Me playing rule of law and blind obedience and basically being accused of being a pub stomper because they had such a guttural response to it, when it was literally stopping the combo player from winning, who then proceeded to win 3 out of 4 games with various infinite mana combos into staff of dom draw your whole deck. One of the infinites being dockside, but hey it’s just a casual Feldon deck who wins with dockside.
@@thetrinketmage He's certainly on his magic journey, I think a few players at my LGS may have caused him to go into a villain arc because it's typically higher power there. All of his decks are 100% MPC fill now with crazy arts and super min maxed mana bases with all the OG duals/shocks/fetch's etc. Like the example I gave above, in that game he was playing a 3000$ Isshin deck that he described as good old fair attacking, which I really don't mind at all the card quality just the hypocrisy. Aside from dockside that combo players decks had much lower card quality on average than us.
were you also stopping the other two players from effectively playing though? how did not being able to cast more than one spell a turn and having all their creatures come in tapped affect the other two players at the table and their ability to get ahead of both you and the combo player? if they were also unable to get any momentum going as a result of your stax then yeah, i could easily see them groaning at you instead of the combo player because you're not changing the outcome of the game for THEM you're just making it less fun to play with stax.
One of my biggest issues with stax is how broad the definition has become. It used to refer to effects like smoke stacks that basically left you eternally with no board state, but now people have thrown any land destruction or prison effect in with it. Due to stax's bad rep, it means everything added to it becomes bad by association. I'd also note that the reason people hate stax is pretty logical: it grinds games to a halt. Yes it keeps things under control, but usually people will be happier after a game they lost with agency than one without.
I agree. I do not consider things stax unless they actually prevent "normal" and "fair" gameplay. Like Smokestack removing all the permanents, or Winter Orb preventing lands from being usable. Blood Moon shouldn't be considered stax, because it punishes something greedy. That's an answer, not a stax piece.
@ethanglaeser9239 I wouldnt really call not running full basics in a multi color deck especially anything like tainted Pact in it greedy. Blood Moon for sure is a stacks piece and that's totally fine because like you said it's an answer to a problem(kinda)so is most stacks pieces to be fair they limit or restrict avenues of play which make winning more difficult. Stacks pieces aren't usually a one card affect all players like a Grafdigger's Cage means nothing to someone attacking with 10 creatures to win but at the same time a crawlspace means nothing to the guy doing thoracle combo just gotta have the right piece for the right situation and it's still stacks regardless of it affects you personally or not
That’s not always the case. A lot of tables adopt the “Scooping is a sorcery Speed action,” which I personally subscribe to (except you can scoop if there’s some urgent irl thing happening.) Scoooping at instant speed can often deflate games and lead to unclimactic endings.
@@dreamsalongthepath7377 Scooping is an instant speed action, and players should be allowed to do it at any time. However, if you scoop at instant-speed to attempt to affect the game, I think the other players get the final say. If someone "concedes in response to attacks so you can't draw cards with your Toski", I don't think that player can complain if the rest of the table allows the attacking player to draw their cards anyway. After all, you can't complain if you're out of the game.
@@ethanglaeser9239 That's a fair opinion. I think both options are viable, I just like the Sorcery Speed version more as a personal preference, and I myself will never, ever scoop at instant speed even if we decide that it's okay.
True. And if you* scoop to game the system, I reserve the right to discredit you ad nauseum and never sit across from in an honest, friendly manner after that. *The hypothetical "that guy." We all know them.
@@dreamsalongthepath7377 "You can only surrender on an open gamestate" is such a strange rule to append. MTG - and Commander especially - is lousy with infinite combos, and this rule just says "Yeah, you have to sit there while they play their combo out despite it being clear that it's a game win." If someone drops a Zulaport Cutthroat or Blood Artist and then starts playing cards that look to be assembling some kind of infinite-mana, infinite-token, infinite-whatever combo, I'm going to ask if anyone has an answer to stop them winning, and if everyone says no, I'm scooping.
Fun Fact: Back when WOTC designed pokemon, you COULD remove your opponent's energy cards. Energy Removal and Super Energy Removal were so ubiquitous and unfun I believe they were among the few banned cards during the WOTC Pokemon Era. Also the yu-gi-oh line cracked me up.
I only remember 2 non-promo cards being banned during WOTC Pokemon: Sneasel and Slowking. Sneasel because it could KO anything from 2 energy and Slowking due to a mistranslation resulting in a state where someone had a 1/16 chance of using a trainer.
I think the most pressing issue regarding stax has been the absolute departure of any semblance of sportsmanship within the edh community. Back when I first started playing the format, a large emphasis was placed on letting anyone have fun with their deck, regardless of what it did. If what it did was obnoxious? You sucked it up for at least a game because that player put time and effort into building and playing that deck. After that game, you could politely ask to shake things up a bit, or scramble the pods at the lgs for some more varied gameplay. We used Rule Zero mostly just to know what to expect for the games we were going to play anyways, not to guilt trip opponents for running cards/commanders you dislike. Nowadays it's just accepted that you can salt off on people for playing "stax cards" (a term which has been expanding drastically in application, compounding this issue), and the burden of social contract violation falls on the accused, not on the grown-ass man throwing a tantrum in the lgs.
Yeah, In my mind if mass artifact removal (like vandalblast, farewell, etc) is on the table then MLD is on the table. Otherwise green just has a completely unchecked advantage since they would never get punished for investing heavily into land ramp.
Fundamentally people dont like having their agency taken away, being prevented from performing regular actions like untapping makes people feel like theyre not able to "play the game". Stax effectively changes the core game rules to be more restrictive, which brings out negative emotions more than having cards directly removed and interacted with. Also pokemon and yugioh do have stax cards (referred to as locks or floodgates), and theyre usually way more powerful at shutting plays down than mtg stax cards.
My coworker and I sometimes play commander with each other during lunch. I like running a simple white/green human deck for fun. Recently he made a deck that can repeatedly kill every creature the turn I cast it, and make it impossible for me to swing for damage (He has 5 tutors that can get him a spore frog, which he can return to the battlefield for free every turn with his commander). He is frustrated that I switched to my stax deck against that, but it leaves me feeling weird. How is me making his creatures 1/1s using humility, and then comboing out preventing him from playing the game any more than him preventing me from playing creatures or attacking? The whole thing feels very confusing to me.
You make some profound and good points here, but one of your remarks is wrong IMO. Lands decks do not get punished hardest from mass land destruction. They can recover the quickest usually because of the quantity of ramp they play. Otherwise, great video and a lot of the soft STAX suggestions like Rule of Law effects, and one sided board wipes are fantastic ideas people should play more!
I still maintain that part of this is because people tend to only destroy the lands and not the recursion engines. If there's a Crucible of Worlds on the field, Armageddon is probably handing the game to the landfall player, yeah. Throwing an Obliterate or Apocalypse at them instead and getting rid of their recursion engines is probably going to throw a bit more of a wrench in their plans.
@@Dynme I agree. But if I cast Farewell, or Everything Comes to Dust, and MLD together - then everyone is dead, not like I’m punishing the Green player anymore than anyone else at the table.
In theory, I agree with a lot of your points - in practice I disagree with most of them. Yes, playing "hated" cards and playstyles in Magic is not just fine, it's an incredibly important part of the game and ressource denial is a very important pillar of that. And yes, running a few individual stax pieces here and there is fine. And yes, in theory, playing symmetrial stax pieces could lead to interesting deck building challenges. However: 1) I've never actually seen pure stax decks built interestingly. I've only ever seen Derevi or Urza stax and here the only "interesting" part is: Cast commander -> oh, look, I've now solved this whole symmetrical problem. 2) In theory, if the stax deck is doing its thing, all other players *should* just concede. In practice, there is (almost) always at least one player being spiteful or too optimistic and saying "I just need to draw 2 untapped lands for this Disenchant" and then the game continues on for 1,5 hours without anyone actually playing any Magic. 3) Mass land destruction very often simply swaps the player with the most lands being ahead with the player with the most non-land ramp being ahead - and very often that isn't actually the player who just cast the Armageddon. With these problems usually being very pronounced in Commander, I've yet to play against a hard stax deck and enjoy the ensuing experience.
thats seen generally cause Stax/Stun is never played symetrically its either played in a deck which doesn't get effected or played in a situation where it only effects the opponment. it always gets optimised to being applied unsymetrically.
This is the same guy blasting chaos and group hug decks tho. He seems to equavilate winning with fun, even if fun can come at the cost of winning, or, like in this video, winning can come at the cost of fun. He also tends to cherrypick which decks fit his argument. The unfun Derevi-deck would be "no true stax", and an asymetrical Norin deck just happens to fall outside of his definition of a chaos deck. Past the calm voice and the pretty presentation it's just the ''stop liking what I don't like''-guy. That's a shame, because he seems clever and makes good arguments, yet deeply incurious towards other playstyles. I hope he'll grow to be more like Salubrious Snail and honestly reflect on actual game experience rather than hypothetical decks.
A lot of the difference between stax and a more "acceptable" playstyle seems to be optics. - "Stax denies you agency" - in the case of a ramp deck much more powerful than the rest of the pod, you may not have agency either. You can play spells, sure, but it doesn't *matter* - they have twice the number of lands you do, they're going to overwhelm you no matter what you do. The difference is that there's no card that explicitly says "you don't have agency" - "It makes the game take ages" - So does a ramp deck. Or a storm deck. Or a counters deck. A good player *can* make these archetypes move quickly - but that's also true in stax. Lots of decks, when they're in a commanding position, can hog the game time. - "There's no way of dealing with it" - by the same token, a deck that draws a lot of cards can feel impossible to deal with once it's gotten going, because they will always draw into an answer to whatever you throw at them. Amusingly, one way to deal with massive card draw is stax. Stax is more explicit in the ways it can make a game un-fun, but there's plenty of archetypes that get away with doing the same things. They just don't have that fact printed on the cards they use.
MonoB Stax player here. Disclaimer: yes, I am an evil person. I actually do play Stax because I am a sadist that enjoys the suffering of others. Nevertheless, Stax has rapidly gone from an indulgence I dabble in to a necessity at my table. The fact is that WotC has injected a ridiculous amount of power into EDH specifically (and Magic more generally) in the past several years. We're past the days of Isamaru Voltron. "Oh just Rule 0, talk with your friends." Half of the people I play with, let alone randoms at my LGS, want the strong cards. They want to run everyone else over with unbridled, linear value piles. They want the explosive Yu-Gi-Oh win. And they're willing to sink their entire paycheck into it. "Heh, even if I kill everyone on turn 6 [in this allegedly casual multiplayer format] at least we got to play." No we didn't. So just remember the old Genghis Khan quote when you complain about Stax. "Had you not created great sins, god would not have sent a punishment like me upon you."
Sometimes it's needed. I dipped my toe into stax in Standard when Temur Adventures was running everyone over. Did you know Temur Adventures can't do squat when they're sacrificing everything? But then since I'm evil I got the yugioh win anyway because my creatureless stax deck's win condition was making enough 4/4s in one turn to one-shot you
I think the biggest issue regarding stax and control is that people can't threat assess well enough to scoop appropriately. When the Elfball player has 40 power on board and noone has a board wipe a lot of the time everyone just scoops and calls it a game, no need to drag it out when it's over. When the storm player hits their 10th spell of the turn and still has gas you can assume they'll just win in the end. With control and stax it's a bit less obvious so people will often not scoop into a losing board. Sure you CAN draw a board wipe in the next 10 turns before the control player wins and they could also happen to not have any protection in hand, but how likely is it when a control player has their winning engine going they won't have the tools to protect it? 9 times out of 10 you can just scoop and start a new game and if you miss that 1 time, it's casual who cares if you win?
I took a break from magic for ages, and got back into commander at some locals recently. Almost all decks were some variation of solitaire running minimal interaction. It was easy to win but... a bit boring. Last night I played with some older players and their decks were combo-ey, staxy and hatebears... It was fun. My opponents -needed- to be interacted with. They cast counterspells. They blew up my lands. My need to aetherise one turn to an aggro push allowed another player to play jokulhaups the next turn. And it was great. We had 5 or 6 games in 2 hours, and no one felt -exhausted- at the end waiting for someone to combo off.
all of my favorite games of commander ever have been against stax decks. It might be the change of pace that only seeing them occasionally provides, but the board states in those games gets wild in the "nobody intended for things to be this way" sense and I'm so here for it. I also love seeing if my own deckbuilding can handle the stress test that stax provides.
In my experience, the players who complain about stax also complain about the turbo/combo decks that stax keeps in check. In my experience, the players who complain about stax want everyone at their table to play creature based value strategies with minimal interaction other than attacking and blocking. So while in theory stax has a place at the commander table to check combo decks, that's true only if combo decks are also permitted to exist.
This. "...want everyone at their table to play creature based value strategies with minimal interaction other than attacking and blocking." Yup. And those people are playing the wrong game. They need to play Monopoly. One of the things that should draw someone to the game of Magic is that you get to be a wizard Harry! Sling spells, HIYAA!!! Instantly deny an action, wield ultimate power... Shit, we all pay taxes and slog through this life not ever really doing the kingly things we all want to do, accomplish, conquer. So let's get wild and play some effing magic dude. If you got the win, cool, next game. If I got it, cool, next game. People act like the are so scared to play with any of their other decks. How do you expect to play them all if you sit on one game for 3 hours!? End rant lol.
I wish more people would think like that. With how fast commander games have become, stax is necessary to slow games down and makes the games much more puzzly and fun. People complain when I have a rule of law effect on board, but then the moment it gets destroyed someone vomits their hand and wins the game immediately.
stax is interesting. A friend of mine played a zur the enchanter stax deck with a few auras to kill people with. Even though he tutored for a stax piece every turn, it ironically made him lose more because everyone hated stax. Whilst building my wip zur eternal schemer deck, I wanted to introduce some more long term gameplan kinda stuff, but I didnt want to run stax because it'd make me more of a target. Instead I've gone for more of a pillow fort side. Essentially, if you want to run stax but everyone is targeting you because of your deck, try running pillow fort instead
This goes for most all powerfully known decks in a play group. My friend has a powerful Eldrazi deck that everyone gangs up on. No one will let that deck get over 7 mana without a hard fight.
In a format where I can barely coerce the game store's population to embrace proper threat assessment and running artifact/enchantment removal: I will not be recommending stax pieces to them.
14:10 I think another big generator of the salt where stax is involved is that it's kind of random if you can deal with it, even if you know how. Imagine a situation where someone ramps out a Trinispehere on an early turn. The correct response is to destroy their rocks while it's on the stack, preventing them from breaking parity. But in order to do that, you have to know that that's the right play AND have enough cheap, instant speed removal in your deck AND have it in hand AND have left the mana open. All while there's no way of knowing that Player B is going to play a stax piece beforehand, and after it's already too late. Some games you will have it and feel like a boss while the stax player cries, but most games there's nothing you could have done other than filing your deck with nothing but removal, and that's not fun. My personal rule for building with stax pieces is to just avoid the words 'no' and 'can't'. Harsh Mentor instead of Collector Ouphe.
Kinjalli's Sunwing is a 3 mana flyer that says "Creatures your opponents control enter the battlefield tapped" and it came in the Pantlaza precon. I saw in multiple precon upgrade videos that people cut it... but I've found it's one of the best cards in the deck! I was always averse to stax effects, but this one has been changing my mind. It does serious work every game, and it really hasn't produced much salt in my regular playgroup. Since then, I've been liking sprinkling one or two effects like that in my decks.
Yeah, I like Hatebears, which is basically creature based soft stax, because it just slows people down, is very beatable, and you still get to swing out with creatures. I love Elesh Norn as a wincon for a hatebears deck, since the 4 p/t swing turns your hatebears into hateBeasts! :D
Kinjali's Sunwing is my favorite stax card. It's such fun to hear the groan when my friends see that their creatures enter tapped. It's not a game ruining stax piece, but it adds just enough salt to make the game more flavorful
Fr thats exactly why I play those (anti tutor, anti-free spells, anti-reanimate) in my Azorius Control Deck, I love it and it aint the strongest but it can be hard to overcome for people trying to go too fast.
I think this is where Stax shines in Casual EDH tables, because instead of just stopping players from playing the game, it usually stops players from doing something degenerate.
@@dreamsalongthepath7377thats the issue, there's so many degenerates that hate when their gameplay is interacted with that they default to blaming the mechanic that kept them from going out of control turn 4 and denying them an uncontested win
I think Stax is a valid way to further your own gameplan. The only problem is, if players know you have a Stax heavy deck you will be arch enemy and the game will be 3v1 until you are out of the game. Being arch enemy can be its own kind of fun, but not everybody is made for that life.
I'm also interested in Hokori, although yeah breaking parity is tricky. I'm tempted to build Ardenn and Rograkh stax/MLD because once Rograkh is suites up on board, blowing up the lands is pretty much the death knell
Awesome video, id like to play more stax effects but think it would be kind to ask if the table would like to play with it. In turn, most will probably turn you down and you'd need to bring two decks in that case.
to my knowledge there isn't a way to hard lock out a player from energy but there is still energy removal, infact that's the name of the card that started this interaction, Jirachi XY Black Star Promos, Archeops Unified Minds, Clefable Rebel Clash, Crushing Hammer, Team Flare Grunt, etc are all resource denial and some are recurable
I have a deck I love that is a "stax"/"control" deck based entirely on creatures and I built it because people are a lot less salty when playing against creature based stax cards as opposed to artifacts or enchantments
Pretty much because a board wipe or removal at convenient times can at least break the game back open. If I'm not playing the right colors I just can't do anything to enchantments basically
From a casual perspective, there are 2 kinds of stax effects that I find simply unacceptable. First, anything that slows down the game simply for the sake of slowing down the game. Commander games already last a long time, and there is simply no reason to intentionally make them take longer. This is where all of the mass land destruction or excessive wraths fall under. If you have legitimate ways to break parity on these effects and have a reasonable strategy to win the game, in my opinion that does not fall into this category and it totally fine. Second, are cards that hard lock only 1 player. Because of the social and multiplayer aspect of commander scooping is typically something that just doesn't happen. There is no worse feeling than sitting at the table watching everyone else play the game when you simply can't. This category of card is difficult to define and is very playgroup specific. I think a good rule of thumb is, if you every time you play a certain card one player at your table/group is frustrated or says "well, I can't play now", maybe consider swapping that card out. I took blood moon out of mono-red decks for this reason. The last time I played it, one player was a 3 color deck with out red. That player basically could not play the rest of the game. Because the moon was not effecting anyone else, no one wanted to remove it and because that player was no longer a threat no one bothered to attack them. Aside from these 2 category of card, I am fine with any other kind of stax card.
14:55 "When you're staring down a mono-green deck with a mana doubler in play, you might think that you're still in the game, but the controller is basically unplugged at this point." Poetry
There are some good points here. First, I'm very hypocritical with how much I love extra turn denial. That's probably a Stax effect (though I doubt anyone is trying to champion extra turn spells as victims) But those "one spell per turn" cards? In casual decks those actually make a ton of sense. It makes the more competitive decks either move at their pace, waste removal, or basically always lose counter wars in the case of the noncreature one.
Yu-Gi-Oh has stax, they're called floodgates, and most of them were banned in the last year for being too oppressive, and just generally hated by the competitive community
I have plans of adding a spice of Stax my Urza, Lord High Artificer commander deck. Winter Orb, Trinisphere, and Static Orb will form the foundation. So far, I acquired Trinisphere at a good price. That's the only commander deck I am willing to use Stax cards.
I'm also in the process of building Urza, I think being a definitive villian of the table that everyone has to try and take down is a lot of fun. I love punishing green.
Reporting back after a 4 player table tourney. Trinisphere really slowed down a mono Green deck, but the rest of the table couldn't quite close it out as mono Green still popped off. Definitely will prioritize in getting Winter Orb for dealing with Green shenanigans.
I successfully got all my players in my pod to start running stax, and even got one, and almost two, building stax decks. One really thinks he hates stax but is playing graveyard hate in all his decks now (which I think is also pretty in spirit of stax, being resource denial and all). I ended up giving away a lot of my stax cards to friends to try using as well. I think the more players start to see WOTC print cards that generate crazy value, the more they'll inherently see the value in pumping the brakes in a game for sure. This video was made for me though, I thought stax was awesome since I heard the name. It reminds me of things like timing players out in fighting games, or winning via a c9 in OW2, like some strategies are so outfield they're inspiring. Currently my favorite soft stax deck to play is Grimgrin, with arena of the ancients and meekstone. the ability to manually untap grimgrin gets through these effects and makes him able to soar against MG big stompy decks and attack centered commanders. The combos are still in the deck, but easily countered by graveyard hate/ rule of law style effects or counterspells, so usually the deck has to win by just making a lot of zombies or a really big grimgrin. It's amazing how a few cards that slow the game down actually make the game way more creative too.
I think people think of Stax as some Spike Style win at all costs type of play, but Stax isn't really that efficient. A Spike would play Red Deck Wins, or whatever deck is op at the moment. I feel like Stax is more of a Johnny Deck type, trying to figure out a way to slow down or stop everyone else. A hard stax lock is the same as an infinite combo. And soft stax or Hatebears is barely a step above playing enough removal. I like the idea of Hatebears because it is beatable.
I like this take mostly but the reason people hate stax is not because games take longer, its because they cant use their cool cards. From a competative perspective (not cedh, just a competative perspective) there is nothing wrong with hard stax, but it's arguably more frustrating to be losing for 6 turns hoping to recover and get told that "you may concede at any time" when trying to hang out with friends and blast some spells. I kind of like stax though, especially in a game where its all about gaining resources and never denial of those resources for some reason.
I have a Chromium commander deck that sometimes gets accused of being a stax deck, even though I think it is more like a control deck. It does run a few stax pieces, but I think calling it a stax deck is a bit extreme. The entire premise of the deck is that the 99 pretty much only contains interaction like counterspells and removal, as well as answers/hatebears to various strategies. Simply put, you don't get to do your weird combo shenanigans in my presence. I built the deck specifically because I felt the playgroup and everyones decks were becoming way less interactive, and just spun their wheels until someone assembled their engine and won. All my deck does is stopping those types of combos and value engines. It doesn't lock anyone out of the game, at least there is no kind of combo in it to do so. The only way for the deck to actually lock someone out of the game is if they have built their deck poorly, and in my opinion there is nothing wrong for those kinds of decks to be punished. Sometimes I consider building an actual real stax deck just to teach my playgroup that what I am currently playing is faw from something that could be called a stax deck.
Stax is underrated and overhated imo Love having some Hatebears on the battlefield that change the flow of the game and tone it into a puzzle Guy at my Lgs dropped a magus of the tabernacle once and it was one of the most interesting games I’ve ever played and one of the most fun even though i was mana screwed and only always had 1 creature. I’m not saying hard stax and winter orb should be common but Green decks playing collector ouphe or gaddock teeg are fine and should see more play
Yeah, I dont care how salty anyone would get. As a blue/red player, I will shamlessly smash powerful lands with a Violent Impact, Smashing Success, or Aftershock. I am absolutly not letting lands go unpunished, even casually. But, thats why I would pack those particular spells. They arent just land removal, so if there isnt a huge land issue at the table, I can use them for an artifact or something else.
While denying resources definitely is the outcome of many, if not most stax effects, I think the most accurate description of stax is an ongoing effect that prohibits or impedes one or more players from taking an action. A definition like this is closer to what I think of when I think of stax and differentiates it from spot removal
and its exactly why people don't like it. being able to take actions that move you closer toward winning the game is what the game is, stax just says 'you don't get to play magic when you sit down to play magic' and that's just boring and not fun.
@@themoops4006that's the true definition of stax yes, but so many things get lumped into the category. Rhystic study and smothering tithe are great examples of cards that aren't stax but are treated like they are. They don't stop you from playing, but they reward another player when you play greedy, and thats the issue. "Casual" commander players hate having to consider the consequences more often than anyone should be comfortable with.
@@NewSirenSong those cards aren't stax but i also don't think they're particularly casual-friendly either. if they can't be removed every other player needs to pay the tax every time or they generate an absurd amount of value for a single player. so in a casual game you end up dumping lots of your early-game resources into that tax so that one player doesn't pop off instead of playing your fun timmy cards.
@@themoops4006 Wrong, players just don't pay the tax. They either remove it, or they don't pay the tax and the person who played it gets tons of value.
I think one issue is that a lot of us has played agenst a a**hole who play stax. Example i used to play in a group that thought conceding was unsportmanly, unless you had to get q bus or something. There was a guy who brought a hard stax deck, which after locking you out the game his win con was letting you draw you entire library. Amd then acuse you of being a d**k if you tried to concede. I'd love a gaddock teeg deck, but its never going to happen because of these past experiences.
Long time stax player here. I wanted to bring this up about static orb in particular. You can break parity with static orb also by lowering your mana curve. If Static Orb lets you untap 2 permanents and your average mana curve is closer to two, you can still play one spell per turn when your opponent are waiting often multiple turns. Building and piloting a stax deck often feels like putting together a puzzle. I might be the only stax player in our town, certainly at my kitchen table. Stax has undoubtedly created the most interesting games i have ever played. I am avid supporter of the archetype. You spoke about locks a little and I consider these decks to be more akin to combo. Im thinking a Lavinia deck built to set up the Knowledge Pool lock. Technically if playing cards is a resource, you re denying them this resource. Its not quite the same as running symmetrical stax pieces and trying to break parity. In fact a deck like that isnt all that much fun to pilot.
As someone who disagrees with the powercreep design nowadays ive been using more of these cards. Edit: It is not out of spite, Im just not buying new cards and games end in 5 turns, which is too short for me and my playgroup
Its really interesting how different people view stax. In my mind i dont even think "soft stax" is a thing. My definition of stacks is what you called "hard stax". Complete and total lockout and everyone scoops and/or get hit with a 1/1 thirty plus times. I think the definitions get muddy and as someone who has actually played against "hard stax" i do think it gets a bad rep rightfully so b/c most people dont want to lose a game just by scooping and/or that 1/1 token senario. I think most people sit down to play a game b/c they want to PLAY the game. Found your channel recently. Really loving the videos! I enjoyed listening and thinking about this one.
@@thetrinketmage sweet! Looking forward to it! Btw I just watched your spell slinger video and it inspired me to build a deck i have never tried before. So thank you!
A bit of light stax is perfectly fine. Any good deck should have an out, or accept the limitations of moving slower. It’s akin to removal. Then again, some people get salty if you dare interact with whatever degenerate thing they’re attempting to pull off.
Stax is indeed a net positive archetype for the game as a whole. A metagame is very similar to a food web in nature: you need cats to stop rats from overpopulating, sucks for the rat but allows for smaller insects to have a chance, and prevents rats from overpopulating themselves into extinction by drying up all resources and too much competition, so in a way by killing the rats, the cats are making sure rats won't go extinct, and makes sure other species can compete. That's Stax decks. Without Stax decks, many decks simply don't have any counters. Additionally, Stax decks are essentially budget options to deal with very expensive tryhard commander decks, so it is an equalizer of sorts. It is good that Stax isn't as good that is a mainstream strategy, but popular enough for people to consider it when deckbuilding, and I wouldn't have it any other way. I personally would never play Stax, I love ramp big dumb monsters decks like Eldrazi, but I want people to keep playing Stax decks enough to be a threat.
If your Commander is just a static ability, value piece that doesn't attack then may i highly recommend Arena of The Ancients. It gets other people surprisingly salty, which was interesting because i just thought it was cool tech 🤷♂️
I was playing a game last week with 3 friends. I was running my only deck (Laughing Jasper Flint), my friends played an elf deck, a white token deck and the last was running Blind Seer soft stax deck. The blind seer friend got a lot of hate since he made the game so slow for everyone. "All spells cast are red", "red spells cost 2 more to cast", he could pay 1 mana to counter any red spell, "all lands are green", "exile all green permanents" etc. The game took 2 hours before everyone conceded due to bedtime.
Used to play a 60 cards casual Mono Red Enchantment/Chandra deck with Jökhulaups as the center. Once people knew the card, the game became a race to see when my 6th land dropped, and if I could win on the spot. Also it was the first deck I built myself by searching cards online and in store bulks, so I had strong feelings for the cards that kinda started my love for brewing ! Coming back to EDH lately and discovering th salt system and where Jökhulaups was made me very sad and I removed it from my Narset deck. Your video just gave me a new way of thinking and I might start brewing something centered around it again ! Thanks !
I clicked for the thumbnail alone. Flawless. I don't like playing against stax, but it's usually because I only have a few hours every month for games. Love the archetype though!
This is why my favorite level of EDH play is High-Power Casual or Degenerate EDH. You know what you're going in for, and no one gets needlessly salty, and decks are more personalized and rogue than CEDH. Everything is welcome and permitted. Playing with mature people also helps as well. Low or mid power Casual and CEDH only want to play EDH a certain way, very restrictive and boring, at least for me.
What an excellent video!!! Definitely made me appreciate stax a bit more. And understand the difference between being frustrated by stax and frustrated by poorly played stax! Important distinction!
Anti stax is only a valid argument if every color has equal access to card draw and mana ramp. Without stax certain colors or color combos lose their edge in a match up against creature based value engines. Run a little bit more varied removal, youll be fine.
This has actually inspired a new deck idea for me: Boros super friends led by Cadric. I’ve been thinking about this build for a while, but now I have an actual strategy for it. Early game hate bears and non basic hate running mostly basics as White ramp largely grabs basic plains, mid game planeswalkers, counting each as costing one more to account for Cadric, and late game sweepers like Obliterate to win off my plethora of planeswalkers. Could be fun.
My main issue with any deck (although it mainly comes up it stax and control) is when the player doesn't seem to be working towards a win. I think being clear with your gameplan (especially against newer opponents who won't understand why a player would play these cards) can help alleviate frustration.
I played a round with the bois a week or two ago, and I had the funny opening hand of 2 lands, a sol ring, mana crypt, sphere of resistance, and whatever else. Since I won the roll to go first, i dropped more than half of my hand on turn 1. We were all playing our competitive decks, and after I ended up winning (pulled off the Solphim + Heartless Hidetsugu combo), my friends revealed to me that the simple added tax of requiring just 1 more generic mana to cast anything completely screwed over both of their game plans, and one of them could have popped off the turn before I combo'd off, had it not been for that light stax piece. Just goes to show how far a single tax/stax effect can end up completely changing the course of a game. I don't think I'll ever have a more powerful opener with that deck, lol.
I have two stances on stax, it’s a puzzle to break stax or prevent a lock from being formed. And there should be an amount of time to interact with the set up before the stax is at full force. I’ve played a few games against an atraxa superfriends deck that generally is pretty cool. I stopped having fun when Narset Transcendent comes out with doubling season and ulting the same turn. I had to response because I wasn’t in blue and couldn’t counter narset. Even though I had removal the emblem was still there and non of my removal was tied to a creature. It generally felt bad and hopeless. I have also played games with my friend who has a yasharn stax deck. That one has a few different locks that can be achieved but they require time and parts. You can get out of it or remove some parts before a lock is created. That deck is one big puzzle both to pilot and defeat. Anyway that’s my two cents, good video I know I’m late but I’ve finally been able to put my feelings on the matter into words.
I've theorized on a Commander subformat that starts with Emblems in play that have card effects, like Aven Mindcensor and Blood Moon. I think it is the easiest way to have rules like "No tutoring" and "Basics only". That resembles your argument of adding some stax to decks. I've always been fascinated with Land Destruction, Discard, and Hatebears. Oddly, I don't like counterspells or abundance of removal. :D I think I like Hatebears because it slows down opposing decks, but it doesn't stop them, and it is very vulnerable. Your point about dropping an Armageddon once you've built up your board state to a winning position is interesting. :D
My girlfriend has an amazing Lynde Curses deck that i like to think of as painful stax. Instead of prohibiting that you combo off with rule setting effects, she just makes combos as painful as possible
My issue with stax isn't necessarily the "slowing the game down", it's the "You can't play for the rest of the game" aspect. The few games i played with stax pieces involved all came down to that. Someone plays a Blood Moon on turn 3 and my Esper deck couldn't do anything because of a fairly greedy mana base, granted, because i wasn't expecting that kind of threat. I then proceeded to spend the next 30 minutes looking at people play. Same thing happened with Winter Orb, on a different deck, because i didn't have enough lands to use my artifact destruction and the Nadu player won in the meantime because nobody had the resources to stop him, not even the stax player who cast the damn Winter Orb on turn 3 or 4
I feel like stax is in a similar boat to counter in that when played where it makes sense they result in a better game. For counters that means holding them for when they are relevant and not just using them at the first possible moment which just sliws games and risks king making. For stax pieces it's only playing them in a board stat where you know you can keep playing yourself, the worst games are when someone tries to slow down the game eith no follow up and everything just grinds to a halt. Also regarding the Yu-Gi-Oh comment while it's true resources aren't obvious in the same way they definitely exist in multiple forms. Cards in hand, monster/spell/trap zones, summons (normal and special), card draw/search, extradeck access and more essentially function as resources with decks that maximize those elements frequently being the best decks even if they have a lower power ceiling. Also there are cards to restrict every one of those elements of the game, which under thus videos broad definition would probably count as stax, and they probably make up the majority of the most hated (and frequently banned) cards in the game
The game was specifically designed to be interactable on every axis like you said. I think stax pieces are usually a necessary evil, otherwise edh is a game of who gets the most lands in play the fastest. When I build a deck I like to include stax pieces that happen to work well with my theme. For instance, in my Gix, Yawgmoth Praetor I put meekstone because a majority of my creatures have lower than 2 power. It’s hindering plays on an axis that doesn’t affect me, so it speeds the game up in my favor. If I didn’t play meekstone I would often have to fight through the larger creatures that my opponents are dropping, meaning even if I’m ahead with card draw and lands and should be winning the game I might have to durdle around trying to find a threat that eventually gets through for the win. Stax pieces that are synergistic with your deck are a massive advantage
I love to play a few light stax effects in aggro decks in place of some board wipe slots. Call it pre-emptive removal. For example, if I can slow the board down for 2-3 turns while amassing a landfall-triggered token army with Hazezon, I can swing out against a much lighter board, rather than all of us starting over from scratch. Rule of law effects work great here. My other motivation to playing stax pieces is that cards are walls of text since FIRE design. Everyone is playing under higher cognitive loads. If Kyle is limited to one spell per turn, his turns are easier, my turns are easier, and maybe nobody takes 15 minutes per turn. There is more room for table talk and hanging out with the boys. I can live with them hating me a little for it.
I have a Sephara, Sky's Blade deck that's all about getting a bunch of small fliers out quickly, then getting the commander out for commander damage smackdown. It doesn't have a lot of ramp or card draw being in mono-white, so I have a lot of the white stax pieces listed in this video to slow everyone else down. It's a great combo and works well to seal wins quite frequently.
One of my favorite cards recently is Urza's Sylex. it's a great way to microdose my opponents with land destruction. They are normally more okay with it than when i play Farewell. But that is for a different video.
Stax is a great addition to the deck to protect your game plan, limit potentially threatening strategies and breaking symmetrical effects to your advantage, but should be used in moderation. Dedicated stax decks that lock out every possibility to play are frustrating if they cannot turn the situation into a win in 2-3 turns, or at least present a lock that everyone will agree to not struggle against.
I LOVE Stax and think that casual pods really need to open the card pool to these "salty" cards and allowing the local meta to police itself instead of just Rule 0'ing or shaming people people into everyone just playing the same old midrange or battlecruiser piles
I like your point about people being upset about it being visible that you cant win and that's what frustrates people. It's kind of the same reason people hate playing against mill (unless they are graveyard decks, but then again If I run mill I usually run heavy package of grave hate too). In the same way you can see yourself losing your win conditions and pieces to mill, you can see yourself losing your avenues out against stax, like having an ETB artifact removal to deal with their one stax piece in hand but then they play a torpor orb, adding another layer to the proverbial onion. I think some degree of stax is necessary in order to play a proper control deck in commander, and land destruction is absolutely necessary nowadays with how much turbo ramp is present, and with how pushed nonbasics are. I generally like to play responsive decks that punish value strategies, so I guess I have the heart of a stax player but I have never made a proper stax deck.
@@thetrinketmage Maybe Idk, I would imagine it tends to draw a lot of ire when you make it your whole game plan unless you are at a pretty competitive table (which I'm usually not). I also tend to only use the occasional modal MLD card like Catastrophe (my favorite btw) since its a creature wipe when I'm behind on the board or its a MLD card when I'm just ahead enough it can twist the screws to turn a favorable state into an inevitable win. Nobody likes a random Armageddon out of nowhere, especially if you don't have a clear way to win afterwards. In my mind it has to be versatile enough not to be a dead card when you are behind or at parody, like Catastrophe.
Great video. Yugioh has stax, but in yugioh they call it "floodgates". Right now there's a top deck that uses a card "skill drain" that is basically an enchantment that turns off every creatures on the battlefield effect. They play under this card because when their turn starts, they can easily remove it so it doesn't affect them.
This video talks so much about land destruction/Armageddon that ya know, I'm not sure i've ever played but against one of them in 5-6 years. The stigma is such that most just don't play that card anymore. You don't need to if you can make 1,000 scute swarms in one turn or combo like a g on turn 0.
9:14 Hearthstone actually does let you destroy all your opponent's mana crystals with Elwynn Boar/Sword of a Thousand Truths! But that's more of a payoff for a difficult combo. Also pre-nerf Celestial Alignment set both players to 0 mana crystals but made all cards in their hand/deck cost 1, which the druid was able to come back from with their ramp cards. And currently in standard is the recently nerfed Doomkin which steals a mana crystal from your opponent putting you ahead 2 which is brutal, especially in multiples.
Don't need to watch this one. TL;DR is sometimes(SOMEtimes) you just don't feel like playing Magic. So you pull out Stax, sit back, relax, and *let your opponent defeat themselves*
Im a modern player originally and my in to commander was a friends krenko cedh deck. I now play a mono white 'stax' deck yet I would call it prison because thats more what the architype is in modern. The idea is get 1 or two effective hate pieces down early to slow the game down (something like thorn of amethyst and turning off etbs generally stops the rest of the table from winning) then go for drannith uba lock. Then win off myr welder infinites. In a lot of ways its more of a combo deck whos interaction are these cheap effecient artifact pieces that are directly chosen cause they interface well against other decks in the format
Great video. Side note, the fact you have to create a video for this shows most players are new and soft as well as lack understanding of the game. Because you are right. Stax is a balance. Much like counterspells. And the stigma of fear towards these cards is really only supplanted by someone else's lack of removal or sheer skill to maneuver around them. That's magic. The game isn't supposed to be some easy walk in the park, the nature of the game is competitive. Commander is the biggest format and houses the most powerful things you can do. People need to go play Monopoly if they are hard of understanding and want everything to go their way and to have their cake and eat it too. But it really makes things sour for being good at the game because people dont understand stax, threat assessment, removal, etc. So props for the video, just pointing out bluntly that it's sad that we have to address simple, fun card games in this manner.
The biggest issue for me is when stax (or control) decks are just there to stop others from playing while not having any sort of plan or wincon. Cool, thanks for wasting my time and ruining everyone's fun. Never sit down at a table with me again. I do have a boros deck that some would argue has lite stax in it (like War's Toll and Linvala, Keeper of Silence), but I mainly designed it to shut down control decks, since I despise them. Then rest of the deck is a mix of goad, pillow fort, and angels for beating people down. Also just had a lot of angels laying around that I wanted to use 🤷♂
15:13 Yes! This is excellent perspective for playing in general - the turn you win is not always the turn you end the game. If you make a board of lethal attackers with protection in hand, but no haste, the game is likely won, though it's not technically over. Pushing that "likely" into a guarantee is the difference maker. The thing about stax is that games with stax turn the entire game into a skill check. Didn't build your deck with a good removal count and varied interaction? Skill issue, you lose. Failed to identify the lock pieces and didn't build a deck able to navigate varied board states? Skill issue, you lose. Deck is too dependent on the commander? Skill issue, you lose. Got locked out of the game 4 turns ago and can't tell that the game ended already? Skill issue, you lose. Failed to properly set up parity breakers before going for your lock? Skill issue, you lose. You have poor redundancy? Skill issue, you lose. It will lay bare for the entire table to see what mistakes every single player has made or is going to make, and that is almost not more evident than in the stax player themselves. It is so easy to kingmake, throw games, deploy the wrong pieces for the board state, mulligan incorrectly, sequence pieces poorly, and generally fail to convert your pieces into wins. Decks with stax subthemes are more forgiving because you can just use them as a means to slow the game down while your game plan moves forward unabated, but even that can falter when selecting weak pieces in deckbuilding or choosing strong pieces that your deck cannot fully navigate through. Stax is intensely difficult to play properly, both mechanically and in terms of game knowledge. cEDH may have moved into a metagame where stax is unfavored, but individual stax pieces are still tremendously powerful and knowing what lock pieces put you ahead while suppressing the correct decks at the table is very easy to fuck up. It is not surprising that, as welcoming as the cEDH community is, stax is one of the archetypes not recommended for new players because it requires so much game knowledge and ability.
I love Storm and Combo, but it is pretty boring when all of the games are just a drag race. I am usually the Stax player at my LGS. It is a double edged sword though. Players hate you most of the time and are always looking first to you to have all the answers. A lot of politicking is required to convince inexperienced players not to remove a Rule of Law effect. Even after I Gitaxian Probe the Heliod player, I have many lost many games because a new player doesn’t believe or trust me about a combo. I have found that building a reputation at an LGS of always being honest is the best way to play Stax successfully.
It's actually funny, I wanted to build around Decree of Annihilation in my Kirri, Talanted Sprout deck and started building an enchantress theme to not only dig for the card, but also enchants were immune. But I want to find a way to close out the game, so I picked enchants that make tokens to swing out after casing Decree.
I believe that stax has a place in edh. The game is just more interesting when the game is slower. Feels so nice to see my dragonlord ojutai control deck keep a tatiyova landfall deck in check and also see them get punished for play expensive cards.
Personally, I’ve always enjoyed soft stax/tax strategies. I think this was a solid case made to defend the archetype. Totally agree that it’s a way to keep those more powerful decks in check in multiplayer games, if implemented correctly, of course. Honestly, after playing against a pubstomper the other day who dominated every game, it kind of made me want to build hatebears just to keep in my back pocket in case I find myself in that situation again. It could maybe help those lower powered decks keep up a bit. Lol
5:15 Sorry to say, but the Torpor Orb prevents the Portcullis from working so yea, Elesh Norn Grand Arbiter would work instead, preventing only their etb's, but not your own.
@@thetrinketmage sadly even this has a way out, like the eldrazi (just destoy/exile, or whatever cast trigger they have) or a spell that can't be countered.
@@thetrinketmagewell one would be brisila + teek + aether portal that are all can't be destroyed or exiled in any way, your opponents can't cast spells then, nor remove them.
Esper, & Azorius has, over time, become more of a kill on sight for my quicker decks. You don't get to complain about being targeted if you have even a whiff of stax in your deck!
The aversion to Stax is the reason I kinda grew out of playing casual commander: I know players say they dislike playing against stax because they dislike longer games and feeling like they cannot do anything about it, but that's not the reason. Casual Commander has basically built an unspoken meta that's basically, board wipes: Because of some of the characteristics of commander like being 4 players with 40 life each, the format naturally gravitated towards creature strategies. But instead of playing accepting control and stax as valid tactics against creature strategies at one point the social contract (That honestly, other influencers and youtubers for example, help build with constant casual commander etiquette videos) determined that most games of commander should be basically creature strategies with only multiple board wipes as the way to try to defend and close out games with very long, very drown out games to see which creature-based value engine prevails after several board wipes. Stax ironically enough can win on top of said strategies by effectively shutting down creature strategies and/or value engines as well as effectively defending from players being able to even assemble their resources to go into constant board wipes. If a stax player has a win condition he can use on top however, those games would be much shorter wins from the stax player. However, that's been deemed not socially acceptable, and to a lesser extent control is also frowned upon. Instead the format has warped into a Timmy paradise because apparently that's the stereotype everyone wants to foster as what 'casual gaming' means. There's nothing wrong with creature strategies, I started on the format by playing mostly just Dragon tribal but I really disliked how many people complained about what I felt were valid tactics with infinite combos (Back then, dragon based but still, infinite mana and/or creatures combos) And once I doubled down on what I feel are valid tactics like control midrange decks and stax decks, I've basically saw a lot of people with really strong creature decks just quit on the spot when I was shutting down their creature strategies: They had removal, they were obvious ways to come back from it but more than one time people outright quit and conceded when I did stuff like temporarily lock out their commanders or their lands. But why should I just play more creature strategies and board wipes if I don't feel like it? Why should I have to play 3-4 hour games when in that same timeframe I've found more cedh-oriented players I was playing with were able to finish 4 or 5 different games overall in the time the creature-happy 'casual' pods were still trying to resolve their 6th board wipe in a single match?
In my opinion though, everything you just listed is exactly the reason why Stax (at least hard stax) should stay in CEDH. It’s not that it’s objectively more powerful than other archetypes, or that it can’t be used to make fun games with a little bit of politicking or changing out some salty cards for targeted hate/removal loops, but I think when people play casual commander that’s not what they’re there to do. It’s not really fun for the Stax player or anyone else unless everyone is playing to win. CEDH tables are way more chill in that regard, because you can’t get mad at a player for winning the game in a certain way unless you just have bad sportsmanship. But in Casual tables, people don’t want cutthroat games. If you want to play something akin to Stax in casual commander, I’d recommend playing either pillow fort, or playing “Soft Stax”/hate bears like Trinket is saying.
The issue with commander is that the "Why should I" argument goes both ways and creates alot of friction between people *outside* of the game. I can just as easily see your opponents saying "Why should I have to sac half my win condition/setup etc slots in the deck to increase my rate of drawing into removal enough to be allowed to play at all". Or "why should I keep entertaining this guy". It's hard to get these ideas people have about how the game should be played to meld together well. It requires a certain level of maturity to let yourself get hit with the most demoralizing things you hate for the sake of someone elses idea of fun and walk away feeling like it was still a good investment of your time (and money, because Magic ain't cheap 😅). People often have to look inward and make big changes to themselves to make this work, but these are human beings we're talking about so that don't come easy lol It's crazy out there but the more I think about it, everyone's argument is technically right if you're supposed to be playing for yourself and your own views. But that kind of selfishness being thrown into a format where people insist they got together to have a "good time" while invoking misery on one another is kind of a weird line to walk. But the second you try to reconcile it, it almost never produces the desired result anyways 🤔 Basically at some point, everyone HAS to suck it up or stay mad. There doesn't seem to be a functional balance (for the people, not the game).
@@Kurayamiblack scratch that, THIS is the comment here I agree with the most. However, both opinions are valid, and that's the beautiful thing about CEDH. If your like OP and you don't like the weird social dynamics of commander, CEDH offers a place where there is virtually NO SALT. And if you don't want to play against stax or turn 3 inf combos, that's what casual tables are for. They're not separate formats, but there's reason why they feel so different; the cultures surrounding them appeal to different people who have their own idea of "fun." I think players should decide when playing a deck whether it is best suited to the Pod they are playing against, because when they butt heads it just leads to a bad time for everyone.
No matter how long the argument, in the end neither pre-emptive stax nor infinite combos are casual gameplay. As soon as you put these things in play, people will conclude you're a stealth cEDH player who's out to shut down the game.
The biggest issue with stax in casual commander is that the powerful archetypes in casual commander that stax decks counter the best (ie lands), effect everyone equally. All stacks ends up doing in a casual table is slow things down, as the best deck is still the best deck if every deck is say 25% slower. While I do like stacks in cedh and even just more competitive tables that are still casual, full casual, everyone playing 7s games do not need stacks and in fact probably shouldn't have them at all
I builded a Gufd planeswalker deck last year. I started adding stax pieces that slow or block completely the attack phase, then obliterate for win condition. Seems a nice balance to me
I play an Avacyn hard stacks deck every once in a while and I find it funny when my friends treat me as the huge threat when the Ur-Dragon deck has 13 lands on board and I try to play a boardwipe only to be immediately countered. Stax is important, guys.
no your playgroup is right to focus you down. you'll just sit there with your thumb up your butt holding the game hostage and no one has fun, the ur-dragon player will end the game.
What a great channel. I really like the way you explain things. You have a pleasant voice and the topics you are creating your videos arround are fun and interesting. Good job!
Unchecked ramp and combos are becoming so rampant that i and some other players inplayed arround have been heavily considered starting build stax decks. And i love playing storm decks and i feel stax is slowly starting to become a necesity along side targeted land removal.
Me playing rule of law and blind obedience and basically being accused of being a pub stomper because they had such a guttural response to it, when it was literally stopping the combo player from winning, who then proceeded to win 3 out of 4 games with various infinite mana combos into staff of dom draw your whole deck. One of the infinites being dockside, but hey it’s just a casual Feldon deck who wins with dockside.
Threat assessment is not everyone’s strength!
@@thetrinketmage He's certainly on his magic journey, I think a few players at my LGS may have caused him to go into a villain arc because it's typically higher power there. All of his decks are 100% MPC fill now with crazy arts and super min maxed mana bases with all the OG duals/shocks/fetch's etc. Like the example I gave above, in that game he was playing a 3000$ Isshin deck that he described as good old fair attacking, which I really don't mind at all the card quality just the hypocrisy. Aside from dockside that combo players decks had much lower card quality on average than us.
I am I certified Johnny, and I don't mind at all if someone stops my shenanigans, cause I deserve it.
Seriously, I wish I could redirect every Reply argument to this comment. This puts alot of my thoughts in a more succinct manner!
were you also stopping the other two players from effectively playing though? how did not being able to cast more than one spell a turn and having all their creatures come in tapped affect the other two players at the table and their ability to get ahead of both you and the combo player? if they were also unable to get any momentum going as a result of your stax then yeah, i could easily see them groaning at you instead of the combo player because you're not changing the outcome of the game for THEM you're just making it less fun to play with stax.
Vexing bauble is one of the best cards printed recently because modern EDH is so infatuated with free spells
Wotc is literally staffed by monkeys, yes.
One of my biggest issues with stax is how broad the definition has become. It used to refer to effects like smoke stacks that basically left you eternally with no board state, but now people have thrown any land destruction or prison effect in with it. Due to stax's bad rep, it means everything added to it becomes bad by association.
I'd also note that the reason people hate stax is pretty logical: it grinds games to a halt. Yes it keeps things under control, but usually people will be happier after a game they lost with agency than one without.
I agree. I do not consider things stax unless they actually prevent "normal" and "fair" gameplay. Like Smokestack removing all the permanents, or Winter Orb preventing lands from being usable. Blood Moon shouldn't be considered stax, because it punishes something greedy. That's an answer, not a stax piece.
I agree what is bad and mean or stax or anything has kinda lost meaning over time
@ethanglaeser9239 I wouldnt really call not running full basics in a multi color deck especially anything like tainted Pact in it greedy. Blood Moon for sure is a stacks piece and that's totally fine because like you said it's an answer to a problem(kinda)so is most stacks pieces to be fair they limit or restrict avenues of play which make winning more difficult. Stacks pieces aren't usually a one card affect all players like a Grafdigger's Cage means nothing to someone attacking with 10 creatures to win but at the same time a crawlspace means nothing to the guy doing thoracle combo just gotta have the right piece for the right situation and it's still stacks regardless of it affects you personally or not
drives me crazy. stax has come to mean "anything my opponent does that makes it harder for me to win"
@@edhdeckbuilding well throw in then every combo in that as well, due to if they win its impossible for you to win 🤣
A player may concede the game at anytime for any reason
That’s not always the case. A lot of tables adopt the “Scooping is a sorcery Speed action,” which I personally subscribe to (except you can scoop if there’s some urgent irl thing happening.) Scoooping at instant speed can often deflate games and lead to unclimactic endings.
@@dreamsalongthepath7377 Scooping is an instant speed action, and players should be allowed to do it at any time. However, if you scoop at instant-speed to attempt to affect the game, I think the other players get the final say. If someone "concedes in response to attacks so you can't draw cards with your Toski", I don't think that player can complain if the rest of the table allows the attacking player to draw their cards anyway. After all, you can't complain if you're out of the game.
@@ethanglaeser9239 That's a fair opinion. I think both options are viable, I just like the Sorcery Speed version more as a personal preference, and I myself will never, ever scoop at instant speed even if we decide that it's okay.
True. And if you* scoop to game the system, I reserve the right to discredit you ad nauseum and never sit across from in an honest, friendly manner after that.
*The hypothetical "that guy." We all know them.
@@dreamsalongthepath7377 "You can only surrender on an open gamestate" is such a strange rule to append. MTG - and Commander especially - is lousy with infinite combos, and this rule just says "Yeah, you have to sit there while they play their combo out despite it being clear that it's a game win."
If someone drops a Zulaport Cutthroat or Blood Artist and then starts playing cards that look to be assembling some kind of infinite-mana, infinite-token, infinite-whatever combo, I'm going to ask if anyone has an answer to stop them winning, and if everyone says no, I'm scooping.
Fun Fact: Back when WOTC designed pokemon, you COULD remove your opponent's energy cards. Energy Removal and Super Energy Removal were so ubiquitous and unfun I believe they were among the few banned cards during the WOTC Pokemon Era.
Also the yu-gi-oh line cracked me up.
Tbf you still can, crushing hammer was a meta staple for the entirety of the time it was legal and it's a coin toss to destroy an energy
I only remember 2 non-promo cards being banned during WOTC Pokemon: Sneasel and Slowking. Sneasel because it could KO anything from 2 energy and Slowking due to a mistranslation resulting in a state where someone had a 1/16 chance of using a trainer.
Wait, WotC used to own Pokémon (the card game)
@@laurentrobitaille2204yes they actually invented the entire game system but lost the license once Nintendo realized how much money it was printing
As someone with a deck of Dragonairs and Dark Vaporeons, I feel un-represented XD
I think the most pressing issue regarding stax has been the absolute departure of any semblance of sportsmanship within the edh community. Back when I first started playing the format, a large emphasis was placed on letting anyone have fun with their deck, regardless of what it did. If what it did was obnoxious? You sucked it up for at least a game because that player put time and effort into building and playing that deck. After that game, you could politely ask to shake things up a bit, or scramble the pods at the lgs for some more varied gameplay. We used Rule Zero mostly just to know what to expect for the games we were going to play anyways, not to guilt trip opponents for running cards/commanders you dislike. Nowadays it's just accepted that you can salt off on people for playing "stax cards" (a term which has been expanding drastically in application, compounding this issue), and the burden of social contract violation falls on the accused, not on the grown-ass man throwing a tantrum in the lgs.
I love playing stax. It's fun seeing how the table plays around the limits i put on the game.
Armageddon isn't stax, it's a win condition
Stax can be a win condition indeed
I use it as a combo piece
Excellent way to say you commented before or instead of watching the video 😂
Yeah, In my mind if mass artifact removal (like vandalblast, farewell, etc) is on the table then MLD is on the table. Otherwise green just has a completely unchecked advantage since they would never get punished for investing heavily into land ramp.
It’s a win condition, if you have the board to back it up
Fundamentally people dont like having their agency taken away, being prevented from performing regular actions like untapping makes people feel like theyre not able to "play the game". Stax effectively changes the core game rules to be more restrictive, which brings out negative emotions more than having cards directly removed and interacted with. Also pokemon and yugioh do have stax cards (referred to as locks or floodgates), and theyre usually way more powerful at shutting plays down than mtg stax cards.
My coworker and I sometimes play commander with each other during lunch. I like running a simple white/green human deck for fun. Recently he made a deck that can repeatedly kill every creature the turn I cast it, and make it impossible for me to swing for damage (He has 5 tutors that can get him a spore frog, which he can return to the battlefield for free every turn with his commander).
He is frustrated that I switched to my stax deck against that, but it leaves me feeling weird. How is me making his creatures 1/1s using humility, and then comboing out preventing him from playing the game any more than him preventing me from playing creatures or attacking? The whole thing feels very confusing to me.
You make some profound and good points here, but one of your remarks is wrong IMO. Lands decks do not get punished hardest from mass land destruction. They can recover the quickest usually because of the quantity of ramp they play.
Otherwise, great video and a lot of the soft STAX suggestions like Rule of Law effects, and one sided board wipes are fantastic ideas people should play more!
Yep came to say this. MLD is a pretty reliable wincon/winmore card in landfall decks from my experience
I still maintain that part of this is because people tend to only destroy the lands and not the recursion engines. If there's a Crucible of Worlds on the field, Armageddon is probably handing the game to the landfall player, yeah. Throwing an Obliterate or Apocalypse at them instead and getting rid of their recursion engines is probably going to throw a bit more of a wrench in their plans.
@@Dynme me going be like Apocalypse for the win 🤣would be great
@@Dynme I agree. But if I cast Farewell, or Everything Comes to Dust, and MLD together - then everyone is dead, not like I’m punishing the Green player anymore than anyone else at the table.
@@drkatz1192the idea is to punish everyone but yourself. Build your deck to withstand your own stax
In theory, I agree with a lot of your points - in practice I disagree with most of them. Yes, playing "hated" cards and playstyles in Magic is not just fine, it's an incredibly important part of the game and ressource denial is a very important pillar of that. And yes, running a few individual stax pieces here and there is fine. And yes, in theory, playing symmetrial stax pieces could lead to interesting deck building challenges.
However: 1) I've never actually seen pure stax decks built interestingly. I've only ever seen Derevi or Urza stax and here the only "interesting" part is: Cast commander -> oh, look, I've now solved this whole symmetrical problem. 2) In theory, if the stax deck is doing its thing, all other players *should* just concede. In practice, there is (almost) always at least one player being spiteful or too optimistic and saying "I just need to draw 2 untapped lands for this Disenchant" and then the game continues on for 1,5 hours without anyone actually playing any Magic. 3) Mass land destruction very often simply swaps the player with the most lands being ahead with the player with the most non-land ramp being ahead - and very often that isn't actually the player who just cast the Armageddon.
With these problems usually being very pronounced in Commander, I've yet to play against a hard stax deck and enjoy the ensuing experience.
thats seen generally cause Stax/Stun is never played symetrically its either played in a deck which doesn't get effected or played in a situation where it only effects the opponment. it always gets optimised to being applied unsymetrically.
This is the same guy blasting chaos and group hug decks tho. He seems to equavilate winning with fun, even if fun can come at the cost of winning, or, like in this video, winning can come at the cost of fun. He also tends to cherrypick which decks fit his argument. The unfun Derevi-deck would be "no true stax", and an asymetrical Norin deck just happens to fall outside of his definition of a chaos deck.
Past the calm voice and the pretty presentation it's just the ''stop liking what I don't like''-guy. That's a shame, because he seems clever and makes good arguments, yet deeply incurious towards other playstyles. I hope he'll grow to be more like Salubrious Snail and honestly reflect on actual game experience rather than hypothetical decks.
A lot of the difference between stax and a more "acceptable" playstyle seems to be optics.
- "Stax denies you agency" - in the case of a ramp deck much more powerful than the rest of the pod, you may not have agency either. You can play spells, sure, but it doesn't *matter* - they have twice the number of lands you do, they're going to overwhelm you no matter what you do. The difference is that there's no card that explicitly says "you don't have agency"
- "It makes the game take ages" - So does a ramp deck. Or a storm deck. Or a counters deck. A good player *can* make these archetypes move quickly - but that's also true in stax. Lots of decks, when they're in a commanding position, can hog the game time.
- "There's no way of dealing with it" - by the same token, a deck that draws a lot of cards can feel impossible to deal with once it's gotten going, because they will always draw into an answer to whatever you throw at them. Amusingly, one way to deal with massive card draw is stax.
Stax is more explicit in the ways it can make a game un-fun, but there's plenty of archetypes that get away with doing the same things. They just don't have that fact printed on the cards they use.
I love a good Rule of Law. I don't want to stop you from playing the game. I just want to make sure everyone can play the game, not just you.
MonoB Stax player here. Disclaimer: yes, I am an evil person. I actually do play Stax because I am a sadist that enjoys the suffering of others. Nevertheless, Stax has rapidly gone from an indulgence I dabble in to a necessity at my table. The fact is that WotC has injected a ridiculous amount of power into EDH specifically (and Magic more generally) in the past several years. We're past the days of Isamaru Voltron. "Oh just Rule 0, talk with your friends." Half of the people I play with, let alone randoms at my LGS, want the strong cards. They want to run everyone else over with unbridled, linear value piles. They want the explosive Yu-Gi-Oh win. And they're willing to sink their entire paycheck into it. "Heh, even if I kill everyone on turn 6 [in this allegedly casual multiplayer format] at least we got to play." No we didn't. So just remember the old Genghis Khan quote when you complain about Stax. "Had you not created great sins, god would not have sent a punishment like me upon you."
A man of culture
Sometimes it's needed. I dipped my toe into stax in Standard when Temur Adventures was running everyone over. Did you know Temur Adventures can't do squat when they're sacrificing everything?
But then since I'm evil I got the yugioh win anyway because my creatureless stax deck's win condition was making enough 4/4s in one turn to one-shot you
I think the biggest issue regarding stax and control is that people can't threat assess well enough to scoop appropriately. When the Elfball player has 40 power on board and noone has a board wipe a lot of the time everyone just scoops and calls it a game, no need to drag it out when it's over. When the storm player hits their 10th spell of the turn and still has gas you can assume they'll just win in the end. With control and stax it's a bit less obvious so people will often not scoop into a losing board. Sure you CAN draw a board wipe in the next 10 turns before the control player wins and they could also happen to not have any protection in hand, but how likely is it when a control player has their winning engine going they won't have the tools to protect it? 9 times out of 10 you can just scoop and start a new game and if you miss that 1 time, it's casual who cares if you win?
Knowing when to concede is a very important thing
I took a break from magic for ages, and got back into commander at some locals recently.
Almost all decks were some variation of solitaire running minimal interaction. It was easy to win but... a bit boring.
Last night I played with some older players and their decks were combo-ey, staxy and hatebears... It was fun. My opponents -needed- to be interacted with. They cast counterspells. They blew up my lands.
My need to aetherise one turn to an aggro push allowed another player to play jokulhaups the next turn. And it was great. We had 5 or 6 games in 2 hours, and no one felt -exhausted- at the end waiting for someone to combo off.
all of my favorite games of commander ever have been against stax decks. It might be the change of pace that only seeing them occasionally provides, but the board states in those games gets wild in the "nobody intended for things to be this way" sense and I'm so here for it. I also love seeing if my own deckbuilding can handle the stress test that stax provides.
In my experience, the players who complain about stax also complain about the turbo/combo decks that stax keeps in check. In my experience, the players who complain about stax want everyone at their table to play creature based value strategies with minimal interaction other than attacking and blocking. So while in theory stax has a place at the commander table to check combo decks, that's true only if combo decks are also permitted to exist.
This. "...want everyone at their table to play creature based value strategies with minimal interaction other than attacking and blocking." Yup. And those people are playing the wrong game. They need to play Monopoly. One of the things that should draw someone to the game of Magic is that you get to be a wizard Harry! Sling spells, HIYAA!!! Instantly deny an action, wield ultimate power... Shit, we all pay taxes and slog through this life not ever really doing the kingly things we all want to do, accomplish, conquer. So let's get wild and play some effing magic dude. If you got the win, cool, next game. If I got it, cool, next game. People act like the are so scared to play with any of their other decks. How do you expect to play them all if you sit on one game for 3 hours!? End rant lol.
@@Nex41354 if you want quick games then just play CEDH. If you don’t want to play CEDH then why are you trying to win as fast as possible?
In my playgroup (not cEDH), we always say that stax is "fun", in the sense that it makes the game more interesting.
Completely agree
I don’t really have a playgroup but i wish people at my Lgs would have the same mindset and put some Stax pieces in their decks lol
I wish more people would think like that. With how fast commander games have become, stax is necessary to slow games down and makes the games much more puzzly and fun. People complain when I have a rule of law effect on board, but then the moment it gets destroyed someone vomits their hand and wins the game immediately.
stax is interesting. A friend of mine played a zur the enchanter stax deck with a few auras to kill people with. Even though he tutored for a stax piece every turn, it ironically made him lose more because everyone hated stax. Whilst building my wip zur eternal schemer deck, I wanted to introduce some more long term gameplan kinda stuff, but I didnt want to run stax because it'd make me more of a target. Instead I've gone for more of a pillow fort side.
Essentially, if you want to run stax but everyone is targeting you because of your deck, try running pillow fort instead
This goes for most all powerfully known decks in a play group. My friend has a powerful Eldrazi deck that everyone gangs up on. No one will let that deck get over 7 mana without a hard fight.
@@seanwechsler6783 This is only true if one person is playing a powerful deck.
In a format where I can barely coerce the game store's population to embrace proper threat assessment and running artifact/enchantment removal: I will not be recommending stax pieces to them.
14:10 I think another big generator of the salt where stax is involved is that it's kind of random if you can deal with it, even if you know how. Imagine a situation where someone ramps out a Trinispehere on an early turn. The correct response is to destroy their rocks while it's on the stack, preventing them from breaking parity. But in order to do that, you have to know that that's the right play AND have enough cheap, instant speed removal in your deck AND have it in hand AND have left the mana open. All while there's no way of knowing that Player B is going to play a stax piece beforehand, and after it's already too late. Some games you will have it and feel like a boss while the stax player cries, but most games there's nothing you could have done other than filing your deck with nothing but removal, and that's not fun.
My personal rule for building with stax pieces is to just avoid the words 'no' and 'can't'. Harsh Mentor instead of Collector Ouphe.
Kinjalli's Sunwing is a 3 mana flyer that says "Creatures your opponents control enter the battlefield tapped" and it came in the Pantlaza precon. I saw in multiple precon upgrade videos that people cut it... but I've found it's one of the best cards in the deck! I was always averse to stax effects, but this one has been changing my mind. It does serious work every game, and it really hasn't produced much salt in my regular playgroup. Since then, I've been liking sprinkling one or two effects like that in my decks.
Yeah, I like Hatebears, which is basically creature based soft stax, because it just slows people down, is very beatable, and you still get to swing out with creatures. I love Elesh Norn as a wincon for a hatebears deck, since the 4 p/t swing turns your hatebears into hateBeasts! :D
Kinjali's Sunwing is my favorite stax card. It's such fun to hear the groan when my friends see that their creatures enter tapped. It's not a game ruining stax piece, but it adds just enough salt to make the game more flavorful
Fr thats exactly why I play those (anti tutor, anti-free spells, anti-reanimate) in my Azorius Control Deck, I love it and it aint the strongest but it can be hard to overcome for people trying to go too fast.
Yeah some amount of stax is almost necessary if you want to play control oriented deck in a format with 3 opponents and barely any ban list.
I think this is where Stax shines in Casual EDH tables, because instead of just stopping players from playing the game, it usually stops players from doing something degenerate.
@@dreamsalongthepath7377thats the issue, there's so many degenerates that hate when their gameplay is interacted with that they default to blaming the mechanic that kept them from going out of control turn 4 and denying them an uncontested win
I think Stax is a valid way to further your own gameplan. The only problem is, if players know you have a Stax heavy deck you will be arch enemy and the game will be 3v1 until you are out of the game. Being arch enemy can be its own kind of fun, but not everybody is made for that life.
Not me finding this video immediately after deciding to make a Hokori deck...
I've been wanting to make a hokori deck but not sure which way I want to break parity.
pls share the decklist, hokori is so cool imo
I'm also interested in Hokori, although yeah breaking parity is tricky. I'm tempted to build Ardenn and Rograkh stax/MLD because once Rograkh is suites up on board, blowing up the lands is pretty much the death knell
Awesome video, id like to play more stax effects but think it would be kind to ask if the table would like to play with it. In turn, most will probably turn you down and you'd need to bring two decks in that case.
It's fine if you give them the option, but they should also have to ask your permission to play creature based value engine decks.
to my knowledge there isn't a way to hard lock out a player from energy but there is still energy removal, infact that's the name of the card that started this interaction, Jirachi XY Black Star Promos, Archeops Unified Minds, Clefable Rebel Clash, Crushing Hammer, Team Flare Grunt, etc are all resource denial and some are recurable
I have a deck I love that is a "stax"/"control" deck based entirely on creatures and I built it because people are a lot less salty when playing against creature based stax cards as opposed to artifacts or enchantments
Pretty much because a board wipe or removal at convenient times can at least break the game back open. If I'm not playing the right colors I just can't do anything to enchantments basically
From a casual perspective, there are 2 kinds of stax effects that I find simply unacceptable.
First, anything that slows down the game simply for the sake of slowing down the game. Commander games already last a long time, and there is simply no reason to intentionally make them take longer. This is where all of the mass land destruction or excessive wraths fall under. If you have legitimate ways to break parity on these effects and have a reasonable strategy to win the game, in my opinion that does not fall into this category and it totally fine.
Second, are cards that hard lock only 1 player. Because of the social and multiplayer aspect of commander scooping is typically something that just doesn't happen. There is no worse feeling than sitting at the table watching everyone else play the game when you simply can't. This category of card is difficult to define and is very playgroup specific. I think a good rule of thumb is, if you every time you play a certain card one player at your table/group is frustrated or says "well, I can't play now", maybe consider swapping that card out.
I took blood moon out of mono-red decks for this reason. The last time I played it, one player was a 3 color deck with out red. That player basically could not play the rest of the game. Because the moon was not effecting anyone else, no one wanted to remove it and because that player was no longer a threat no one bothered to attack them.
Aside from these 2 category of card, I am fine with any other kind of stax card.
14:55 "When you're staring down a mono-green deck with a mana doubler in play, you might think that you're still in the game, but the controller is basically unplugged at this point." Poetry
There are some good points here. First, I'm very hypocritical with how much I love extra turn denial. That's probably a Stax effect (though I doubt anyone is trying to champion extra turn spells as victims)
But those "one spell per turn" cards? In casual decks those actually make a ton of sense. It makes the more competitive decks either move at their pace, waste removal, or basically always lose counter wars in the case of the noncreature one.
Yu-Gi-Oh has stax, they're called floodgates, and most of them were banned in the last year for being too oppressive, and just generally hated by the competitive community
I have plans of adding a spice of Stax my Urza, Lord High Artificer commander deck. Winter Orb, Trinisphere, and Static Orb will form the foundation. So far, I acquired Trinisphere at a good price. That's the only commander deck I am willing to use Stax cards.
Yeah just make sure you are playing at the right tables with that deck 😅
“Winter Orb” 😝 muhahaha!
I'm also in the process of building Urza, I think being a definitive villian of the table that everyone has to try and take down is a lot of fun. I love punishing green.
Reporting back after a 4 player table tourney. Trinisphere really slowed down a mono Green deck, but the rest of the table couldn't quite close it out as mono Green still popped off. Definitely will prioritize in getting Winter Orb for dealing with Green shenanigans.
I successfully got all my players in my pod to start running stax, and even got one, and almost two, building stax decks. One really thinks he hates stax but is playing graveyard hate in all his decks now (which I think is also pretty in spirit of stax, being resource denial and all). I ended up giving away a lot of my stax cards to friends to try using as well. I think the more players start to see WOTC print cards that generate crazy value, the more they'll inherently see the value in pumping the brakes in a game for sure.
This video was made for me though, I thought stax was awesome since I heard the name. It reminds me of things like timing players out in fighting games, or winning via a c9 in OW2, like some strategies are so outfield they're inspiring.
Currently my favorite soft stax deck to play is Grimgrin, with arena of the ancients and meekstone. the ability to manually untap grimgrin gets through these effects and makes him able to soar against MG big stompy decks and attack centered commanders. The combos are still in the deck, but easily countered by graveyard hate/ rule of law style effects or counterspells, so usually the deck has to win by just making a lot of zombies or a really big grimgrin. It's amazing how a few cards that slow the game down actually make the game way more creative too.
I think people think of Stax as some Spike Style win at all costs type of play, but Stax isn't really that efficient. A Spike would play Red Deck Wins, or whatever deck is op at the moment.
I feel like Stax is more of a Johnny Deck type, trying to figure out a way to slow down or stop everyone else. A hard stax lock is the same as an infinite combo. And soft stax or Hatebears is barely a step above playing enough removal.
I like the idea of Hatebears because it is beatable.
I like this take mostly but the reason people hate stax is not because games take longer, its because they cant use their cool cards. From a competative perspective (not cedh, just a competative perspective) there is nothing wrong with hard stax, but it's arguably more frustrating to be losing for 6 turns hoping to recover and get told that "you may concede at any time" when trying to hang out with friends and blast some spells. I kind of like stax though, especially in a game where its all about gaining resources and never denial of those resources for some reason.
I have a Chromium commander deck that sometimes gets accused of being a stax deck, even though I think it is more like a control deck. It does run a few stax pieces, but I think calling it a stax deck is a bit extreme.
The entire premise of the deck is that the 99 pretty much only contains interaction like counterspells and removal, as well as answers/hatebears to various strategies. Simply put, you don't get to do your weird combo shenanigans in my presence. I built the deck specifically because I felt the playgroup and everyones decks were becoming way less interactive, and just spun their wheels until someone assembled their engine and won. All my deck does is stopping those types of combos and value engines. It doesn't lock anyone out of the game, at least there is no kind of combo in it to do so. The only way for the deck to actually lock someone out of the game is if they have built their deck poorly, and in my opinion there is nothing wrong for those kinds of decks to be punished.
Sometimes I consider building an actual real stax deck just to teach my playgroup that what I am currently playing is faw from something that could be called a stax deck.
the problem its not stax as an enabler to your wincon, the problem is stax without wincon
Stax is underrated and overhated imo
Love having some Hatebears on the battlefield that change the flow of the game and tone it into a puzzle
Guy at my Lgs dropped a magus of the tabernacle once and it was one of the most interesting games I’ve ever played and one of the most fun even though i was mana screwed and only always had 1 creature.
I’m not saying hard stax and winter orb should be common but
Green decks playing collector ouphe or gaddock teeg are fine and should see more play
Yeah, I dont care how salty anyone would get. As a blue/red player, I will shamlessly smash powerful lands with a Violent Impact, Smashing Success, or Aftershock. I am absolutly not letting lands go unpunished, even casually. But, thats why I would pack those particular spells. They arent just land removal, so if there isnt a huge land issue at the table, I can use them for an artifact or something else.
Yeah, to me, non-basic lands are fair game.
While denying resources definitely is the outcome of many, if not most stax effects, I think the most accurate description of stax is an ongoing effect that prohibits or impedes one or more players from taking an action. A definition like this is closer to what I think of when I think of stax and differentiates it from spot removal
and its exactly why people don't like it. being able to take actions that move you closer toward winning the game is what the game is, stax just says 'you don't get to play magic when you sit down to play magic' and that's just boring and not fun.
@@themoops4006that's the true definition of stax yes, but so many things get lumped into the category. Rhystic study and smothering tithe are great examples of cards that aren't stax but are treated like they are. They don't stop you from playing, but they reward another player when you play greedy, and thats the issue. "Casual" commander players hate having to consider the consequences more often than anyone should be comfortable with.
@@NewSirenSong those cards aren't stax but i also don't think they're particularly casual-friendly either. if they can't be removed every other player needs to pay the tax every time or they generate an absurd amount of value for a single player. so in a casual game you end up dumping lots of your early-game resources into that tax so that one player doesn't pop off instead of playing your fun timmy cards.
@@themoops4006 Wrong, players just don't pay the tax. They either remove it, or they don't pay the tax and the person who played it gets tons of value.
@themoops4006 I find them to be great greed punishers, and Timmy players hate being punished for greed.
I think one issue is that a lot of us has played agenst a a**hole who play stax.
Example i used to play in a group that thought conceding was unsportmanly, unless you had to get q bus or something. There was a guy who brought a hard stax deck, which after locking you out the game his win con was letting you draw you entire library. Amd then acuse you of being a d**k if you tried to concede.
I'd love a gaddock teeg deck, but its never going to happen because of these past experiences.
Highly considering playing Armageddon in my necrobloom deck as a win condition
Long time stax player here. I wanted to bring this up about static orb in particular. You can break parity with static orb also by lowering your mana curve. If Static Orb lets you untap 2 permanents and your average mana curve is closer to two, you can still play one spell per turn when your opponent are waiting often multiple turns. Building and piloting a stax deck often feels like putting together a puzzle.
I might be the only stax player in our town, certainly at my kitchen table. Stax has undoubtedly created the most interesting games i have ever played. I am avid supporter of the archetype.
You spoke about locks a little and I consider these decks to be more akin to combo. Im thinking a Lavinia deck built to set up the Knowledge Pool lock. Technically if playing cards is a resource, you re denying them this resource. Its not quite the same as running symmetrical stax pieces and trying to break parity. In fact a deck like that isnt all that much fun to pilot.
Yeah, I think hard stax locks are the same as an infinite combo.
As someone who disagrees with the powercreep design nowadays ive been using more of these cards.
Edit: It is not out of spite, Im just not buying new cards and games end in 5 turns, which is too short for me and my playgroup
Its really interesting how different people view stax. In my mind i dont even think "soft stax" is a thing. My definition of stacks is what you called "hard stax". Complete and total lockout and everyone scoops and/or get hit with a 1/1 thirty plus times. I think the definitions get muddy and as someone who has actually played against "hard stax" i do think it gets a bad rep rightfully so b/c most people dont want to lose a game just by scooping and/or that 1/1 token senario. I think most people sit down to play a game b/c they want to PLAY the game.
Found your channel recently. Really loving the videos! I enjoyed listening and thinking about this one.
I’m glad you’re liking the videos! Honestly I have a more more to say about stax but it will be saved for another video
@@thetrinketmage sweet! Looking forward to it! Btw I just watched your spell slinger video and it inspired me to build a deck i have never tried before. So thank you!
A bit of light stax is perfectly fine. Any good deck should have an out, or accept the limitations of moving slower.
It’s akin to removal. Then again, some people get salty if you dare interact with whatever degenerate thing they’re attempting to pull off.
Very Useful video especially explaining how to break parity and build around them.
Every game I promise myself I wont put stax into my aggro deck. Then they untap with 10 mana on turn 5.
Stax is indeed a net positive archetype for the game as a whole.
A metagame is very similar to a food web in nature: you need cats to stop rats from overpopulating, sucks for the rat but allows for smaller insects to have a chance, and prevents rats from overpopulating themselves into extinction by drying up all resources and too much competition, so in a way by killing the rats, the cats are making sure rats won't go extinct, and makes sure other species can compete.
That's Stax decks. Without Stax decks, many decks simply don't have any counters. Additionally, Stax decks are essentially budget options to deal with very expensive tryhard commander decks, so it is an equalizer of sorts.
It is good that Stax isn't as good that is a mainstream strategy, but popular enough for people to consider it when deckbuilding, and I wouldn't have it any other way. I personally would never play Stax, I love ramp big dumb monsters decks like Eldrazi, but I want people to keep playing Stax decks enough to be a threat.
Stax is only a net postive archetype in broken formats. its a band aid for lacking counterplay.
@@randomprotag9329 Commander is the most broken format of all time.
If your Commander is just a static ability, value piece that doesn't attack then may i highly recommend Arena of The Ancients.
It gets other people surprisingly salty, which was interesting because i just thought it was cool tech 🤷♂️
my friend runs that specifically to answer my sigarda voltron deck, very vexing and effective card indeed
I was playing a game last week with 3 friends. I was running my only deck (Laughing Jasper Flint), my friends played an elf deck, a white token deck and the last was running Blind Seer soft stax deck. The blind seer friend got a lot of hate since he made the game so slow for everyone. "All spells cast are red", "red spells cost 2 more to cast", he could pay 1 mana to counter any red spell, "all lands are green", "exile all green permanents" etc. The game took 2 hours before everyone conceded due to bedtime.
Used to play a 60 cards casual Mono Red Enchantment/Chandra deck with Jökhulaups as the center.
Once people knew the card, the game became a race to see when my 6th land dropped, and if I could win on the spot.
Also it was the first deck I built myself by searching cards online and in store bulks, so I had strong feelings for the cards that kinda started my love for brewing !
Coming back to EDH lately and discovering th salt system and where Jökhulaups was made me very sad and I removed it from my Narset deck.
Your video just gave me a new way of thinking and I might start brewing something centered around it again !
Thanks !
I clicked for the thumbnail alone. Flawless. I don't like playing against stax, but it's usually because I only have a few hours every month for games. Love the archetype though!
This is why my favorite level of EDH play is High-Power Casual or Degenerate EDH. You know what you're going in for, and no one gets needlessly salty, and decks are more personalized and rogue than CEDH. Everything is welcome and permitted. Playing with mature people also helps as well.
Low or mid power Casual and CEDH only want to play EDH a certain way, very restrictive and boring, at least for me.
What an excellent video!!! Definitely made me appreciate stax a bit more. And understand the difference between being frustrated by stax and frustrated by poorly played stax! Important distinction!
I love stax so much. My most played cedh deck is a winota stax ball deck which is so fun. Ploping a magus out, not on the stack is so joy inducing
Anti stax is only a valid argument if every color has equal access to card draw and mana ramp. Without stax certain colors or color combos lose their edge in a match up against creature based value engines. Run a little bit more varied removal, youll be fine.
This has actually inspired a new deck idea for me: Boros super friends led by Cadric. I’ve been thinking about this build for a while, but now I have an actual strategy for it. Early game hate bears and non basic hate running mostly basics as White ramp largely grabs basic plains, mid game planeswalkers, counting each as costing one more to account for Cadric, and late game sweepers like Obliterate to win off my plethora of planeswalkers. Could be fun.
My main issue with any deck (although it mainly comes up it stax and control) is when the player doesn't seem to be working towards a win. I think being clear with your gameplan (especially against newer opponents who won't understand why a player would play these cards) can help alleviate frustration.
I played a round with the bois a week or two ago, and I had the funny opening hand of 2 lands, a sol ring, mana crypt, sphere of resistance, and whatever else. Since I won the roll to go first, i dropped more than half of my hand on turn 1. We were all playing our competitive decks, and after I ended up winning (pulled off the Solphim + Heartless Hidetsugu combo), my friends revealed to me that the simple added tax of requiring just 1 more generic mana to cast anything completely screwed over both of their game plans, and one of them could have popped off the turn before I combo'd off, had it not been for that light stax piece. Just goes to show how far a single tax/stax effect can end up completely changing the course of a game. I don't think I'll ever have a more powerful opener with that deck, lol.
I have two stances on stax, it’s a puzzle to break stax or prevent a lock from being formed. And there should be an amount of time to interact with the set up before the stax is at full force.
I’ve played a few games against an atraxa superfriends deck that generally is pretty cool. I stopped having fun when Narset Transcendent comes out with doubling season and ulting the same turn. I had to response because I wasn’t in blue and couldn’t counter narset. Even though I had removal the emblem was still there and non of my removal was tied to a creature. It generally felt bad and hopeless.
I have also played games with my friend who has a yasharn stax deck. That one has a few different locks that can be achieved but they require time and parts. You can get out of it or remove some parts before a lock is created. That deck is one big puzzle both to pilot and defeat.
Anyway that’s my two cents, good video I know I’m late but I’ve finally been able to put my feelings on the matter into words.
I've theorized on a Commander subformat that starts with Emblems in play that have card effects, like Aven Mindcensor and Blood Moon. I think it is the easiest way to have rules like "No tutoring" and "Basics only". That resembles your argument of adding some stax to decks.
I've always been fascinated with Land Destruction, Discard, and Hatebears. Oddly, I don't like counterspells or abundance of removal. :D I think I like Hatebears because it slows down opposing decks, but it doesn't stop them, and it is very vulnerable. Your point about dropping an Armageddon once you've built up your board state to a winning position is interesting. :D
My girlfriend has an amazing Lynde Curses deck that i like to think of as painful stax. Instead of prohibiting that you combo off with rule setting effects, she just makes combos as painful as possible
My issue with stax isn't necessarily the "slowing the game down", it's the "You can't play for the rest of the game" aspect. The few games i played with stax pieces involved all came down to that.
Someone plays a Blood Moon on turn 3 and my Esper deck couldn't do anything because of a fairly greedy mana base, granted, because i wasn't expecting that kind of threat. I then proceeded to spend the next 30 minutes looking at people play. Same thing happened with Winter Orb, on a different deck, because i didn't have enough lands to use my artifact destruction and the Nadu player won in the meantime because nobody had the resources to stop him, not even the stax player who cast the damn Winter Orb on turn 3 or 4
I feel like stax is in a similar boat to counter in that when played where it makes sense they result in a better game. For counters that means holding them for when they are relevant and not just using them at the first possible moment which just sliws games and risks king making. For stax pieces it's only playing them in a board stat where you know you can keep playing yourself, the worst games are when someone tries to slow down the game eith no follow up and everything just grinds to a halt.
Also regarding the Yu-Gi-Oh comment while it's true resources aren't obvious in the same way they definitely exist in multiple forms. Cards in hand, monster/spell/trap zones, summons (normal and special), card draw/search, extradeck access and more essentially function as resources with decks that maximize those elements frequently being the best decks even if they have a lower power ceiling. Also there are cards to restrict every one of those elements of the game, which under thus videos broad definition would probably count as stax, and they probably make up the majority of the most hated (and frequently banned) cards in the game
"yugioh does not have resource denial"
Me swetting looking at mystic mine
Yugioh does not have resources like normal games there is resource denial for sure
@@thetrinketmage Your cards in hand are the resource.
@@Cybertech134 true but it’s basically the only resource. I guess there is the 1 normal summon rule but other than that everything is free
@@Cybertech134 Your cards in hand are the resource in every game
@@abjoern But they are not the primary limiting resource in every game.
The game was specifically designed to be interactable on every axis like you said. I think stax pieces are usually a necessary evil, otherwise edh is a game of who gets the most lands in play the fastest. When I build a deck I like to include stax pieces that happen to work well with my theme. For instance, in my Gix, Yawgmoth Praetor I put meekstone because a majority of my creatures have lower than 2 power. It’s hindering plays on an axis that doesn’t affect me, so it speeds the game up in my favor. If I didn’t play meekstone I would often have to fight through the larger creatures that my opponents are dropping, meaning even if I’m ahead with card draw and lands and should be winning the game I might have to durdle around trying to find a threat that eventually gets through for the win. Stax pieces that are synergistic with your deck are a massive advantage
I love to play a few light stax effects in aggro decks in place of some board wipe slots. Call it pre-emptive removal. For example, if I can slow the board down for 2-3 turns while amassing a landfall-triggered token army with Hazezon, I can swing out against a much lighter board, rather than all of us starting over from scratch. Rule of law effects work great here.
My other motivation to playing stax pieces is that cards are walls of text since FIRE design. Everyone is playing under higher cognitive loads. If Kyle is limited to one spell per turn, his turns are easier, my turns are easier, and maybe nobody takes 15 minutes per turn. There is more room for table talk and hanging out with the boys. I can live with them hating me a little for it.
I have a Sephara, Sky's Blade deck that's all about getting a bunch of small fliers out quickly, then getting the commander out for commander damage smackdown. It doesn't have a lot of ramp or card draw being in mono-white, so I have a lot of the white stax pieces listed in this video to slow everyone else down. It's a great combo and works well to seal wins quite frequently.
One of my favorite cards recently is Urza's Sylex. it's a great way to microdose my opponents with land destruction. They are normally more okay with it than when i play Farewell. But that is for a different video.
Stax is a great addition to the deck to protect your game plan, limit potentially threatening strategies and breaking symmetrical effects to your advantage, but should be used in moderation. Dedicated stax decks that lock out every possibility to play are frustrating if they cannot turn the situation into a win in 2-3 turns, or at least present a lock that everyone will agree to not struggle against.
I LOVE Stax and think that casual pods really need to open the card pool to these "salty" cards and allowing the local meta to police itself instead of just Rule 0'ing or shaming people people into everyone just playing the same old midrange or battlecruiser piles
I like your point about people being upset about it being visible that you cant win and that's what frustrates people. It's kind of the same reason people hate playing against mill (unless they are graveyard decks, but then again If I run mill I usually run heavy package of grave hate too). In the same way you can see yourself losing your win conditions and pieces to mill, you can see yourself losing your avenues out against stax, like having an ETB artifact removal to deal with their one stax piece in hand but then they play a torpor orb, adding another layer to the proverbial onion. I think some degree of stax is necessary in order to play a proper control deck in commander, and land destruction is absolutely necessary nowadays with how much turbo ramp is present, and with how pushed nonbasics are. I generally like to play responsive decks that punish value strategies, so I guess I have the heart of a stax player but I have never made a proper stax deck.
Maybe this is your sign to finally build one
@@thetrinketmage Maybe Idk, I would imagine it tends to draw a lot of ire when you make it your whole game plan unless you are at a pretty competitive table (which I'm usually not). I also tend to only use the occasional modal MLD card like Catastrophe (my favorite btw) since its a creature wipe when I'm behind on the board or its a MLD card when I'm just ahead enough it can twist the screws to turn a favorable state into an inevitable win. Nobody likes a random Armageddon out of nowhere, especially if you don't have a clear way to win afterwards. In my mind it has to be versatile enough not to be a dead card when you are behind or at parody, like Catastrophe.
Great video.
Yugioh has stax, but in yugioh they call it "floodgates". Right now there's a top deck that uses a card "skill drain" that is basically an enchantment that turns off every creatures on the battlefield effect. They play under this card because when their turn starts, they can easily remove it so it doesn't affect them.
Oh I remember skill drain! Hated that card
Do Tenpais run Skill Drain?
@@kindlingking yubel and snake eyes do.
This video talks so much about land destruction/Armageddon that ya know, I'm not sure i've ever played but against one of them in 5-6 years. The stigma is such that most just don't play that card anymore. You don't need to if you can make 1,000 scute swarms in one turn or combo like a g on turn 0.
9:14 Hearthstone actually does let you destroy all your opponent's mana crystals with Elwynn Boar/Sword of a Thousand Truths! But that's more of a payoff for a difficult combo. Also pre-nerf Celestial Alignment set both players to 0 mana crystals but made all cards in their hand/deck cost 1, which the druid was able to come back from with their ramp cards. And currently in standard is the recently nerfed Doomkin which steals a mana crystal from your opponent putting you ahead 2 which is brutal, especially in multiples.
Don't need to watch this one.
TL;DR is sometimes(SOMEtimes) you just don't feel like playing Magic. So you pull out Stax, sit back, relax, and *let your opponent defeat themselves*
Im a modern player originally and my in to commander was a friends krenko cedh deck. I now play a mono white 'stax' deck yet I would call it prison because thats more what the architype is in modern. The idea is get 1 or two effective hate pieces down early to slow the game down (something like thorn of amethyst and turning off etbs generally stops the rest of the table from winning) then go for drannith uba lock. Then win off myr welder infinites. In a lot of ways its more of a combo deck whos interaction are these cheap effecient artifact pieces that are directly chosen cause they interface well against other decks in the format
Great video. Side note, the fact you have to create a video for this shows most players are new and soft as well as lack understanding of the game. Because you are right. Stax is a balance. Much like counterspells. And the stigma of fear towards these cards is really only supplanted by someone else's lack of removal or sheer skill to maneuver around them. That's magic. The game isn't supposed to be some easy walk in the park, the nature of the game is competitive. Commander is the biggest format and houses the most powerful things you can do. People need to go play Monopoly if they are hard of understanding and want everything to go their way and to have their cake and eat it too. But it really makes things sour for being good at the game because people dont understand stax, threat assessment, removal, etc. So props for the video, just pointing out bluntly that it's sad that we have to address simple, fun card games in this manner.
The biggest issue for me is when stax (or control) decks are just there to stop others from playing while not having any sort of plan or wincon. Cool, thanks for wasting my time and ruining everyone's fun. Never sit down at a table with me again. I do have a boros deck that some would argue has lite stax in it (like War's Toll and Linvala, Keeper of Silence), but I mainly designed it to shut down control decks, since I despise them. Then rest of the deck is a mix of goad, pillow fort, and angels for beating people down. Also just had a lot of angels laying around that I wanted to use 🤷♂
If your deck is just counter spells and no win con. I’m not sure I’d even call that a control deck. It’s just a gimmick at that point
15:13 Yes! This is excellent perspective for playing in general - the turn you win is not always the turn you end the game. If you make a board of lethal attackers with protection in hand, but no haste, the game is likely won, though it's not technically over. Pushing that "likely" into a guarantee is the difference maker.
The thing about stax is that games with stax turn the entire game into a skill check. Didn't build your deck with a good removal count and varied interaction? Skill issue, you lose. Failed to identify the lock pieces and didn't build a deck able to navigate varied board states? Skill issue, you lose. Deck is too dependent on the commander? Skill issue, you lose. Got locked out of the game 4 turns ago and can't tell that the game ended already? Skill issue, you lose. Failed to properly set up parity breakers before going for your lock? Skill issue, you lose. You have poor redundancy? Skill issue, you lose.
It will lay bare for the entire table to see what mistakes every single player has made or is going to make, and that is almost not more evident than in the stax player themselves. It is so easy to kingmake, throw games, deploy the wrong pieces for the board state, mulligan incorrectly, sequence pieces poorly, and generally fail to convert your pieces into wins. Decks with stax subthemes are more forgiving because you can just use them as a means to slow the game down while your game plan moves forward unabated, but even that can falter when selecting weak pieces in deckbuilding or choosing strong pieces that your deck cannot fully navigate through. Stax is intensely difficult to play properly, both mechanically and in terms of game knowledge. cEDH may have moved into a metagame where stax is unfavored, but individual stax pieces are still tremendously powerful and knowing what lock pieces put you ahead while suppressing the correct decks at the table is very easy to fuck up. It is not surprising that, as welcoming as the cEDH community is, stax is one of the archetypes not recommended for new players because it requires so much game knowledge and ability.
You play Blood Moon because it's a powerful effect against multicolor decks.
I play it to say "Nope, that's a Mountain".
I love Storm and Combo, but it is pretty boring when all of the games are just a drag race. I am usually the Stax player at my LGS. It is a double edged sword though. Players hate you most of the time and are always looking first to you to have all the answers. A lot of politicking is required to convince inexperienced players not to remove a Rule of Law effect. Even after I Gitaxian Probe the Heliod player, I have many lost many games because a new player doesn’t believe or trust me about a combo. I have found that building a reputation at an LGS of always being honest is the best way to play Stax successfully.
It's actually funny, I wanted to build around Decree of Annihilation in my Kirri, Talanted Sprout deck and started building an enchantress theme to not only dig for the card, but also enchants were immune. But I want to find a way to close out the game, so I picked enchants that make tokens to swing out after casing Decree.
I believe that stax has a place in edh. The game is just more interesting when the game is slower. Feels so nice to see my dragonlord ojutai control deck keep a tatiyova landfall deck in check and also see them get punished for play expensive cards.
Personally, I’ve always enjoyed soft stax/tax strategies. I think this was a solid case made to defend the archetype. Totally agree that it’s a way to keep those more powerful decks in check in multiplayer games, if implemented correctly, of course. Honestly, after playing against a pubstomper the other day who dominated every game, it kind of made me want to build hatebears just to keep in my back pocket in case I find myself in that situation again. It could maybe help those lower powered decks keep up a bit. Lol
5:15 Sorry to say, but the Torpor Orb prevents the Portcullis from working so yea, Elesh Norn Grand Arbiter would work instead, preventing only their etb's, but not your own.
Oh it does doesn’t it you are right! I should’ve used humility as an example actually
@@thetrinketmage sadly even this has a way out, like the eldrazi (just destoy/exile, or whatever cast trigger they have) or a spell that can't be countered.
@@ScorpioneOrzion yup! It’s almost impossible to have an actual hard lock
@@thetrinketmagewell one would be brisila + teek + aether portal that are all can't be destroyed or exiled in any way, your opponents can't cast spells then, nor remove them.
Wow this video came out just as I was trying to construct a Light Paws stax deck. Now I have some good cards to start with.
Esper, & Azorius has, over time, become more of a kill on sight for my quicker decks.
You don't get to complain about being targeted if you have even a whiff of stax in your deck!
Kendrick level hater holy god
Wonder how well such dumb threat assessment works for you.
@@mmorkinism You don't get to complain about threat assessment when you're playing stax.
The aversion to Stax is the reason I kinda grew out of playing casual commander: I know players say they dislike playing against stax because they dislike longer games and feeling like they cannot do anything about it, but that's not the reason.
Casual Commander has basically built an unspoken meta that's basically, board wipes: Because of some of the characteristics of commander like being 4 players with 40 life each, the format naturally gravitated towards creature strategies. But instead of playing accepting control and stax as valid tactics against creature strategies at one point the social contract (That honestly, other influencers and youtubers for example, help build with constant casual commander etiquette videos) determined that most games of commander should be basically creature strategies with only multiple board wipes as the way to try to defend and close out games with very long, very drown out games to see which creature-based value engine prevails after several board wipes.
Stax ironically enough can win on top of said strategies by effectively shutting down creature strategies and/or value engines as well as effectively defending from players being able to even assemble their resources to go into constant board wipes. If a stax player has a win condition he can use on top however, those games would be much shorter wins from the stax player.
However, that's been deemed not socially acceptable, and to a lesser extent control is also frowned upon. Instead the format has warped into a Timmy paradise because apparently that's the stereotype everyone wants to foster as what 'casual gaming' means.
There's nothing wrong with creature strategies, I started on the format by playing mostly just Dragon tribal but I really disliked how many people complained about what I felt were valid tactics with infinite combos (Back then, dragon based but still, infinite mana and/or creatures combos) And once I doubled down on what I feel are valid tactics like control midrange decks and stax decks, I've basically saw a lot of people with really strong creature decks just quit on the spot when I was shutting down their creature strategies: They had removal, they were obvious ways to come back from it but more than one time people outright quit and conceded when I did stuff like temporarily lock out their commanders or their lands.
But why should I just play more creature strategies and board wipes if I don't feel like it? Why should I have to play 3-4 hour games when in that same timeframe I've found more cedh-oriented players I was playing with were able to finish 4 or 5 different games overall in the time the creature-happy 'casual' pods were still trying to resolve their 6th board wipe in a single match?
This is probably the comment here that I agree with the most.
In my opinion though, everything you just listed is exactly the reason why Stax (at least hard stax) should stay in CEDH. It’s not that it’s objectively more powerful than other archetypes, or that it can’t be used to make fun games with a little bit of politicking or changing out some salty cards for targeted hate/removal loops, but I think when people play casual commander that’s not what they’re there to do. It’s not really fun for the Stax player or anyone else unless everyone is playing to win. CEDH tables are way more chill in that regard, because you can’t get mad at a player for winning the game in a certain way unless you just have bad sportsmanship. But in Casual tables, people don’t want cutthroat games.
If you want to play something akin to Stax in casual commander, I’d recommend playing either pillow fort, or playing “Soft Stax”/hate bears like Trinket is saying.
The issue with commander is that the "Why should I" argument goes both ways and creates alot of friction between people *outside* of the game.
I can just as easily see your opponents saying "Why should I have to sac half my win condition/setup etc slots in the deck to increase my rate of drawing into removal enough to be allowed to play at all". Or "why should I keep entertaining this guy".
It's hard to get these ideas people have about how the game should be played to meld together well. It requires a certain level of maturity to let yourself get hit with the most demoralizing things you hate for the sake of someone elses idea of fun and walk away feeling like it was still a good investment of your time (and money, because Magic ain't cheap 😅). People often have to look inward and make big changes to themselves to make this work, but these are human beings we're talking about so that don't come easy lol
It's crazy out there but the more I think about it, everyone's argument is technically right if you're supposed to be playing for yourself and your own views. But that kind of selfishness being thrown into a format where people insist they got together to have a "good time" while invoking misery on one another is kind of a weird line to walk. But the second you try to reconcile it, it almost never produces the desired result anyways 🤔
Basically at some point, everyone HAS to suck it up or stay mad. There doesn't seem to be a functional balance (for the people, not the game).
@@Kurayamiblack scratch that, THIS is the comment here I agree with the most. However, both opinions are valid, and that's the beautiful thing about CEDH. If your like OP and you don't like the weird social dynamics of commander, CEDH offers a place where there is virtually NO SALT. And if you don't want to play against stax or turn 3 inf combos, that's what casual tables are for. They're not separate formats, but there's reason why they feel so different; the cultures surrounding them appeal to different people who have their own idea of "fun." I think players should decide when playing a deck whether it is best suited to the Pod they are playing against, because when they butt heads it just leads to a bad time for everyone.
No matter how long the argument, in the end neither pre-emptive stax nor infinite combos are casual gameplay. As soon as you put these things in play, people will conclude you're a stealth cEDH player who's out to shut down the game.
What would be good commanders to hit that "hard lock" state you're talking about?
Zur is 100% the best. But you could go with Daretti or Darevi the tactician
The biggest issue with stax in casual commander is that the powerful archetypes in casual commander that stax decks counter the best (ie lands), effect everyone equally. All stacks ends up doing in a casual table is slow things down, as the best deck is still the best deck if every deck is say 25% slower. While I do like stacks in cedh and even just more competitive tables that are still casual, full casual, everyone playing 7s games do not need stacks and in fact probably shouldn't have them at all
I builded a Gufd planeswalker deck last year. I started adding stax pieces that slow or block completely the attack phase, then obliterate for win condition. Seems a nice balance to me
I play an Avacyn hard stacks deck every once in a while and I find it funny when my friends treat me as the huge threat when the Ur-Dragon deck has 13 lands on board and I try to play a boardwipe only to be immediately countered. Stax is important, guys.
no your playgroup is right to focus you down. you'll just sit there with your thumb up your butt holding the game hostage and no one has fun, the ur-dragon player will end the game.
What a great channel. I really like the way you explain things. You have a pleasant voice and the topics you are creating your videos arround are fun and interesting. Good job!
I’m gonna have Rule 104.3a printed out in full on a T-shirt so I can gesture to it when my opponents get a lil salty
104.3a “A player can concede the game at any time. A player who concedes leaves the game immediately. That player loses the game.”
Unchecked ramp and combos are becoming so rampant that i and some other players inplayed arround have been heavily considered starting build stax decks. And i love playing storm decks and i feel stax is slowly starting to become a necesity along side targeted land removal.
You have inspired me to build a Stax Deck my good sir. I can already taste the salt its bound to produce