When he played Yu-Gi-Oh for the first time (on master duel) it only took him 2 hours before he said "I need to go first so I can prevent my opponent from doing anything"
@@laytonjr6601 That's just yugioh at this point though, the entire game has devolved into do your thing, stop your opponent from playing. They could maybe fix that if they introduced multiple formats and banned all the degenerate stuff that happens there in those formats, but their entire design philosophy is 'we must make things able to combo off on turn 1 or 2 at the latest.'
This is like if Rarran was in one of those infomercials - he's filmed in black and white and just perpetually failing to open a cabinet door, spilling spaghettio's on himself repeatedly. Giant red X's all over the footage.
I definitely understand the Golos argument. when I played Magic as a kid my thing was this Solar Eruption deck, colorless artifacts that got stronger if you paid diverse mana. So a few years later my friends hit me up about commander and my first thought is "damn lets commandify that old solar deck." But when I look up rainbow decks, its all Golos. Sure, I didnt have to play him , but it immediately made sense to me why he was the best card for the job. Even the most specific artifact buffing cards just dont compare to those general effects. And what happens if you take Golos? You start to think "I should put more 10+ cost spells into this deck, dont wanna exile a 1 cost". I think its that combo of having a very desirable universal effect AND warping your decklist in ways you might not want that makes him so problematic.
Yeah, Golos was always gonna get hit with the ban. If his effect was WUBRG Scry two the opportunity might still have been over centralizing but maybe not format warping, but the fact that you can load so many overcosted cards with strong effects with a generally good commander because you have the design space to make it work at below rate is broken and kinda toxic.
One thing worth mentioning for Golos, much like Rusko on arena, or Roxanne, Starfall savant, is that commanders that ramp into themselves are just incredibly strong because if you remove it, there’s no downtime in it coming back if they have the land, which ramps them even harder into casting those game winning spells.
Yeah it's a big part of why Golos was so strong that it strangled out diversity in the format, even if you remove Golos it usually doesn't actually hurt the Golos player because they are usually able to just recast him. Especially since he's quite likely to get a land that produces multiple mana. This led Golos to the unenviable position of being a commander that pays for it's own command tax and has a win condition stapled on, most Commander decks are going to at some point produce a ton of mana and win and Golos solved that puzzle single handedly. While also being able to run whatever cards you want. Golos was the best commander for almost every strategy and while that allowed for tons of really cool decks to appear that couldn't exist before, like Golos Gates, it also risked creating a very boring format.
@@TheNotshauna Yeah i built a golos deck that was 50/50 incredibly powerful cards that would catapult me into archenemy and incredibly crippling cards that might lose me the game. Very chaotic deck that was a hit to all the tables I brought it. But ultimately it was the paying for itself aspect that really puts it ahead. I suspect that nadu might also be banned in part for that reason.
I don't think it was obvious to Rarran that a 5-color commander satisfies the "creature of each color" requirement of Coalition Victory, since the wording suggests having 5 creatures.
Yeah, it wasn't for me. Knowing you only need a single creature and that you never *don't* have access to said single creature makes it so much more obviously strong.
@@tristenbreen7462That's like saying Mana Crypt is a bad mana rock because there's decks with a lot of low-cmc single-pip spells that can't use colorless mana well since there's so little generic to use it on in the card costs. Like duh, just don't play it in that deck. For the decks it does work in, it's stupidly powerful.
If you make a follow-up to this one, I'd really love to see the format you used a while ago for bans in the Urza/Mirrodin blocks, where Rarran had to choose between 3 cards for which one(s) were banned. There are a lot of interesting groupings you could do like: Gaia's Cradle - Serra's Sanctum - Tolarian Academy Library of Alexandria - Reliquary Tower - Inventor's Fair Flash - Sneak Attack - Defense of the Heart Yawgmoth's Bargain - Necropotence - Peer into the Abyss Balance - Cyclonic Rift - Impending Disaster Azusa, Lost but Seeking - Fastbond - Burgeoning
Coalition Victory, well worded explanation Since it's a free for all, you now have to assume "every" 5 color deck will run this for a free win. It is the easiest thing to cheese in the game. Pick Child of Alara, remember this deck can have, demonic tutor, imperial seal, mystical tutor, merchant scroll, enlighted tutor (prismatic omen/prismatic lantern), crop rotation, then every retrieval spell. You also have worldly and sylvan tutor Put the game in a state of board wipe or I win almost every turn, also your only way to full stop counter the coalition victory win is mind break tutor. Remove Child of Alara? Board state is reset to 0 you just repeat this over and over.
Not only that, it's something that some colours just don't have an answer to. Because yes, you could say "blue players should always have a counter spell up if the 5C player has their commander in play". But what does the green player do? The only counterplay is to hope they don't draw it.
Honestly, the fact that Rarrans answer to the question "Did you have fun? Would you wanna do another video like this" was "This video idea is really good so you should do more" made me respect him so much. Like sure, it's contentpilled gen z behavior at it's finest, but man, imagine having a friend who when asked if they had fun with your idea goes "dude, idc about that, we're 100% doing this again cuz it's a brilliant idea"! I would kill to have friends with that kind of energy :D
@@dude11579 It's somewhere between that and "the grindset" or "being on the grind". It's more organized and more business oriented. I don't know if you were looking for a serious answer, but there ya go :)
I wouldn't describe Rarran as "content-pilled" but I get what you are saying. I think he is just really conscious of how being a RUclipsr is his job and he thinks a lot about the "meta" of creating and content. Hence when he says to CGB he think this was an amazing idea he genuinley means that CGB has struck gold and he is impressed/happy for him.
I don't even think it's for the content specifically. In this specific vid, Rarran on multiple occasion gets why the card could get banned but also gets why an unbanned card is so hated that many don't get why it wouldn't get banned. Also, as a kinda-noob in MTG and a long-time hearthstone player much like Rarran, it's a genuinely fun discovery to hear about all the reasons (and CGB's performance reading lol), i'd definitely wanna see more of this just to learn more about commander.
For Winter Orb I think it needed to call out the unwritten text there - the 'as long as Winter Orb is untapped'. Without that provision I think Rarran's view is a little more reasonable (though it neglects that it can come into play with the other players tapped out, so it could be a lot more debilitating than he thinks). But with that provision it's much easier to lock enemies down and just play normally yourself, which makes it more frustrating. Edit - also the banlist changing over time is, to me, a reflection of the format becoming mainstream. When it's a niche format that few people play it's a lot easier to justify banning a card - but when it's a quasi-official one and the most popular one in magic, you kind of need a little more justification.
hard agree, he definitely should have shown rarran the reprinted version of winter orb from eternal masters with the updated oracle text, this old printing does not do the card justice since you have to both know how the rules worked back then AND that the card was changed to still work the same
...I don't understand: why would Winter Orb be tapped? Is that an unwritten function of its effect? Or does that just mean having a spell that can tap target permanent is an alternate way to deal with it when you can't destroy/remove it?
@@ShjadeNexayre You could also just have any permanents with a "Tap an untapped artifact/permanent" costing instant speed activated ability then just do that before it's your turn.
@@ShjadeNexayre When winter orb was printed, all artifacts with that sort of static effect only had that active while untapped. So they all effectively got errata to add that text to them afterwards. As for how it changes things, you just use any effect that can tap an artifact at instant speed, so you tap it at end of turn of the last opponent. So at the start of your turn it's inactive, so you untap all your lands and the Winter Orb itself.
Another thing about Gifts Ungiven: in commander, you could probably usually politic someone into picking the cards you want them to pick. That would make it a lot more powerful than intended. That’s probably why it’s banned. Kind of like how Trade Secrets can get out of hand when you politic it in a multiplayer format.
Golos absolutely deserved the ban hammer, it was by far the most popular commander of all time when it was banned, more than doubling the 2nd place commander Atraxa, Praetor’s Voice. It paid for it’s own commander tax on ETB, by searching any land out and usually that land made more than one mana, so removing Golos didn’t hurt the deck, it sometimes made it stronger to recast and get another land. The (2)WUBRG ability was the most broken part, giving it 5-color identity and it doesn’t shuffle like Urza, Lord High Artificer does, so you can stack the top card(s) and guarantee a bomb spell every time. The amount of online commander games with 1 Golos player was insane, more than half the time in my experience, and there were a bunch of games with 2 Golos players at the table. It was a very oppressive card in that aspect of the game, which is what the RC said they banned it for.
I actually have a Golos deck myself (rule 0 to even be able to play it) where my goal is to flicker Golos as much as possible and pull 9 gates from my deck followed by mazes end :)
Funny you said Atraxa and Golos in the same breath. I was researching to get into commander at the time and I literally only wanted to build a WUBG deck because I hate red. Golos was the only alternative to the way way more expensive Atraxa (the price wasn't even the problem, it was that it was sold out) then they banned Golos and I scrapped Magic entirely. Partner commanders was the only option but I was too demotivated. Then a few years later I checked back to see if there were any new ways to play WUBG but then I saw Magic had devolved into Fortnite-style crossover BS and experimenting with sci-fi and in a snap sold all my old cards that I still had left.
@@Vinterloft That sounds kind of unreasonable. I don't think WotC is the most generous company and I understand not liking their business practice lately, but if the price of Atraxa, a roughly $15 card right now, *wasn't* the problem then what was? Partner commanders are the only option? There are tons of rainbow commanders like Kenrith and Morophon that just let you build whatever deck you want to, and they're both like a few bucks max. Most of the crossover stuff are Secret Lair "skins" of sorts over existing cards, so its not something that's "invading" mainline magic. If you aren't motivated, hey you aren't motivated and that's fine, but it sounds like a mountain out of a molehill that prevented you from playing a really fun format.
I'm surprised no one has discussed the wacky "fail to find" trick with Gifts Ungiven. For the uninitiated, the rules of Magic state that when you search a hidden zone, such as a library, for a card with a specific condition, you can fail to find a card that meets the condition. This happens all the time with fetchlands, lands that can be sacrificed to find other lands with specific land types. Its not unheard of for a player to sac a Flooded Strand, look through their deck then realize they have no more Island or Plains. So, going back to Gifts Ungiven, the wording says "search your library for 4 cards with different names & reveal them. Target player then chooses 2 of these cards. Put those in the graveyard & the rest in your hand." In a sneaky play first pioneered by Frank Karsten, the caster of Gifts can choose to only find 2 cards, saying they failed to find any other cards with different names. That forces the target opponent to place those cards in their opponent's graveyard, presumably exactly where the Gifts caster wants them.
I find it crazy that Rarran didnt see that card as omega-busted in a format that forces you to go highlander AND has a min. deck size of 100 cards. A single good tutor effect can create combo decks from nothing, even in hearthstone. But the 2-4 card tutor is just a fine, strong card? lmao :D
@@IplayTeemoasaWard Hearthstone literally already has a 4 mana, tutor 4 card that's used to draw entire combos - Juicy Psychmelon. I'm a little surprised Rarran didn't make that conection after CGB talked about drawing your combo with Gifts.
On the topic of gifts I am surprised Intuition didn't come up. Specifically how it's basically THE SAME CARD AS GIFTS. But one mana cheaper and gets 3 cards with 1 to hand for one mana cheaper. So, you can still get two recursion and a combo piece (or sometimes, like in breach lines, a combo piece double serves as recursion) or just three pieces that complete a combo you already have in hand. Card is just infinitely more expensive and so less accessible than gifts.
@@TheMessinger47 true, and my understanding is that the errata was precisely to make the card's use cases slightly more clear and less reliant on a rules technicality. which is a smart move by wotc imo
The problem with "Just tech in a card to deal with it" in commander is that a) there is such a huge number of cards legal that you can't possibly tech for every situation. And b) you have a hundred cards in your deck, so you have to DRAW that tech card. If you want to consistently deal with something you need 2 or 3 if not more tech cards, not 1.
The card also has to generate insane value (Meathook Massacre) or do something really unique (Force of Will). Since you have multiple opponents, you can't one-for-one because it leaves the other players not in the exchange up card advantage.
Also, sometimes someone will have an answer, but because it's multiplayer, they won't even use it right away if they don't think it's to their benefit. If you have a Vandalblast but also a very slow hand and someone casts Winter Orb, you may well shrug and say "hey it'll slow down players 3 & 4" and not cast it until later, meaning players 3 & 4 still get to experience the fun of a thrilling Winter Orb game for awhile.
Yeah true, but weird emotions too. The banlist is a total joke, Primeval Titan is banned but not things like Sheoldred. If PT would be more toxic than Sheoldred 😅. And thats just one example.
@@timiturret148 I think their justification for PT is that its ability to find any two lands was too much mana advantage for a colour that already is almost always in advantage from a mana standpoint. If PT, with the same effect, would have been red or white (regardless of colour pie philosophy) nobody would have said anything, but it being green is too much advantage for green. Or at least that's how I understand the justification.
@@NeroCM it's more because it's not limited to basic lands. If it was just basic lands, it'd be cracked, but probably not banned. But looking for two of any land every turn is way too strong, especially when lands like Maze's End, Nykthos, Dark Depths, and Field of the Dead exist
the thing about emrakul is that if it's your commander your deck does exactly one thing and it needs to be stopped. If it's stopped it does nothing and if it isn't interacted with that person just wins. It's very linear. You basically play like 50 ramp artifacts.
I can see it being seen as fun if it isn't being abused - but obviously that's not the case, if someone is playing winter orb it's going to be asymmetric. But yeah, a trade-off between "should I spend my mana now or wait a turn for a bigger effect" could, in theory, be a fun mini-game for the table. Just, uh, not in the way that Winter Orb *actually* plays out as (which I don't get the impression Rarran was thinking of)
@@casteanpreswyn7528 I can totally get that, but this really isn't the general case Just look at the amount of like Urza decks abusing Winter Orb, sure, it's not everyone, but it is a large enough majority for it feel like everyone a guy is reasonably going to meet
@adamxue6096 I think it is the "general case" because the vast majority of commander players aren't trying to play cEDH. I'd agree with you if the most common form of the format was high powered and trying to win as soon as possible. However, that isn't how things work in Commander/EDH. Bringing up Urza decks proves my point.
@@casteanpreswyn7528 If you look at EDHrec, because that's one of the easiest place to look at for statistics You can see that not only is Winter Orbs not the most popular card to play (in 1% of all decks as a colorless, compared to really popular cards like rhystic, which is played in 29% of all decks) You can also see that just in the commanders, Urza, Derevi, Meria, put together is nearly 10k decks out of the 32k that you know for sure are gonna be asymmetrical just by looking at the commanders. There are more ways to make it one sided as well, like mass creating treasures circumventing the drawback, having a crap ton of mana dorks and rocks etc. etc.. Point is, if asymmetrical just in the command zone can easily come up to nearly 1/3rd of the decks winter orb is in, there's literally no telling how many more decks and commanders that can circumvent it are being used, from most players experience with winter orb, they will tell you its probably asymmetrical. Also, nothing wrong with playing for fun and less so for win - I do that too But cEDH is very primarily a proxy friendly format and so there are actually quite a lot of players for it, and they can absolutely have a ton of fun with it. cEDH is less well represented with things like EDHrec as well, because most good decks comes in one optimized list with very few small variations and deviations, meaning that more players will be actually playing essentially the same deck. Even if you think that Winter Orb can come in a lower power table, this surely hasn't been the case for many peoples experiences with the card, there's a reason it's on top1 salty list.
@@viktorgabriel2554That's like 1% of play scenarios. The other 99% of the time it might as well read "(Quick Effect) You can discard this card from your hand, and if you do, then your opponent ends their turn." Playing against any mildly good deck will have them draw into their hand traps that can make you stop playing even more, so the chance that you just win off someone's Maxx C is not high at all.
@@NeoBoneGirlironically, the presence of so many HOPT causes many of those draws to be dead anyways. Imperm and Veiler are the exceptions since they came out before or during 2018. Nibiru is the only handtrap that REALLY matters, but pre-2024 you almost always had an omni-negate ready for Nibiru. Hell, one of Yugioh's oldest "good" archetypes in Six Samurai is capable of infinite special summons and, since Nibiru tributes, triggers the Red-Blue Loop so long as you have Gates active.
The bigger part of Gifts is that since you're searching in a hidden zone, you can fail to find two cards and then force your opponents to put those two cards into your yard. That means you could search, say, Jin-Gitaxis and Unburial Rites, then you can get your Jin for 4 mana on the following main phase. Not to mention, there are cards like Vedalken Orrery so that you can play the cards you tutor immediately.
I think the main point of Coalition Victory is that it makes it so that every single 5-color commander single-handedly creates a game-winning board state and makes it so players playing "nice" 5-color commanders are always the archenemy. Now, it's even worse because Leyline of the Guildpact exists, so you can win by Coaliton on turn 2.
Even then Prismatic Omen existed which was a two mana green enchantment with the same all basic lands typing effect. Though now it’s less problematic as more 5-color commanders are just in the identity, like Kenrith, who don’t meet the requirements on their own
How is it worse than the dozens of two card instant win combos? If the goal is to make the game less degenerate than the ban list is an utter failure. It's the most degenerate format outside of vintage which is balanced around everything being broken and expensive as a starting point.
@@gothosfolly I think it stays banned because low-power groups hate to play against it, but keeping it banned also doesn't affect the high-power groups in the slightest. The Rules Committee has basically said it rarely considers "competitive" commander. The complete bonkers power available in 99-card singleton Vintage means that basically everything is broken so it takes something truly absurd to move the needle on cEDH bans (Flash -> Hulk combos probably being the best example I can think of where cEDH needed it gone). So most of what they do is ban for lower-power formats. Well, actually they mostly do nothing. There's probably 3-4 more cards I think they could remove that wouldn't be missed, but so far no movement.
Then there's Command Beacon to get any commander into you hand to then be cheated in ... Also there's Commander's with eminence who don't even need to leave the command zone
Golos also had a problem with the Commander Tax as well (which I was surprised never got mentioned in this video). His ETB ramp also lets him cheat on half the tax for the next time you have to cast him, even if you arenxt getting something like Cabal Coffers.
Emrakul isn't always ramped out. It's often cheated into play for free, for small amounts of mana with things like Joira which was popular then, reanimated at instant speed, snuck into play with things like Golem's Eye, there was even the Animar temur deck that could make Emrakul free.
I mean red alone has sneak attack. Which is only 4 mana to play and 1 to use. In a one on one commander game your just dead at 5 mana. Your out of mana. Bam sneak attack tap 1 red and here is a 15/15 with annihilator 6 protection from everything that flies and can't be countered. It dies at end of turn goes back into your deck with everything else and you can tutor it all over again.
@jadegrace1312 that is part of Emrakul's problem though. The way the play pattern works out is that Emrakul is cheated out, hits but doesn't kill a player while reducing them to turn 0 or 1 on board state. This means a player is kinda stuck having lost the game while still be forced to watch hoping to top deck into something that let's him play something. A big balancing issue with multi-player games in general is having situations where a player is effectively out of the game yet not eliminating them from the game.
55:10 - you are forgetting the false friend deck - "Veteran Explorer. Return Veteran Explorer with Phyrexian Reclamation. Sacrifice Veteran explorer to ashnod's Altar, play it 2 more times." Or " Collective Voyage for 5 - oh, you Twincast it? nice." now the game ender for that deck is just "Tap Boseiju, Who shelters all, Mind Grind for 12. "
The thing about commander is if you’re playing for fun it’s hard for it to be all about winning. If winning is the only way you have fun, you’re only going to have fun 25% of the time. You have to get enjoyment out of the experience in some way. Even cEDH players enjoy the act of trying to play optimally and solve the puzzle of their table. They have to. If not they don’t last long in the format.
This is why I fully agree with rarran’s assessment of winter orb in this video. Am I going to lose to it? Probably. Am i going to think it’s at least an interesting play experience to try playing optimally through it? Absolutely
a whole table of precon commander is such a fun experience too, we did that with friends with the set of wh40k decks, and they are all kinda shit but on the same level so everybody is just hanging out doing their crappy stuff and it was a great time.
@neilu7132 "they are all kinda shit" they are the strongest, consistently, precons released ever. Not even the eminence commanders are as consistenly powerful.
@@casteanpreswyn7528 I don't see how that contradicts my point :) They might be good for precons but anyone with some experience and even a small collection can easily identify weak cards and find suitable upgrades. However, as they talked about in the video, the point of commander isn't always to have a strong deck but rather an interesting one for the table. hence why it's fine to bring a pile of shit as long as it's funny shit :D I once made a deck that had no other goal than spread maximum chaos, playing a bunch of cards with positive effects for the whole table and stuff that digs in decks to cast spells (wand of wonders is definitely one of the cards of all times). I obviously didn't win but it was super fun.
One of the problems with emrakul is that IF you can cheat it out, it's almost impossible to deal with. You losing the extra turn doesn't matter if he comes out early because that protection from colors stops most normal ways of dealing with it. You have to have even more specific destruction cards to handle it, if you can even get them early enough to be usable to effect it.
I had him in my Satoro Umezawa deck and would ninjitsu him out for 4 mana...I felt worse doing that than Blightsteel Colossus but it wasn't an instant game over, but was pretty much over
@@uS0ra Yeah, i think this is one of those combo reasons where yeah cheating him out basically wins you the game as no one can deal with it but even more importantly he holds the game hostage as he slowly wins the game. I think this is a very important reason as to why a lot of infinite combos don't get banned but cards like Emrakul do. Commander really hates when a game is held hostage while one player just durdles forever until they eventually find a win after wasting peoples time. If someone just slaps down an insta win combo then everyone just shuffles up and goes again. The only insta win combos that are significantly frowned upon are extremely efficient low card combos. Things like Thassa's Oracle and Demonic Consultation which is a 2 card 3 mana insta win combo that also happens to be in blue and black the best colors to draw and tutor in making it extremely efficient.
@uS0ra yea but blightsteel, etc. Can be path of exiled for 1 mana, or pacified, or tapped, kul is just much harder to deal with unless you are specifically targeting for him, and since it's colorless it can be in any deck
@@DrBocks big creatures sure but theres plenty of like 2 card combos 3 card combos that are about as easy as cheating emrakul into play that just win the game, stop everyone from being able to play or give you infinate mana or something
I think something that might have helped Rarran understand why Winter Orb is so unfun to play against would have been to show him one of the ways to break the symmetry of it (or even just the oracle text, which includes the untapped condition). Because I've never seen a Winter Orb deck that plays it "fairly", they always break the symmetry (or tab it) in some way, turning it into one of the worst stax pieces in the game to play against.
12:00 as a person how has exclusively played commander for years now I find this answer very interesting. I don't count games by time I count games by actions and turns. If the game has tons of fast turns and is over in like a half hour (I honestly don't pay enough attention to even have a frame of reference on time) I would enjoy that more than say a super long game but I didn't do much because I was hard countered or got bad draws or whatever. The only short games I dislike are when the person wins and I didn't even get to do much more than play a few lands 46:00 I prefer this 500000000 times over winter orb since people only use winter orb in decks that use mana rocks and thus don't get effected by it. winter orb makes me not able to do stuff while normally not doing much to the deck running it and thus feels much less fun than just rhystic study, it might help them win far more that the orb but at least I can still play the game 52:20 emrakul is very easy to play you will never cast it for full cost and even if you do, it is very possible to rapidly ramp into her cost as I've seen from landfall decks. You could cheat it out with things like 'fist of suns' which makes it 5 mana to play as a for instance, or using the ninja commander that lets you ninjutsu anything for 4 mana 1:08:30 for some it is not wanting to be unfun, but for others its less about not wanting to be unfun and more about not wanting to get targeted as you have 3 other players that might decide to end you because they don't want to deal with your deck being on the board
Okay so original Emrakul. A) She's obviously the best possible creature to cheat into play, which has only gotten easier over time. Some of those ways to cheat her into play even count as casting so you get the extra turn, because why not. B) It's best not to imagine we're fair ramping into her, we're doing nonsense and casting her for 15 on turn 4 or some garbage like that. C) There's just never a time when you're going to see an Emrakul hit the table and think 'yeah she sure improved this game, it's good this happened'. It's just always going to be flipping the grill and turning the fourth of july into the fourth of nonsense.
hmm...you make a good point actually, about fair ramping. I was just wondering how fast I could get to fifteen mana in my Saheeli artefact deck, and yeah...turn 4 cast Emrakul is entirely possible wiÞout even having my commander on Þe field...really changes Þe perspective
I don't think Emrakul is the best creature to cheat into play, unless you can get the extra turn trigger while cheating it in. Atraxa or Griselbrand is better in most cases.
@1:28:00 I can see the easy ban on Golos. There's a lot of "This Commander is fun and okay, let me just run it IN the Golos deck, rather than build around it as a Commander... so then I can just put whatever in the Golos deck". It very much kills the fun and flavor of the deckbuilding, and you can't rely on players to voluntarily NOT take the cheap and easy route.
It's funny to me, seems I never knew any meta players because I played commander in 3 different friend groups over the years and I have never even seen Golos before this video :D
@@Gravewhisper I feel bad for saying this multiple times in the same comment section. But I thought I should point it out to you as well. Golos was great budget option, where you could get 1 Golos, to fill the slot as commander for 4 or more decks. Even if you didn't think Golos was stronger than the commander you wanted to run, you might still not want to spend real money on a commander, when you can just run Golos. (and unlike other 5 color options, Golos helps you with almost any gameplan.)
@@mawillix2018 Yeah, that's the big thing. A lot of the actual 5-color Legendaries suck. And more than a few of the 2-3 color options. If you were building your Commander deck around the colors rather than the Commander itself, Golos is just better than many options. You bring him out once or twice, you get the best nonbasic Lands in your deck. As CGB noted, you run him in mono black to tutor that Cabal Coffers. I quit Magic like 10 years ago and even I can see that dude is crazy in this format.
If people want to ruin the experience for themselves then let them. Golos shouldn't have been banned because "Oh it promotes unhealthy building habits". He was good but not format warping or game ruining .
I have experienced winter orb and study and it was a casual game. The whole tone of the table changed. We murdered that guy. He instantly became arch enemy. He drew 20 cards and we didn't care. It is as painful as you can imagine it to be. Re: The gifts ban - the other thing about gifts is that you can just look for two cards and put them into the graveyard. It's very strong in a singleton format where your commander can also be part of a combo piece. Combo in some ways is easier to execute in commander because the commander is always available. So I get gifts.
As a non-mtg player, this is the best video of it's type that you've made so far for me. It was incredibly fun the whole way through and taught me enough about commander that I unironically want to pick up mtg just to make a commander deck I can play with my friends (I never got it when an acquaintance said they were making a commander deck and made it seem like a huge deal... But it IS a huge deal in a really cool way!!!)
Would definitely love to see more of these! I think a missing discussion point from Opposition Agent is that the Rules Committee (and quite rightfully so in my opinion) doesn't tend to ban cards that go off in high power pods but don't do much in lower power pods. Sure, Opposition Agent is disgusting if all your opponents are playing every fetch possible and running multiple tutors, but if you're running all those the implied idea is that you're either running ways to deal with Opposition Agent, or doing equally broken things yourself. In a lower power pod you don't have those kinds of answers / counter moves to make, but you're also not running a bunch of tutors and Opposition Agent might as well be a vanilla flash creature. It's the exact same reasoning that leaves Dockside Extortionist unbanned (which would be an excellent card for a follow up video!), play it in a low powered pod and see just how bad the card can actually be when people aren't running optimal decks.
Winter Orb is a lot like the Celestial Alignment deck in Hearthstone. It bills itself as a symmetrical card but really it lets you play fairly normally afterwards while restricting your opponent to 1 mana afterwards.
@@ich3730 he means that the deck with winter orb plays whith normal amount of mana (by using creature or artifact mana) while everyone else is stuck with the winter orb effect
Something glossed over here with Emrakul, is that as a commander, you have permanent access to it, and Rarran isn't told how the command zone works in detail. A colorless deck with a bunch of artifact ramp can basically play this turn 5ish, take an extra turn, play some other ramp artifact, swing with Emrakul, send it back to the command zone with various effects, recast, and continue this cycle until you win. Side note on Elesh Norn. The outcry from the rules committee wasn't about banning but was more about how generically good Elesh Norn is and was begging wizards not to print it. They don't like that wizards keeps printing generic auto includes that fit in to every deck of a color.
Speaking of generic auto includes. IDK if u watch him but EDHdeckbuilding made a Fantastic video talking about that. And claims that wizard's is trying their best to turn commander into a rotating format with that philosophy. Every set prints 10+ auto includes so by the time the year ends, you're entire deck is basically changed every year because you have to update it with all these new cards.
Turns out Elesh Norn is soft banned. It ends up turning off 1.5-2.5 decks at the table, and the other players either use all out player removal, or lose to it.
Just like not banning other powerful cards because people just rule 0 them out, like thassa's oracle. You can just say that emrakul is one of that decks that is NOT strong enough for cEDH and too strong for casual. Why ban it?
oh my gosh. As someone who played colorless eldrazi for years with over 50% of the deck being ramp getting to 10 mana was exceptionally difficult. Even optimized getting to 10 on turn 5 was a feat. MAYBE I could do it like 50% of the time. Getting to 15 without a commander that just refills your hand like Kozilek? Oof.. GOOD LUCK! I don't think Emrakul is ban worthy. But people are so irrational about extra turn spells and annihilator that I'm not surprised people cried about it so hard it got banned.
@@VkrauRJ because its not about being too powerful for cedh. it's that its just so miserable to play against because it doesn't outright win. It's also a 1 card issue, Thoracle requires 2 to win and so do most of the cedh combos at minimum and they're so easily interactable. Emrakul is near impossible to interact with and can be cheated out way too easily being pure colorless mana. (animar, Rakdos, fast mana rocks). Shit like Kinnin doubles mana gain from rocks so with him you could get emrakul out easily. What REALLY did it tho, is Emrakul was a promo so it was literally Everywhere and it was such a problem that they decided to ban it.
As a guy who brought Biorhythm to multiplayer games before the Commander Banlist existed, as a guy who almost always lost because he didn't really understand Magic due to just starting out -- I will say it was an amazing experience being the guy causing ragequits for a change. It was with Biorhythm that I first tasted the twisted joy of being toxic.
Biorhythm is such a dumb ban because if you can resolve an 8 mana sorcery that can accidentally kill you, you should win the game. I'd rather deal with that than Tooth and Nail, Omniscience, or Bolas's Citadel (which are also cards that shouldn't be banned).
Really not that much different from that white card that freely allows you to distribute life points however you want (but you can't put them below 1). Sand of Time? A single damage ping is not going to be stopped if any of these big spells got through
@@nekrataali Funny you should mention accidentally killing yourself. My fondest memory involving Biorhythm is the time I played it, and another player in the group responded with an instant board wipe.
@@fancygiraffe3340 Do you mean "Reverse the sands" (Redistribute any number of players' life totals.)? That just swaps life totals of players and does not put players to 0 or 1 (unless someone was already at 1). I don't know what other card you could mean.
Please I want more of you two bantering about the two card games that I played, no longer play, but like to hear about from time to time :) These videos are a nice thing to listen to on my way to work.
The thing with Golos, and i imagine, about any commander who ramps and is cheap enough (around 3 to 5 mana cost), is that the ramp effect halfway pays for commander tax. Back then in MTGA i remember slamming it ASAP regardless of my ability to protect it, or use its activated ability. And as long as you hit your land drop, you can keep doing it, until everything else is cheap. It was so dominating you had to use a Golos deck to beat a Golos deck.
For Rhystic Studies versus some of the other cards on the ban list, I think the key question is "what's the counterplay to this?". In the case of a card like Coalition Victory, the answer is basically "have a counterspell", which not every Commander deck can do. Rhystic Studies typically plays out like a Sphere of Resistance, where everyone just pays one more mana for their spells. Sure, there's an asymmetrical tempo drawback from it, but it's not egregious, especially in a format so known for being heavy on ramp and big mana.
While you can also stop CV with a removal spell (it checks on resolution), it has a negative effect on the whole format where anytime you play against any 5c commander, you need to always hold up removal or regularly kill it, which makes a pretty negative play experience for people with 5c commanders who aren't playing it as well.
Commander players will claw and bite and scream at you for playing rhystic and then refuse to pay the 1 lol. I honestly think smothering tithe is way worse given the tax of 2 instead of 1.
@@DemonBlanka more than that, you can willingly choose not to play a spell if you cannot pay rhystic tax, but you cannot choose not to draw for the turn (or if something like wheel forces you to draw cards) to avoid tithe tax.
@@DemonBlanka I wouldn't care if there was no tax and you just drew a card each spell. What actually annoys me is folks interrupting every ten seconds to ask if you payed the 1. If only everyone was as attentive to their triggers as Rhystic Study players are!
on the emrakhul ramp part: I've seen players turn 3 this fucker when we had a weekend of all banned cards allowed. With only emrakhul not banned, I've seen it turn 4 regularly, till we re-banned it in our group again
Yes. I was not surprised that Rarran didnt get that. But someone who seriously runs Emrakhul basically only plays ramp lands and creatures. Eldrazi Decks in themself are basically ramp decks. I played with an Eldrazi Deck one time. Altough it was not an Emrakhul deck but a Kozilek deck I had so much more mana then everyone else it was insane.
54:32 I used to play with my uncle a lot a couple of years ago and he had this card from winning a local tournament. He built a deck around this card and it was absurdly hard to beat. It was a mono green deck and it relied on a couple of mana building effects and card draw. Unfortunately I don’t remember everything but the main Mana builders were creatures that tap for mana. Specifically one that taps for as much mana as you control Wall Creatures, which obviously helped the deck in two ways because you couldn’t aggro it. I believe it also did something with Eldrazi tokens or something. But I could not beat that deck for quite a while until I build a 5 color Ally deck which was able to win maybe 30-40% of duels. To be fair neither one of us really played competitively at that point but I fondly remember those days because even though it was difficult to beat it was fun to play against since it wasn’t salt inducing (don’t know how to describe it better). Once I actually managed to win with this card on the board. So even though it’s stronger than you make it sound, I agree that it shouldn’t be banned
Thinkin emrakul should not be banned is crazy That can only come from the perspective of either someone that only plays cedh, where it is infact a non-problem, or from someone who doesn't play casual commander at all
@@mildsatyr3731 Nope. From a quick google search, it requires one of each basic land *type*, but not one of each basic land. Thus, it doesn't require a Wastes.
As soon as hullbreacher was teased I called it being banned and my playgroup said it'd not that bad, it isn't ban worthy. I proxies it before it even released and built a deck arround getting it into play as fast as possible then spamming wheel effects and my playgroup changed thier minds really quick.
I once went first and played Mana Crypt + Island, flashed in Hullbreacher right before I untapped and then played Teferi's Puzzle Box. We spent more time shuffling than playing that game
More like, "I have this in my binder thus it's legal". But yes, it was a fairly biased process by Sheldon and co, with actual balance only being a distant consideration.
@@ClubbingSealCub i have been on the other side of Iona with a mono-red deck. It's not fun when because of a card you could not respond to, you are locked out of the game entirely, with no recourse other than ask/beg your fellow players to deal with it.
@@thedeathray8620 I used to play Unstable Obelisk and duplicant and Nevinyrral's Disk in my deck back in the day when my playgroup had Iona running around since those were decent removal anyway for casual magic
I wish I could explain properly to both these players why emrakul is COMPLETELY busted. It's the same problem as mirrodin, all the cheap artifacts that make mana casting more cheap artifacts that make mana. and your entire deck IS artifact ramp. emrakul can come down as early as turn 2, and around turn 5 on average. and if you kill it(with your sorcery speed removal?) it just comes back from the command zone.
54:21 One if the biggest issues I saw with Emrakul, was that every game basically turned into players passing around Emrakul and the game was won by whoever kept Emrakul.
Showing Rarran winter orb without the updated oracle text seemed a little unfair. Of course he got it right but it would have been even more funny if he understood that you could make it asymmetric when judging the card.
I honestly think the time walk reasoning is pretty fair. If you see a 500$ card that is super strong being played, that can DEFINITELY stop you from getting into mtg commander if you haven't played magic.
I agree, though also I think that as the format is becoming more and more friendly to proxies, especially of expensive reserved list cards like the OG dual lands, the cost argument for the ban might seem less of a reason to keep it there. Also Timetwister is legal in the format, and a real copy of the card will cost you upwards of $7,000
Also early day commander had really weak card pool and most people just had one deck and power levels were all over the place. General consensus was to build as good multiplayer deck as you could and most people didn't know or have cards to the few good combos that may have been available at that time. Typical finishers were normal bomb rares, 6 mana 6 power with one keyword ability or so, maybe with recursion and then there were only few powerful finishers like time stretch, insurrection or blatant thievery that were decent, so the cards that power nine (or any other super expensive good card) would replace were very weak.
47:51 Yes. I have been on that board. We're still friends. It was in their Kynaios and Tiro of Meletis deck and after playing against that deck for around six months we managed to protest enough to get her to remove the Winter Orb from the deck. We no longer put Winter Orb in any of our decks because of the trauma.
One thing of note with Winter Orb is you didn't use the version of the card with updated rules text. Winter orb only applies while winter orb is untapped. I can be made asymmetrical especially with Urza as the commander.
Dark Ritual, Sol Ring, a bunch of moxes; turn 2 and 3 Braids were common and that usually meant the Braids player is going to be the only one playing magic.
I personally hated when they removed the "As Commander" list because a lot of these were honestly fine inside decks. Braids is one example of this. I used to have her in my Muldrotha deck and she allowed me to have an easy way to recast a few of my Etb effects consistently.
I can confirm. I’ve played Winter Orb and Rhystic Study on the same board, and players don’t like it very much. Just as much as War’s Toll and Mana Web on the same board.
Recreating super weird normal magic cards and un-set cards in a custom card creator and having Rarran guess which are UN-cards and which arent like what Rarran did in his real vs fake hearthstone card video would be awesome
What is important to take into mind is: If you play a really unfun card, it not only make that experience bad. It makes you a target. And if you do that a lot, you become a permanent target in your playgroup.
its so easy to get to 15 mana tho. I think Emrakul is the perfect example of a card that should be banned in commander. Its the same thing with Coalition victory. I just feel like pros judge the casual community very harshly.
Yeah so this was fun. Played MtG for ~16 years myself, most of which has been EDH. Rarran's reactions and the thought process on each of the cards is so entertaining, as has been the case for all your and Rarran's collabs, but this might be the best one yet. More of this for sure, cheers!
Some commander specific rules that Rarran may be missing (it at least didn't come up in this video) is commander tax, which is a big part when considering Golos who ramps himself halfway to his next cast.
In my pod we all have one "no banlist" deck, and my buddy has an emrakul deck. He regularly casts it turn 5 or 6. Waste, sol ring, arcane signet, ancient tomb, mana crypt, gilded lotus, hedron archive, waste is 16 mana. With that hand, you have emrakul turn 4. Turn 4. some people have 3 lands and a draw engine.
Crypt Ghast, Mirari's Wake, High Tide, Mana Geyser, Smothering Tithe. There are so many ways to hit 15 mana with ease, I know CGB hasn't played against this. Much respect to the king, but thank goodness he ain't on the committee.
CGB + Rarran has been one of my favorite video series in the last year and I am one of the admins on the competitive EDH discord and moderators of the subreddit. This video is the funniest shit I've ever seen and I love you both, this is great.
55:18 let’s just ignore that there are multiple ways to ‘cast’ for free…hell, darksteel monolith is there specifically FOR eldrazi… then there’s forsaken monument which effectively doubles your ramp (so if, when ramping, the goal is typically to get to 7-8 mana, monument doubles the colorless mana you produce so that 7-8 instead becomes 14-16)
Banning cards based on price is never correct. Prices are determined by a card's ability to see play and how many copies are in circulation. Mishra's Workshop isn't banned in EDH and it's a $2,000 card. The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale is $4,000. Neither card is stronger than Time Walk or Contract from Below, both of which are rightfully banned for power level reasons. If you ban every card worth more than $25 in a format and that format becomes popular, the banlist will change by the hour as staples in the format emerge. Or you get people deliberately manipulating the price to force a ban.
@@nekrataali A lot of the reasons why commander cards were banned back then doesn't make sense today largely because this was an entirely different time period. Time Walk was banned in 2005, before the rules committee was even formed and around the same time as Scott Larabee was introduced the format and when he took it back to WotC. This was when Sheldon Menery was still spreading the format through the pro-tour scene primarily judges, if you were following Commander in 2005 you are someone who is deeply invested in Magic likely through the pro-scene or through a single article written in 2004. These people knew exactly what they were signing up for, so there was less pressure for people to ban things that are too powerful, because they were deliberately avoiding the most powerful effects.
@@nekrataaliit's also worth noting that the rules committee is separate for wizards and so doesn't have the option to reprint cards to reduce their price (though the reserved list complicates Wizard's ability to do that). Also, you can get Contract from Below for $2 and it is banned for Ante reasons not for power level (though it definitely deserves to be on there for either reason).
You and Rarran get me my nostalgia fix for both MTG and HS simultaneously! These videos are some of my favorite things to watch on youtube and look forward to. Please keep these videos coming, they are so fun! Thanks again for all the laughs and good times
Note on Coalition Victory: Think about it like this Victory Condition 1: Basic Land Types. With lands existing having 2-3 basic land types, and ways to tutor it with fetchlands a lot of 5 color decks will have all basic land types out by default. The commander of a 5 color deck is also something that a 5 color deck wants to cast. So this card would be a must- auto - include in any 5c commander deck bc it reads "if your commander has been out for a turn and is not instantly removed win the game" - which is a bad experience both for the person playing the deck (the deck doesn't do what it aims to do, it just wins, plus the commander is hated from the table with every removal available) and for everyone else. Its just a single card that reads "win the game" that does not require any build around and fits in every. single. 5c commander deck
This was an excellent video CGB I loved hearing the thought process of an "outsider" on the ban process. I think you gave good context afterwards, too ... besides the gaslight for content. lol jk that was a good switcheroo ... you're cool
Almost all the reasons given for bans in this video are not about card power, but preventing certain play patterns. This is hard for certain players to understand. Emrakul, for example. Might be the best creature ever printed. Was not designed for Commander in mind. You're almost never hard-casting this, there are way more ways to put it onto the battlefield without paying it's mana cost. Let's say, turn 4 on average. You give it haste, it attacks and that person is basically out of the game. In a purely competitive sense, this is great! But, since this the best creature to do this with, all decks that were using a similar strategy before now swap to using Emrakul. It's the best, after all, so why weaken yourself by not playing the best card for your strategy? Now all those decks revolve around this single play pattern: Cheat Emrakul > win game (eventually). But Emrakul isn't limited by colors, rights? Well I might as well throw it in my deck, if other people are going to try and cheat it into play; if they play symmetrical effect, expecting to take advantage, now I have a trump card: Emrakul! Now Emrakul gets put into more and more decks, especially as people see it winning games. A decent percentage of games come down to "Who has the Emrakul?" or "How do I deal with Emrakul?". There's a video game design term called "dominant strategy": the best play pattern, that beats all others, at accomplishing a goal. Players will use the dominant strategy, *even if it isn't fun*, to achieve that goal. People will also spread this information, and soon most players are using the dominant strategy. If this is not fun, now the "best way to play" sucks. Emrakul is a "dominant strategy". Edit: Golos is another example of this; it's presence in the format warps everything around it. Why play anything else when you can just play Golos? There was a point where Sol Ring could have been banned, b/c "every deck needs a Sol Ring"; now you're building a 98 card deck instead. Wizards has printed that card to oblivion, so that's not going to happen, but years ago it could have been argued.
If you ban emrakul, people just default to Ulamog or Grislebrand. It is not possible to have multiple equally powerful creatures meant to be cheated out. I think I fundamentally disagree with the very core idea behind commander.
@@egoalter1276 AFAIK, players haven't though; the others just don't have quite the same sauce as Emrakul. Grisle can be dealt with easier as well, or you can let them draw all their cards then stop what they're doing with them. I think you're maybe jumping to conclusions. Here's the thing: you can ignore these card bans if you + your playgroup want to. It's a casual format. My point is that adjusting the "meta" of a game isn't just about power levels.
@@ubermenschen01 No, I agree autoincludes are bad. But emrakul isnt an autoinclude. Its a reanimation/ramp target. Realistically such decks would run multiple targets to increase the chance of drawing into one anyways. Actual autoinclude cards, as you have said are stuff like sol ring, which literally any deck can run.
I get it. The less setup it requires, the more likely it is to get banned. Coalition Victory is 8 mana to win the game for what you're already doing. Gifts is probably the best blue tutor in the game. If it was in commander, my Mizzix deck would instantly be way more efficient at combo killing. Mystical tutor, gifts ungiven, get firemind and two recursion spells (failing to find the fourth card), firemind for combo and win. In another world, if i only have one of the three cards to win (or some other combo), i can just gifts for the other two and my recursion combo.
I love Rarran's questions at 25:00, he just by looking at different cards was able to figure out exactly the issue that most people playing this format. What data are they using to determine the ban list? Which of course when Sheldon first talked about it that they had data they where using ( we have never seen that) and everyone had surmised that there where basing it entirely off of there local meta and kitchen table games.
I'm going to take a guess on Golos - the real kicker is the fact that he searches for ANY land you want and puts it into play. So you play on turn 5, put a 6th land in play and then he immediately gets destroyed. You play your 7th land and just immediately replay him, putting in your 8th land. He gets destroyed, you play your 9th land and replay him etc. He always gives you a powerful effect and helps to pay for his own commander tax, and if he ever isn't answered, then you just trigger his ability to draw 3 cards and play them all for free. If one of those is a land, then he has already paid for his own commander tax. The end result is that he is always efficient to play and just wins you games by ramping and tempoing your games.
And since he is 5 colors, you can play all the most busted/expensive staples you want. Many MANY decks would have been better off if they just swapped whatever commander they had for golos and shoved in a bunch of staples.
Exactly. He pays for half his commander tax by just entering the battlefield, and the fact that he can search for any land means you can get exactly what you need every time. He is so generically good that there really is no reason to not play him over a huge number of lower-power commanders. He was the gatekeeper of the format that said "You must be at least this broken to be a viable commander."
My father just built a commander deck a few weeks ago that ran Winter Orb and Rhystic Studies (And other obnoxious stuff too) Also, I want more "Are these commander cards banned?" videos, and just any of these Hearthstone/MTG crossover games really, they're super fun.
11:22 i think rarran might be missing the fact that in a 5 color deck the commander automatically fullfils the 5 color identities required creature part of the wincon
Not necessarily. Kenrith, Kyodai, Morophon, and Sisay, Weatherlight Captain are all 5 color commanders who do not fulfill the conditions. Though you probably aren't running Coalition Victory in a deck that has those as their commander.
This is not entirely true. Coalition victory does not follow the "color identity" rule that commander deckbuilding conventions do- The creature actually needs the color in it's mana cost. Things like golos or morophon would not satisfy the creature requirement for the win.
Yea it's really about a boring decision point in deckbuilding. It is good and toxic in almost every deck that would be allowed to include it. One of those cards that just eat a slot in every legal deck.
something i want to add is rule 0 of commander: all other rules are sugestion and you should talk with your group before the game to agree on the experience everyone wants. the banlist is a sugestion you can convince the table to let you play with ban card or to ban others, the cards in the banlist are some representatives(but not all) of traits that can make a card unfun to play with
Yes. Banlists should absolutely be nothing more than a suggestion for a starting point between people that don't play together regularly. If you have a regular playgroup then every single card should be on the table - so long as others are willing to play you with it.
@@thewarhunter5400 you literally can, there are no sanctioned cEDH events. WOTC has never in the history of the game held a sanctioned cEDH tournament. Any tournament organizer can go "yeah we gonna allow coalition victory LUL" and nobody could stop them.
@@thewarhunter5400 the agreament in cEDH is "we are all trying to make the strongest deck we can inside of the rules", the rules are sugestions that you and your group agree to follow
I think 2 important things about Winter Orb that wasn't explained is 1) If the player has ways to tap it they get to untap all their lands while no one else does cause of old artifact rules 2) the sheer amount of mana rocks in the format helps mitigate the effect
My first casual commander game at an lgs the opponent played rhystic study and winter orb. I didn't play Commander again for years. I wish i was joking.
It's that moment where they want Rarran to play commander, and by about 45 minutes there is ALOT of regret asking him to xD Oh and yes, I have played on a board where Orb/Rhystic was in control of the same player. We all played a game two. They didn't.
24:53 There are so many tutors, but not a lot of tutors that find four cards for four mana. We all know that the graveyard is just a second hand, especially in Commander - you make a pile where it doesn't matter which cards go where. Past in Flames was almost a given, and if it wasn't in the Gifts pile, they had it on hand. Tutoring for four cards at instant speed *is* broken, and bannable. Not that power level has anything to do with cards being banned, lmao, so it's kind of whatever. Doomsday is not banned, and that's a *five* card tutor for *three* mana that wins the game on the spot. Commander bans were a brilliant pick for a video :) Would have loved to see Doomsday as a counterpoint to Gifts, but anyways, great time. (and Rarran describing it as ""draw two"" oh my god :P )
Love the video! It was super fun seeing the perspective from an outsider! A little note for winter orb, it's also hated because it's a "rigged minigame" in Rarran terms: the player playing it has a deck prepeard for it while the rest doesn't. Commander is a highlander format with 100 card decks, you can't have an answer for everything in the format, and even if you do, you need to draw it (And not every color has an answer for everything). If an opponent plays winter orb, their deck probably generates mana through artifacts and doesn't affect them much, while you are stuck probably just drawing your card per turn and passing (probably also discarding your cards due to hand size). It's just a 'only i can play the game' card if you have no answer.
@@egoalter1276 It's not very fun if you have to conced in a casual format imo. And winter orb only causes games to go way much slower and the person playing it kind of 'monopolizes' the fun of that game
@@egoalter1276 no it's not. It's not a 1v1 format, so of course it will take longer. It's more like a board game, you spend time with friends and have fun, talk with each other and laugh
@@Nidai64 I play bridge on the regular which is a 2v2 cardgame, with 60-90 minute matches. The thing is, each of those is made up of 8 games that each dont take much longer than 10 minutes, and plying through a set is still exhausting, and there is plenty of time you are left twiddling your thumb, despite getting the play on avarage every minute. I didnt play much commander, because I find the format overcomplicated too loose in play, and ultimately boring, owing mostly to games being too long, and to card interactions multiplying exponentially with more than 2 players.
love the vid, plz do more. Ive noticed how much more comfortable you guys are together and it makes th evideo even more entertaining with ranrans constant laughing.
@Gravewhisper , nah, Annihilate 6 somebody as early as turn 4/5 means they reset and are badly hurt. Then Emrakul shuffles back in ready to be tutored with the other thing you snuck earlier.
That Maxx "C" rant followed by seeing Rhystic Study was truly something poetic.
Is like poerty, it rhymes.
Serendipitous
after saying that trickstar reincarnation locking three other players is not bannable, even!
As someone who plays both it truly was poetic.
@@nachomanrandy finally, another person of culture
Rarran is a stax player in the making given how fondly he talked about winter orb and rhystic studies crushing the opponents will to live
When he played Yu-Gi-Oh for the first time (on master duel) it only took him 2 hours before he said "I need to go first so I can prevent my opponent from doing anything"
Wish cgb mention the effect only works while it isn't tapped
@@laytonjr6601 This is why I play neither Arena or YGO
@@laytonjr6601 That's just yugioh at this point though, the entire game has devolved into do your thing, stop your opponent from playing. They could maybe fix that if they introduced multiple formats and banned all the degenerate stuff that happens there in those formats, but their entire design philosophy is 'we must make things able to combo off on turn 1 or 2 at the latest.'
someone needs to show him lantern or bridge and have his mind break
This is like if Rarran was in one of those infomercials - he's filmed in black and white and just perpetually failing to open a cabinet door, spilling spaghettio's on himself repeatedly. Giant red X's all over the footage.
This comment is so brutal, and I love it.
Has this ever happened to you?
Holy shit I don’t know if a comment has made me crack up this hard ever. Thanks for this.
I definitely understand the Golos argument. when I played Magic as a kid my thing was this Solar Eruption deck, colorless artifacts that got stronger if you paid diverse mana.
So a few years later my friends hit me up about commander and my first thought is "damn lets commandify that old solar deck."
But when I look up rainbow decks, its all Golos. Sure, I didnt have to play him , but it immediately made sense to me why he was the best card for the job. Even the most specific artifact buffing cards just dont compare to those general effects. And what happens if you take Golos? You start to think "I should put more 10+ cost spells into this deck, dont wanna exile a 1 cost". I think its that combo of having a very desirable universal effect AND warping your decklist in ways you might not want that makes him so problematic.
While I DO agree with you, I've ALSO mainly played my Edgar Markov deck since it was released and people actually "enjoy" playing against it
Yeah, Golos was always gonna get hit with the ban. If his effect was WUBRG Scry two the opportunity might still have been over centralizing but maybe not format warping, but the fact that you can load so many overcosted cards with strong effects with a generally good commander because you have the design space to make it work at below rate is broken and kinda toxic.
Legitimately, if Golos had the phrase "You can't activate this ability on your next turn" I don't think it wouldve ever become a problem
26:42 It's hilarious that Raran thinks people communicated by letters in 2009 😂
The "Community College Guy" Professor mentioned in a Mesa Falcon Guy collab!
Ranran Ranch mentioned the professor
One thing worth mentioning for Golos, much like Rusko on arena, or Roxanne, Starfall savant, is that commanders that ramp into themselves are just incredibly strong because if you remove it, there’s no downtime in it coming back if they have the land, which ramps them even harder into casting those game winning spells.
Yeah it's a big part of why Golos was so strong that it strangled out diversity in the format, even if you remove Golos it usually doesn't actually hurt the Golos player because they are usually able to just recast him. Especially since he's quite likely to get a land that produces multiple mana. This led Golos to the unenviable position of being a commander that pays for it's own command tax and has a win condition stapled on, most Commander decks are going to at some point produce a ton of mana and win and Golos solved that puzzle single handedly. While also being able to run whatever cards you want.
Golos was the best commander for almost every strategy and while that allowed for tons of really cool decks to appear that couldn't exist before, like Golos Gates, it also risked creating a very boring format.
@@TheNotshauna Yeah i built a golos deck that was 50/50 incredibly powerful cards that would catapult me into archenemy and incredibly crippling cards that might lose me the game. Very chaotic deck that was a hit to all the tables I brought it. But ultimately it was the paying for itself aspect that really puts it ahead. I suspect that nadu might also be banned in part for that reason.
I don't think it was obvious to Rarran that a 5-color commander satisfies the "creature of each color" requirement of Coalition Victory, since the wording suggests having 5 creatures.
Someone that's never played against domain ramp also wouldn't have any idea how fast and consistently you can meet the land and mana requirements.
Yeah, it wasn't for me. Knowing you only need a single creature and that you never *don't* have access to said single creature makes it so much more obviously strong.
Not technically true, Najeela for example is a 5 color commander that does not meet that requirement. Coalition victory is honestly just a bad card.
@@tristenbreen7462 genuinely in what universe is it bad?
@@tristenbreen7462That's like saying Mana Crypt is a bad mana rock because there's decks with a lot of low-cmc single-pip spells that can't use colorless mana well since there's so little generic to use it on in the card costs. Like duh, just don't play it in that deck. For the decks it does work in, it's stupidly powerful.
If you make a follow-up to this one, I'd really love to see the format you used a while ago for bans in the Urza/Mirrodin blocks, where Rarran had to choose between 3 cards for which one(s) were banned.
There are a lot of interesting groupings you could do like:
Gaia's Cradle - Serra's Sanctum - Tolarian Academy
Library of Alexandria - Reliquary Tower - Inventor's Fair
Flash - Sneak Attack - Defense of the Heart
Yawgmoth's Bargain - Necropotence - Peer into the Abyss
Balance - Cyclonic Rift - Impending Disaster
Azusa, Lost but Seeking - Fastbond - Burgeoning
Coalition Victory, well worded explanation
Since it's a free for all, you now have to assume "every" 5 color deck will run this for a free win. It is the easiest thing to cheese in the game.
Pick Child of Alara, remember this deck can have, demonic tutor, imperial seal, mystical tutor, merchant scroll, enlighted tutor (prismatic omen/prismatic lantern), crop rotation, then every retrieval spell. You also have worldly and sylvan tutor
Put the game in a state of board wipe or I win almost every turn, also your only way to full stop counter the coalition victory win is mind break tutor.
Remove Child of Alara? Board state is reset to 0 you just repeat this over and over.
Not only that, it's something that some colours just don't have an answer to.
Because yes, you could say "blue players should always have a counter spell up if the 5C player has their commander in play". But what does the green player do? The only counterplay is to hope they don't draw it.
Enlightened Tutor now also finds Leyline of the Guildpact
Plus with triomes you only need two of those even without the effect that types all lands
By the way, the moment Rarran's cat started playing in the background i stopped paying attention to anything else
Same dude, now I gotta rewatch the video 😂
I came to say the same thing. More kitten playing in videos!
how's your ADHD going?
Same, I was like ok Rarran is saying something and I look behind him and was like "OMG the kitty is playing with its Playhouse! That is so CUTE!"
@@satibelgood, medicated and like kittens lmao
Honestly, the fact that Rarrans answer to the question "Did you have fun? Would you wanna do another video like this" was "This video idea is really good so you should do more" made me respect him so much.
Like sure, it's contentpilled gen z behavior at it's finest, but man, imagine having a friend who when asked if they had fun with your idea goes "dude, idc about that, we're 100% doing this again cuz it's a brilliant idea"! I would kill to have friends with that kind of energy :D
yeah I noticed that too, really appreciate Rarran for that
Is "contentpilled" the zoomer version of "do it for the vine"?
@@dude11579 It's somewhere between that and "the grindset" or "being on the grind". It's more organized and more business oriented. I don't know if you were looking for a serious answer, but there ya go :)
I wouldn't describe Rarran as "content-pilled" but I get what you are saying. I think he is just really conscious of how being a RUclipsr is his job and he thinks a lot about the "meta" of creating and content. Hence when he says to CGB he think this was an amazing idea he genuinley means that CGB has struck gold and he is impressed/happy for him.
I don't even think it's for the content specifically. In this specific vid, Rarran on multiple occasion gets why the card could get banned but also gets why an unbanned card is so hated that many don't get why it wouldn't get banned. Also, as a kinda-noob in MTG and a long-time hearthstone player much like Rarran, it's a genuinely fun discovery to hear about all the reasons (and CGB's performance reading lol), i'd definitely wanna see more of this just to learn more about commander.
For Winter Orb I think it needed to call out the unwritten text there - the 'as long as Winter Orb is untapped'. Without that provision I think Rarran's view is a little more reasonable (though it neglects that it can come into play with the other players tapped out, so it could be a lot more debilitating than he thinks). But with that provision it's much easier to lock enemies down and just play normally yourself, which makes it more frustrating.
Edit - also the banlist changing over time is, to me, a reflection of the format becoming mainstream. When it's a niche format that few people play it's a lot easier to justify banning a card - but when it's a quasi-official one and the most popular one in magic, you kind of need a little more justification.
hard agree, he definitely should have shown rarran the reprinted version of winter orb from eternal masters with the updated oracle text, this old printing does not do the card justice since you have to both know how the rules worked back then AND that the card was changed to still work the same
...I don't understand: why would Winter Orb be tapped? Is that an unwritten function of its effect?
Or does that just mean having a spell that can tap target permanent is an alternate way to deal with it when you can't destroy/remove it?
@@ShjadeNexayre You play another artifact or creature or something to let you tap it before your untap step.
@@ShjadeNexayre You could also just have any permanents with a "Tap an untapped artifact/permanent" costing instant speed activated ability then just do that before it's your turn.
@@ShjadeNexayre When winter orb was printed, all artifacts with that sort of static effect only had that active while untapped. So they all effectively got errata to add that text to them afterwards.
As for how it changes things, you just use any effect that can tap an artifact at instant speed, so you tap it at end of turn of the last opponent. So at the start of your turn it's inactive, so you untap all your lands and the Winter Orb itself.
Another thing about Gifts Ungiven: in commander, you could probably usually politic someone into picking the cards you want them to pick. That would make it a lot more powerful than intended. That’s probably why it’s banned. Kind of like how Trade Secrets can get out of hand when you politic it in a multiplayer format.
Golos absolutely deserved the ban hammer, it was by far the most popular commander of all time when it was banned, more than doubling the 2nd place commander Atraxa, Praetor’s Voice. It paid for it’s own commander tax on ETB, by searching any land out and usually that land made more than one mana, so removing Golos didn’t hurt the deck, it sometimes made it stronger to recast and get another land.
The (2)WUBRG ability was the most broken part, giving it 5-color identity and it doesn’t shuffle like Urza, Lord High Artificer does, so you can stack the top card(s) and guarantee a bomb spell every time.
The amount of online commander games with 1 Golos player was insane, more than half the time in my experience, and there were a bunch of games with 2 Golos players at the table. It was a very oppressive card in that aspect of the game, which is what the RC said they banned it for.
I actually have a Golos deck myself (rule 0 to even be able to play it) where my goal is to flicker Golos as much as possible and pull 9 gates from my deck followed by mazes end :)
Funny you said Atraxa and Golos in the same breath. I was researching to get into commander at the time and I literally only wanted to build a WUBG deck because I hate red. Golos was the only alternative to the way way more expensive Atraxa (the price wasn't even the problem, it was that it was sold out) then they banned Golos and I scrapped Magic entirely. Partner commanders was the only option but I was too demotivated. Then a few years later I checked back to see if there were any new ways to play WUBG but then I saw Magic had devolved into Fortnite-style crossover BS and experimenting with sci-fi and in a snap sold all my old cards that I still had left.
@@Vinterloft That sounds kind of unreasonable. I don't think WotC is the most generous company and I understand not liking their business practice lately, but if the price of Atraxa, a roughly $15 card right now, *wasn't* the problem then what was? Partner commanders are the only option? There are tons of rainbow commanders like Kenrith and Morophon that just let you build whatever deck you want to, and they're both like a few bucks max. Most of the crossover stuff are Secret Lair "skins" of sorts over existing cards, so its not something that's "invading" mainline magic. If you aren't motivated, hey you aren't motivated and that's fine, but it sounds like a mountain out of a molehill that prevented you from playing a really fun format.
I'm surprised no one has discussed the wacky "fail to find" trick with Gifts Ungiven.
For the uninitiated, the rules of Magic state that when you search a hidden zone, such as a library, for a card with a specific condition, you can fail to find a card that meets the condition. This happens all the time with fetchlands, lands that can be sacrificed to find other lands with specific land types. Its not unheard of for a player to sac a Flooded Strand, look through their deck then realize they have no more Island or Plains.
So, going back to Gifts Ungiven, the wording says "search your library for 4 cards with different names & reveal them. Target player then chooses 2 of these cards. Put those in the graveyard & the rest in your hand."
In a sneaky play first pioneered by Frank Karsten, the caster of Gifts can choose to only find 2 cards, saying they failed to find any other cards with different names. That forces the target opponent to place those cards in their opponent's graveyard, presumably exactly where the Gifts caster wants them.
I find it crazy that Rarran didnt see that card as omega-busted in a format that forces you to go highlander AND has a min. deck size of 100 cards. A single good tutor effect can create combo decks from nothing, even in hearthstone. But the 2-4 card tutor is just a fine, strong card? lmao :D
@@IplayTeemoasaWard Hearthstone literally already has a 4 mana, tutor 4 card that's used to draw entire combos - Juicy Psychmelon. I'm a little surprised Rarran didn't make that conection after CGB talked about drawing your combo with Gifts.
*technically*, Gifts has been errata’d to say “up to”, so it’s not really a “fail to find” trick. Still probably trips people up though
On the topic of gifts I am surprised Intuition didn't come up. Specifically how it's basically THE SAME CARD AS GIFTS. But one mana cheaper and gets 3 cards with 1 to hand for one mana cheaper. So, you can still get two recursion and a combo piece (or sometimes, like in breach lines, a combo piece double serves as recursion) or just three pieces that complete a combo you already have in hand. Card is just infinitely more expensive and so less accessible than gifts.
@@TheMessinger47 true, and my understanding is that the errata was precisely to make the card's use cases slightly more clear and less reliant on a rules technicality. which is a smart move by wotc imo
The problem with "Just tech in a card to deal with it" in commander is that a) there is such a huge number of cards legal that you can't possibly tech for every situation. And b) you have a hundred cards in your deck, so you have to DRAW that tech card. If you want to consistently deal with something you need 2 or 3 if not more tech cards, not 1.
The card also has to generate insane value (Meathook Massacre) or do something really unique (Force of Will). Since you have multiple opponents, you can't one-for-one because it leaves the other players not in the exchange up card advantage.
Also, sometimes someone will have an answer, but because it's multiplayer, they won't even use it right away if they don't think it's to their benefit. If you have a Vandalblast but also a very slow hand and someone casts Winter Orb, you may well shrug and say "hey it'll slow down players 3 & 4" and not cast it until later, meaning players 3 & 4 still get to experience the fun of a thrilling Winter Orb game for awhile.
He described commander so much better than most commander players would. It is more emotionally driven than any other form of Magic
Yeah true, but weird emotions too. The banlist is a total joke, Primeval Titan is banned but not things like Sheoldred. If PT would be more toxic than Sheoldred 😅. And thats just one example.
@@timiturret148 I think their justification for PT is that its ability to find any two lands was too much mana advantage for a colour that already is almost always in advantage from a mana standpoint. If PT, with the same effect, would have been red or white (regardless of colour pie philosophy) nobody would have said anything, but it being green is too much advantage for green.
Or at least that's how I understand the justification.
@@NeroCM it's more because it's not limited to basic lands. If it was just basic lands, it'd be cracked, but probably not banned. But looking for two of any land every turn is way too strong, especially when lands like Maze's End, Nykthos, Dark Depths, and Field of the Dead exist
the thing about emrakul is that if it's your commander your deck does exactly one thing and it needs to be stopped. If it's stopped it does nothing and if it isn't interacted with that person just wins. It's very linear. You basically play like 50 ramp artifacts.
Not bringing up mana dorks and mana rocks when talking about winter orb is a crime
mana rocks, Tyhayan dynamos, Worn powerstones, sol rings, comander sphere, grim monoliths, the many artifact infinite mana loops...
And the fact that your opponents only have 1 untapped land available to deal with the artifact.
And that you can have a card that taps it before your turn so you are not affected by it.
@@Juanito_Pecadostwiddle baby!
Saying Winter Orb sounds fun is the most HS Warlock-main take Rarran has ever had.
I can see it being seen as fun if it isn't being abused - but obviously that's not the case, if someone is playing winter orb it's going to be asymmetric. But yeah, a trade-off between "should I spend my mana now or wait a turn for a bigger effect" could, in theory, be a fun mini-game for the table. Just, uh, not in the way that Winter Orb *actually* plays out as (which I don't get the impression Rarran was thinking of)
@@mattgopack7395 this is not true. I only include Winter Orb in a decklist if it's gonna be symmetrical.
@@casteanpreswyn7528
I can totally get that, but this really isn't the general case
Just look at the amount of like Urza decks abusing Winter Orb, sure, it's not everyone, but it is a large enough majority for it feel like everyone a guy is reasonably going to meet
@adamxue6096 I think it is the "general case" because the vast majority of commander players aren't trying to play cEDH.
I'd agree with you if the most common form of the format was high powered and trying to win as soon as possible. However, that isn't how things work in Commander/EDH.
Bringing up Urza decks proves my point.
@@casteanpreswyn7528
If you look at EDHrec, because that's one of the easiest place to look at for statistics
You can see that not only is Winter Orbs not the most popular card to play (in 1% of all decks as a colorless, compared to really popular cards like rhystic, which is played in 29% of all decks)
You can also see that just in the commanders, Urza, Derevi, Meria, put together is nearly 10k decks out of the 32k that you know for sure are gonna be asymmetrical just by looking at the commanders.
There are more ways to make it one sided as well, like mass creating treasures circumventing the drawback, having a crap ton of mana dorks and rocks etc. etc..
Point is, if asymmetrical just in the command zone can easily come up to nearly 1/3rd of the decks winter orb is in, there's literally no telling how many more decks and commanders that can circumvent it are being used, from most players experience with winter orb, they will tell you its probably asymmetrical.
Also, nothing wrong with playing for fun and less so for win - I do that too
But cEDH is very primarily a proxy friendly format and so there are actually quite a lot of players for it, and they can absolutely have a ton of fun with it.
cEDH is less well represented with things like EDHrec as well, because most good decks comes in one optimized list with very few small variations and deviations, meaning that more players will be actually playing essentially the same deck.
Even if you think that Winter Orb can come in a lower power table, this surely hasn't been the case for many peoples experiences with the card, there's a reason it's on top1 salty list.
I love love love love love love CGB and Rarran collabs
Maxx "C" talk into Rhystic Study is perfect
MaxC is free.
@@zeo4481 There are special summon decks that force the MaxC player to draw their whole deck and then win when ending their turn
@@viktorgabriel2554That's like 1% of play scenarios. The other 99% of the time it might as well read "(Quick Effect) You can discard this card from your hand, and if you do, then your opponent ends their turn."
Playing against any mildly good deck will have them draw into their hand traps that can make you stop playing even more, so the chance that you just win off someone's Maxx C is not high at all.
@@zeo4481 Well yeah, there is no mana in yugioh
@@NeoBoneGirlironically, the presence of so many HOPT causes many of those draws to be dead anyways. Imperm and Veiler are the exceptions since they came out before or during 2018. Nibiru is the only handtrap that REALLY matters, but pre-2024 you almost always had an omni-negate ready for Nibiru. Hell, one of Yugioh's oldest "good" archetypes in Six Samurai is capable of infinite special summons and, since Nibiru tributes, triggers the Red-Blue Loop so long as you have Gates active.
The bigger part of Gifts is that since you're searching in a hidden zone, you can fail to find two cards and then force your opponents to put those two cards into your yard. That means you could search, say, Jin-Gitaxis and Unburial Rites, then you can get your Jin for 4 mana on the following main phase. Not to mention, there are cards like Vedalken Orrery so that you can play the cards you tutor immediately.
I think the main point of Coalition Victory is that it makes it so that every single 5-color commander single-handedly creates a game-winning board state and makes it so players playing "nice" 5-color commanders are always the archenemy. Now, it's even worse because Leyline of the Guildpact exists, so you can win by Coaliton on turn 2.
Even then Prismatic Omen existed which was a two mana green enchantment with the same all basic lands typing effect.
Though now it’s less problematic as more 5-color commanders are just in the identity, like Kenrith, who don’t meet the requirements on their own
Except you still need the 8 mana to cast it
@@imrlyboredful eight mana isn't anywhere near as high a bar to get to now as it was when the card was banned.
How is it worse than the dozens of two card instant win combos? If the goal is to make the game less degenerate than the ban list is an utter failure. It's the most degenerate format outside of vintage which is balanced around everything being broken and expensive as a starting point.
@@gothosfolly I think it stays banned because low-power groups hate to play against it, but keeping it banned also doesn't affect the high-power groups in the slightest.
The Rules Committee has basically said it rarely considers "competitive" commander. The complete bonkers power available in 99-card singleton Vintage means that basically everything is broken so it takes something truly absurd to move the needle on cEDH bans (Flash -> Hulk combos probably being the best example I can think of where cEDH needed it gone). So most of what they do is ban for lower-power formats.
Well, actually they mostly do nothing. There's probably 3-4 more cards I think they could remove that wouldn't be missed, but so far no movement.
"You can't cheat something into play from your command zone." - CGB
"Hold my beer." - Yuriko
"Hold my beer, kid" - Derevi to Yuriko
Then there is hellkite courser giving all commanders a shot.... including ur dragon
Then there's Command Beacon to get any commander into you hand to then be cheated in ...
Also there's Commander's with eminence who don't even need to leave the command zone
If only cheatyface was a legendary
“Hold my wine”-Derevi
Golos also had a problem with the Commander Tax as well (which I was surprised never got mentioned in this video). His ETB ramp also lets him cheat on half the tax for the next time you have to cast him, even if you arenxt getting something like Cabal Coffers.
Emrakul isn't always ramped out. It's often cheated into play for free, for small amounts of mana with things like Joira which was popular then, reanimated at instant speed, snuck into play with things like Golem's Eye, there was even the Animar temur deck that could make Emrakul free.
I mean red alone has sneak attack. Which is only 4 mana to play and 1 to use. In a one on one commander game your just dead at 5 mana. Your out of mana. Bam sneak attack tap 1 red and here is a 15/15 with annihilator 6 protection from everything that flies and can't be countered. It dies at end of turn goes back into your deck with everything else and you can tutor it all over again.
Polymorph was also a strategy to cheat out emrakul.
@@andrewhaydock5557 wow sneak attack would finally be strong !
@@andrewhaydock5557 There's so many better combos than that that are legal though
@jadegrace1312 that is part of Emrakul's problem though. The way the play pattern works out is that Emrakul is cheated out, hits but doesn't kill a player while reducing them to turn 0 or 1 on board state. This means a player is kinda stuck having lost the game while still be forced to watch hoping to top deck into something that let's him play something. A big balancing issue with multi-player games in general is having situations where a player is effectively out of the game yet not eliminating them from the game.
55:10 - you are forgetting the false friend deck - "Veteran Explorer. Return Veteran Explorer with Phyrexian Reclamation. Sacrifice Veteran explorer to ashnod's Altar, play it 2 more times." Or " Collective Voyage for 5 - oh, you Twincast it? nice." now the game ender for that deck is just "Tap Boseiju, Who shelters all, Mind Grind for 12. "
CGB: "People will say I was doing something degenerate, but I was just wanted to fetch astral dragon from my commander"
The thing about commander is if you’re playing for fun it’s hard for it to be all about winning. If winning is the only way you have fun, you’re only going to have fun 25% of the time. You have to get enjoyment out of the experience in some way. Even cEDH players enjoy the act of trying to play optimally and solve the puzzle of their table. They have to. If not they don’t last long in the format.
This is why I fully agree with rarran’s assessment of winter orb in this video. Am I going to lose to it? Probably. Am i going to think it’s at least an interesting play experience to try playing optimally through it? Absolutely
This really makes me want to see rarran play an commander game with precons just to watch his reactions to politics and shenanigans
a whole table of precon commander is such a fun experience too, we did that with friends with the set of wh40k decks, and they are all kinda shit but on the same level so everybody is just hanging out doing their crappy stuff and it was a great time.
@neilu7132 "they are all kinda shit" they are the strongest, consistently, precons released ever. Not even the eminence commanders are as consistenly powerful.
@@casteanpreswyn7528 I don't see how that contradicts my point :)
They might be good for precons but anyone with some experience and even a small collection can easily identify weak cards and find suitable upgrades.
However, as they talked about in the video, the point of commander isn't always to have a strong deck but rather an interesting one for the table.
hence why it's fine to bring a pile of shit as long as it's funny shit :D
I once made a deck that had no other goal than spread maximum chaos, playing a bunch of cards with positive effects for the whole table and stuff that digs in decks to cast spells (wand of wonders is definitely one of the cards of all times). I obviously didn't win but it was super fun.
@@neilu7132 it wasn't about contradicting your whole point, but rather pointing out the fact that they are not shit. Like at all.
One of the problems with emrakul is that IF you can cheat it out, it's almost impossible to deal with. You losing the extra turn doesn't matter if he comes out early because that protection from colors stops most normal ways of dealing with it. You have to have even more specific destruction cards to handle it, if you can even get them early enough to be usable to effect it.
I had him in my Satoro Umezawa deck and would ninjitsu him out for 4 mana...I felt worse doing that than Blightsteel Colossus but it wasn't an instant game over, but was pretty much over
yea but theres a billion cards that are OP if you cheat them out or if the combo happens, a lot of them just literally win
@@uS0ra Yeah, i think this is one of those combo reasons where yeah cheating him out basically wins you the game as no one can deal with it but even more importantly he holds the game hostage as he slowly wins the game. I think this is a very important reason as to why a lot of infinite combos don't get banned but cards like Emrakul do. Commander really hates when a game is held hostage while one player just durdles forever until they eventually find a win after wasting peoples time. If someone just slaps down an insta win combo then everyone just shuffles up and goes again. The only insta win combos that are significantly frowned upon are extremely efficient low card combos. Things like Thassa's Oracle and Demonic Consultation which is a 2 card 3 mana insta win combo that also happens to be in blue and black the best colors to draw and tutor in making it extremely efficient.
@uS0ra yea but blightsteel, etc. Can be path of exiled for 1 mana, or pacified, or tapped, kul is just much harder to deal with unless you are specifically targeting for him, and since it's colorless it can be in any deck
@@DrBocks big creatures sure but theres plenty of like 2 card combos 3 card combos that are about as easy as cheating emrakul into play that just win the game, stop everyone from being able to play or give you infinate mana or something
I think something that might have helped Rarran understand why Winter Orb is so unfun to play against would have been to show him one of the ways to break the symmetry of it (or even just the oracle text, which includes the untapped condition). Because I've never seen a Winter Orb deck that plays it "fairly", they always break the symmetry (or tab it) in some way, turning it into one of the worst stax pieces in the game to play against.
12:00 as a person how has exclusively played commander for years now I find this answer very interesting. I don't count games by time I count games by actions and turns. If the game has tons of fast turns and is over in like a half hour (I honestly don't pay enough attention to even have a frame of reference on time) I would enjoy that more than say a super long game but I didn't do much because I was hard countered or got bad draws or whatever. The only short games I dislike are when the person wins and I didn't even get to do much more than play a few lands
46:00 I prefer this 500000000 times over winter orb since people only use winter orb in decks that use mana rocks and thus don't get effected by it. winter orb makes me not able to do stuff while normally not doing much to the deck running it and thus feels much less fun than just rhystic study, it might help them win far more that the orb but at least I can still play the game
52:20 emrakul is very easy to play you will never cast it for full cost and even if you do, it is very possible to rapidly ramp into her cost as I've seen from landfall decks. You could cheat it out with things like 'fist of suns' which makes it 5 mana to play as a for instance, or using the ninja commander that lets you ninjutsu anything for 4 mana
1:08:30 for some it is not wanting to be unfun, but for others its less about not wanting to be unfun and more about not wanting to get targeted as you have 3 other players that might decide to end you because they don't want to deal with your deck being on the board
Okay so original Emrakul. A) She's obviously the best possible creature to cheat into play, which has only gotten easier over time. Some of those ways to cheat her into play even count as casting so you get the extra turn, because why not. B) It's best not to imagine we're fair ramping into her, we're doing nonsense and casting her for 15 on turn 4 or some garbage like that. C) There's just never a time when you're going to see an Emrakul hit the table and think 'yeah she sure improved this game, it's good this happened'. It's just always going to be flipping the grill and turning the fourth of july into the fourth of nonsense.
I would argue the same goes for the new Ulamog that exiles half your library. I wouldn't be surprised about that one having some outcry.
for what it's worth I appreciate the dril reference
hmm...you make a good point actually, about fair ramping. I was just wondering how fast I could get to fifteen mana in my Saheeli artefact deck, and yeah...turn 4 cast Emrakul is entirely possible wiÞout even having my commander on Þe field...really changes Þe perspective
I don't think Emrakul is the best creature to cheat into play, unless you can get the extra turn trigger while cheating it in. Atraxa or Griselbrand is better in most cases.
@@ManaDrain315
Those aren't colorless.
Emrakul can be played in Mono Blue High Tide. Griselbrand can't. If you're playing black, you play both.
@1:28:00 I can see the easy ban on Golos. There's a lot of "This Commander is fun and okay, let me just run it IN the Golos deck, rather than build around it as a Commander... so then I can just put whatever in the Golos deck". It very much kills the fun and flavor of the deckbuilding, and you can't rely on players to voluntarily NOT take the cheap and easy route.
It's funny to me, seems I never knew any meta players because I played commander in 3 different friend groups over the years and I have never even seen Golos before this video :D
@@Gravewhisper I feel bad for saying this multiple times in the same comment section. But I thought I should point it out to you as well. Golos was great budget option, where you could get 1 Golos, to fill the slot as commander for 4 or more decks. Even if you didn't think Golos was stronger than the commander you wanted to run, you might still not want to spend real money on a commander, when you can just run Golos. (and unlike other 5 color options, Golos helps you with almost any gameplan.)
@@mawillix2018 Yeah, that's the big thing. A lot of the actual 5-color Legendaries suck. And more than a few of the 2-3 color options.
If you were building your Commander deck around the colors rather than the Commander itself, Golos is just better than many options. You bring him out once or twice, you get the best nonbasic Lands in your deck. As CGB noted, you run him in mono black to tutor that Cabal Coffers.
I quit Magic like 10 years ago and even I can see that dude is crazy in this format.
@@mawillix2018 What I meant was, i literally never saw anyone play it, which made me realize how un-meta all of my friends seem to be :D
If people want to ruin the experience for themselves then let them. Golos shouldn't have been banned because "Oh it promotes unhealthy building habits". He was good but not format warping or game ruining .
I have experienced winter orb and study and it was a casual game. The whole tone of the table changed. We murdered that guy. He instantly became arch enemy. He drew 20 cards and we didn't care. It is as painful as you can imagine it to be. Re: The gifts ban - the other thing about gifts is that you can just look for two cards and put them into the graveyard. It's very strong in a singleton format where your commander can also be part of a combo piece. Combo in some ways is easier to execute in commander because the commander is always available. So I get gifts.
As a non-mtg player, this is the best video of it's type that you've made so far for me. It was incredibly fun the whole way through and taught me enough about commander that I unironically want to pick up mtg just to make a commander deck I can play with my friends (I never got it when an acquaintance said they were making a commander deck and made it seem like a huge deal... But it IS a huge deal in a really cool way!!!)
Would definitely love to see more of these! I think a missing discussion point from Opposition Agent is that the Rules Committee (and quite rightfully so in my opinion) doesn't tend to ban cards that go off in high power pods but don't do much in lower power pods. Sure, Opposition Agent is disgusting if all your opponents are playing every fetch possible and running multiple tutors, but if you're running all those the implied idea is that you're either running ways to deal with Opposition Agent, or doing equally broken things yourself. In a lower power pod you don't have those kinds of answers / counter moves to make, but you're also not running a bunch of tutors and Opposition Agent might as well be a vanilla flash creature.
It's the exact same reasoning that leaves Dockside Extortionist unbanned (which would be an excellent card for a follow up video!), play it in a low powered pod and see just how bad the card can actually be when people aren't running optimal decks.
Winter Orb is a lot like the Celestial Alignment deck in Hearthstone. It bills itself as a symmetrical card but really it lets you play fairly normally afterwards while restricting your opponent to 1 mana afterwards.
saying a stax deck plays "fairly normal" is quite the take for sure xD
@@ich3730 he means that the deck with winter orb plays whith normal amount of mana (by using creature or artifact mana) while everyone else is stuck with the winter orb effect
Something glossed over here with Emrakul, is that as a commander, you have permanent access to it, and Rarran isn't told how the command zone works in detail. A colorless deck with a bunch of artifact ramp can basically play this turn 5ish, take an extra turn, play some other ramp artifact, swing with Emrakul, send it back to the command zone with various effects, recast, and continue this cycle until you win.
Side note on Elesh Norn. The outcry from the rules committee wasn't about banning but was more about how generically good Elesh Norn is and was begging wizards not to print it. They don't like that wizards keeps printing generic auto includes that fit in to every deck of a color.
Speaking of generic auto includes. IDK if u watch him but EDHdeckbuilding made a Fantastic video talking about that. And claims that wizard's is trying their best to turn commander into a rotating format with that philosophy. Every set prints 10+ auto includes so by the time the year ends, you're entire deck is basically changed every year because you have to update it with all these new cards.
Turns out Elesh Norn is soft banned. It ends up turning off 1.5-2.5 decks at the table, and the other players either use all out player removal, or lose to it.
Just like not banning other powerful cards because people just rule 0 them out, like thassa's oracle. You can just say that emrakul is one of that decks that is NOT strong enough for cEDH and too strong for casual. Why ban it?
oh my gosh. As someone who played colorless eldrazi for years with over 50% of the deck being ramp getting to 10 mana was exceptionally difficult. Even optimized getting to 10 on turn 5 was a feat. MAYBE I could do it like 50% of the time. Getting to 15 without a commander that just refills your hand like Kozilek? Oof.. GOOD LUCK!
I don't think Emrakul is ban worthy. But people are so irrational about extra turn spells and annihilator that I'm not surprised people cried about it so hard it got banned.
@@VkrauRJ because its not about being too powerful for cedh. it's that its just so miserable to play against because it doesn't outright win. It's also a 1 card issue, Thoracle requires 2 to win and so do most of the cedh combos at minimum and they're so easily interactable. Emrakul is near impossible to interact with and can be cheated out way too easily being pure colorless mana. (animar, Rakdos, fast mana rocks). Shit like Kinnin doubles mana gain from rocks so with him you could get emrakul out easily.
What REALLY did it tho, is Emrakul was a promo so it was literally Everywhere and it was such a problem that they decided to ban it.
As a guy who brought Biorhythm to multiplayer games before the Commander Banlist existed, as a guy who almost always lost because he didn't really understand Magic due to just starting out -- I will say it was an amazing experience being the guy causing ragequits for a change. It was with Biorhythm that I first tasted the twisted joy of being toxic.
Really the only card from the banlist that I would like to see unbanned
Biorhythm is such a dumb ban because if you can resolve an 8 mana sorcery that can accidentally kill you, you should win the game. I'd rather deal with that than Tooth and Nail, Omniscience, or Bolas's Citadel (which are also cards that shouldn't be banned).
Really not that much different from that white card that freely allows you to distribute life points however you want (but you can't put them below 1). Sand of Time?
A single damage ping is not going to be stopped if any of these big spells got through
@@nekrataali Funny you should mention accidentally killing yourself. My fondest memory involving Biorhythm is the time I played it, and another player in the group responded with an instant board wipe.
@@fancygiraffe3340 Do you mean "Reverse the sands" (Redistribute any number of players' life totals.)? That just swaps life totals of players and does not put players to 0 or 1 (unless someone was already at 1). I don't know what other card you could mean.
Please I want more of you two bantering about the two card games that I played, no longer play, but like to hear about from time to time :) These videos are a nice thing to listen to on my way to work.
The thing with Golos, and i imagine, about any commander who ramps and is cheap enough (around 3 to 5 mana cost), is that the ramp effect halfway pays for commander tax. Back then in MTGA i remember slamming it ASAP regardless of my ability to protect it, or use its activated ability. And as long as you hit your land drop, you can keep doing it, until everything else is cheap. It was so dominating you had to use a Golos deck to beat a Golos deck.
And it has a kill on sight ability so its not like you can just ignore it, it's a lose lose situation for the other players.
For Rhystic Studies versus some of the other cards on the ban list, I think the key question is "what's the counterplay to this?". In the case of a card like Coalition Victory, the answer is basically "have a counterspell", which not every Commander deck can do. Rhystic Studies typically plays out like a Sphere of Resistance, where everyone just pays one more mana for their spells. Sure, there's an asymmetrical tempo drawback from it, but it's not egregious, especially in a format so known for being heavy on ramp and big mana.
It should speak volumes that Rhystic Study wasn't even a viable card in it's own standard environment.
While you can also stop CV with a removal spell (it checks on resolution), it has a negative effect on the whole format where anytime you play against any 5c commander, you need to always hold up removal or regularly kill it, which makes a pretty negative play experience for people with 5c commanders who aren't playing it as well.
Commander players will claw and bite and scream at you for playing rhystic and then refuse to pay the 1 lol. I honestly think smothering tithe is way worse given the tax of 2 instead of 1.
@@DemonBlanka more than that, you can willingly choose not to play a spell if you cannot pay rhystic tax, but you cannot choose not to draw for the turn (or if something like wheel forces you to draw cards) to avoid tithe tax.
@@DemonBlanka I wouldn't care if there was no tax and you just drew a card each spell. What actually annoys me is folks interrupting every ten seconds to ask if you payed the 1. If only everyone was as attentive to their triggers as Rhystic Study players are!
The way CGB looks into the camera while Rarran goes through his thought process stares into my soul.
on the emrakhul ramp part: I've seen players turn 3 this fucker when we had a weekend of all banned cards allowed.
With only emrakhul not banned, I've seen it turn 4 regularly, till we re-banned it in our group again
Yes. I was not surprised that Rarran didnt get that. But someone who seriously runs Emrakhul basically only plays ramp lands and creatures. Eldrazi Decks in themself are basically ramp decks. I played with an Eldrazi Deck one time. Altough it was not an Emrakhul deck but a Kozilek deck I had so much more mana then everyone else it was insane.
54:32 I used to play with my uncle a lot a couple of years ago and he had this card from winning a local tournament. He built a deck around this card and it was absurdly hard to beat. It was a mono green deck and it relied on a couple of mana building effects and card draw. Unfortunately I don’t remember everything but the main Mana builders were creatures that tap for mana. Specifically one that taps for as much mana as you control Wall Creatures, which obviously helped the deck in two ways because you couldn’t aggro it. I believe it also did something with Eldrazi tokens or something. But I could not beat that deck for quite a while until I build a 5 color Ally deck which was able to win maybe 30-40% of duels. To be fair neither one of us really played competitively at that point but I fondly remember those days because even though it was difficult to beat it was fun to play against since it wasn’t salt inducing (don’t know how to describe it better). Once I actually managed to win with this card on the board. So even though it’s stronger than you make it sound, I agree that it shouldn’t be banned
Thinkin emrakul should not be banned is crazy
That can only come from the perspective of either someone that only plays cedh, where it is infact a non-problem, or from someone who doesn't play casual commander at all
It’s actually crazy how once Rarran talked about “the mana colors on the top right” I knew it was coalition victory lol
I thought it was gonna be a cheeky Ulalek lmao
@@filipecattoni that would make sense lol
I didn't think of Coalition Victory but I immediately thought it would be a 5 color card
Didn’t coalition victory receive a technical nerf when we were introduced to the Wastes basic land?
@@mildsatyr3731 Nope. From a quick google search, it requires one of each basic land *type*, but not one of each basic land. Thus, it doesn't require a Wastes.
As soon as hullbreacher was teased I called it being banned and my playgroup said it'd not that bad, it isn't ban worthy. I proxies it before it even released and built a deck arround getting it into play as fast as possible then spamming wheel effects and my playgroup changed thier minds really quick.
I once went first and played Mana Crypt + Island, flashed in Hullbreacher right before I untapped and then played Teferi's Puzzle Box. We spent more time shuffling than playing that game
Ironically, "I just lost to this card, BANNED!" was how the original EDH banlist began.
More like, "I have this in my binder thus it's legal". But yes, it was a fairly biased process by Sheldon and co, with actual balance only being a distant consideration.
That's how iona got banned too
@@ClubbingSealCub i have been on the other side of Iona with a mono-red deck. It's not fun when because of a card you could not respond to, you are locked out of the game entirely, with no recourse other than ask/beg your fellow players to deal with it.
@@thedeathray8620 I used to play Unstable Obelisk and duplicant and Nevinyrral's Disk in my deck back in the day when my playgroup had Iona running around since those were decent removal anyway for casual magic
@@ClubbingSealCub Iona was banned because it's just plain unfun
I wish I could explain properly to both these players why emrakul is COMPLETELY busted. It's the same problem as mirrodin, all the cheap artifacts that make mana casting more cheap artifacts that make mana. and your entire deck IS artifact ramp. emrakul can come down as early as turn 2, and around turn 5 on average. and if you kill it(with your sorcery speed removal?) it just comes back from the command zone.
Ram Ranch 🤝 Mesa Falcon Guy 🤝 Community College Guy
Im really impressed with Rarran's logic/questions throughout this. It just shows how subjective a lot of these bans are too.
54:21 One if the biggest issues I saw with Emrakul, was that every game basically turned into players passing around Emrakul and the game was won by whoever kept Emrakul.
Showing Rarran winter orb without the updated oracle text seemed a little unfair. Of course he got it right but it would have been even more funny if he understood that you could make it asymmetric when judging the card.
I honestly think the time walk reasoning is pretty fair. If you see a 500$ card that is super strong being played, that can DEFINITELY stop you from getting into mtg commander if you haven't played magic.
It is kind of funny though that cards are banned for expense when you look at Intuition being allowed over Gifts Ungiven.
I agree, though also I think that as the format is becoming more and more friendly to proxies, especially of expensive reserved list cards like the OG dual lands, the cost argument for the ban might seem less of a reason to keep it there. Also Timetwister is legal in the format, and a real copy of the card will cost you upwards of $7,000
Also early day commander had really weak card pool and most people just had one deck and power levels were all over the place. General consensus was to build as good multiplayer deck as you could and most people didn't know or have cards to the few good combos that may have been available at that time. Typical finishers were normal bomb rares, 6 mana 6 power with one keyword ability or so, maybe with recursion and then there were only few powerful finishers like time stretch, insurrection or blatant thievery that were decent, so the cards that power nine (or any other super expensive good card) would replace were very weak.
47:51 Yes. I have been on that board. We're still friends. It was in their Kynaios and Tiro of Meletis deck and after playing against that deck for around six months we managed to protest enough to get her to remove the Winter Orb from the deck. We no longer put Winter Orb in any of our decks because of the trauma.
Yes, another Rarran colab
Thx, Mesa Falcon Guy, that's the good news I did not even know I needed for today
One thing of note with Winter Orb is you didn't use the version of the card with updated rules text. Winter orb only applies while winter orb is untapped. I can be made asymmetrical especially with Urza as the commander.
Man, Dark Ritual into Braids on turn 2 was so brutal...
Dark Ritual, Sol Ring, a bunch of moxes; turn 2 and 3 Braids were common and that usually meant the Braids player is going to be the only one playing magic.
I was so devasted for my Meren deck when Braids was banned. :D
@@Gravewhisper Yeah, I'm a bit of a Braids (and Refellos) apologist, so I was sad to see banned as commander removed as a rule.
I personally hated when they removed the "As Commander" list because a lot of these were honestly fine inside decks. Braids is one example of this. I used to have her in my Muldrotha deck and she allowed me to have an easy way to recast a few of my Etb effects consistently.
@@digitalk1llraymon448 I agree. Rofellos is my personal pick for a card that should just be banned as a commander.
I can confirm. I’ve played Winter Orb and Rhystic Study on the same board, and players don’t like it very much. Just as much as War’s Toll and Mana Web on the same board.
As somone just getting unto commander, its really interesting to learn about the history if the ban list. Def make more!
showing rarran UN-set cards would be pretty entertaining
Recreating super weird normal magic cards and un-set cards in a custom card creator and having Rarran guess which are UN-cards and which arent like what Rarran did in his real vs fake hearthstone card video would be awesome
Or even guessing which real In cards have effects that are now functionally black-bordered.
Your kitten made a grown man go "hehehehe" at work when kitty jumped on the cat tree bed and started playing with that toy.
What is important to take into mind is:
If you play a really unfun card, it not only make that experience bad. It makes you a target. And if you do that a lot, you become a permanent target in your playgroup.
Or you just don't get games to play, because people go 'Nah, I don't want to deal with your BS.'.
its so easy to get to 15 mana tho. I think Emrakul is the perfect example of a card that should be banned in commander. Its the same thing with Coalition victory. I just feel like pros judge the casual community very harshly.
Yeah so this was fun. Played MtG for ~16 years myself, most of which has been EDH. Rarran's reactions and the thought process on each of the cards is so entertaining, as has been the case for all your and Rarran's collabs, but this might be the best one yet. More of this for sure, cheers!
The comparison to Commander Groups to DnD Parties is a good one. Who you play with can make or break the experience
Some commander specific rules that Rarran may be missing (it at least didn't come up in this video) is commander tax, which is a big part when considering Golos who ramps himself halfway to his next cast.
In my pod we all have one "no banlist" deck, and my buddy has an emrakul deck.
He regularly casts it turn 5 or 6. Waste, sol ring, arcane signet, ancient tomb, mana crypt, gilded lotus, hedron archive, waste is 16 mana. With that hand, you have emrakul turn 4. Turn 4. some people have 3 lands and a draw engine.
Ancient Tomb, Mana Crypt, Sol Ring, Mana Vault, Thran Dynamo, Basalt Mononith.
Emrakul on T2.
Crypt Ghast, Mirari's Wake, High Tide, Mana Geyser, Smothering Tithe. There are so many ways to hit 15 mana with ease, I know CGB hasn't played against this. Much respect to the king, but thank goodness he ain't on the committee.
Crush your friend's soul, arcane signet doesn't tap for mana in colorless edh decks
@@manasync He kind of deserves it a bit to be fair.
@@uqs57bjuhe could just replace it with a liquimetal torque or some other 2 mana rock, but yknow, technicalities matter lol
CGB + Rarran has been one of my favorite video series in the last year and I am one of the admins on the competitive EDH discord and moderators of the subreddit. This video is the funniest shit I've ever seen and I love you both, this is great.
55:18 let’s just ignore that there are multiple ways to ‘cast’ for free…hell, darksteel monolith is there specifically FOR eldrazi… then there’s forsaken monument which effectively doubles your ramp (so if, when ramping, the goal is typically to get to 7-8 mana, monument doubles the colorless mana you produce so that 7-8 instead becomes 14-16)
Rarran on Time Walk: "Lmao how could you ban a card for being too expensive"
Time Walk: *Is $3500*
That's how.
Banning cards based on price is never correct. Prices are determined by a card's ability to see play and how many copies are in circulation. Mishra's Workshop isn't banned in EDH and it's a $2,000 card. The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale is $4,000. Neither card is stronger than Time Walk or Contract from Below, both of which are rightfully banned for power level reasons.
If you ban every card worth more than $25 in a format and that format becomes popular, the banlist will change by the hour as staples in the format emerge. Or you get people deliberately manipulating the price to force a ban.
@@nekrataali A lot of the reasons why commander cards were banned back then doesn't make sense today largely because this was an entirely different time period. Time Walk was banned in 2005, before the rules committee was even formed and around the same time as Scott Larabee was introduced the format and when he took it back to WotC. This was when Sheldon Menery was still spreading the format through the pro-tour scene primarily judges, if you were following Commander in 2005 you are someone who is deeply invested in Magic likely through the pro-scene or through a single article written in 2004. These people knew exactly what they were signing up for, so there was less pressure for people to ban things that are too powerful, because they were deliberately avoiding the most powerful effects.
@@nekrataaliit's also worth noting that the rules committee is separate for wizards and so doesn't have the option to reprint cards to reduce their price (though the reserved list complicates Wizard's ability to do that).
Also, you can get Contract from Below for $2 and it is banned for Ante reasons not for power level (though it definitely deserves to be on there for either reason).
Proxy gang
And yet dual lands are legal. Yeah, they're cheaper, but also you're going to be running more than one of them generally.
You and Rarran get me my nostalgia fix for both MTG and HS simultaneously! These videos are some of my favorite things to watch on youtube and look forward to. Please keep these videos coming, they are so fun! Thanks again for all the laughs and good times
“We’re gonna teach you some rules” sounds like Justin Wong trashing that kid in Mortal Kombat. You gonna learn today!
Note on Coalition Victory:
Think about it like this
Victory Condition 1: Basic Land Types. With lands existing having 2-3 basic land types, and ways to tutor it with fetchlands a lot of 5 color decks will have all basic land types out by default.
The commander of a 5 color deck is also something that a 5 color deck wants to cast.
So this card would be a must- auto - include in any 5c commander deck bc it reads "if your commander has been out for a turn and is not instantly removed win the game" - which is a bad experience both for the person playing the deck (the deck doesn't do what it aims to do, it just wins, plus the commander is hated from the table with every removal available) and for everyone else.
Its just a single card that reads "win the game" that does not require any build around and fits in every. single. 5c commander deck
We definitely need more of this. I was stoked when it showed up on my feed
Surely CGB wouldn't show me 10 Banned cards in a row right?
-Rarran probably
This was an excellent video CGB I loved hearing the thought process of an "outsider" on the ban process. I think you gave good context afterwards, too ... besides the gaslight for content. lol jk that was a good switcheroo ... you're cool
Almost all the reasons given for bans in this video are not about card power, but preventing certain play patterns. This is hard for certain players to understand.
Emrakul, for example. Might be the best creature ever printed. Was not designed for Commander in mind. You're almost never hard-casting this, there are way more ways to put it onto the battlefield without paying it's mana cost. Let's say, turn 4 on average. You give it haste, it attacks and that person is basically out of the game.
In a purely competitive sense, this is great! But, since this the best creature to do this with, all decks that were using a similar strategy before now swap to using Emrakul. It's the best, after all, so why weaken yourself by not playing the best card for your strategy? Now all those decks revolve around this single play pattern: Cheat Emrakul > win game (eventually).
But Emrakul isn't limited by colors, rights? Well I might as well throw it in my deck, if other people are going to try and cheat it into play; if they play symmetrical effect, expecting to take advantage, now I have a trump card: Emrakul! Now Emrakul gets put into more and more decks, especially as people see it winning games. A decent percentage of games come down to "Who has the Emrakul?" or "How do I deal with Emrakul?". There's a video game design term called "dominant strategy": the best play pattern, that beats all others, at accomplishing a goal. Players will use the dominant strategy, *even if it isn't fun*, to achieve that goal. People will also spread this information, and soon most players are using the dominant strategy. If this is not fun, now the "best way to play" sucks. Emrakul is a "dominant strategy".
Edit: Golos is another example of this; it's presence in the format warps everything around it. Why play anything else when you can just play Golos? There was a point where Sol Ring could have been banned, b/c "every deck needs a Sol Ring"; now you're building a 98 card deck instead. Wizards has printed that card to oblivion, so that's not going to happen, but years ago it could have been argued.
If you ban emrakul, people just default to Ulamog or Grislebrand. It is not possible to have multiple equally powerful creatures meant to be cheated out. I think I fundamentally disagree with the very core idea behind commander.
@@egoalter1276 AFAIK, players haven't though; the others just don't have quite the same sauce as Emrakul. Grisle can be dealt with easier as well, or you can let them draw all their cards then stop what they're doing with them.
I think you're maybe jumping to conclusions. Here's the thing: you can ignore these card bans if you + your playgroup want to. It's a casual format.
My point is that adjusting the "meta" of a game isn't just about power levels.
@@ubermenschen01 No, I agree autoincludes are bad. But emrakul isnt an autoinclude. Its a reanimation/ramp target. Realistically such decks would run multiple targets to increase the chance of drawing into one anyways. Actual autoinclude cards, as you have said are stuff like sol ring, which literally any deck can run.
I get it. The less setup it requires, the more likely it is to get banned.
Coalition Victory is 8 mana to win the game for what you're already doing.
Gifts is probably the best blue tutor in the game. If it was in commander, my Mizzix deck would instantly be way more efficient at combo killing. Mystical tutor, gifts ungiven, get firemind and two recursion spells (failing to find the fourth card), firemind for combo and win. In another world, if i only have one of the three cards to win (or some other combo), i can just gifts for the other two and my recursion combo.
I love Rarran's questions at 25:00, he just by looking at different cards was able to figure out exactly the issue that most people playing this format. What data are they using to determine the ban list? Which of course when Sheldon first talked about it that they had data they where using ( we have never seen that) and everyone had surmised that there where basing it entirely off of there local meta and kitchen table games.
Ran-Ranch and the Falcon is my new favorite drive-time radio show.
I'm going to take a guess on Golos - the real kicker is the fact that he searches for ANY land you want and puts it into play. So you play on turn 5, put a 6th land in play and then he immediately gets destroyed. You play your 7th land and just immediately replay him, putting in your 8th land. He gets destroyed, you play your 9th land and replay him etc. He always gives you a powerful effect and helps to pay for his own commander tax, and if he ever isn't answered, then you just trigger his ability to draw 3 cards and play them all for free. If one of those is a land, then he has already paid for his own commander tax.
The end result is that he is always efficient to play and just wins you games by ramping and tempoing your games.
Yes, and if you did not have him shut down eventually his ability will start doing broken things resulting in a weird, pretty unfun subgame.
And since he is 5 colors, you can play all the most busted/expensive staples you want. Many MANY decks would have been better off if they just swapped whatever commander they had for golos and shoved in a bunch of staples.
Remember, Gaea's Cradle is legal in commander. You can be ramping with him much, much more than 1 mana.
@@FractalSpiral1 Yeah I also noticed that it wasn't limited to 'basic' land so you can pull out those specific legendary lands every single game.
Exactly. He pays for half his commander tax by just entering the battlefield, and the fact that he can search for any land means you can get exactly what you need every time. He is so generically good that there really is no reason to not play him over a huge number of lower-power commanders. He was the gatekeeper of the format that said "You must be at least this broken to be a viable commander."
"15!! mana? how is no one stopping you to ramp to 15?"
*laughs in Jodah, Eternal ArchMage*
*wheezes in Neera, The Wild Mage*
Summoner's Egg be like: 😮
*giggles in jank belbes portal*
heh... Sneak Attack go brrrr
Let me Show you my Emrakul And Tell you how it wins games
My father just built a commander deck a few weeks ago that ran Winter Orb and Rhystic Studies (And other obnoxious stuff too)
Also, I want more "Are these commander cards banned?" videos, and just any of these Hearthstone/MTG crossover games really, they're super fun.
11:22 i think rarran might be missing the fact that in a 5 color deck the commander automatically fullfils the 5 color identities required creature part of the wincon
Not necessarily. Kenrith, Kyodai, Morophon, and Sisay, Weatherlight Captain are all 5 color commanders who do not fulfill the conditions. Though you probably aren't running Coalition Victory in a deck that has those as their commander.
@@matthewgagnon9426true but unnecessarily off topic and pedantic
This is not entirely true. Coalition victory does not follow the "color identity" rule that commander deckbuilding conventions do- The creature actually needs the color in it's mana cost. Things like golos or morophon would not satisfy the creature requirement for the win.
Fair i supose, shouldve been more specific😂 @@matthewgagnon9426
Yea it's really about a boring decision point in deckbuilding. It is good and toxic in almost every deck that would be allowed to include it. One of those cards that just eat a slot in every legal deck.
How is nobody talking about how amazingly CGB's hexes align with the Norn in the background???😮😮😮
something i want to add is rule 0 of commander: all other rules are sugestion and you should talk with your group before the game to agree on the experience everyone wants.
the banlist is a sugestion you can convince the table to let you play with ban card or to ban others, the cards in the banlist are some representatives(but not all) of traits that can make a card unfun to play with
Yes. Banlists should absolutely be nothing more than a suggestion for a starting point between people that don't play together regularly. If you have a regular playgroup then every single card should be on the table - so long as others are willing to play you with it.
if you play cEDH you cant do that
@@thewarhunter5400 then the rule 0 being "we play cEDH instead of casual"
@@thewarhunter5400 you literally can, there are no sanctioned cEDH events. WOTC has never in the history of the game held a sanctioned cEDH tournament. Any tournament organizer can go "yeah we gonna allow coalition victory LUL" and nobody could stop them.
@@thewarhunter5400 the agreament in cEDH is "we are all trying to make the strongest deck we can inside of the rules", the rules are sugestions that you and your group agree to follow
I think 2 important things about Winter Orb that wasn't explained is
1) If the player has ways to tap it they get to untap all their lands while no one else does cause of old artifact rules
2) the sheer amount of mana rocks in the format helps mitigate the effect
My first casual commander game at an lgs the opponent played rhystic study and winter orb. I didn't play Commander again for years. I wish i was joking.
Oh yes! Get Rarran to play Commander! that would be great to see!
It's that moment where they want Rarran to play commander, and by about 45 minutes there is ALOT of regret asking him to xD
Oh and yes, I have played on a board where Orb/Rhystic was in control of the same player. We all played a game two. They didn't.
24:53 There are so many tutors, but not a lot of tutors that find four cards for four mana. We all know that the graveyard is just a second hand, especially in Commander - you make a pile where it doesn't matter which cards go where. Past in Flames was almost a given, and if it wasn't in the Gifts pile, they had it on hand. Tutoring for four cards at instant speed *is* broken, and bannable.
Not that power level has anything to do with cards being banned, lmao, so it's kind of whatever. Doomsday is not banned, and that's a *five* card tutor for *three* mana that wins the game on the spot. Commander bans were a brilliant pick for a video :) Would have loved to see Doomsday as a counterpoint to Gifts, but anyways, great time.
(and Rarran describing it as ""draw two"" oh my god :P )
Love the video! It was super fun seeing the perspective from an outsider! A little note for winter orb, it's also hated because it's a "rigged minigame" in Rarran terms: the player playing it has a deck prepeard for it while the rest doesn't. Commander is a highlander format with 100 card decks, you can't have an answer for everything in the format, and even if you do, you need to draw it (And not every color has an answer for everything). If an opponent plays winter orb, their deck probably generates mana through artifacts and doesn't affect them much, while you are stuck probably just drawing your card per turn and passing (probably also discarding your cards due to hand size). It's just a 'only i can play the game' card if you have no answer.
Conceding is always an option.
The multiplayer nature and insanely.fucking long games are the peoblem of this format.
@@egoalter1276 It's not very fun if you have to conced in a casual format imo. And winter orb only causes games to go way much slower and the person playing it kind of 'monopolizes' the fun of that game
@@Nidai64 I reiterate, a cardgame lasting over an hour is insane. A round shouldnt last more than 10 minutes imho.
@@egoalter1276 no it's not. It's not a 1v1 format, so of course it will take longer. It's more like a board game, you spend time with friends and have fun, talk with each other and laugh
@@Nidai64 I play bridge on the regular which is a 2v2 cardgame, with 60-90 minute matches. The thing is, each of those is made up of 8 games that each dont take much longer than 10 minutes, and plying through a set is still exhausting, and there is plenty of time you are left twiddling your thumb, despite getting the play on avarage every minute. I didnt play much commander, because I find the format overcomplicated too loose in play, and ultimately boring, owing mostly to games being too long, and to card interactions multiplying exponentially with more than 2 players.
love the vid, plz do more. Ive noticed how much more comfortable you guys are together and it makes th evideo even more entertaining with ranrans constant laughing.
Emrakul is more scary when they are out there sneak attacking it rather than ramping in to it lmao
Nah, the extra turn on cast makes it even more busted and ramping into colourless is way too easy. Just ask Saheeli :)
@@Gravewhisper Sorry can't. She was printed almost 10 years too late.
@Gravewhisper , nah, Annihilate 6 somebody as early as turn 4/5 means they reset and are badly hurt. Then Emrakul shuffles back in ready to be tutored with the other thing you snuck earlier.
Jhoira can suspend it for 2 and you still get a cast trigger
@@fizzywizzy0 and gives haste.