
@@wesleywyndam-pryce5305 the wincon was the fashion we made along the way.
I guarantee you
Unless they play urza or yuriko
You dont hang with 8-10 decks on a budget
10 is cedh ffs, ONLY urza and yuriko compete with full power cedh on a budget
8 out of 10 isnt full power CEDH, I think you misread my comment. Also there are many other commanders that you can build on a 2-300 dollar budget that can sit at most CEDH tables.@@V2ULTRAKill
Why Sol Ring? Fast mana like: Mana Crypt $164, Ancient Tomb $67, Mox Diamond $608 are played in casual tables.
Rules Committee fails to ban Shaman of Forgotten Ways, which has Biorhythm's text as a creature activation, for 8 years in a row.
Shaman has to tap. You need to either have 14 mana and a Haste outlet that no one destroys in response to you casting the Shaman, OR you need to drop it and have it see your next turn. Biorhythm can just come and kill everyone with very few ways to stop it. It's not the life total nuking effect of Biorhythm that is the problem. It's that is basically a one card Sorcery win con.
I’ve been going through a lot of my decks and improving them because my play group seems to be growing in power level. More tier zero super staples like fierce guardianship, and back to back insane efficient turns and such.
I feel like my desire to play on a more mid power level (where you can cast a 3 cost mana rock or counter spell and not get eyebrow raises or criticism) is valid. But I don’t know how to express that to my friends without sounding like a crybaby who doesn’t know how to build decks and wants everyone to get rid of the cards they paid good money for just so I can have a shot.
It feels like an arms race where we see one person using mana vault (or something) to turn two play a smothering tithe and then we edge up our decks to try and compete. Just a vicious never ending arms race.
Yeah, that’s an annoying spot to be in. I really enjoy playing a mix of different power levels, and mid-power is where my two most creative decks sit. Having a competitive aspect can be fun, but IMO within a format like commander it needs limits in order to prevent it from becoming a cash-burning contest. A few years back, my little covid-era playgroup made a set of $25 decks, one for each two-color pair, and optimized them as hard as possible. That sort of competition felt much more grounded than it would have with a higher (or no) budget, and had an obviously natural limit on the amount we spent.
If most of the players have multiple decks, try asking them to keep one deck under a certain budget for testing newer decks against. If your friends are anything like mine they’ll end up with a budget deck or two they’ve been wanting to try but didn’t want to use against everyone’s high power decks. Usually after 1-2 mid level or budget games we’ll play 1 “bring out the best deck you have” game and everyone can play their fully amped up deck and it might not be the most fun for anyone falling behind on the race, but those first 2 games will be a blast.
There’s also the dark side route of building a stax deck to shut down all that speedy turn 1 ramp if your friend group can accept that stacks has a place in the rock paper scissors of deck construction. Just make sure the stax deck has a wincon please.
easy fix is just talk
@@dustin89clanton budget is a horrible measure of power.
@@wesleywyndam-pryce5305 I have tried that now. We messaged on discord for THREE HOURS and didn’t get anywhere. Just a ton of “lower the power of your deck by getting rid of fast mana to prevent explosive openers.” Followed by “Im not sure if most conflict arises directly from fast mana” and then bickering over the semantics of what makes a card “inherently powerful”.
Now it’s midnight and we’re putting a pin in it. It’s just so aggravating. It can’t be THAT hard to agree to make some lower power decks.
This was an… interesting watch. Most of the runtime, I felt like this would possibly be better for a new player vs. a 10+ year EDH veteran. In any case, I’m happy I watched at 1.5x speed
Started playing EDH 4 months ago, got a ton out of this.
Wish I would've read this BEFORE watching... 😵💫😂
I finally got into commander about 2 years ago and I got more out of it than expected. Mostly because it does fully explain how my own deck building has reflected the exact situation he described. Making wildly inconsistent decks by putting in heavier hitting combo pieces. Though I kind of like it that way. I prefer that kind of randomness. Though I fully admit I play casually.
Yeah I can definitely say I see why this guy's name is "Snail".
This is a very interesting topic. I've found that it depends on who you play with for the most part. I used to play a lot of commander games at my local lgs with a random assortment of people. However, more often than not I have found the experience to be not worth it in my opinion. Player one is playing a super tight deck full of cutting edge staples, while player 3 is playing a precon fresh out of the box with no sleeves. I have my small playgroup that we build decks according to a standard that we have built over the years and choose cards based on that rather than adding the big efficient hitters. Great video! Super enlightening.
im curious how bad your deck is that sword of the animist makes your deck too strong for the range youre looking at
It's not about 'bad decks' it's about the type of game you want to play. My friends and I have all built $5 budget decks and we had to put together a pretty heavy list of cards that are in that range that are far too powerful to be played because they are dirt cheap, but so strong they break our little homebrew format - Sol Ring is one of such cards. They aren't 'bad decks' they are decks built to play a specific way (and be a fun challenge to build) and it possible to ruin that fun by 'making them better.' If someone threw a 15 cent infinite combo into their deck it would completely destroy the fun of putting together these often janky decks and playing them against each other.
@@reezethevampire the whole point of your $5 challenge sounds like “make a $.15 infinite”
@@riddick1128 No, because that's insanely not fun for anyone. The point is to make an exciting, functional $5 deck.
Believe it or not, but MTG is a GAME and it's about having fun, not winning by being the asshole at the table.
@@reezethevampire if you’re playing a game with winners and losers I expect my opponents to try to win and I do the same
@@riddick1128 You can still have that game without running decks that ruin the game's fun for everyone else.
If I had a Time Machine and several million dollars for bribes, I’m going back in time and keeping wizards of the coast from making the reserve list a thing.
Naw make cards like demonic and mana crypt more affordable so more player get into competitive magic if they want
My group plays with only proxies. We constantly make use of the strong staple cards because having strong cards is fun. I especially like giving even our weaker decks strong mana bases and strong card draw because being able to play your cards is fun.
People worry about crazy snowball wins ruining it, but we just don't really experience that. If everyone has a strong mana base, it's rare to ever feel *too* far behind, and with strong removal options, players with an advantage can be kept in check by the rest of the table.
Our only real restriction is we try to keep out strong stax cards that slow the game down and not use combos that can instantly win the game from the hand.
This video went a lot of unrelated places that had nothing to do with budget, even some of the parts about budget.
I thought this exact thing. He made so many different points and then failed to connect them back to the videos thesis
I'm kind of new to mtg, I've been playing almost a year and only play EDH, so forgive me if I don't understand as well as someone more familiar with the game.
that being said, I can't really say I agree with the main point of this video. for starters, building and playing the format around power levels, strictly speaking, is kind of silly because no two people are going to 100% agree on said levels. not saying power levels shouldn't exist, but if you want them then there should be a structured ruling on the cards that are used in EDH. this whole "the table agreed to bring power level 5 decks and this guy brought a level 7" idea is hard to get on board with because what you consider to be level 5 and what the other person considers to be level 5 can be vastly different. without a proper structuring of the format with ban lists to go along with said structure, all you're doing is giving yourself a headache and less than optimal experience.
to prove the point: I don't think counterspell and sol ring are overpowered. if you feel that your deck is taking a hit because you don't include them, that is you willingly kneecapping yourself. and that's okay! I have 4 decks so far that I've built myself, and 1 of them don't use either of those cards. that is a choice I made myself, and I don't demand that other players respect it and play with decks that are also lacking said cards. of course, if you're walking into a casual setting then you want to expect similar levels of optimization and levels of strength, but the idea that you should avoid a card like sol ring just because it's really good and popular is kind of dumb. in sol ring's case, literally every single build would benefit off of having it. so yes, it's a very strong card. in regards to my structured stance, I wouldn't even mind if it got banned in a universal "casual" tier of EDH. but, that doesn't exist for mtg the same way it does for competitive pokemon, at least not yet. and furthermore, the idea that sol ring should not have been reprinted is flawed, even if it is meant as a joke. not only did the last comment kind of undermine your video, but no card should be gatekept with scarcity and cost because they're "too good." that's just ridiculous. I think that these cards should be accessible to everyone that wants to play EDH, no matter what. if you want to play with mox diamond, you should be able to, end of story. worried about the impact it's going to make on the format? make tiers and ban lists, simple. all of this rule zero and kitchen table talk is nonsense when regarding the format as a whole, if I try to apply the same logic to competitive pokemon I just laugh. not to say the pokemon vgc is perfect by any means, but it would be so much easier to walk up to a table and have everyone agree on playing UU, OU, or Uber instead of a "casual level 5" that has no solid backing.
I do like your point on consistency though. the middle of the video is good; to build a deck without giving thought to what actually works for its theme or win con and simply going for strong cards will make you a target without actually improving your success rate. strong doesn't mean better in every scenario, and it is good to encourage diversity and thinking outside the box to find combos and spells that fit your deck better. but if everyone is running sol ring, and it's cheap and accessible, then I don't think 1 strong card is going to overthrow the entire game and guarantee your victory/demise.
with all that said, thanks for the video. open discussion is important, and I'm still learning the game both in how it's viewed and played.
also, WOTC reprint dual lands or else I will CTRL P taiga 200 times
Mana bases are the single most hindering aspect of deck building. Even some of the most 'casual decks' around would get a big boost in 'power level' if the good lands were more affordable. There's great budget options out there right now but most people sleep on them for whatever reason. Seriously, check and pain lands should be played way more in multi color decks and I still see people to this day playing ETB tapped lands of all sorts. Like...my guy, please. Pay the extra .25 to get one of the massively reprinted check/pain lands instead. I beg of you.
In a casual format like commander, nobody benefits from having singles cost over $50 a piece except the wealthy and those who have played since the beginning. At my LGS, I’m constantly in commander pods with people who are way out of my decks power range, especially when most of my decks are just upgraded precons. I love playing commander against decks that are similar power, but when I’m outmatched because the staples and powerful cards are too expensive, it’s very frustrating.
this is a horrible take, but the henry kissinger part aged so poorly
Dude really complained about 2 good cards he added to his deck.
this is really difficult. My personal experience is that if you exclude those staples you will need a strictly casual table to play your weaker decks in. If you don't have the option/don't want to build a high power deck those cards still allow you to have some fun and maybe even a chance to win in higher power tables. I had a game yesterday with syr gwyn against Ghazghkull and noticed that we mostly ran the same higher power low price equipments while the rest were some more expensive equipments from him and some low cost junk from me. I would have felt terrible if those low cost equipments didn't exist and at least felt like i had a chance when he killed me. Those budget cards help to at least close the gap a little bit in games against stronger opponents but i decided to have some backup cards to exchange them if some actual casual tables exist.
This is so relatable. I have a c edh deck. But I can't find a group that's actually casual. They don't like counters and combos and tutors but run all the high cost cards otherwise. I'm getting tired of losing to mana vault and solring or mana crypt
This was a very well structured video. It touched on a lot of points and had great examples to follow up. I struggle a lot with keeping my decks to a more acceptable power level. The LGS's I play at vary wildly with what is considered casual. I try to keep a range of decks on me but after a few events, a few tweaks to the deck to adjust it to the stores meta, and a lot of digging through my collection. I'll bring the deck to the same store and now it's to good for the table where previously it got stomped prior. In a perfect world Sol Ring would be cEDH only and cards that allow for non symmetrical explosive starts and snowballing wins would be less common. But with easy access to so many powerful cards for cheap it will only truly happen with a pre set group and only within that group. Once you have a single person outside the group join it ruins the dynamic. In the future when deck building/teching I will remember this video for reference to keep myself in check not to add that CycRift or Smothering Tithe just because I have it available.
I have found a good clone deck to be flexible dmfor a store with lots of power levels.
I also have an Atla Palani deck with a rule 0 to hatch the eggs and let the dinosaurs (tribal) go to opponents instead of of me. They roll a d20 to see who catches it first. I call it my "pokemon" deck.
But it still functions as a normal Dino tribal deck by swapping in Gishath to the command zone. A lot of my decks now fit this dichotomy of a fun version and kind of janky and flips over to a 7-9 power level deck for if not.
It is a game format where you draw 7 random cards from 100 singleton. The fact that players still whine about RNG in a card game makes me think they should play something else, like fighting games
This makes some good points! In some ways I think it's a good thing that a lot of these simple staples are easily available, but you're right that it means a lot of lower power cards just don't exist.
This video is extremely right in some ways and wrong in others. If you play a deck full of commons uncommons and rares below a certain power level you're asking to make an extremely vulnerable deck.
I have come upon the 'middle difficulty' problem a lot in games, and I never really thought about it from a card-choice perspective.
See, I'm what I tend to call an 'above-average player' - I am skilled at the game, know the rules well, and know enough about deckbuilding to enjoy it and not make a mess. When I play a game, I strive to make good choices, do 'the right play', and analyze the situation to the best of my ability so that I am using the resources I have in the way that makes the most sense, and I am usually pretty good at doing this.
I am NOT, however, a *great* player. I would get eaten alive in a true competitive setting. I miss things just a bit too much, make deckbuilding choices for what looks like it would be fun to make use of during the game, and find net-decking or meta-chasing boring. I would much rather do my best with what I've got, or within some interesting challenge idea, than just "play the best deck the best way and win all the games".
However, this puts me in an awkward place, compared to 'average' players, who maybe are a bit *more* casual, or a bit less skilled or familiar, or who are paying less attention to things, or who value making their plays in different ways... I tend to win a lot of games against 'average' players and decks, but lose a lot of games against 'very good' players and decks, and it often feels like there's very little middle ground; very little space in the middle. I hadn't considered that my card choices might also be contributing to that; as in the video, my collection contains mostly bulk, but a small number of valuable and powerful cards which I do enjoy putting in decks where they fit well, because it feels good to run the right card for the job. However, such card choices might be creating, or at least exacerbating the problem. This will require some thought.
I feel like there are about 14 levels of magic players, and the gap between each level is huge.
I had this exact issue with my first homebrewed EDH deck: Yedora Grave Gardener. The morph & sac combos were absurd and game winning, but the rest of the deck just kind of floundered with lack luster morph synergies.
I also thing the pickle theory bi-modal power thing is another big reason why quantitative "power levels" suck at describing a deck. Your deck isn't a "7", its a "4" or a "9" depending on how you draw.
Sol ring helps get out a high cost commanders so low cost commanders don’t beat you before you can get yours out..
I feel like having a card that is “too good” for your deck is a bit of a non issue, particularly in the case of sol ring. If everyone has it, then no one has it. And the only issue with power level would be social ones. If your group decides a deck or card you play is too powerful then that’s for you guys to sort out and make lil mini group bans.
"If everyone has it, no one has it" is baffling logic, turn 1 sol ring is a game warping scenario and, uh, how do I explain this. Just because one person gets it in their opening hand, doesn't mean that everyone will.
@@FinetalPies sure but, are we seriously going to start arguing a about opening hands because it's a game with a crapshoot of rng on which cards you start with and then draw.
just look at the command zone memes of jimmy wong and land draw. you check the decklists and land is comparable to literally every other players. he just seems cursed to never draw it.
sometimes people draw amazing opening hands and sometimes they don't. just with precons I've had luck to have only drawn bounce lands and one basic to starting with command tower into sol ring into an arcane signet. it is what it is.
Having cards that are significantly stronger than others in the deck exacerbates the issue of certain players drawing really well of really badly.
This is a very reductive example, but if you play a deck that plays at a low power level 95% of the time but a mid power level 5% of the time, others players will have a dilemma when choosing their deck against yours. If they choose a low power deck, then 5% of the time, they just lose, while if they play a mid level deck, you get demolished 95% of the time.
If you play a deck where the power of your cards are consistent, you don’t power spike randomly and reduce the number of non-games.
the ideas in this video play into my main issue w/ edh as a whole. It can be frustrating when I make an active choice to nerf a deck, then bring it to a “low power” table only to be faced w/ Alpha powerhouses that cost $1. also notable, edh players generally being bad at both threat analysis and deck building can lead to some miserable games in mid-higher power tables.
You know the struggle. My last game i was using my tatsunari mutate which is garbage. A friend attacking me while they let the combo player keep refiling his hand and calmly waiting to combo off. Edh ia fun but can be a pain also, lets not even get into power lvls. One of my friends always use combat deks, last time i used my kenrith which is not super top tier but still have combos and they cried about it. Well u been owning us over w your combo deks ffs lol. No one ever will be happy
@@xNemesiSxPR I still remember about 15 years ago when I finished building my Urabrask the Hidden deck, I was being targeted over and over any time I put a reasonable body into play, at a time where Red had so little meaningfully good top end creatures (Other than like...Inferno Titan at that point). All the while the Ulamog player was just idly setting up to table sweep and it was the first time I legit lost my temper because it was such a repeat offense. Like, the fuck are you people DOING? At the time I was by no means a seasoned MTG player either. I just couldn't believe they were wasting every resource on me when Ulamog was about to Annihilator the entire table over and over.
@@TaskMaster5 i play mostly beatdown decks and i relate heavily. many people i play against at my LGS have either control or voltron. ill put like one damn creature out and immediately everyone on the table is like "omg we have to kill him on turn 4." like dude its not even part of my wincon, leaveme alone ffs. meanwhile the control players are chilling with a full hand and 5 free mana and/or voltron players literally have their entire wincon on the field cuz all it takes is like 2 enchantments attached to their commandrr and its gg.
sol ring being cheap helps the jank compete with the stuff that would have been broken without it. The availability means that weaker decks will sometimes have games and turns strong enough to punch upwards. not just sol ring, this goes for alot of powerful budget fast mana and strong cards.
I mean, not really. Whats’s stopping the super expensive deck from playing sol ring, counterspell, swords, and the rest of those cheap staples.
if we take away these cards, stupidly powerful Commander decks like Tymna the Weaver and Kraum Ludevic's Opus will still be stronger and better. Giving no mutual ground to deckbuild on makes it so that less blatantly powerful commanders can never hang and so these decks would never be at the same table @@Kuuga12-gc1gp
"younger than kissinger" is my new go to for any discussion of age
I mean it’s basically “sol ring + 99 other cards”
Deck building has become
Find commander
Add sol ring
Add arcane signet
Add your commanders signets and talismans
Add thought vessel
Add reliquary tower
EDH Rec the rest of the deck
My Sharuum has 2 infinite combos, and one of those has 2 variations. The lads I play against know this, but as I cannot search out Disciple of the Vault for the first combo and the other requires 4 cards they accept it in higher-power games.
In fact the guy that hates combo the most was grudgingly impressed when I assembled the 4-card Memnarch combo once, normally the game ends well before I get all the pieces in play.
What are they? My 20+ year old first ever deck is now a Sharuum artifacts control, and while I've got more triggers and activations than I know what to do with (hello Unwinding Clock/Clock of Omens) I have no actual infinite combos.
Game pieces shouldn't be unaffordable.
Imagine if you went to play Chess and if you couldn't afford a queen (which in this hypothetical is really expensive) you had to replace it with a pawn.
Many players would complain to me that I didn't have an infinite combo in my deck so I could "close out a game" instead of relying on attacking a player to death. So I ended up tossing in a combo to "end the game" if I needed to. I personally love that Sol Ring isn't banned. But I'm biased as it's my favorite card and I collect them. In 2012 I had 100+ revised copies. But I sold them then except for 4 NM ones because WOTC was reprinting them for Commander. If they ever did ban Sol Ring I don't think I would continue playing Commander. Because a large part of playing cards with my friends is about playing with cards I love. I don't care if I win or not. I just want to play the cards I like and interact in a game with people I enjoy spending time with.
It'd also just be a stupid ban. One of Magic's largest problems and one that a lot of players don't seem to grasp, is mana bases are often garbage in a lot of decks I've encountered over the years. A lot of decks, just by virtue of having GOOD land bases would shoot up on the 'power level' for that alone. Not just fast mana, just GOOD mana. Thankfully there's some budget options for better lands other than having to rely solely on ETB Tapped lands for multi colored decks. But having access to ways to play more efficiently is such an important aspect of building not just a 'strong' deck but a 'good' one as well.
My 5 color Morph deck started out using a lot of the tap lands but I quickly invested in pain lands when they were being reprinted fairly regularly at one point, getting them for a couple bucks or less each. Then I got some Triomes from my Ikora openings and slotted those in. Instantly the deck went from being just for memes to actually being one of my better decks. It was already soundly built but the lack of reliable lands was what REALLY hindered it. And I wont apologize for upgrading the deck to operate far better than it did before. :/
Maybe it's just because I'm older now but I don't think I'd enjoy playing EDH the way I did 15 years ago when I first started with my buds and at the LGS. Four+ hour games just aren't something I want to do on the regular. I want games that are fun, interactive and people build in a way they can actually close out games and not meander like they did before. It's the same reason I enjoy One Page Rules over 40k now because 40k takes AGES to play a single game while OPR let's me play two or even THREE games in the time it takes to play one normal 40k game.
People should embrace better deck building. You don't have to sacrifice anything to do it. I truly believe games will be infinitely more fun when people build in a way that allows them to be more efficient and interactive rather than twiddle thumbs due to having no way to play on curve and still have the ability to meaningfully interact with the boardstate.
@TaskMaster5 agreed LANDS make the biggest difference I've noticed and tbh I focus more on the fixing and ramp more than the cards in the deck and my decks are more consistent than my friends
This is an interesting concept and thought experiment and outlines the inherent struggles with power levels of decks.
Hey, super great video, I wanted to know if you have that Meria deck list laying around anywhere? My friends and I are getting into lower power level decks and I absolutely love some voltron!
Yeah sure! archidekt.com/decks/4615680/i_tap_my_equipments_because_its_funny
Commander is weird because it’s so casual (in most settings) and it’s beautiful because rule zero essentially ensures games will always be a fluid experience.
How is literally every one of these comments misunderstanding something that should be so obvious??
The point isn't that the cheap, strong cards should be more expensive to match their price.
The point is that the existence of these cheap, powerful cards, which have prices that don't match their power, in comparison to other cards' price/power, causes a lot of problems that make building a "good" (not "strong") EDH deck, without an unlimited budget, into a huge hassle, and can also cause a bunch of other problems, like souring the experience of some games.
This video was all over the place, but I'd like to try and summarize the main point:
Budget restriction can be quite fun in that they allow for unique gameplay at lower powerlevels. However the issue here is that the correlation between budget and powerlevel lessens time, as strong cards get reprinted or find their way into our collections otherwise. When powerful cards enter budget decks, it creates a power variance for the deck, which is unfun, because of "Pickle Theory" (the graph at 10:49). Thus one should be careful to keep the powerlevel even across the deck by identifying stronger cards and cutting them despite their availability.
Your videos are so well made and maintain my attention the whole time. Looking forward to more
When I build decks, I absolutely build with specific numbers of ramp, card draw, and removal in mind. Most people I know do. I feel like you're a little off on that point.
4:40 Wait but that's how I build my decks :( I start with "what is my win con" Then I go "ok sweet lets fill the deck with X Draw Y Ramp Z draw, and some counters/removal/tutors
for example my kediss/malcolm deck was built as follows
10 Cards that let malcolm attack turn 3 (Haste givers, and cards that let you hit 3 mana turn 2)
6 Pirate pingers (inc glint horn bucanneer)
6 Type change effects
4 Tutors
14 Draw/Card selection
18 Counterspells
6 Bounce/Removal Spells
34 Lands (including 2 depletion lands that count as card 1)
Well ok I sorta bounced around on the tutors/draw/counterspell/bounce counts, but I never really thought of myself as needing specific cards as much as categories. I do play Test of Talents (negate that only hits instants/sorceries) because i needed to hit my quota of countermagic
18 counterspells is a joke right😅............... right??😮
as long as your having fun but thats a terrible template for a commander deck.
starting off with your lands, you really should have 41-43 unless your ending the game turn 3-4
@@wesleywyndam-pryce5305 I really only plan on hitting my first 3 land drops naturally, after that I'm planning on drawing 3 cards/turn to hit my land drops. The 14 draw spells are there to make it reasonable to hit my land drops past turn 3. Obviously if I'm not drawing many extra cards on turn 3/4/5 I'm not going to hit my land drops
not necessarily, with both malcolm and kediss he's creating 3 extra mana every battle phase. It does look like he needs a few mana rocks though@@wesleywyndam-pryce5305
41-43?????
I don't think I get it. :(
"The Problem with 'Budget' Cards" is... people only look at the popular cards when they're deckbuilding and they don't put in enough cards of certain types because other types of cards are more numerous... and also when they have a couple really good cards in the deck, its power level is inconsistent, and Sol Ring belongs in CEDH rather than casual maybe...? I don't understand.
I feel like maybe this is saying something about staples leading to homogenous deckbuilding? But what does budget have to do with it? If you want to play less efficient cards in order to lower your deck's overall power level, aren't those cards normally more "budget"?
Also, this way of making a deck (outline your deck, decide on a budget, search for cards by popularity/power ranking to fill out predetermined slots in your decklist, buy all the cards at once presumably?) sounds absolutely miserable. Do people really do this?
It's baffling how many people seem to completely miss the point of this video. I'm going to look at my deck building differently now, thank you.
The all encompassing answer to powerful strategies is playing stax.
Stax pieces should be more common at casual tables.
Ew
I can agree on very specific stax pieces, things like cursed totem or torpor orb, dropping a static ord on a low power table is asking to be left out of future games
@@federicopanzonato4528 This and graveyard hate like Grafdigger's Cage
@@uninspiredname2974 you are wrong.
@@federicopanzonato4528 yes but thats a problem, a player problem, and its a really big problem.
tax and lock and stax pieces are needed for healthy game environments. they are also the only way to slow certain strategies in any meaningful way.
Sol Ring is in every Commander precon nowadays. There really is no reason to not play it. If everyone has a Sol Ring out, it's fair game. If only one person has a Ring out, that Ring will either get destroyed or that player will get focused down, meaning the Sol Ring will actively negatively impact that person's game.
Additionally, you still have to draw Sol Ring. A Ring on turn 9 is way worse than on turn 1 or 2.
Sol Ring is positive mana. You can just hold it until you need it instead of slamming it turn 1. The mistake people fall into is keeping really bad hands because of Sol Ring, or playing it too early when it gives them no advantage to do so.
@@Tracker947That as well. If a Sol Ring on Turn 9 would enable you to play an X spell for "X = lethal" instead of "X = everyone else survives for one more turn", then sure. Sol Ring turn 9 is the best thing you could play together with that game winning other spell.
And yes, people keeping insanely bad hands because of Sol Ring, is a thing. It's an insanely dumb thing. If all the cards in your hand cost 7 mana plus, Sol Ring turn 1 won't do anything for you. Tbh, I hadn't mentioned that because I had forgotten there are people, who need to actually hear this. Don't keep hands "because of Sol Ring", if those hands don't consist of cards, that you can actually ramp out in the first three turns thanks to Sol Ring.
Where on the stuffy doll did the sol ring touch you?
Price is a noisy measure of power level, and having decks with consistent power levels is more fun - be they high or low. So these odd duck cards, that are very powerful but have for various reasons dropped in price, disrupt the lazy sorting based on price and the experience of playing at a lower price point.
So this all falls back on what people determine is fun. Personally when someone gets the nuts they got the nuts. They hit 20 lands let them win instead of just sitting there and saying “ I got nothing pass turn”
Pretty much this. Some people do find it fun to 'land pass' for the first five turns of the game but that lost its luster VERY quickly as I got better at playing/building and got tired of being out paced. Mana is the single most inhibiting thing for a deck and is why I wish WOTC would reprint the shit out of good lands so they're not so expensive and even Timmy can have MORE fun because he isn't playing crap lands that fundamentally cripple his deck from the start.
When playing graveyard strategies you should have a plan B.
You must pack removals to deal with the hate, and have a work around if you cant.
Like the new CMM enchantress. Anikthea can both become a problem if you let the player Mill, but if graveyard isnt an option anymore you can just go normal enchantress gameplay, playing lots of cards, drawing a lot, and using something like Hallowed Haunting to create a good board, even if you cant create 2 more copies of Parallel Lives with a Populate Trigger anymore 😂
Gotta run Aura Shards, Aura of Silence and so on.
The problem i see with it is, it limits the real deck you are allowed to build with to like 20-30 slots. Half of the deck turns into staples in order to fight other staples.
And while i benefit from my removal in many more situation, if you top deck a graveyard hate card when you are in tought spot, you are gonna lose.
So in my opinion it kinda loops around and if you play around that people are going to cut the hate directly.
Honestly, any deck should have a plan b and a plan c. If your deck hinges on one thing and can't play otherwise, then your deck needs work.
In my Stickfingers I run Feldon's Cane, Perpetual Time Piece and Elixir of Immortality as ways to circumvent graveyard hate and it's served me well. However, most people simply DON'T play answers to a lot of strategies. With the friends I play against they still refuse to slot in any sort of splashable graveyard hate despite all of us playing with the graveyard in a lot of our decks. Except me and then they get mad about it XD
Thats not true
In cedh you dont make a plan b or c, YOU MAKE PLAN A GO FASTER
@@V2ULTRAKill not to be rude, but I don't think we're talking about cEDH, so I'm not sure why you think it's relevant considering how drastically different the format I'd.
@@V2ULTRAKillI would also like to add that many decks do have multiple combos, like both thoracle and breach lines, so this isn't even entierly true for cEDH
I enjoyed this video. You raised some interesting points and my thoughts were prevoked.
My system for building below-maximum power decks is to try to closely follow a theme. For instance, if I was building a Pirate deck, I would absolutely include an Explorer's Scope. It isn't a particularly powerful card, nor would it have any notable synergy, but it fits the theme perfectly.
The idea is to focus on making a deck that tells an intersting story when I play it. If it has a strong but inconsistent win condition, it's "earned" by being the climax of that story.
The concept is that I'm providing value to the other players by telling them a good story such that they will be disincentivised to cut me down early even if my deck has some potential to become a threat.
I'd wager that the effectiveness of this strategy will be highly dependent on the playgroup, but it leads to fun, unique deckbuilding challenges where the impact on the boardstate a card has must be weighed against its emotional impact.
What's the solution though? Inconsistency is going to be a guarantee of a 100 card singleton format, so even if Sol Ring gets banned by Commander (which it should, along with Rhystic Studies, Mana Drain, Smothering Tithe, Cyclonic Rift etc. etc. that you see in every non-budget deck), you will still have players with better and worse cards, or more or less synergistic/ideal cards, in their deck. If they get the nut starting hand the games are still going to be wildly inconsistent.
Possibly the following formula should be used:
1. $80USD budget for every person's deck with the deck price being calculated based on an agreed upon metric (e.g. Card Kingdom's price, or whatever your local game stores price is), with proof submitted of it being under $80 at the time of construction (if it drifts up to $85ish afterwards that's fine). So it doesn't matter that you already own the card, it still contributes to the deck cost.
2. Have a group voted ban list... Goodbye Sol Ring, even if you are relatively affordable in a $75 deck 👋
3. Ban 2 card combos and disclose upfront 3-4 card combos.
4. Probably need to come up with some rule about landbases and what's allowed for that, cause that's how WOTC REALLY gets you in terms of price-to-consistency ratio.
That should end up with a bunch of 6-7 powered, relatively consistent, fun, and varied, decks at the playgroup, with a bunch of unexpected play patterns and win cons, but nothing too broken.
The problem being that play groups that have $500+ decks with all the $30+ staples are not gonna want to let those cards collect dust, even if it meant more fun games...
Your ruleset is both dogshit, and still leads to you getting hard swept by a $50 yuriko deck
Because yuriko hits power level 9 at $50 with no infinite combos at all
So does orvar
Very great points in the video and all well constructed and spoken. The only thing I'll say is that i feel like the return to the sol ring joke at the very end there undercut the point you're making. In the conclusion you were very thoughtful in saying how cards should be chosen in context, and that having a lot of variance in card quality can be a bad thing for a deck, only to return to "haha sol ring bad".
I feel like concluding w/ something along the lines of "and so long as you understand how to put these philosophies into practice, maybe it's not so bad that wizards reprinted Sol Ring way back when"
Overall though really good and important points to make about building high quality decks!
not so bad? its extremely good sol ring has been reprinted into the ground.
@@wesleywyndam-pryce5305 oh definitely agreed lol but the "not so bad" statement fit more with the tone of the video
I'm having exactly this problem, been playing for a time and have quite a collection but tend towards lower level, so I struggle to not include some powerful cards
also with how some price cards' fame change the perception of a deck, doubling season is expensive but just ok outside of walker decks for example
sometimes the card is not powerful on its own, maybe it's just "I play kiki jiki for value guys" and the table throws all interaction at you
Yeah, I’ll usually literally just preface with “yeah I’m not running x, y, and z in this deck, keep that in mind.” I have a kinda goofy mid-power sharuum deck that uses her to generate value in pretty fair-magic ways, but people will see her as the commander and immediately expect some super degenerate stuff.
Doubling season is trickier because the potential of the card is quite high, and the argument that it’s not gonna be too nutty is a less convincing one to make than “yeah I literally don’t have the other half of this combo, this is just a card.”
Powerful cards are great for the really jank decks though. Doubling Season is one of two green token doublers I have, and you can bet it's in an Investogation deck just for the chance to get more clues.
I hope you keep making more EDH brewing videos or just vids like this talking about your approach and thought process when brewing.
Do you have a discord to discuss edh building?
I dont think people should feel bad of including high power wincons or staples in otherwise low budget or low power decks, if thats what they like and its available to them. It's up to the rest of the pod to be effective players and do good threat assessment, casual or not. And it's the player's responsibility is to get a good feel of the table during pregame convo, just in case infect or infinites (or, heaven forbid, the super-scary sol ring) brings down the mood at the table before picking a deck for the game.
The problem is, I have a group that hates these and tutors. They then also run every expensive card ever while not comboing or playing the other half of any combos but still running super expensive almost competitive level decks.
Its a boring format when they all have the same 20-30 cards in every deck in the shop in the same colors
@@TerraFindleMan sounds like a gross double standard. I would find a new group
Hehe... Niv Mizzet and Curiosity, one of my fave infinite combos, and I run it on my Myra, the Magnificent which has broken abilities (ATTRACTIONS) that allows me to dig Niv Mizzet and Curiosity with Turns type spells.
Also, on the last part of your video, I would partially disagree... as I would rather use the time machine, go back in time, and convince WOTC to abolish or never implement the RESERVED LIST in the first place and then encourage them to reprint the most powerful cards (the moxes, power 9, etc.) so that everyone can enjoy them! I reckon the future would be so altered that Commander has a Tier 0 power level which includes the moxes, power 9, etc.
I like this idea of making a framework of things you need before starting to build the deck. I just don't see how you'd be able to tell properly. LIke, how do I know how much ramp or card draw I need? Or how do I roughly know what mana cost they could or should be?
Right now I'm building a 'Slobad, Goblin Tinkerer' deckand this problem is spitting me in the face. I'm trying to win with with big artifact creatures that are difficult to keep off the board because of recursive cards in the deck and my commander's ability. What kind of framework roughly would work for this sort of list?
Regarding graveyard decks, there are certain graveyard decks that don't care about a single graveyard hate card.
Muldrotha is the best example of this. At least when I build her anyway, the deck is an endless train of threats and value. The graveyard ability is purely there to push the threats over the edge and to clean up certain scuffed draws. I've had plenty of games where someone exiled my grave and all it did was slow me down for a turn or two
@13:28 Shit like this is why I just can't get into commander as a format: the fact that people have to worry about a deck being to high powered, the fact you're even making this point in your video just makes me go back to playing 60 card formats. It's so bizzare that you need to worry about power level within this format and card inclusions, the format feels like you're babysitting and you don't want to make them cry the whole time. Just do what you want. If you stomp, other people can get good and play artifact removal.
Ever considered cedh?
I will agree that the general power level of EDH has gone up over time with reprints making some cards more avaliable to budgets. This results in situations where you have a lot of options and you slowly upgrade over time. The Jank budget deck you made quickly becomes a high power stomp machine not by intention. But the problem I kinda have is that because commander is based so heavily on the pod of people you play with, there isn’t a good way of doing it outside of talking to your pod ahead of time about the decks you play.
I play in a playgroup with two heavy graveyard decks that are decently powerful and no one runs intense graveyard hate outside of two people in specific decks.
It’s just too much up to variance and how folk view specific cards. I will agree on making a consistent deck power strategy and not throwing in whatever, but commander is too volatile/random for this to matter to most playgroups.
I like the video though! It brought up some good points. I think it would help your video hook attention more if you state what the video is about at/near the beginning so people quickly get an idea what it’s about.
I think stronger cards becoming cheaper is good that way we more casual players can compete a bit
this is by far the best video i've seen about the problems in commander. thanks dude nice work!!! :3
Ive always had trouble with my owm torment of hailfire and what to do with it. Its such a cool card, but it never seems to fit anywhere. Thankfully I made a deck that is ment to be higher power so i can finaly use it
This is part of the reason I play Pauper Commander. Much lower Power Level in general, due to the limited card pool. Try it out.
Pauper isn't exempt from the same pitfalls, however. It's just that the cards that are mentioned here are simply cards that are also best in slot for whichever format you play.
That said, Pauper EDH is pretty fun overall. My Constable of the Realm pauper deck is dumb and I love it.
@@TaskMaster5 I personally enjoy my Hamza, Guardian of Arashin +1/+1 Counter Deck. We should play together sometime.
A lot of interesting ideas here. I think the problems are fundamentally a human nature one. People want to play with their cards, some people want to do well. I think the issue is that there is no cohesive vision for what commander is. Thats why it comes down to ruke zero doscussions so much. Each group must establish its norms because xurrently everyones idea of the format is different.
"human nature" is a thought terminating cliche. it cannot be defined because it doesn't actually exist.
Except cedh players
We just sit down, go "everyone got their big kid decks?" Shuffle up, and end it by turn 5
The problem with establishinga cohesive vision of the format is that commander is so huge that you're going to anger a not insignificant portion of people if you make huge sweeping changes to the banned list. As an example say the cohesive vision they wanted for commander is the casual kitchen table kind of play so they ban a large swath of stax instant win combos and enablers and all the absurdly powerful cards that run casual tables and are staples a la sol ring smothering tithe necropotence etc etc. They now piss off a crapton of players. so instead they try to take the most egregious examples out of the format (emphasis on try) and basically let tables figure out their own banlist. because maintaining a banlist for a format primarily played casually is hard.
Your point about the Swords is something I've done with my own Araumi deck as well. I'm running Gary because the deck needs a win condition besides just grinding my opponents out with Encore value, but I haven't included Panharmonicon because I only have to OTK once using that card before my playgroup catches on to how dangerous it is alongside Araumi and Gary and I become KOS immediately every time it hits the table.
a higher level of artificial scarcity only helps this problem because it stops people from playing thr game in the first place, like in your sword of feast and flame example it would have played out the same way even if you spent 1000 dollars rather then 0, it just didn't fit so you didn't play it why hurt all the decks and gameplay it would fit with just because some people don't understand the game perfectly, even more so when increasing price still keeps power gaps between cheaper cards and lower budget players in the same way with the same pitfalls
Ah yes because I want my collectable cardboard to be a investment like some people treat a home
really cool video. this reminds me of the deck i have, the urza artefact precon. in my group we all play with precons and mine kinda stomps the others so i stopped playing with it bc i don't know how to downgrade it or have the resources
This is fair, it’s kinda tricky to downgrade an already made deck unless it has obvious power cards that can be replaced. My favorite method of making a bad deck is to pick a very goofy and questionable playstyle and then try as hard as I can to commit to that playstyle. It’s much more satisfying to make a deck that excels in a game plan that’s bad than it is to make a deck that has an okay game plan that it’s not good at following.
I enjoyed your video. It showed me I still have a lot more to learn about deck building for casual EDH.
I run a Growing Threat pre-con, heavily upgraded to focus more on Phyrexian tribal and creature tokens. While I did avoid adding tutors, infinite combos, and Sheoldred in an attempt to stay on the same power level as my friends, I did add "Mondrak, Glory Dominus".
I like Mondrak's art and low mana cost, but it took watching your video to reflect on how often I get 3v1'd when I play the deck, and how often I've heard some variation of "I hate Mondrak, she's a menace" at the table. It only took one card to severely warp the consistency and power level of my deck. I'm taking it out now so people will perceive me as less of a threat, and hopefully everyone (including me!) will have more fun.
Thanks for your video.
Yeah I... don't think the answer to "More powerful, fun cards aren't accessible except for a few other options" should be "Nobody gets to play with powerful, fun cards except if they have money".
what’s the point of this video though? 😩 advocate for the ban of sol ring? compare budget options? talk about power level even though that’s not the title of the video? confusing to say the least
It's either you pay for power, have an incoherent sloppy budget deck, or you spend hours and hours building a deck that is both budget minded and consistent.
You have to pay for a powerful deck, either in money or research time
My main problem on commander is im always the Archenemy
We usually play on a table up to 6 people and the discussion alwas goes as following
" we need to kill you first because youre decks are alwas broken"
"You guys force me to build broken decks because i always have to fight of 5 people"
Rinse and repeat 😅
I think this video does a pretty good job of explaining why Im so conflicted with my Mono blue list right now. It was my first deck, and Ive been adding cards to it over the course of nearly a decade now, but rarely going out of my way to pick up new cards specifically to include them.
I've never seen anyone called a gamer for playing a Sol Ring lmao. Now, Mox Diamond? Yes.
Or you could try the simpler solution and...
GET GUD SON!!!
💪😎🤜
Nah bro i wont stand for the Disallow slander. Its not JUST a counterspell. Need to stop a planeswalker ultimate? Disallow. Need to stop an end of turn effect? Disallow. Need to stop a LAND ability? Disallow. Need to target a tap ability? Disallow. What about a win con like lab maniac? You guessed it. Disallow.
Ill take the extra 1 mana cost for that level of utility.
6:10 My boy Arcane Denial continuing to be slandered as "worse counterspell" despite being objectively better in edh
"Meandering" is a a gross understatement at the direction of this video. I don't _know_ what you're trying to say, I can only _guess_ at what you're trying to say. It seems to be something along the lines of, "popular cards sure are expensive," also, "build more consistent decks by abandoning frequently used cards."
I would simply say, "design your decks to be fun to both play _with_ and play _against."_ Flexing your "skill" in Magic is about as meaningful as your accumulated achievement points on Steam or Xbox. That is to say, people are generally _not_ impressed by infinite combos and/or other equally obnoxious things you can do in Magic.