How many blue cards do you need for Force of Will/Force of Negation?

NZB2323
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Post by NZB2323 » 4 years ago

If I run a 5 colored deck with 19 blue cards, is that enough for Force of Will and Force of Negation? I run 27 green cards and feel like that's reliable enough for Force of vigor.

These are the cards I run for card draw:


Force of Will and Force of Negation are great cards, but I don't know if I run enough blue sources to justify running them.
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Outcryqq
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Post by Outcryqq » 4 years ago

Doubt that 19 is enough. That's about one out of every 5 cards is blue. So your starting hand might have 1-2, and your chances of drawing more aren't great. And that also means you won't be about to play with the card you hold to pitch. Unless you play against super competitive combo decks, I'd opt for other cards.

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Sinis
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Post by Sinis » 4 years ago

I think the threshold for Force of Negation is much lower than Force of Will, because FoN is much more playable as a hardcast.

I think 19 is low for FoW; I would want around 30, I think. I think Force of Will is much stronger in 60x4 formats because you will have redundancies (like multiple planeswalkers while you're ticking up, etc.).

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pokken
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Post by pokken » 4 years ago

It depends very strongly on how strong your card draw and selection suite is. In most CEDH decks that run forces you'll see 25-30 blue spells and the decks draw/see a metric ton of cards.

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darrenhabib
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Post by darrenhabib » 4 years ago

Its a question that I sort to figure out many years ago. So I Googled on Legacy numbers, and the short answer is that a low number to aim for is about 30% of your deck.
But I've found that 25 blue cards is about the bare-minimum to consistently support a Force of Will. Then thing is that in commander you are not always looking to counter on the first turn, where as in Vintage and Legacy often you are looking to have one in your opening hand and have another blue card to support it.

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Sinis
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Post by Sinis » 4 years ago

darrenhabib wrote:
4 years ago
So I Googled on Legacy numbers, and the short answer is that a low number to aim for is about 30% of your deck.
When I was playing in Legacy reanimator, it was always a shadow lurking in the background for new considerations. When Griselbrand was released, lots of people had 2x Gris + 2x Jin-Gitaxias, Core Augur because there was a fear that cutting all the Jins would make FoW unreliable. We eventually all folded 4x Gris into our decks, since the rest of the deck was mostly blue anyway.

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Post by schweinefett » 4 years ago

there might be some other viable options, depending on what the rest of your deck looks like. But as said, FoN is probably a safer bet, since you're able to save up 1uu to hardcast it.

The thing with counterspells in EDH isn't that you wanna be able to say "gotcha" when an opponent tries something; it's holding up uu in an obnoxiously visible way, and giving them the eye of "so... d'ya feel lucky, punk?" Being tapped out just makes your opponents all go for it - and you can only force one thing at a time.

But to answer your question, i'd say at minimum, 1 in 4 cards needs to be blue. Unless you have stuff like painter's servant to help out (but even then, it's just one card). But if you want force to be active as soon as you pick it up, it'd seriously need to be higher than that. 1 in 2 or 3 (33-50 cards). in EDH, most of your cards are useful (and presumably have unique effects/wincons), so pitching stuff is also a tough question more often than not. Outside of mono U, i don't think force of will is worth it.

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