This is my problem with the board game Munchkin. Literally every game ends with one player making a win attempt, everyone else stopping them with their interaction, and then the next player wins immediately. Every. Single. Game.
I've had games of Munchkins last for hours because everyone is collectively stopping the winning player(s) to the point that everyone need to rebuild a boardstate. It's like if we would boardwipe and give some life back to everyone every two-three turns. Let's just say I'm never playing this game ever again lol
@@jacobcharleszimmerman7934same. 2014 we were playing a TON of Munchkin and then found that everyone would camp at 8 or 9 and then pile on. At least in MTG there’s enough variety and alternate win cons that don’t make it the case in EVERY game.
I call It "the Munchkin Effect". One player goes to the Win, other players spend their resources stopping It. The next player goes to the Win, the others stop It. Until eventually somebody goes to the Win and everybody else dont have resources to stop It. It happens in several free for all games, regardless of It being "last Man standing". In fact, its stronger in games without player elimination.
Yes indeed but the problem is even bigger than you think my friend. As a male I am extremely dipleased with the direction art has been taken depicting women. Almost all of it now features either old and or unattractive/butch women with unrevealing attire with no sex appeal, cleavage, or skin shown whatsoever. A pefectly on point example is have a look at Teysa, Orzhov Scion from Guildpact. This card was recently reprinted in Ravnica Remastered with new art commisioned by a different artist. Teysa is wearing the same outfit but with the cleavage completely covered up and she looks like much less attractive and almost like a completely different person. There is so many other examples of this with reprints and much of the old art of characters compared to all the new stuff. I enjoy seeing beautiful women, and I know many feel the same.
@@xeper9458 I recently spoke with one of Magic's artists at a live event and I asked the artist about this. The artist said that Wizards tells artists 90% of what to do. Everything from color palettes, to what a gun should look like, how the characters are dressed, etc. etc. Most of the art is not truly art: it's directives from Wizards.
The main problem I see in my mind with an incentive to kill isn't even the snowballing effect but rather a potential scenario where someone will take damage firstw thus become the "easiest target" to finish, making everyone suddenly targeting them to get the kill, making them die fast and then having to sit at a table for 20 minutes, waiting for the game to end and be able to play again. There is a good reason as to why "party games" (and commander is very much a party game) try to make sure everyone stay in play for as long as possible: it just sucks all the fun of that kind of game is you or one of your friend has to sit for a long period of time because they got eliminated early.
But it also depends on the commanders at the table. If someone shows up with a commander who is CLEARLY stronger than all the other ones, the table has no choice but to 3v1.
@@PP-mb2ky Kinda? Depends on the table play level. If its a CEDH usually everyone is at the same level. If its a more casual game usually the people at the table lack the knowledge to even realize who's the outlier on the table, or by the time they do it's already too late. I've also noticed that at most "casual" tables people tend to dislike having to focus on someone, it almost always end up with people slapping the target a couple of time, leaving it low health but never going for the kill because, "yaknow, that wouldn't be nice".
@@Pers0n97 Absolutely, it depends on the knowledge of the players at the table. I don't know if you're familiar with Hakbal and Volja, they are both relatively new (but not cEDH). Every game I have played against them they absolutely dominate games. Both decks are similar in that they grow massive board presence while simultaneously drawing a ton of cards. If someone shows up with a commander that is "kill on sight" and the rest of the table is unaware of this, then the game was already lost on turn 0. Like you said, by the time they realize what is going on, it's already too late.
In my experience this is common in commander games where someone plays Curse of Opulence. Even a small reward is enough to finish off the cursed player very fast and typically players don't care that the player who cast the curse also benefits.
the "bonus" for defeating another player in magic is you remove their ability to interact or win in the future. One of the things I find players do not do is make deals. "I won't hit you for 10 this turn if you do X, Y, or Z" use your opponents as tools. Make deals, even bad ones, and commander gets much more exciting.
but this would then also be true for the other two players who did not contribute to the defeat of the fourth player. You're helping two opponents by eliminating someone, which is more than it helps you.
But that brings you to the point they've brought up in another video, in that, "politics," essentially removes skill expression all together. Personally, I do not like playing politics in edh. I want to build and play a good and decently powerful deck that wins on it's own merit.
A lot of players have strong decks but play them "casually", but some (me included) play casual decks but playing to win. But that is why I always think a lot about interaction and threat assesment. A lot of players use their interaction in ways that baffles me, when I always save it for saving my win or prevent me from losing the game.
Exactly. The only real play is to pass and force players that come after you to deal with the problem. Only if there is nobody after you that can react is when you have to use your reaction.
A lot of players also use their interaction spitefully, knowing full well that it's a poor use of their resources. "You want to hurt me? Well I'll hurt you back, even though you are no threat."
@@maxoggeunfortunately if rules are followed correctly and you pass priority and no one has interaction while you sand bagged yours to check if someone else will pull the trigger you will lose. You don’t get another chance if priorities pass without any actions.
@@ekolimitsLIVE That is correct. But like any gambling it is about the overall winrate and not about one single game. Losing while still holding the good cards has to happen from time to time.
@@ekolimitsLIVE thats right but priority can also be reset by tapping a land - so the real douchebag move is to pass - until its the last player in the chain that could react - then say - i will counter if you tap a land - then pass priority again untill everybody is tapped out, then counter - get your turn against 3 tapped out opponents and win. Of course at every time somebody could say, i wont tap and i want the first player to win =) - but then its instant loose vs, he might have a win..... so in a tournament setting you would most likely not do that.
In the Vampire TCG (made also by Garfield !) you play a 5 players free for all game with some twists : - You can only attack the player on your left, named your "prey" (but you can interact with the others) - Once you defeat your prey or by certain actions in the game, you earn Blood Points. The goal of the game being having the most Blood Points once the last player stands. It creates a situation where you killing your first prey incentivizes others to be more careful of what you're trying to do next, now that you already have some points. It's not really doable in a 4 players free to target game i believe, but it's one way of playing that could be looked at. Secondly, to answer the question "how to get some reward when killing a player" you could introduce some mechanic like, "That player reveal bottom of library until non land card. Exile it. You can cast it as long as you're in the game, and the card is exiled" Or something similar but by asking the defeated player for a specific card/card type/type of spell (the creature you played turn 3 / A Planeswalker / A removal spell for enchantment) And lastly I believe we need to remember that in a fun non competitive game like commander (not CEDH), we should be more interested in having players understand that winning is not all the fun they can have within the game. Of course, the chemical response in your brain makes many of us do that, but have you tried letting a player do a silly turn to create a board state never seen before ? The goal of a game can (and in many cases I believe, should) be to have a good time with friends or strangers. Always keeping the "I need to win" mindset can ruin the fun for both you and the others players. But that's a very different discussion !
My friends made a commander variant best described as “color pie”. Each player must be in a specific, different color. They are only targeting their enemy colors, they win if they remove both their enemy colors.
Oddly this bystander nature is good for the Commander format because it is a catchup mechanic that is an extension of the archenemy effect. It is part of the gamble and calculus of when to try to go for the win, and how soon you should back off if you were wrong. If you gamble correctly you become the archenemy and overwhelm the interaction. If you gamble incorrectly but stubbornly persist, then you risk one of your opponents getting into a situation where they would win the archenemy gamble. (This is of course mitigated a bit by your control of how you distribute your win progress between your opponents). Alternatively you can make some progress, then realize you won't win the gamble and back off while having resources remaining to defend. (There is so much to say about tactically abdicating the archenemy position). This has the effect of extending the interesting part of the commander game. It extends the part where people are playing the big fun cards and using them against each other right before the game ends. Turn 2 is boring but turn N-2 is exciting.
Years ago our play group ran a league where you got points in the league for individually eliminating players and then separately for being the last player standing or just outright winning the game. There was a lot more to the league than this but I did like that it incentivizes aggressive and interactive play and you could still scrape points out of a game you didn't ultimate win if you could still eliminate someone. This was pre Thassa's oracle but it also somewhat disincentivized "win the game" cards since you just got the "last player standing" point if you won that way. On the whole I really enjoyed the league though I'm sure it would be tweaked if we did it again.
My local shop also has a points system, and it helps with making people go for the points. They also have penalties for letting combos get out of control and knocking players out early. It's a fun system that encourages different play styles.
“Descent into Avernus” is a good example of a mtg card that forces action like battle royale. What if each game started with that card on the battlefield?
I was thinking something like that. Imo that fixes games length but not player inaction. I was thinking about an objective sheet for example Whenever you deal combat dmg to a player: create a treasure token Whenever you destroy a creature you don't control: draw a card Stuff that would incentivize player to play more removal instead of hoarding it and attack more.
We've started playing a chaotic version of commander with a big deck of random cards in the middle of the table. Each time you deal damage or interact, you pull a random card (in our current version, you get to cast it for free, which is very fun but not at all balanced haha). The cards aren't always that good, or beneficial, but it really pushes people to interact and "play" as much as possible, so bystanders get left behind. Definitely a very wonky version of commander, but I'm interested to see how it evolves. Another fun aspect is that you keep the cards you pull, which is very satisfying, to walk away from a game with a bunch of new cards.
I thought of a similar thing, considering that mechanics like the storm in fortnite appear to serve a similar purpose, but it's really quite the opposite. Being within the storm isn't what brings interaction, not wanting to bring interaction is what does this. So I fear that with constant bleeding there's even less incentive for trying to overwhelm your opponents since they're gonna bleed out anyways. Instead lifegain and pillowfort seem like the way to go.
Also in Catan, playing knights is another point towards the largest army bonus, which is a 2point condition that leads to a 4 point swing if you take it from someone, same as largest road. So in addition to blocking and stealing, knight cards let you work towards a large point goal AND can be used for defense. You’re allowed to play the knight card before you roll on your turn, which lets you move the thief off of your own resource spaces
Whacky proposal: a cycle of commander cards which you can search, reveal, and put into play at the start of the game which give you significant benefits (of various sorts) but give your opponents various benefits for interacting with you. So basically a card as game modifier for yourself, as an opt-in, which you want and which encourages more fun play for the other players.
Great Idea! I always felt like this should have been what Battles were. You could have a Companion-style card that is separate from the 99 that can go with your Commander and gives you an effect while it's in play and other players can destroy it for a benefit. I got similar vibes of this idea with the Wall creatures printed in the recent Assassin's Creed set that were essentially bases that gave useful effects.
One house rule can be that you win as soon as you eliminate a player. It might be a bit extreme, but it also solves the player elimination issue of not getting to play after being eliminated
This is a poor idea in Commander, it'd suck to effectively lose because someone else was beaten before you for one reason or another. It also goes against the standard methods of losing the game, reduced to 0, deck out, poison, alternate win/lose condition. This would also be affected by how Platinum Angel works as you can't lose the game and the opponent can't win the game, what happens there? Does the fourth player, who lacks PA but wasn't the player who was reduced to 0, just lose the game? It's far simpler to retain the current style of last man standing as there are still alternate win cons that you can achieve without having to kill a single player, there are also cards that get stronger from single players being removed from the game. To cut the game short with your suggestion makes it so the other players at the table feel bad for not being able to play out the game a bit longer.
I really like this idea and I think it's worth testing. Only potential issue is that it represents such a big change that some cards become pretty much useless - Ramses being the only commander that comes to mind at the moment, but also cards that reward elimination of players like was mentioned in the video. @ooterfire4712 "This would also by affected by how Platinum Angel works . . . Does the fourth player, who lacks PA but wasn't the player who was reduced to 0, just lose the game?" I don't see why they would. The proposed house rule is only that you win the game when you eliminate a player. If player A eliminates player B when player C has a PA in play: player B is eliminated, player A does not win the game, the game continues with players A, C, and D. I think cutting the game short is fine, game length has been an issue for people for as long as I've played commander. Making aggro strategies more viable is an obvious goal, although whether that goal is achieved would require testing. Losing the game because another player in your pod has a much higher risk tolerance than you could be annoying, but honestly presents an interesting dynamic that changes the value of certain types of cards. Instant speed burn becomes a lot more interesting, combat tricks, mass pump, fogs, instant speed removal. There's weird game theory stuff where you might be incentivized to protect another player's life total well before you would in the current rule set. All these are not necessarily bad, just different. This house rule is definitely interesting to me; it might actually be horrible, but I think it's really hard to tell without brewing and testing and iterating a couple times.
This is exactly what all good risk players know. If someone attacks early and makes an enemy, both of them will lose unless you gained a bonus to recoup your troops. Even then, the meta in high level is to be very friendly and agree on bonuses. Slowing the game right down.
Also when it comes to butter and guns. Progressive cards risk allowed you to snowball if you make a kill. Commander is more like fixed where there is basically no incentive in the late game because cards mean less as the game progresses.
i feel like bystanding is a skill just like any other and players need to learn when to interact and what to interact with. some players get too carried away and kill a player who is less antagonistic which lets another player run away with their value or sometimes two stronger decks fight each other while you bide your time to foil the victor. interaction is one of those things that you hold onto not for "threats" but for when you are being "threatened". commander just ends up being more complex than 1v1 by adding additional players, creating an internal metagame between keeping players alive while killing them at the same time
I was thinking something similar but it should have a different name, a poison counter would really help the poison player. I was thinking "at the end of the turn, if you didn't attack an opponent or committed a crime you lose X life +1 where X is the number of consecutive turns in which you didn't attack an opponent or committed a crime" Basically the more inactive you are the more you remain in the storm.
Many people in the comments are suggesting house rules. One Ive heard of, but not used personally, is essentially to assign everyone hidden roles before the game begins, based on the game Bang! One player is the King, they reveal their role at the start of the game and win if theyre the last player standing. Two players are Bandits, they win as a team if they kill the king. One player is the Knight, they win if the King wins. One player is the Assassin, they win if the King dies but they have to kill the bandits first. Basically they pretend to be a Knight, and then betray the King. They called it Kingdoms and their main goal was to solve board politics in games with more than four players, but I wonder the structure it adds might solve several of the problems you have talked about on this channel. Dont know if you knew about this one already.
Don't these types of hidden role games scale better with more players? I'm just imagining a 6-player game of Commander with these roles and that just sounds like it'll take a whole day to play.
I want to say they added something along these lines with the Thunder Junction commander decks where there are varying bounties that can be claimed by players for certain game actions giving them bonuses. In the form of a separate deck similar to plane chase
They are experimenting with this as they know this is an issue. Unfortunately magic has an old design that will not change and an old player base that doesn’t like gimmicks. Because of this these experiments “fail” The ideas behind them are good and many time execution is fun (like planechase) but no one plays it at the casual local table because they just want to play the rules they know.
The Thunder Junction Commander Party game solves that problem quite well, more people should try it. In short, everyone put bounties on locales at every end step, and those bounties stack until rewards are so valuable (such as drawing 4 cards) someone is bound to rob it and become a fugitive, which than leads to others attacking the criminal, etc etc.
You miss understand, the ring is not what forces action the act of players dropping their loot is. In any battle royale you can sneak into the smaller and smaller rings to ensure a higher position, however you're not likely to win because you are rewarded more by fighting and succeeding than by waiting and ambushing.
its kind of still the ring though since without the ring you could garantuee a 1 v 1 every time by just hiding. Yes you would be down in resources, but the chances of winning the game (depends on the game) are usually still higher than having to potentially kill 98 other player to get to that 1v1
I think that if a player takes out another player, they should be rewarded with the flat reduction or outright removal of any additional commander costs accumulated throughout the match.
This is an issue in a lot of other games, often they mitigate it by you getting benefits from defeating a player (e.g. you get to take their hand or permanents they control when you defeat them)... But that doesn't fully mitigate it because Player A might use all their resources battling player B only for player C (the bystander) to still come in and win because player B didn't have enough resources left to give player A anything good when player A defeated them.
It's called turtling what you are describing. That is where a player sits back waits for an advantage while everyone else attacks each other. Generally, it is solved by placing incentives for attacking like in Risk, where you get a slight advantage in dice rolls and gain a card for being the aggressor.
I remember playing the custom map Footman Frenzy in Warcraft III, a four team, twelve player game where you could only accumulate resources (Gold and experience) by involving yourself in combat with other players; when your periodically generated units are defeated, they grant the opponents resources. So there's a strange push and pull away from playing the game itself. You don't want to get your units stuck in the middle of three opposing teams of players, but your inaction leads to certain loss from falling behind. And sometimes it culminates in people agreeing with opponents to just full send into the middle of the map to get the game started.
Glad to see another footy fan There is a treasure trove of good old war3 custom maps that could be analysed for this purpose. Glaive Masters is a niche favourite of mine, but Enfo's Team Survival, Vampire Ice, Legion TD, Custom Hero Line Wars, Pimp My Peon..... So many good concepts...
I’m thinking about every time you cause one or more players to lose the game, you gain treasures equal to the number of rounds the game has gone on. It doesn’t necessarily solve the problem of interaction but does help with incentivizing action. If that isn’t strong enough you could also let the player draw cards for every 5 rounds the game has gone on and tweak that to your liking
In tournament poker, this effect occurs in ICM (independent chip model) situations, where there is a pay jump and player A benefits from not getting involved while players B and C fight for a pot. There are even calculators to model the situations pretty accurately and we study them!
I love the bit of "Oh, Gavin's thinking about Commander?" even though I can't put my finger on why. Also, that opening is among the most bizarre hooks I've ever seen for a video. If I was watching your stuff blind, I definitely would have kept watching just to figure out why that would make any sense.
If you would like to alleviate this slightly at kitchen table games (leagues at your LGS have their own rewards, usually in the form of points and prizes), you can house rule to add a "prize" for whenever you defeat a player. At my table we've been trying "eliminate a player = draw two cards" and it's been encouraging more aggression (and politicking, which is also a good way to incentivize stopping someone from winning)
They could add prize cards. Simple added effects that the first player gets after defeating another player. I'm not sure what those added bonuses would be. Maybe an enchantment that gives you extra draw. Creature that can block for you. Untapping one creature.
I’ve seen a few people in your comment sections suggest Commander is its own game, not a game format, and I think it might be interesting to explore that. That claim didn’t really make sense to me, but then again I’m not looking at it with a background in game design.
Commander involves not trying to win. It fundamentally goes against what 1v1 Magic is. In any sanctioned format, there is an understanding that each player is trying to win the game at all times. Every decision is centered on winning. In Commander, you have to not lose and not make yourself the target. Decks that can durdle around and suddenly win out of nowhere are better because they're not the target until it's too late. "Normal" decks are worse because winning with creature damage over 5 turns is too obvious.
In my opinion edh is a narrative led game: you're trying to tell a story and a story is more entertaining when it has come backs, underdogs and clear villains.
@@JohnFromAccountingThat’s how SOME people view commander. But for me and my friends we’re all trying to win, the casualness comes from not being a sore loser, something that I see being allowed to flourish by the mindset you described.
@@maximillianhallett3055 Exactly. The goal for everyone is to win and to stop me from winning so they can, while keeping in mind that it is just a game while having fun along the way
@@JohnFromAccounting I strongly disagree. The goal of the game is always to win. If you are playing this game actively trying to not win that's just weird and you should not be playing this game
What if, if you kill an opponent with creatures, you get to untap them so you can still defend yourself. If you beat them with non creature effects you gain 10-15 life?
I think this is solvable with a benefit rule defined by the rules of commander and not magics system. Much like something like commander damage a rule could be played by choice like when a player is killed the player can choose what resource(s) or creatures ( recruits) move to their control.
Been playing a Vastra/Flint deck since MKM, 'must be blocked' makes her like a gun, producing clues & food makes the butter, and it incentivises interaction.
Reminds me a little bit of zugswang from chess, where you're in a position where every legal move is bad and you wish you could make no move at all. It's not the same, but it's part of the concept - When one player makes a push, they put every other player in zugzwang - you wish you could just sit back and continue what you're doing, but you can't.
It might come down to how games are won at higher levels. If a players generally attempt to win through combat damage, this situation doesn’t come up too much, but that’s at lower power levels. At higher power levels, players try to beat each opponent at once. And that causes what people seem to call the “munchkin effect.” But at this point, unless players agree that, “you win the game” cards or combos are boring, or not exciting, that’s going to continue to be the premier way to beat 3 opponents.
A few sayings come to mind. While two dogs fight over a bone a third one runs away with it. Neither the Snipe nor the Clam will yield, until a fisherman comes by and snatches them both into his net. Business also has the concept of “second mover advantage” which boils down to exploiting the results/efforts of an established company to turn a profit with less investment/effort
The only game I've found where this really works is the board game Inis. It's kind of hard to be a bystander in Inis due to how the win conditions are met, and often, what happens is that there are multiple people who meet win conditions at the same time.
EDH has a million win-cons that defeat all opponents at once for one simple reason - it is a social multiplayer format. All this talk about how can we eliminate one player and gain a personal benefit, then have them sit around the table and watch the rest of us play the game is giving a real bad vibe. Not to mention how you yourselves mention that the person getting benefits from eliminating someone will become the target of the other two remaining players. I fail to see how is this any different than one player impatiently blowing his load early, another shutting him down, while the two remaining players are in the best position to score a win.
The bystander dilemma definitely has its problems, but I think it's also core to what makes commander fun. I wouldn't say the core pattern of commander is doing as little as possible to hide in the background, because that doesn't move the game to a conclusion. You're performing a balancing act, trying to get your engine online to put you into a position to win the game while not looking too scary to avoid giving your opponents obvious removal targets. This is a large part of where the casual nature of the format comes into play. Because I think CEDH does stuffer from this problem due to the decks having optomized the fun out of that aspect of the game. I'm not saying that you're supposed to play suboptimally in a casual game, rather that your deck will be built differently. 'Build the decks to create fun and interesting games, play the decks to win' is the approach that I've found to be the most fun, so you never feel like you're letting someone do a cool thing, but you qlso leave space for your opponents to beat you by going even more over-the-top
I think the issue is that cEDH is EDH. All of those cards are legal in the format and it’s the logical conclusion of the format. The strategies of it lay all of commanders issues to bare. Casual is just choosing not to see or take advantage of those issues in one way or another, but there’s no way to measure if someone is or not or to what degree. This is what the power level system and rule 0 are trying to solve, but they both rely on players being honest.
@@distractionmakers I think there's enough distinctions between cEDH and EDH, that they should be considered different formats. The heuristics between the two are so wildly different, that I think its difficult to make a case that they are the same. My favorite example of this is simic/selesnya signet vs Nature's Lore/Three Visits. Within EDH, 2 mana ramp spells that get you an untapped land tend to beat out mana rocks of the same cmc since its a much more resilient resource. The vast access to ramp causes green to be one of the best colors in the format, since ramp is so effective at parity, and its so much harder to interact with. This ends up being flipped on its head within cEDH. You would think that the green signets would perform even worse since artifact hate/removal is even more widespread. Things like Null Rod and Collector Ouphe are common since you know for a fact that artifacts will be the most common reasource. Instead, Nature's Lore/Three Visits and ALL of its ilk are laughable in the format, and completely disappear. This is due to the fact that although the format has a much higher density of artifact hate, the sheer explosiveness of using double colorless to cast a signet early ends up being worth the risk of running into hate. Green goes from one of the strongest colors in the format, all the way to the very bottom in cEDH. Not to mention there a ton of cards that are so strong that its borderline boring to play them in low-to-high power level EDH, but completely unplayable in cEDH.
More casual power levels of commander have characteristics that address this. Gishath gets incredible value for hitting an opponent with big damage, and many other decks run things that give you value when you hit players with them
You mentioned Monarch; a small clarification: monarch wasn't designed for commander, it was created in the second Conspiracy set to create aggressive and dynamic play in a multiplayer draft format. The Monarch(tm) just ended up working really well in the other multiplayer format.
I mean I'm a fan of the idea of getting an extra turn when you KO an opponent (through damage, cmdr damage, or emptying their library). for casual games, it would incentivise combat more and focusing one player, which forces action early. would be interested in testing this idea 🤔
I really like how they added a 'Bounty Deck' in Outlaws of Thunder Junction. Incentives people to do things. I love when they add new things like this to the game.
I would like to see a rule that helps creature combat decks and encourages more aggressive play. What do you think if commander added a rule where if you cause just one (to avoid this rule benefiting someone from building a board non interactively and then just turning everything sideways) player to lose the game via combat damage (conventional or commander) you get to tutor 7 basic lands to the battlefield (untapped) and draw 7 cards giving you an infusion of resources as a reward for actually attacking with creatures
Monarch is automatically integrated in commander, and whoever doesn’t have it looses 4 life at the upkeep/ end step of the monarch players turn, (similiar to a battle royal ring)
I feel like the cards you're describing are Descent Into Avernus, The One Ring and Black Market Connections. Strong enough to want to take, but they put a clock on the game that necessitates interaction using the resources you're getting. It is a frustrating issue though, I enjoy theft decks and I really have to often attempt to defeat the table simultaneously, as beating a player whose creatures I've taken (or allowing them to be beaten) is a severe disadvantage.
Create more mono white hate cards. a 3 mana enchantment that says "Whenever a nonland permanent enters the battlefield under an opponent's it enters with 3 vanishing counters. On each opoonent's end step remove a counter from each permanent unless that creature attacked a player other than you this turn. When the last counter is removed its controller sacrifices it and you draw a card." Make the butter spoil. a riff on pithing needle that hits triggered abilities. Or make a hushbringer with flash and split second. My earnest belief is that commander is broken because the white piece of the color pie is stigmatized. Rule of law effects, tax effects, banning stuff, making stuff enter tapped, etc etc. Stax brings balance to the force.
In war it's generally a strategy called "playing both ends against the middle." The moment two other people begin expending resources everyone else who isn't directly involved in the conflict benefits off the squabbling.
I’ve had this theory since about my Third cedh tourney. Because of it I rarely try to go off first unless I have straight lockdown mode going on w abolisher type effects .
This type of conflict happens very often in endgame scenarios of Twilight Imperium What I try to do is to translate the overall accessment from TI4 to what could be an equivalent way of analyzing the board in MTG
Eberis the binding blade flips into a demon that gets stronger when a player loses. I've always loved throwing it into decks that have black color identity for the fun of it
@@CatManThree perhaps, but the point being made here is that the third man out who sits back and watches the other players fight, has an advantage by not spending resources. So at the end of the day, the lesser active player ends up with an advantage currently. Shouldn’t the advantage go to the person who was active, and shouldn’t they be rewarded for removing another player?
Aight long time magic player(OG innistrad) and long time fortnite player(c1 s3). Fortnite had a systrm call storm surge to prevent what you guys talked about with inaction. The players with the least amount of damage done to other players will start to loose life until they pass the threshold. So it was added a year or two after its br launch to prevent people from doing exactly what you stated since wasting resources( building materials,ammo and heals) was often a huge detriment. It also really fucked with the server when 70 out of 100 players were grouped up in the small storm circle. To the point that it was unplayable. Which when i happened at tournys probably led to the creation of Storm surge. Love you vids by the way!!🎉
@@distractionmakers I forgot to add that for a few years Fortnite also had this mechanic called siphon(in ranked) that rewarded you 50hp/shield after a kill as well as some materials. This helped more aggressive players play aggro or as most called it W-keying (pretty much mono red aggro). Usually at the higher lvls of play only the really good players could really abuse this but it was still a good reward normal players got in addition to the regular loot of a body.
What if at the end of combat if you eliminated another player you were able to untap all your permanents or was given an extra turn after that turn. This would give a reward and extra resources to the player for tapping out and leaving themselves vulnerable. They could add something like this to the official rules and Could also apply to 1v1 but it wouldn’t matter for that.
In your initial example, it sounds more like the first player devoting their strategy to a risky combo and using their interaction to push for game. While other players at the table have interaction to stop combos. So when a second player has that winning combo, the first player already expended their interaction for their failed combo which they could have used said interaction to stop the second player. The issue would lay more on players building decks that are too focused on getting to that combo to resolve rather than building to do more outside of it. From this point, it's not so much an issue with the game but rather an issue with some players and some deck building philosophy They've introduced cards that get bigger from players losing the game, but the quantity is too small to take advantage of.
in cedh every deck is a combo deck more or less since its the best way to win against 3 opponents. it usually goes eighter infinite or takes a alternative wincon because cards that are made for 20 life one on one are too ineffective when you suddenly have to hit 120 damage. I mean a good cedh deck can threaten a win consistently on turn 3 to 4, and every card in the deck is eighter interaction, resource generation or a gamewinning threat. So everybody has interaction and the "risky combo" is the equivalent of playing a good creature in a normal 1 v 1 game. The powerlevel is just different. The question is, usually the game should reward the agressor right? because if it does not reward the aggressor then and the first person acting loses, then the ideal way to play the game is doing nothing and thats not good game design. In a 4 player cedh match player 1 going for the win has the least chance of winning most of the time because he is staring at 3 player with full resources and full hands of interaction. If you where able to get ahead in resources A LOT you can sometimes use your own interaction to force the win, but most of the time the interaction of 3 other players is just too much. But somebody has to make the first move and because every threat is gamewinning in cedh there is no other choice from the other players than using interaction on it. This first winning attempt will usually occur very early since one of the ways you could win is catching your opponents with bad, unsculpted hands. thats why you need to use your interaction to test the opponents, because for every card you draw, the table draws 3, making it even more unlikely to win. That of course needs interaction from opponents because unlike a creature that would just attack one opponent, that spell will make everybody loose. So player 2 will have way less opposition and a better position to win now. If player 1 would not counteract and let his spell get countered, then of course he would still have resources left for player 2. But then its player 3 that gets the good position. And if its not player 3 then its player 4. The Problem is, that one player cannot control 3 other players at the same time and eventually resources will run out. So the first player taking initiative is still the player least likely to win. The problem is not all black and white though because there is baiting involved, there is instant winconditions you can play after another players win attempt and stuff like that, and also decks that are able to control 3 players or deny enough resources. But this is about the core design flaw of edh and especially cedh that punishes the player acting first and benefits inactive players with easier wins, while it should be the other way around.
@@dennisvogel5982 your comment misses out on methods of achieving victory like control which seek to out value opponents over the course of the game. Eliminating single players also opens up opportunities to close the game out on the other two players, that in of itself is value and the other two players would find this agreeable.
Curse of Vengeance is a really cool attempt. I kinda want to try giving everyone a 0 cost Curse of Vengeance in the command zone (and it comes back when it leaves the field) and seeing where this goes. I really like the deckbuilding constraints of commander, but the gameplay is way more enjoyable to me when played as 2-headed giant, archenemy or even 1v1. Being the group hug guy that wins out of nowhere on turn 20 (or dies before that) got old real quick.
Im that oddball, I play with several decks designed to steer the flow of the game into a battleship style slugfest. Combo pieces invariably get blown up graveyards culled and my entire win strategy is I die you die with me. This specific style of play is actually harder to pull off then goodstuff the deck or combo tutor win.
There are a few legends they made to try to incentivise killing opponents. Sengir the Dark Baron and Ramses Assassin Lord both do things when an opponent dies. Out of these I think Sengir goes in the right direction, but the benefit is too inconsistent since to kill a player their life usually needs to be low.
Been thinking about making a deck benefiting from opponent's death for a while. Player death ending "gain control" effects enables an interesting build avenue: getting back cards like Wishclaw Talisman right after giving it away. Btw, here are a few more cards take advantage of a player losing the game: Blood Tyrant, Ramses, Assassin Lord and Sengir, the Dark Baron. Certain ones could even be a commander! :O
Okay, you two have been showing up in my recommended lately and I have to say.. very based takes. You guys have a very healthy way of viewing the game.. and I think you have a great ability to put into words what many players feel or notice but maybe not so overtly.
Here's an idea to force interaction back on the board level: Add a 5th npc player. That player is immune to all non combat damage and has infinit HP. Each players draw a card and get 1 mana at the start of the post combat main phase for every time they deal 5 damage to that NPC (doesnt need to be in one hit, think of it as if every player had its hown npc damage counter. If youve done 3 this turn you will only need to do 2 more to triggeran instance of that reward the next turn). The catch here is that anyone can block for that NPC. That way focusing on "making butter" becomes suboptimal, actively engaging in the battle, attacking, blocking and removing creatures becomes way important and worth spending ressources on. I think this could lead to some break away from combos and turn commander back into the creature on creature action game MTG was always meant to be.
I kinda feel like pokemon's prize card system could work well for a ffa. Basically, at the start of a game you set aside 6 cards from your deck, and when you knock out an enemy's pokemon you get to draw one (or more). Once you draw all 6, you win. Basically the main reaon I think it works is that you dont have the problem of having to set yourself behind to stop someone from winning; killing your opponent's biggest threat *also* advances your win condition. You are actively encouraged to engage instead of hoading resources, because other players will just beat you up while gaining resources at the same time. Basically it heavily incentivizes tempo and active play.
Cat always makes the video better. Interesting topic. Rather than making cards to incentivize action how about a rules change? When you eliminate a player you get +5 or 10 health and draw till you have 7 cards if you have less than 7 instantly. Another way could be you get all their lands, untapped, on your board. So you get back some resources for eliminating a player and the next guy in line shouldn't be able to just shoot you.
I remember that there was a guy at my lgs which destroyed high power tables with his zombie deck, me and my friends lost several games to him. So what we my friends did? King-made me and attacking the guy as much I possible, we defeated him and then I won the game in one swoop. They sacrificed their game just for the grudge we had against the guy.
In shadowfist you steal your opponent's lands by attacking them. This has two beneficial effects for multiplayer. It incentivizes attacking, and it allows a player to snowball a win from the archenemy position.
i mean yeah thats a big problem in these kinda games. sure you cn spend a turn and a card board wiping but the other people who are behind wheover was first get to reap the beneifts of the board wipe reset without having to spend an actual card or mana
Freerider would be more like I can run more combo pieces instead of interaction because I'm banking on other players to remove the cards that threaten all of us but counterspells diffuse this problem in commander because they're just as good at protecting your win attempt as they are at stopping an opponent so there's no value to free riding
How about a house rule that goes Whenever you kill an opponent, choose 1 - Draw 2 cards - Create a 4/4 angel token with flying and vigilance - Create 3 Treasure tokens
Ive used swords to plowshares to win by exiling my own (tapped down) serra avatar and doubleing my life total on my opponents end step, then won on my upkeep with Test of Endurance
I think I've heard it described as the "3rd party problem", often not describing them as not just a bystander but someone who swoops in after two players fight and weaken themselves. I've seen a lot of board games solve it in different ways, my favorite being Kemet, a conflict game originally published in 2012. In Kemet, there are a few ways to score points, but the main way is battle. If you win a battle *as the attacker*, you get a permanent victory point. Holding a territory offers points that can be stolen, meaning people want to attack all the time to score the permanent VP as well as take the territory to steal your points and get some extra resources. I want to try playing Commander with the Monarch rules starting at turn 0. Players may be able to draw tons of cards, but they aren't drawing them in the early turns so I think smoothing out draws would help build decks a bit differently.
They should give us a stax piece that prevents "I win the game" effects. A 2 drop artifact that does only that. I reckon it'd do a lot to minimize this issue in cEDH
This dilemma is exactly why I spend hours refining a deck to be “fun” to pilot. If I win, that’s cool if not, I at least got to pilot a really fun deck and others got to see the mechanics on display. It may even inspire someone else to try out the deck that you built.
i propose the "be vigilent to bystander solution": if a player has not interacted with other players for 2 turns after the first proper interaction, other players get vigilance on creatures attacking that player, this forces that player to contribute to the game without fucking over the player that's forcing that player into interacting with the game, thoughts?
I wonder how much this would be improved if all of these value engine commanders that WOTC have made recently had rewarded interacting with opponents instead of just using a certain type of card. Triggered value engines would certainly be a card-efficient way to add a pay-off for hindering another player, even if not particularly interesting.
I think it’s a skill issue where people try to interact way too early and half the time they aren’t even trying to stop win attempts they’re casting a removal spell then backing it with counters. When they should just hold the counter until they need to.
Video starts with CEDH then switches to Commander- basically two separate games tho . One wins with good combos and the other wins by attacking or bad combos
I think that given the commander format contains players largely trying to design decks around their commander wotc needs to place more emphasis on legendary creatures designed for the commander format that reward engaging in the combat step. There are too many generic value engine commanders that benefit from cards just being played, which is going to encourage a passive playstyle. Designing unique legends that create an advantage worth utilizing the combat step for could help curb this playstyle over time.
Regarding the enchantment that is supposed to impose more aggressive play… Card drawing simply doesn’t cut it, since you usually need to wait till your next turn until you can cast anything after a big swing. You’ll be the main target after drawing so much and might not make it to the next one. Also, the player that runs the enchantment gets an immediate permanent card disadvantage, only for putting a reward on someone’s head. Player Enchantment: If the enchanted player loses the game, the player that caused him or her to lose does X, then return this card to your hand. As a card cycle, X could be this per color: Green: Creates as many 1/1 Saproling tokens as there are creatures on the battlefield. Red: Divides 20 damage between any number of target players and creatures of his or her choice. Blue: Takes another turn after this one. Black: Returns all creature cards from his or her graveyard to the battlefield. White: Gains 20 life and untaps all of his or her permanents. No permanent card disadvantage for the player that plays it and a decent reward for the players that invest in being aggressive during the match.
"If you commit a crime" is a reward from using "guns" though. But yeah, that's only when you're using those specific cards saying that, that the guns gives you those specific rewards as mentioned on those cards :)
I feel like this is only really a problem in CEDH where any player can win at any time. In a more casual game with budget decks sure if you swing everything you have to take someone out one of the other people at the table may be able to take you out in turn but usually by leaving themselves vulnerable. It becomes less of a problem and more of just another layer of strategy. Now in CEDH yes that is an issue and results in boring games to watch sometimes. But sometimes it also creates this really unique tension where everyone is trying to expend as little as possible while not allowing someone else to win because the tools you use to stop someone else's win, typically counterspells in CEDH, are the same tools you use to protect your own win.
Something I've learned in over a decade of playing EDH is you should only ever be the first guy to try and win if you have enough countermagic to secure it. Typically the first guy that goes for the win gets shut down by 3-4 other players worth of interaction, so you need to be packing your own arsenal of countermagic to fight back. Alternatively, you can set up a decoy win con and after everyone has spent their resources to stop that play, you just play Demonic Consultation and flash in a Thassas Oracle for the surprise win. One time I saw a guy go for a Craterhoof Behemoth win with a bunch of big fat tokens on the field. He got hit with so much interaction that this board was pretty much wiped except for his lands; after everyone was tapped out he spent 3 mana for the DeCon/Thoracle combo and pulled out the win it was one of the funniest things I've ever seen.
One idea I have been toying with is an expansion of Monarch type effects to replace the extra starting life total and the win condition for commander games. Goals of this would be both addressing the issue brought up in this video, and softening player elimination. Narratively, we reframe the game as kind of a Game of Thrones jockeying for control of the kingdom. There is a deck of Collaborators, with each player starting with a random 5 that represents the coalition of people loyal to them. Each Collaborator has a number of loyalty (base 4) similar to a Planeswalker. Each collaborator also has an effect that can be activated at the end of your turn. I want the collaborators to have interesting effects, roughly equal to the drawing of a card afforded by Monarch. That does mean though that there is going to be tension of how much gametime should be taken up by these end of turn effects. My gut says that regardless of how many collaborators you control, you can only activate 3 of them at the end of your turn. You can only have so many schemes going at a time. If a player defeats one of your collaborators, they can gain control of it and reset to its starting loyalty, if they do not it is discarded, and they draw a new collaborator from the collaborator deck and put it into play. Narratively, this can either be turning an individual to your side, or having the person currently in that position killed so that you can have someone loyal to you installed into that position in the kingdom. Players start with the standard 20 life, which "blocks" before any Collaborators you control can take combat damage. You don't lose the game for having 0 life, you just don't have anything to protect your Collaborators. A player wins when they control X roles at the start of their turn (base 11). You can gain life only back up to 20 (minus how many poison counters you have). I am still considering if having 0 life and 0 collaborators signals you are actually eliminated, or if it just means you are very far away from winning. I outline drafts of 35 possible collaborator effects below. I have not had a chance to playtest, so they would likely need adjustments either in effect, or reducing their starting loyalty. 35 is also nearly twice the number you need at minimum by these rules, so there is room for a playgroup to curate the Collaborator deck they choose to use to a subset of these if desired. Monarch - Draw Consort - Goad target creature. Diplomat - Until the end of your next turn whenever an opponent attacks with creatures, if two or more of those creatures are attacking you and/or targets you control, draw a card. Soothsayer - Scry 5 General - Until the end of your next turn creatures you control have +1/+0 Guard - Until the end of your next turn creatures you control have +0/+2 Merchant - Make tapped treasure(s) Servant - Make tapped food(s) Inquisitor - Make tapped clue(s) Apothecary - Make tapped blood(s) Adventurer - Make tapped map(s) Cartographer - You may search your library for a basic land, reveal, and put it in your hand. Artist - Until the end of your next turn, whenever a creature you control dies, target player loses 1 life and you gain 1 life. Minstrel - Until the end of your next turn, legendary spells you cast cost (1) less to cast. Sorceror - 2 damage to target creature or planeswalker Chaplain - Choose up to three cards in graveyards. Their controllers shuffle them into their libraries. Bishop - You may return target creature card with mana value 3 or less from your graveyard to the battlefield. Champion - Until the end of your next turn, Exalted. Exalted. Exalted. Negotiator - Add a loyalty counter to a planeswalker or collaborator you control. Sentry - Untap up to two creatures you control. Inventor - Get an ornithopter Blinkmage - You may exile target creature. If you do, return that card to the battlefield under its owner’s control. Astrologist - If target permanent could transform into a permanent card, transform it. Runecaster - Until the end of your next turn, spells you cast from your graveyard or exile cost 2 less. Crone - Target player is Cursed. They gain 3 Rad counters. Quartermaster: Until the end of your next turn, you reduce equip costs by (1) and crew/saddle costs by 1. Groundskeeper: Until the end of your next turn, you may spend mana as if it were colorless or mana of any color. Extortionist - Target player may discard a card, if they do not, add 3 Loyalty to a Collaborator you control. Mentor - Put a +1/+1 counter on up to two target creatures you control. Mind Reader - Choose an opponent. Choose up to 3 cards from that player's hand. Secretly look at those cards. Abjuror - Return up to one target artifact or enchant to its owner's hand. Gladiator - Target creature you control fights target creature you don’t control. Beastmaster - Populate. Mercenary Captain - Until the end of your next turn, whenever you attack with at least one creature, target creature with mana value 2 or less is put under your control tapped and attacking a player other than its owner. Arbiter - Until the end of your next turn, your opponents can’t search libraries. Any player may pay {2} for that player to ignore this effect until end of turn.
It's Kingmaking, that's the game theory term. Kingmaking is when a player who isn't going to win decides who the winner is. Bystander is basically kingmaker. All games with three or more teams, where players can directly interact with one another, have the kingmaker problem. I think some solid solutions towards encouraging interaction are, monarch in the middle: The player who draws first blood with combat damage gets the monarch emblem. And, perhaps there could be a reward for last hitting a player, such as creating five tapped treasure tokens. More passively you could encourage interaction by generating tapped treasure tokens at the end of your turn for each player you dealt damage to that turn.
Nah this is slightly different. Kingmaking means you take direct actions to cause another player to win. Ex: destroying a valuable resource of the lead player's enemy, causing the lead player to draw extra cards. The scenario they are talking about is completely different from kingmaking. No one is taking direct actions to make a king. Instead they are all trying to win but failing because of others expending their resources to stop them, thus when those players run out of gas they can no longer stop the next attempt to win. There is no way to stop this though. Every time some one attempts to win you're going to exhaust your resources to stop them. Eventually you're going to run out of cards and can't stop them any more. The only thing you can do is just hope to be the player to pull the win. No extra rules are going to change this. No treasures from some house rule is going to stop it. No extra cards from from monarch is going to save the game. That is just the nature of multiplayer free for alls. In fact when you impose extra house rules such as this you are just creating snowballing positions that favor aggressive play styles over controlling ones. Sure, that's half the talk of this video and the comment section, but making up extraneous rules that alienate an entire deck archetype is kinda ridiculous. To top it off you'll actually cause arch enemy scenarios where the other players can't stop the lead player because your silly rules gave the player who came out the gates rolling even more advantages. Now I'm all for groups deciding their own games, but please think about what I've said here and talk to your whole group before you actually try imposing this kinda thing.
@@tonysmith9905 You are taking actions to not lose, which ultimately determines who the winner is. This is Kingmaking. If you choose to not cast your counterspells, then the player popping off wins. If you do, the next player to pop off wins. Therefore, you are choosing a winner, which isn't necessarily you. I agree that there is no real solution. All you can do is adjust the incentives, and hope the game resembles what you're going for a little bit more. Therefore I suggested some rules changes that might align the incentives a little bit better for free-for-all commander. This is a game design channel. We should try thinking about game design and challenge ourselves to think about how game design could change to accomplish different ends.
@@evilagram This isn't king making though. As I stated kingmaking is deliberate actions taken with the intention of causing some one beside the acting player to win the game. Some one else winning the game because you stopped another player's attempt and now can't stop this one is NOT the same as king making. The same out come doesn't mean the same thing happened. 2+2 and 2x2 results in the same thing but you're not doing the same type of math to get there.
@@evilagram Bruh, the definition of kingmaking is as follows: In game theory, a kingmaker scenario in a game of three or more players is an endgame situation where a player who is unable to win has the capacity to determine which player among others will win. This player is referred to as the kingmaker or spoiler. This differs from the scenario on topic in the following ways: No single person is the direct result of this. King making usually consists of sub optimal plays and deliberate actions to cause another player to win. It is usually their goal to make that player the king. In the topic scenario no one made any action directly to choose a king. One player wins but they were not chosen to win, they are just acting on opportunity. If what you think is king making was the actual case then nearly every normal multiplayer game would be a victim of king making but that's just not true at all.
This is my problem with the board game Munchkin. Literally every game ends with one player making a win attempt, everyone else stopping them with their interaction, and then the next player wins immediately. Every. Single. Game.
I was literally coming down to the comments to say that I call this the Munchkin problem.
I've had games of Munchkins last for hours because everyone is collectively stopping the winning player(s) to the point that everyone need to rebuild a boardstate. It's like if we would boardwipe and give some life back to everyone every two-three turns. Let's just say I'm never playing this game ever again lol
@@jacobcharleszimmerman7934same. 2014 we were playing a TON of Munchkin and then found that everyone would camp at 8 or 9 and then pile on. At least in MTG there’s enough variety and alternate win cons that don’t make it the case in EVERY game.
@@rustygates7551 mtg commander is still 2 hours of kingmaking. If the alternative is infinites then you get scorned out of the lgs
Dang it, I'm now reminded about how much I hate Munchkin.
I call It "the Munchkin Effect". One player goes to the Win, other players spend their resources stopping It. The next player goes to the Win, the others stop It. Until eventually somebody goes to the Win and everybody else dont have resources to stop It.
It happens in several free for all games, regardless of It being "last Man standing". In fact, its stronger in games without player elimination.
I too call it the munchkin effect!
Ye it trashed the munchkin game. You never wanted to make a victory attempt first and spent the whole game assembling your hand for your attempt.
I was just going to type this lol. This is literally every game of Munchkin ever. Completely killed the game for me.
Richard Garfield discusses this at length in his book "Characteristics of Games"
How is this book? Seems like a read that would be up my alley.
@@p4radoxical it's rather dry and academic, but covers a whole spectrum of games in pretty accessible language
Magic has a even bigger problem, and that the lack of Teysa artwork Gyatt damn
forreal forreal
Yes indeed but the problem is even bigger than you think my friend. As a male I am extremely dipleased with the direction art has been taken depicting women. Almost all of it now features either old and or unattractive/butch women with unrevealing attire with no sex appeal, cleavage, or skin shown whatsoever. A pefectly on point example is have a look at Teysa, Orzhov Scion from Guildpact. This card was recently reprinted in Ravnica Remastered with new art commisioned by a different artist. Teysa is wearing the same outfit but with the cleavage completely covered up and she looks like much less attractive and almost like a completely different person. There is so many other examples of this with reprints and much of the old art of characters compared to all the new stuff. I enjoy seeing beautiful women, and I know many feel the same.
@@xeper9458 weird comment
@@xeper9458 I recently spoke with one of Magic's artists at a live event and I asked the artist about this. The artist said that Wizards tells artists 90% of what to do. Everything from color palettes, to what a gun should look like, how the characters are dressed, etc. etc. Most of the art is not truly art: it's directives from Wizards.
@@xeper9458please never speak again this is the most cringe shit i ever read
The main problem I see in my mind with an incentive to kill isn't even the snowballing effect but rather a potential scenario where someone will take damage firstw thus become the "easiest target" to finish, making everyone suddenly targeting them to get the kill, making them die fast and then having to sit at a table for 20 minutes, waiting for the game to end and be able to play again.
There is a good reason as to why "party games" (and commander is very much a party game) try to make sure everyone stay in play for as long as possible: it just sucks all the fun of that kind of game is you or one of your friend has to sit for a long period of time because they got eliminated early.
For sure! This is likely why we see a shift of first across the finish line wins, like lorcana counting up to 20 instead of everyone counting down.
But it also depends on the commanders at the table. If someone shows up with a commander who is CLEARLY stronger than all the other ones, the table has no choice but to 3v1.
@@PP-mb2ky Kinda?
Depends on the table play level.
If its a CEDH usually everyone is at the same level.
If its a more casual game usually the people at the table lack the knowledge to even realize who's the outlier on the table, or by the time they do it's already too late.
I've also noticed that at most "casual" tables people tend to dislike having to focus on someone, it almost always end up with people slapping the target a couple of time, leaving it low health but never going for the kill because, "yaknow, that wouldn't be nice".
@@Pers0n97 Absolutely, it depends on the knowledge of the players at the table. I don't know if you're familiar with Hakbal and Volja, they are both relatively new (but not cEDH). Every game I have played against them they absolutely dominate games. Both decks are similar in that they grow massive board presence while simultaneously drawing a ton of cards. If someone shows up with a commander that is "kill on sight" and the rest of the table is unaware of this, then the game was already lost on turn 0. Like you said, by the time they realize what is going on, it's already too late.
In my experience this is common in commander games where someone plays Curse of Opulence. Even a small reward is enough to finish off the cursed player very fast and typically players don't care that the player who cast the curse also benefits.
the "bonus" for defeating another player in magic is you remove their ability to interact or win in the future. One of the things I find players do not do is make deals. "I won't hit you for 10 this turn if you do X, Y, or Z" use your opponents as tools. Make deals, even bad ones, and commander gets much more exciting.
but this would then also be true for the other two players who did not contribute to the defeat of the fourth player. You're helping two opponents by eliminating someone, which is more than it helps you.
But that brings you to the point they've brought up in another video, in that, "politics," essentially removes skill expression all together. Personally, I do not like playing politics in edh. I want to build and play a good and decently powerful deck that wins on it's own merit.
A lot of players have strong decks but play them "casually", but some (me included) play casual decks but playing to win. But that is why I always think a lot about interaction and threat assesment. A lot of players use their interaction in ways that baffles me, when I always save it for saving my win or prevent me from losing the game.
Exactly. The only real play is to pass and force players that come after you to deal with the problem. Only if there is nobody after you that can react is when you have to use your reaction.
A lot of players also use their interaction spitefully, knowing full well that it's a poor use of their resources. "You want to hurt me? Well I'll hurt you back, even though you are no threat."
@@maxoggeunfortunately if rules are followed correctly and you pass priority and no one has interaction while you sand bagged yours to check if someone else will pull the trigger you will lose.
You don’t get another chance if priorities pass without any actions.
@@ekolimitsLIVE That is correct. But like any gambling it is about the overall winrate and not about one single game. Losing while still holding the good cards has to happen from time to time.
@@ekolimitsLIVE thats right but priority can also be reset by tapping a land - so the real douchebag move is to pass - until its the last player in the chain that could react - then say - i will counter if you tap a land - then pass priority again untill everybody is tapped out, then counter - get your turn against 3 tapped out opponents and win. Of course at every time somebody could say, i wont tap and i want the first player to win =) - but then its instant loose vs, he might have a win..... so in a tournament setting you would most likely not do that.
In the Vampire TCG (made also by Garfield !) you play a 5 players free for all game with some twists :
- You can only attack the player on your left, named your "prey" (but you can interact with the others)
- Once you defeat your prey or by certain actions in the game, you earn Blood Points. The goal of the game being having the most Blood Points once the last player stands.
It creates a situation where you killing your first prey incentivizes others to be more careful of what you're trying to do next, now that you already have some points.
It's not really doable in a 4 players free to target game i believe, but it's one way of playing that could be looked at.
Secondly, to answer the question "how to get some reward when killing a player" you could introduce some mechanic like,
"That player reveal bottom of library until non land card. Exile it. You can cast it as long as you're in the game, and the card is exiled"
Or something similar but by asking the defeated player for a specific card/card type/type of spell (the creature you played turn 3 / A Planeswalker / A removal spell for enchantment)
And lastly I believe we need to remember that in a fun non competitive game like commander (not CEDH), we should be more interested in having players understand that winning is not all the fun they can have within the game.
Of course, the chemical response in your brain makes many of us do that, but have you tried letting a player do a silly turn to create a board state never seen before ?
The goal of a game can (and in many cases I believe, should) be to have a good time with friends or strangers. Always keeping the "I need to win" mindset can ruin the fun for both you and the others players. But that's a very different discussion !
My friends made a commander variant best described as “color pie”. Each player must be in a specific, different color. They are only targeting their enemy colors, they win if they remove both their enemy colors.
Oddly this bystander nature is good for the Commander format because it is a catchup mechanic that is an extension of the archenemy effect. It is part of the gamble and calculus of when to try to go for the win, and how soon you should back off if you were wrong. If you gamble correctly you become the archenemy and overwhelm the interaction. If you gamble incorrectly but stubbornly persist, then you risk one of your opponents getting into a situation where they would win the archenemy gamble. (This is of course mitigated a bit by your control of how you distribute your win progress between your opponents). Alternatively you can make some progress, then realize you won't win the gamble and back off while having resources remaining to defend. (There is so much to say about tactically abdicating the archenemy position).
This has the effect of extending the interesting part of the commander game. It extends the part where people are playing the big fun cards and using them against each other right before the game ends. Turn 2 is boring but turn N-2 is exciting.
While I generally agree, I think this heavily depends on your group. If you've got a group that tends to durdle then games can get dull quick.
Nah its really not.
It actually hurts most games.
It occasionally helps games where one person is way ahead and getting archenemied.
Years ago our play group ran a league where you got points in the league for individually eliminating players and then separately for being the last player standing or just outright winning the game. There was a lot more to the league than this but I did like that it incentivizes aggressive and interactive play and you could still scrape points out of a game you didn't ultimate win if you could still eliminate someone. This was pre Thassa's oracle but it also somewhat disincentivized "win the game" cards since you just got the "last player standing" point if you won that way. On the whole I really enjoyed the league though I'm sure it would be tweaked if we did it again.
Neat idea!
Star City Games Commander runs this sort of similar point system, I recommend checking it out!
My local shop also has a points system, and it helps with making people go for the points. They also have penalties for letting combos get out of control and knocking players out early. It's a fun system that encourages different play styles.
“Descent into Avernus” is a good example of a mtg card that forces action like battle royale. What if each game started with that card on the battlefield?
I was thinking something like that. Imo that fixes games length but not player inaction. I was thinking about an objective sheet for example
Whenever you deal combat dmg to a player: create a treasure token
Whenever you destroy a creature you don't control: draw a card
Stuff that would incentivize player to play more removal instead of hoarding it and attack more.
We've started playing a chaotic version of commander with a big deck of random cards in the middle of the table. Each time you deal damage or interact, you pull a random card (in our current version, you get to cast it for free, which is very fun but not at all balanced haha). The cards aren't always that good, or beneficial, but it really pushes people to interact and "play" as much as possible, so bystanders get left behind. Definitely a very wonky version of commander, but I'm interested to see how it evolves.
Another fun aspect is that you keep the cards you pull, which is very satisfying, to walk away from a game with a bunch of new cards.
I really want to add it to my obosh deck, since the point it's fallen into is just making games fast anyways.
I thought of a similar thing, considering that mechanics like the storm in fortnite appear to serve a similar purpose, but it's really quite the opposite. Being within the storm isn't what brings interaction, not wanting to bring interaction is what does this.
So I fear that with constant bleeding there's even less incentive for trying to overwhelm your opponents since they're gonna bleed out anyways. Instead lifegain and pillowfort seem like the way to go.
@@pascalsimioli6777
We've had this. Multiple times and multiple ways. People don't like being told how to play.
The original mechanic meant to dissuade inaction: Ante.
big blind little blind is how texas hold em solves the bystander problem. lets make ante a commander only mechanic!
Also in Catan, playing knights is another point towards the largest army bonus, which is a 2point condition that leads to a 4 point swing if you take it from someone, same as largest road. So in addition to blocking and stealing, knight cards let you work towards a large point goal AND can be used for defense. You’re allowed to play the knight card before you roll on your turn, which lets you move the thief off of your own resource spaces
Great point!
Honestly, I don't see this as an issue. Just a different type of respurce management
The issue is when everyone is playing optimally it’s a non-game.
@@distractionmakersyou should do a full episode on “non-game designs”.
Mtg is full of them…
Oh sweet summer child.
Whacky proposal: a cycle of commander cards which you can search, reveal, and put into play at the start of the game which give you significant benefits (of various sorts) but give your opponents various benefits for interacting with you. So basically a card as game modifier for yourself, as an opt-in, which you want and which encourages more fun play for the other players.
Great Idea! I always felt like this should have been what Battles were. You could have a Companion-style card that is separate from the 99 that can go with your Commander and gives you an effect while it's in play and other players can destroy it for a benefit. I got similar vibes of this idea with the Wall creatures printed in the recent Assassin's Creed set that were essentially bases that gave useful effects.
legacy tho
The Cheese stands alone
One house rule can be that you win as soon as you eliminate a player. It might be a bit extreme, but it also solves the player elimination issue of not getting to play after being eliminated
This would definitely change how. Commander metas are played tho
This is a poor idea in Commander, it'd suck to effectively lose because someone else was beaten before you for one reason or another. It also goes against the standard methods of losing the game, reduced to 0, deck out, poison, alternate win/lose condition.
This would also be affected by how Platinum Angel works as you can't lose the game and the opponent can't win the game, what happens there? Does the fourth player, who lacks PA but wasn't the player who was reduced to 0, just lose the game?
It's far simpler to retain the current style of last man standing as there are still alternate win cons that you can achieve without having to kill a single player, there are also cards that get stronger from single players being removed from the game.
To cut the game short with your suggestion makes it so the other players at the table feel bad for not being able to play out the game a bit longer.
why would you ever invest in defending yourself then
I really like this idea and I think it's worth testing. Only potential issue is that it represents such a big change that some cards become pretty much useless - Ramses being the only commander that comes to mind at the moment, but also cards that reward elimination of players like was mentioned in the video.
@ooterfire4712 "This would also by affected by how Platinum Angel works . . . Does the fourth player, who lacks PA but wasn't the player who was reduced to 0, just lose the game?"
I don't see why they would. The proposed house rule is only that you win the game when you eliminate a player. If player A eliminates player B when player C has a PA in play: player B is eliminated, player A does not win the game, the game continues with players A, C, and D.
I think cutting the game short is fine, game length has been an issue for people for as long as I've played commander. Making aggro strategies more viable is an obvious goal, although whether that goal is achieved would require testing.
Losing the game because another player in your pod has a much higher risk tolerance than you could be annoying, but honestly presents an interesting dynamic that changes the value of certain types of cards. Instant speed burn becomes a lot more interesting, combat tricks, mass pump, fogs, instant speed removal. There's weird game theory stuff where you might be incentivized to protect another player's life total well before you would in the current rule set. All these are not necessarily bad, just different.
This house rule is definitely interesting to me; it might actually be horrible, but I think it's really hard to tell without brewing and testing and iterating a couple times.
If we could defend for other players, this could actually be a sick variant 😮
This is exactly what all good risk players know. If someone attacks early and makes an enemy, both of them will lose unless you gained a bonus to recoup your troops. Even then, the meta in high level is to be very friendly and agree on bonuses. Slowing the game right down.
Also when it comes to butter and guns. Progressive cards risk allowed you to snowball if you make a kill. Commander is more like fixed where there is basically no incentive in the late game because cards mean less as the game progresses.
i feel like bystanding is a skill just like any other and players need to learn when to interact and what to interact with. some players get too carried away and kill a player who is less antagonistic which lets another player run away with their value or sometimes two stronger decks fight each other while you bide your time to foil the victor.
interaction is one of those things that you hold onto not for "threats" but for when you are being "threatened".
commander just ends up being more complex than 1v1 by adding additional players, creating an internal metagame between keeping players alive while killing them at the same time
PUBGDH: At the start of every round, each player gets a Poison Counter. If someone doesn't win before the start of the tenth round, everyone dies
Hahaha PUBGDH is an incredible name
I was thinking something similar but it should have a different name, a poison counter would really help the poison player. I was thinking "at the end of the turn, if you didn't attack an opponent or committed a crime you lose X life +1 where X is the number of consecutive turns in which you didn't attack an opponent or committed a crime"
Basically the more inactive you are the more you remain in the storm.
@@pascalsimioli6777if you rule 0 infect, this could make "strict" poison actually viable.
Many people in the comments are suggesting house rules. One Ive heard of, but not used personally, is essentially to assign everyone hidden roles before the game begins, based on the game Bang!
One player is the King, they reveal their role at the start of the game and win if theyre the last player standing.
Two players are Bandits, they win as a team if they kill the king.
One player is the Knight, they win if the King wins.
One player is the Assassin, they win if the King dies but they have to kill the bandits first. Basically they pretend to be a Knight, and then betray the King.
They called it Kingdoms and their main goal was to solve board politics in games with more than four players, but I wonder the structure it adds might solve several of the problems you have talked about on this channel.
Dont know if you knew about this one already.
Don't these types of hidden role games scale better with more players? I'm just imagining a 6-player game of Commander with these roles and that just sounds like it'll take a whole day to play.
I've played a lot of kingdom and it's a blast. I think it needs some spice though.
It's very hard to win as the assassin.
Iv played a draft like this using the Balders Gate set it was great fun
I want to say they added something along these lines with the Thunder Junction commander decks where there are varying bounties that can be claimed by players for certain game actions giving them bonuses. In the form of a separate deck similar to plane chase
They are experimenting with this as they know this is an issue. Unfortunately magic has an old design that will not change and an old player base that doesn’t like gimmicks. Because of this these experiments “fail”
The ideas behind them are good and many time execution is fun (like planechase) but no one plays it at the casual local table because they just want to play the rules they know.
The Thunder Junction Commander Party game solves that problem quite well, more people should try it. In short, everyone put bounties on locales at every end step, and those bounties stack until rewards are so valuable (such as drawing 4 cards) someone is bound to rob it and become a fugitive, which than leads to others attacking the criminal, etc etc.
This sounds very interesting!
Why do I keep getting you guys sugested right after uploading? :p
Keep up the good job!
Same!!!
You miss understand, the ring is not what forces action the act of players dropping their loot is.
In any battle royale you can sneak into the smaller and smaller rings to ensure a higher position, however you're not likely to win because you are rewarded more by fighting and succeeding than by waiting and ambushing.
its kind of still the ring though since without the ring you could garantuee a 1 v 1 every time by just hiding. Yes you would be down in resources, but the chances of winning the game (depends on the game) are usually still higher than having to potentially kill 98 other player to get to that 1v1
I think that if a player takes out another player, they should be rewarded with the flat reduction or outright removal of any additional commander costs accumulated throughout the match.
Not a bad idea.
This is an issue in a lot of other games, often they mitigate it by you getting benefits from defeating a player (e.g. you get to take their hand or permanents they control when you defeat them)... But that doesn't fully mitigate it because Player A might use all their resources battling player B only for player C (the bystander) to still come in and win because player B didn't have enough resources left to give player A anything good when player A defeated them.
It's called turtling what you are describing. That is where a player sits back waits for an advantage while everyone else attacks each other. Generally, it is solved by placing incentives for attacking like in Risk, where you get a slight advantage in dice rolls and gain a card for being the aggressor.
I remember playing the custom map Footman Frenzy in Warcraft III, a four team, twelve player game where you could only accumulate resources (Gold and experience) by involving yourself in combat with other players; when your periodically generated units are defeated, they grant the opponents resources. So there's a strange push and pull away from playing the game itself. You don't want to get your units stuck in the middle of three opposing teams of players, but your inaction leads to certain loss from falling behind. And sometimes it culminates in people agreeing with opponents to just full send into the middle of the map to get the game started.
Glad to see another footy fan
There is a treasure trove of good old war3 custom maps that could be analysed for this purpose.
Glaive Masters is a niche favourite of mine, but Enfo's Team Survival, Vampire Ice, Legion TD, Custom Hero Line Wars, Pimp My Peon.....
So many good concepts...
I’m thinking about every time you cause one or more players to lose the game, you gain treasures equal to the number of rounds the game has gone on. It doesn’t necessarily solve the problem of interaction but does help with incentivizing action. If that isn’t strong enough you could also let the player draw cards for every 5 rounds the game has gone on and tweak that to your liking
In tournament poker, this effect occurs in ICM (independent chip model) situations, where there is a pay jump and player A benefits from not getting involved while players B and C fight for a pot. There are even calculators to model the situations pretty accurately and we study them!
I love the bit of "Oh, Gavin's thinking about Commander?" even though I can't put my finger on why. Also, that opening is among the most bizarre hooks I've ever seen for a video. If I was watching your stuff blind, I definitely would have kept watching just to figure out why that would make any sense.
If you would like to alleviate this slightly at kitchen table games (leagues at your LGS have their own rewards, usually in the form of points and prizes), you can house rule to add a "prize" for whenever you defeat a player. At my table we've been trying "eliminate a player = draw two cards" and it's been encouraging more aggression (and politicking, which is also a good way to incentivize stopping someone from winning)
There is reward for removal in green... have you guys checked "feral encounter" or "contest of claws," for example?
They could add prize cards. Simple added effects that the first player gets after defeating another player. I'm not sure what those added bonuses would be. Maybe an enchantment that gives you extra draw. Creature that can block for you. Untapping one creature.
I’ve seen a few people in your comment sections suggest Commander is its own game, not a game format, and I think it might be interesting to explore that. That claim didn’t really make sense to me, but then again I’m not looking at it with a background in game design.
Commander involves not trying to win. It fundamentally goes against what 1v1 Magic is. In any sanctioned format, there is an understanding that each player is trying to win the game at all times. Every decision is centered on winning. In Commander, you have to not lose and not make yourself the target. Decks that can durdle around and suddenly win out of nowhere are better because they're not the target until it's too late. "Normal" decks are worse because winning with creature damage over 5 turns is too obvious.
In my opinion edh is a narrative led game: you're trying to tell a story and a story is more entertaining when it has come backs, underdogs and clear villains.
@@JohnFromAccountingThat’s how SOME people view commander. But for me and my friends we’re all trying to win, the casualness comes from not being a sore loser, something that I see being allowed to flourish by the mindset you described.
@@maximillianhallett3055 Exactly. The goal for everyone is to win and to stop me from winning so they can, while keeping in mind that it is just a game while having fun along the way
@@JohnFromAccounting I strongly disagree. The goal of the game is always to win. If you are playing this game actively trying to not win that's just weird and you should not be playing this game
that cat is staring into my soul 10:21
What if, if you kill an opponent with creatures, you get to untap them so you can still defend yourself. If you beat them with non creature effects you gain 10-15 life?
I think this is solvable with a benefit rule defined by the rules of commander and not magics system. Much like something like commander damage a rule could be played by choice like when a player is killed the player can choose what resource(s) or creatures ( recruits) move to their control.
Been playing a Vastra/Flint deck since MKM, 'must be blocked' makes her like a gun, producing clues & food makes the butter, and it incentivises interaction.
Reminds me a little bit of zugswang from chess, where you're in a position where every legal move is bad and you wish you could make no move at all. It's not the same, but it's part of the concept - When one player makes a push, they put every other player in zugzwang - you wish you could just sit back and continue what you're doing, but you can't.
It might come down to how games are won at higher levels.
If a players generally attempt to win through combat damage, this situation doesn’t come up too much, but that’s at lower power levels.
At higher power levels, players try to beat each opponent at once. And that causes what people seem to call the “munchkin effect.”
But at this point, unless players agree that, “you win the game” cards or combos are boring, or not exciting, that’s going to continue to be the premier way to beat 3 opponents.
A few sayings come to mind.
While two dogs fight over a bone a third one runs away with it.
Neither the Snipe nor the Clam will yield, until a fisherman comes by and snatches them both into his net.
Business also has the concept of “second mover advantage” which boils down to exploiting the results/efforts of an established company to turn a profit with less investment/effort
The only game I've found where this really works is the board game Inis. It's kind of hard to be a bystander in Inis due to how the win conditions are met, and often, what happens is that there are multiple people who meet win conditions at the same time.
EDH has a million win-cons that defeat all opponents at once for one simple reason - it is a social multiplayer format. All this talk about how can we eliminate one player and gain a personal benefit, then have them sit around the table and watch the rest of us play the game is giving a real bad vibe. Not to mention how you yourselves mention that the person getting benefits from eliminating someone will become the target of the other two remaining players. I fail to see how is this any different than one player impatiently blowing his load early, another shutting him down, while the two remaining players are in the best position to score a win.
The bystander dilemma definitely has its problems, but I think it's also core to what makes commander fun. I wouldn't say the core pattern of commander is doing as little as possible to hide in the background, because that doesn't move the game to a conclusion. You're performing a balancing act, trying to get your engine online to put you into a position to win the game while not looking too scary to avoid giving your opponents obvious removal targets.
This is a large part of where the casual nature of the format comes into play. Because I think CEDH does stuffer from this problem due to the decks having optomized the fun out of that aspect of the game. I'm not saying that you're supposed to play suboptimally in a casual game, rather that your deck will be built differently. 'Build the decks to create fun and interesting games, play the decks to win' is the approach that I've found to be the most fun, so you never feel like you're letting someone do a cool thing, but you qlso leave space for your opponents to beat you by going even more over-the-top
I think the issue is that cEDH is EDH. All of those cards are legal in the format and it’s the logical conclusion of the format. The strategies of it lay all of commanders issues to bare. Casual is just choosing not to see or take advantage of those issues in one way or another, but there’s no way to measure if someone is or not or to what degree. This is what the power level system and rule 0 are trying to solve, but they both rely on players being honest.
@@distractionmakers I think there's enough distinctions between cEDH and EDH, that they should be considered different formats. The heuristics between the two are so wildly different, that I think its difficult to make a case that they are the same. My favorite example of this is simic/selesnya signet vs Nature's Lore/Three Visits. Within EDH, 2 mana ramp spells that get you an untapped land tend to beat out mana rocks of the same cmc since its a much more resilient resource. The vast access to ramp causes green to be one of the best colors in the format, since ramp is so effective at parity, and its so much harder to interact with.
This ends up being flipped on its head within cEDH. You would think that the green signets would perform even worse since artifact hate/removal is even more widespread. Things like Null Rod and Collector Ouphe are common since you know for a fact that artifacts will be the most common reasource. Instead, Nature's Lore/Three Visits and ALL of its ilk are laughable in the format, and completely disappear. This is due to the fact that although the format has a much higher density of artifact hate, the sheer explosiveness of using double colorless to cast a signet early ends up being worth the risk of running into hate. Green goes from one of the strongest colors in the format, all the way to the very bottom in cEDH.
Not to mention there a ton of cards that are so strong that its borderline boring to play them in low-to-high power level EDH, but completely unplayable in cEDH.
More casual power levels of commander have characteristics that address this. Gishath gets incredible value for hitting an opponent with big damage, and many other decks run things that give you value when you hit players with them
You mentioned Monarch; a small clarification: monarch wasn't designed for commander, it was created in the second Conspiracy set to create aggressive and dynamic play in a multiplayer draft format. The Monarch(tm) just ended up working really well in the other multiplayer format.
Alternate title: Magic Has A Big Commander Problem
part 5
@@codyhanson1344 feed these to my veeeiiins
It stinks but welcome to the Commander Master Race.
'I guess we're just that kind of podcast now...'
And better for it!
Casual commander is like a bystander competition. Like how many turns can we go without someone getting attacked?
That’s why ultimately 4 player games cannot be competitive. Edh is just a board game.
I mean I'm a fan of the idea of getting an extra turn when you KO an opponent (through damage, cmdr damage, or emptying their library). for casual games, it would incentivise combat more and focusing one player, which forces action early. would be interested in testing this idea 🤔
I really like how they added a 'Bounty Deck' in Outlaws of Thunder Junction. Incentives people to do things. I love when they add new things like this to the game.
I would like to see a rule that helps creature combat decks and encourages more aggressive play.
What do you think if commander added a rule where if you cause just one (to avoid this rule benefiting someone from building a board non interactively and then just turning everything sideways) player to lose the game via combat damage (conventional or commander) you get to tutor 7 basic lands to the battlefield (untapped) and draw 7 cards giving you an infusion of resources as a reward for actually attacking with creatures
Monarch is automatically integrated in commander, and whoever doesn’t have it looses 4 life at the upkeep/ end step of the monarch players turn, (similiar to a battle royal ring)
Not a bad idea. Who starts with it? 🤔
@@distractionmakers Last player in turning order ?
I feel like the cards you're describing are Descent Into Avernus, The One Ring and Black Market Connections. Strong enough to want to take, but they put a clock on the game that necessitates interaction using the resources you're getting.
It is a frustrating issue though, I enjoy theft decks and I really have to often attempt to defeat the table simultaneously, as beating a player whose creatures I've taken (or allowing them to be beaten) is a severe disadvantage.
Create more mono white hate cards. a 3 mana enchantment that says "Whenever a nonland permanent enters the battlefield under an opponent's it enters with 3 vanishing counters. On each opoonent's end step remove a counter from each permanent unless that creature attacked a player other than you this turn. When the last counter is removed its controller sacrifices it and you draw a card." Make the butter spoil. a riff on pithing needle that hits triggered abilities. Or make a hushbringer with flash and split second. My earnest belief is that commander is broken because the white piece of the color pie is stigmatized. Rule of law effects, tax effects, banning stuff, making stuff enter tapped, etc etc. Stax brings balance to the force.
“Make the butter spoil” is a great design philosophy
Only problem I see then the only effective decks are proliferation decks because their stuff spoils slower or never
In war it's generally a strategy called "playing both ends against the middle." The moment two other people begin expending resources everyone else who isn't directly involved in the conflict benefits off the squabbling.
I’ve had this theory since about my Third cedh tourney. Because of it I rarely try to go off first unless I have straight lockdown mode going on w abolisher type effects .
do you think the new revised Archenemy Commander Could solve this issue?
Nope. Commander is a fundamentally flawed "format"
This type of conflict happens very often in endgame scenarios of Twilight Imperium
What I try to do is to translate the overall accessment from TI4 to what could be an equivalent way of analyzing the board in MTG
In the board game Risk, players have hidden goals. This could be interesting in commander.
Like “defeat the player on your left”.
Eberis the binding blade flips into a demon that gets stronger when a player loses. I've always loved throwing it into decks that have black color identity for the fun of it
What if the player that KO another player gets an extra turn immediately after they are out?
Then they will immedietly snowball into winning the game
@@CatManThree perhaps, but the point being made here is that the third man out who sits back and watches the other players fight, has an advantage by not spending resources. So at the end of the day, the lesser active player ends up with an advantage currently. Shouldn’t the advantage go to the person who was active, and shouldn’t they be rewarded for removing another player?
Aight long time magic player(OG innistrad) and long time fortnite player(c1 s3). Fortnite had a systrm call storm surge to prevent what you guys talked about with inaction. The players with the least amount of damage done to other players will start to loose life until they pass the threshold. So it was added a year or two after its br launch to prevent people from doing exactly what you stated since wasting resources( building materials,ammo and heals) was often a huge detriment. It also really fucked with the server when 70 out of 100 players were grouped up in the small storm circle. To the point that it was unplayable. Which when i happened at tournys probably led to the creation of Storm surge. Love you vids by the way!!🎉
Oh wow I had no idea they had to double down on the storm thing. Super interesting. Thanks for your insight!
@@distractionmakers I forgot to add that for a few years Fortnite also had this mechanic called siphon(in ranked) that rewarded you 50hp/shield after a kill as well as some materials. This helped more aggressive players play aggro or as most called it W-keying (pretty much mono red aggro). Usually at the higher lvls of play only the really good players could really abuse this but it was still a good reward normal players got in addition to the regular loot of a body.
What if at the end of combat if you eliminated another player you were able to untap all your permanents or was given an extra turn after that turn. This would give a reward and extra resources to the player for tapping out and leaving themselves vulnerable.
They could add something like this to the official rules and Could also apply to 1v1 but it wouldn’t matter for that.
Neat idea!
In your initial example, it sounds more like the first player devoting their strategy to a risky combo and using their interaction to push for game. While other players at the table have interaction to stop combos. So when a second player has that winning combo, the first player already expended their interaction for their failed combo which they could have used said interaction to stop the second player. The issue would lay more on players building decks that are too focused on getting to that combo to resolve rather than building to do more outside of it. From this point, it's not so much an issue with the game but rather an issue with some players and some deck building philosophy
They've introduced cards that get bigger from players losing the game, but the quantity is too small to take advantage of.
in cedh every deck is a combo deck more or less since its the best way to win against 3 opponents. it usually goes eighter infinite or takes a alternative wincon because cards that are made for 20 life one on one are too ineffective when you suddenly have to hit 120 damage. I mean a good cedh deck can threaten a win consistently on turn 3 to 4, and every card in the deck is eighter interaction, resource generation or a gamewinning threat. So everybody has interaction and the "risky combo" is the equivalent of playing a good creature in a normal 1 v 1 game. The powerlevel is just different.
The question is, usually the game should reward the agressor right? because if it does not reward the aggressor then and the first person acting loses, then the ideal way to play the game is doing nothing and thats not good game design. In a 4 player cedh match player 1 going for the win has the least chance of winning most of the time because he is staring at 3 player with full resources and full hands of interaction. If you where able to get ahead in resources A LOT you can sometimes use your own interaction to force the win, but most of the time the interaction of 3 other players is just too much. But somebody has to make the first move and because every threat is gamewinning in cedh there is no other choice from the other players than using interaction on it. This first winning attempt will usually occur very early since one of the ways you could win is catching your opponents with bad, unsculpted hands. thats why you need to use your interaction to test the opponents, because for every card you draw, the table draws 3, making it even more unlikely to win. That of course needs interaction from opponents because unlike a creature that would just attack one opponent, that spell will make everybody loose. So player 2 will have way less opposition and a better position to win now.
If player 1 would not counteract and let his spell get countered, then of course he would still have resources left for player 2. But then its player 3 that gets the good position. And if its not player 3 then its player 4.
The Problem is, that one player cannot control 3 other players at the same time and eventually resources will run out. So the first player taking initiative is still the player least likely to win. The problem is not all black and white though because there is baiting involved, there is instant winconditions you can play after another players win attempt and stuff like that, and also decks that are able to control 3 players or deny enough resources. But this is about the core design flaw of edh and especially cedh that punishes the player acting first and benefits inactive players with easier wins, while it should be the other way around.
@@dennisvogel5982 your comment misses out on methods of achieving victory like control which seek to out value opponents over the course of the game. Eliminating single players also opens up opportunities to close the game out on the other two players, that in of itself is value and the other two players would find this agreeable.
Curse of Vengeance is a really cool attempt. I kinda want to try giving everyone a 0 cost Curse of Vengeance in the command zone (and it comes back when it leaves the field) and seeing where this goes.
I really like the deckbuilding constraints of commander, but the gameplay is way more enjoyable to me when played as 2-headed giant, archenemy or even 1v1. Being the group hug guy that wins out of nowhere on turn 20 (or dies before that) got old real quick.
Im that oddball, I play with several decks designed to steer the flow of the game into a battleship style slugfest. Combo pieces invariably get blown up graveyards culled and my entire win strategy is I die you die with me. This specific style of play is actually harder to pull off then goodstuff the deck or combo tutor win.
There are a few legends they made to try to incentivise killing opponents. Sengir the Dark Baron and Ramses Assassin Lord both do things when an opponent dies. Out of these I think Sengir goes in the right direction, but the benefit is too inconsistent since to kill a player their life usually needs to be low.
Been thinking about making a deck benefiting from opponent's death for a while.
Player death ending "gain control" effects enables an interesting build avenue: getting back cards like Wishclaw Talisman right after giving it away.
Btw, here are a few more cards take advantage of a player losing the game: Blood Tyrant, Ramses, Assassin Lord and Sengir, the Dark Baron. Certain ones could even be a commander! :O
Okay, you two have been showing up in my recommended lately and I have to say.. very based takes. You guys have a very healthy way of viewing the game.. and I think you have a great ability to put into words what many players feel or notice but maybe not so overtly.
Here's an idea to force interaction back on the board level:
Add a 5th npc player. That player is immune to all non combat damage and has infinit HP.
Each players draw a card and get 1 mana at the start of the post combat main phase for every time they deal 5 damage to that NPC (doesnt need to be in one hit, think of it as if every player had its hown npc damage counter. If youve done 3 this turn you will only need to do 2 more to triggeran instance of that reward the next turn).
The catch here is that anyone can block for that NPC.
That way focusing on "making butter" becomes suboptimal, actively engaging in the battle, attacking, blocking and removing creatures becomes way important and worth spending ressources on.
I think this could lead to some break away from combos and turn commander back into the creature on creature action game MTG was always meant to be.
Would slow the game too much, I think.
I kinda feel like pokemon's prize card system could work well for a ffa. Basically, at the start of a game you set aside 6 cards from your deck, and when you knock out an enemy's pokemon you get to draw one (or more). Once you draw all 6, you win.
Basically the main reaon I think it works is that you dont have the problem of having to set yourself behind to stop someone from winning; killing your opponent's biggest threat *also* advances your win condition. You are actively encouraged to engage instead of hoading resources, because other players will just beat you up while gaining resources at the same time. Basically it heavily incentivizes tempo and active play.
Cat always makes the video better.
Interesting topic. Rather than making cards to incentivize action how about a rules change?
When you eliminate a player you get +5 or 10 health and draw till you have 7 cards if you have less than 7 instantly. Another way could be you get all their lands, untapped, on your board.
So you get back some resources for eliminating a player and the next guy in line shouldn't be able to just shoot you.
I remember that there was a guy at my lgs which destroyed high power tables with his zombie deck, me and my friends lost several games to him.
So what we my friends did? King-made me and attacking the guy as much I possible, we defeated him and then I won the game in one swoop.
They sacrificed their game just for the grudge we had against the guy.
This is why I like playing with Planechase in EDH. The different planes can really affect the game :P
In shadowfist you steal your opponent's lands by attacking them. This has two beneficial effects for multiplayer. It incentivizes attacking, and it allows a player to snowball a win from the archenemy position.
i mean yeah thats a big problem in these kinda games. sure you cn spend a turn and a card board wiping but the other people who are behind wheover was first get to reap the beneifts of the board wipe reset without having to spend an actual card or mana
Freerider would be more like I can run more combo pieces instead of interaction because I'm banking on other players to remove the cards that threaten all of us but counterspells diffuse this problem in commander because they're just as good at protecting your win attempt as they are at stopping an opponent so there's no value to free riding
How about a house rule that goes
Whenever you kill an opponent, choose 1
- Draw 2 cards
- Create a 4/4 angel token with flying and vigilance
- Create 3 Treasure tokens
Ive used swords to plowshares to win by exiling my own (tapped down) serra avatar and doubleing my life total on my opponents end step, then won on my upkeep with Test of Endurance
I think I've heard it described as the "3rd party problem", often not describing them as not just a bystander but someone who swoops in after two players fight and weaken themselves. I've seen a lot of board games solve it in different ways, my favorite being Kemet, a conflict game originally published in 2012. In Kemet, there are a few ways to score points, but the main way is battle. If you win a battle *as the attacker*, you get a permanent victory point. Holding a territory offers points that can be stolen, meaning people want to attack all the time to score the permanent VP as well as take the territory to steal your points and get some extra resources.
I want to try playing Commander with the Monarch rules starting at turn 0. Players may be able to draw tons of cards, but they aren't drawing them in the early turns so I think smoothing out draws would help build decks a bit differently.
They should give us a stax piece that prevents "I win the game" effects. A 2 drop artifact that does only that. I reckon it'd do a lot to minimize this issue in cEDH
This dilemma is exactly why I spend hours refining a deck to be “fun” to pilot. If I win, that’s cool if not, I at least got to pilot a really fun deck and others got to see the mechanics on display. It may even inspire someone else to try out the deck that you built.
I think its called "Sandbagging" as you are playing weaker on purpose to dodge the heat. Then, you ramp it up once the coast is clear
i propose the "be vigilent to bystander solution": if a player has not interacted with other players for 2 turns after the first proper interaction, other players get vigilance on creatures attacking that player, this forces that player to contribute to the game without fucking over the player that's forcing that player into interacting with the game, thoughts?
I wonder how much this would be improved if all of these value engine commanders that WOTC have made recently had rewarded interacting with opponents instead of just using a certain type of card. Triggered value engines would certainly be a card-efficient way to add a pay-off for hindering another player, even if not particularly interesting.
I think it’s a skill issue where people try to interact way too early and half the time they aren’t even trying to stop win attempts they’re casting a removal spell then backing it with counters. When they should just hold the counter until they need to.
Video starts with CEDH then switches to Commander- basically two separate games tho . One wins with good combos and the other wins by attacking or bad combos
I think that given the commander format contains players largely trying to design decks around their commander wotc needs to place more emphasis on legendary creatures designed for the commander format that reward engaging in the combat step.
There are too many generic value engine commanders that benefit from cards just being played, which is going to encourage a passive playstyle.
Designing unique legends that create an advantage worth utilizing the combat step for could help curb this playstyle over time.
Regarding the enchantment that is supposed to impose more aggressive play…
Card drawing simply doesn’t cut it, since you usually need to wait till your next turn until you can cast anything after a big swing. You’ll be the main target after drawing so much and might not make it to the next one. Also, the player that runs the enchantment gets an immediate permanent card disadvantage, only for putting a reward on someone’s head.
Player Enchantment: If the enchanted player loses the game, the player that caused him or her to lose does X, then return this card to your hand.
As a card cycle, X could be this per color:
Green: Creates as many 1/1 Saproling tokens as there are creatures on the battlefield.
Red: Divides 20 damage between any number of target players and creatures of his or her choice.
Blue: Takes another turn after this one.
Black: Returns all creature cards from his or her graveyard to the battlefield.
White: Gains 20 life and untaps all of his or her permanents.
No permanent card disadvantage for the player that plays it and a decent reward for the players that invest in being aggressive during the match.
You could do a rule like when a player kills a player for the first time he may discard his hand and draw 7
"If you commit a crime" is a reward from using "guns" though. But yeah, that's only when you're using those specific cards saying that, that the guns gives you those specific rewards as mentioned on those cards :)
I feel like this is only really a problem in CEDH where any player can win at any time. In a more casual game with budget decks sure if you swing everything you have to take someone out one of the other people at the table may be able to take you out in turn but usually by leaving themselves vulnerable. It becomes less of a problem and more of just another layer of strategy.
Now in CEDH yes that is an issue and results in boring games to watch sometimes. But sometimes it also creates this really unique tension where everyone is trying to expend as little as possible while not allowing someone else to win because the tools you use to stop someone else's win, typically counterspells in CEDH, are the same tools you use to protect your own win.
Something I've learned in over a decade of playing EDH is you should only ever be the first guy to try and win if you have enough countermagic to secure it. Typically the first guy that goes for the win gets shut down by 3-4 other players worth of interaction, so you need to be packing your own arsenal of countermagic to fight back.
Alternatively, you can set up a decoy win con and after everyone has spent their resources to stop that play, you just play Demonic Consultation and flash in a Thassas Oracle for the surprise win. One time I saw a guy go for a Craterhoof Behemoth win with a bunch of big fat tokens on the field. He got hit with so much interaction that this board was pretty much wiped except for his lands; after everyone was tapped out he spent 3 mana for the DeCon/Thoracle combo and pulled out the win it was one of the funniest things I've ever seen.
I see this play pattern a lot in battle royal games. The best play pattern is often to gather resources and wait to 3rd party another fight
One idea I have been toying with is an expansion of Monarch type effects to replace the extra starting life total and the win condition for commander games.
Goals of this would be both addressing the issue brought up in this video, and softening player elimination.
Narratively, we reframe the game as kind of a Game of Thrones jockeying for control of the kingdom. There is a deck of Collaborators, with each player starting with a random 5 that represents the coalition of people loyal to them. Each Collaborator has a number of loyalty (base 4) similar to a Planeswalker. Each collaborator also has an effect that can be activated at the end of your turn. I want the collaborators to have interesting effects, roughly equal to the drawing of a card afforded by Monarch. That does mean though that there is going to be tension of how much gametime should be taken up by these end of turn effects. My gut says that regardless of how many collaborators you control, you can only activate 3 of them at the end of your turn. You can only have so many schemes going at a time.
If a player defeats one of your collaborators, they can gain control of it and reset to its starting loyalty, if they do not it is discarded, and they draw a new collaborator from the collaborator deck and put it into play. Narratively, this can either be turning an individual to your side, or having the person currently in that position killed so that you can have someone loyal to you installed into that position in the kingdom.
Players start with the standard 20 life, which "blocks" before any Collaborators you control can take combat damage. You don't lose the game for having 0 life, you just don't have anything to protect your Collaborators. A player wins when they control X roles at the start of their turn (base 11). You can gain life only back up to 20 (minus how many poison counters you have). I am still considering if having 0 life and 0 collaborators signals you are actually eliminated, or if it just means you are very far away from winning.
I outline drafts of 35 possible collaborator effects below. I have not had a chance to playtest, so they would likely need adjustments either in effect, or reducing their starting loyalty. 35 is also nearly twice the number you need at minimum by these rules, so there is room for a playgroup to curate the Collaborator deck they choose to use to a subset of these if desired.
Monarch - Draw
Consort - Goad target creature.
Diplomat - Until the end of your next turn whenever an opponent attacks with creatures, if two or more of those creatures are attacking you and/or targets you control, draw a card.
Soothsayer - Scry 5
General - Until the end of your next turn creatures you control have +1/+0
Guard - Until the end of your next turn creatures you control have +0/+2
Merchant - Make tapped treasure(s)
Servant - Make tapped food(s)
Inquisitor - Make tapped clue(s)
Apothecary - Make tapped blood(s)
Adventurer - Make tapped map(s)
Cartographer - You may search your library for a basic land, reveal, and put it in your hand.
Artist - Until the end of your next turn, whenever a creature you control dies, target player loses 1 life and you gain 1 life.
Minstrel - Until the end of your next turn, legendary spells you cast cost (1) less to cast.
Sorceror - 2 damage to target creature or planeswalker
Chaplain - Choose up to three cards in graveyards. Their controllers shuffle them into their libraries.
Bishop - You may return target creature card with mana value 3 or less from your graveyard to the battlefield.
Champion - Until the end of your next turn, Exalted. Exalted. Exalted.
Negotiator - Add a loyalty counter to a planeswalker or collaborator you control.
Sentry - Untap up to two creatures you control.
Inventor - Get an ornithopter
Blinkmage - You may exile target creature. If you do, return that card to the battlefield under its owner’s control.
Astrologist - If target permanent could transform into a permanent card, transform it.
Runecaster - Until the end of your next turn, spells you cast from your graveyard or exile cost 2 less.
Crone - Target player is Cursed. They gain 3 Rad counters.
Quartermaster: Until the end of your next turn, you reduce equip costs by (1) and crew/saddle costs by 1.
Groundskeeper: Until the end of your next turn, you may spend mana as if it were colorless or mana of any color.
Extortionist - Target player may discard a card, if they do not, add 3 Loyalty to a Collaborator you control.
Mentor - Put a +1/+1 counter on up to two target creatures you control.
Mind Reader - Choose an opponent. Choose up to 3 cards from that player's hand. Secretly look at those cards.
Abjuror - Return up to one target artifact or enchant to its owner's hand.
Gladiator - Target creature you control fights target creature you don’t control.
Beastmaster - Populate.
Mercenary Captain - Until the end of your next turn, whenever you attack with at least one creature, target creature with mana value 2 or less is put under your control tapped and attacking a player other than its owner.
Arbiter - Until the end of your next turn, your opponents can’t search libraries. Any player may pay {2} for that player to ignore this effect until end of turn.
It's Kingmaking, that's the game theory term. Kingmaking is when a player who isn't going to win decides who the winner is.
Bystander is basically kingmaker.
All games with three or more teams, where players can directly interact with one another, have the kingmaker problem.
I think some solid solutions towards encouraging interaction are, monarch in the middle: The player who draws first blood with combat damage gets the monarch emblem. And, perhaps there could be a reward for last hitting a player, such as creating five tapped treasure tokens.
More passively you could encourage interaction by generating tapped treasure tokens at the end of your turn for each player you dealt damage to that turn.
Nah this is slightly different.
Kingmaking means you take direct actions to cause another player to win. Ex: destroying a valuable resource of the lead player's enemy, causing the lead player to draw extra cards.
The scenario they are talking about is completely different from kingmaking. No one is taking direct actions to make a king. Instead they are all trying to win but failing because of others expending their resources to stop them, thus when those players run out of gas they can no longer stop the next attempt to win.
There is no way to stop this though. Every time some one attempts to win you're going to exhaust your resources to stop them. Eventually you're going to run out of cards and can't stop them any more. The only thing you can do is just hope to be the player to pull the win.
No extra rules are going to change this. No treasures from some house rule is going to stop it. No extra cards from from monarch is going to save the game. That is just the nature of multiplayer free for alls.
In fact when you impose extra house rules such as this you are just creating snowballing positions that favor aggressive play styles over controlling ones. Sure, that's half the talk of this video and the comment section, but making up extraneous rules that alienate an entire deck archetype is kinda ridiculous. To top it off you'll actually cause arch enemy scenarios where the other players can't stop the lead player because your silly rules gave the player who came out the gates rolling even more advantages.
Now I'm all for groups deciding their own games, but please think about what I've said here and talk to your whole group before you actually try imposing this kinda thing.
@@tonysmith9905 You are taking actions to not lose, which ultimately determines who the winner is. This is Kingmaking. If you choose to not cast your counterspells, then the player popping off wins. If you do, the next player to pop off wins. Therefore, you are choosing a winner, which isn't necessarily you.
I agree that there is no real solution. All you can do is adjust the incentives, and hope the game resembles what you're going for a little bit more.
Therefore I suggested some rules changes that might align the incentives a little bit better for free-for-all commander.
This is a game design channel. We should try thinking about game design and challenge ourselves to think about how game design could change to accomplish different ends.
@@evilagram This isn't king making though. As I stated kingmaking is deliberate actions taken with the intention of causing some one beside the acting player to win the game.
Some one else winning the game because you stopped another player's attempt and now can't stop this one is NOT the same as king making.
The same out come doesn't mean the same thing happened. 2+2 and 2x2 results in the same thing but you're not doing the same type of math to get there.
@@tonysmith9905 You are causing someone besides the acting player to win the game. It is Kingmaking.
@@evilagram
Bruh, the definition of kingmaking is as follows:
In game theory, a kingmaker scenario in a game of three or more players is an endgame situation where a player who is unable to win has the capacity to determine which player among others will win. This player is referred to as the kingmaker or spoiler.
This differs from the scenario on topic in the following ways:
No single person is the direct result of this.
King making usually consists of sub optimal plays and deliberate actions to cause another player to win. It is usually their goal to make that player the king.
In the topic scenario no one made any action directly to choose a king. One player wins but they were not chosen to win, they are just acting on opportunity.
If what you think is king making was the actual case then nearly every normal multiplayer game would be a victim of king making but that's just not true at all.