[MCD] Companions are horrible.

[JovialJovian]

I miss the separeted banlists. This would be a good solution to control certain Companions running rampant, but allow those cards to be used as a commander, or just in the 99.

[BeneTleilax]

I miss the separeted banlists. This would be a good solution to control certain Companions running rampant, but allow those cards to be used as a commander, or just in the 99.

I don't think we need another edgecase ruling to patch the holes left by the RC's edgecase ruling.

[Maluko]

As predicted by many professional players, companion is dominating Standard. More than half the decks have a companion of some sort. The surprising fact is the metagame is actually diverse. So it appears Wizard's strategy to make companion popular and interesting in Standard worked. Now I'm curious to see what is happening in other formats.

https://magic.gg/news/magicfest-online- ... n-2-week-1

[Sheldon]

Companions are running rampant in Commander?

[pokken]

I have played against all kinds of companion decks so far and not a single one was a good experience. The consistency they bring is absolutely unpleasant. It's like they added a bunch of annoyingly synergistic partners pretty much exactly as I expressed.

I hope they nerf the heck out of them in the coming update. I'm sick and tired of it. There are too many super-signposty builds that people will make over and over again.

Even Gyruda-Lazav was annoying; the way Gyruda's trigger works prevents you from interacting with it when you see the creatures it hits, so you have to kill it while it's on the stack and hope they don't hit a body double or reanimation creature or something and get the chain going.

I *love* the design space as a deckbuilder. It's very interesting. But the consistency level has no place in Commander. I wish there weren't so many designed to be so synergistic. Jegnatha and Zirda in particular. It's very frustrating to me because I love designing the decks but playing them is awful and playing against them is awful so I've just given up.

[Maluko]

The most interesting piece of information we can extract out of companion is that it proves just how broken Commander really is. They printed "commanders" that force you to build your decks in (arguably) a more restrictive way than color identity, can only be cast once from the command zone, and have no commander damage associated with it. And look at what these 10 cards did to all the competitive formats of Magic! Hopefully, Wizards learned a big lesson from this: Commander shouldn't be mixed with competitive formats.

Companions are running rampant in Commander?

I play Commander in Cockatrice, and I have seen very few people (<5%) play companions there. I don't remember any of those games being broken or unfun. However, I play at mid-power levels, usually 5-6. The complaints I've mostly been hearing about companion in Commander have been at higher power levels.

I'm very curious to see what changes they will announce today for companions. There have been rumors that companions will replace a card in your hand when the game starts rather than being cast from the outside. I think this change would be welcomed by a lot of people. It would decrease the inherent card advantage that companion decks have in competitive formats where they start the game with access to an extra card. Furthermore, Lutri, the Spellchaser could now leave the ban list to be tested in Commander because playing it would cost you a card in your hand.

[Kelzam]

I also play in a variety of places (Magic Online, XMage and on the PlayEDH Discord servers. etc.) and never see Companions. The claim or idea that they're "running rampant" is baffling to me. Most people I talk to that play Commander (and that's mostly casual players; competitive is neither here nor there and should remain so) don't care for the idea of building decks with such heavy restrictions only to have the Companion exiled and left with a deck that is tends to run pretty awful without the Companion they chained themselves to those restrictions for. Some are fun as Commanders themselves, and the ones people are playing are no more powerful than most other Commanders. If this is an issue at cEDH levels somehow, oh well.

[Outcryqq]

I've also not ran into many companion decks. I saw a Keruga, the Macrosage companion with Prime Speaker Zegana, and it was meh.

[KitsuLeif]

New Companion Rule:

Once per game, any time you could cast a sorcery (during your main phase when the stack is empty), you can pay 3 generic mana to put your companion from your sideboard into your hand. This is a special action, not an activated ability.

https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/a ... nouncement

[folding_music]

are they gonna come over to my house and errata my Yorion LOL
insane ruling

[KitsuLeif]

are they gonna come over to my house and errata my Yorion LOL

Yeah, they just knocked at my door, found my borderless foil Zirda, pulled out a marker and wrote all over it T.T
Hide your Companion cards!

[pokken]

Ooh new rule. 3 mana to put companion in hand. I like that nerd a lot. Kinda sad it shuts off magistrate lol but 3 is a lot of mana and that should basically kill sisay jegantha in competitive and make all the zirda builds a lot worse.

Definitely whacks my desire to deck build with them which means they are probably nerfed enough to only see niche play.

[KitsuLeif]

make all the zirda builds a lot worse.

Not if you play Zirda as the Commander :D
I'm so glad I decided to not build a cEDH deck with the Companion mechanic, but instead one with a Companion at the helm. This change of rules doesn't affect me at all.

[pokken]

Well yeah I mean as companion. 6 mana makes it really undesirable at least at the efficiency I like to build at.

[onering]

The most interesting piece of information we can extract out of companion is that it proves just how broken Commander really is. They printed "commanders" that force you to build your decks in (arguably) a more restrictive way than color identity, can only be cast once from the command zone, and have no commander damage associated with it. And look at what these 10 cards did to all the competitive formats of Magic! Hopefully, Wizards learned a big lesson from this: Commander shouldn't be mixed with competitive formats.

I'm not so sure about that. Well, except for your last sentence because I agree with it whole-heartedly lol.

Companions were a similar design space to commanders, but they differed in many huge ways. First of all, only a couple of companions were actually problematic in competitive formats. They had extremely pushed abilities paired with restrictions that just weren't meaningful in the formats they caused issues in. There were still tradeoffs, but the loss from the restrictions was minor compared to the consistency of an extra card you always had access to and which had a very powerful ability. Lurrus was the most extreme example, as it basically just asked you to play Vintage.

More than that, I think the issues is that companions provided a very small number of decks with a very powerful advantage that wasn't available otherwise. Commander is less broken because every commander deck has a commander. Every deck has that advantage, so there is some balance to it. There's a huge range of power, but that's quite a bit different from companion where only some decks, a narrow range of decks at that, have this extra, very powerful advantage. I'm not sure I'm really communicating this very well, but its like Syndrome said in the Incredibles, if everyone is super then nobody is. Everyone has commanders in commander, so its not a special advantage that only some decks can use, and although some decks are built to ignore their commander that is a specific choice the builder is making that intentionally handicaps themselves, whereas only certain decks can run a companion and get all the advantage of having an extra card in their starting hand that is going to be synergistic with their deck and probably pretty powerful. That's a big enough thing in commander, but its diluted a bit because everyone still` has commanders, while in 60 card formats the companions get to shine alone (although commander/companion synergy is a whole other problem).

[BeneTleilax]

how long how much SPECIAL BANS and SPECIAL NERF RULES before EDH people PULL the PLUG on Companion. special snowflake edgecase mechanic smh

[Sheldon]

Can you translate what snowflake edgecase mechanic means?

[papa_funk]

The best thing about the random all-caps is that it makes you just naturally read it in Shatner voice. Might benefit from a few more periods to really drive it home.

[tstorm823]

I like the no punctuation rants. It makes me read them like an old Microsoft text to speech voice with no concept of cadence.

[Yatsufusa]

The first thing I thought of actually was "Can we have something like this for Commanders, perhaps using Commander Tax as the cost, so that people can actually play Commanders that trigger when cast from hand / can't be cast from the Command Zone?"

I'm aware that Command Beacon exists, but it seems so unintuitive that you basically need land recursion to emulate "Commander-ness" for Commanders like that, which immediately kills any semblance of "fun" when brewing for those Commanders, especially the weaker ones. It's not like Beacon would become irrelevant, it's still a free transfer once the tax piles up.

Of course the point against is that it splits the cost up, but arguably that's a benefit for really casual metas that some person doesn't need to pay 13 mana to cast their Thraximundar for the 4th time and can do it across two turns instead. By using Commander Tax as the cost, you basically pay the same amount to cast it in a turn, basically, outside of some shenanigans that modify cost in-hand, but I don't think that's prevalent enough to be a problem.

In addition, it provides an additional vulnerable zone (hand) which has the largest weakness of targeted discard, a traditionally weak play in EDH anyway. For recursion strategies it might be much more exploitable since it's probably cheaper to transfer to hand and discard-outlet than cast from Command-Zone to sacrifice, but again I doubt it's that prevalent and if anything it might even encourage people to pay more attention to grave-hate.

I know the RC favors minimalism (and so do I), but I do see the advantages outweigh the potential problems here (I don't see anything that would tip the scales that heavily with this addition). Tetzimoc, Primal Death would seem much more attractive as a Commander, alongside the Myojin, Haakon, Phage...

[freelunch]

Big problem with that idea is that it hoses the 2013 commanders (Marath, Prossh, Jelava) and some others that care about how much mana they're cast for.

[folding_music]

I liked the original mechanic in spirit. The way it changed the parameter of what's possible in an opening hand was really exciting; I've always thought the seven card hand + having to shuffle for several minutes every time you mulligan system was offputting so having something to subvert that which guaranteed a little consistency was exciting, especially so because it didn't involve another tutor + shuffle sequence. Turns out that the screw is just part of the game's design and you're MEANT to lose every third game because you got a terrible sequence of hands, and Companion exposed that too heavily. Kinda think they should've ruled in favor of Companion being a positive evolution for the game and found more ways to ameliorate the sadness of the opening hand.

[pokken]

Big problem with that idea is that it hoses the 2013 commanders (Marath, Prossh, Jelava) and some others that care about how much mana they're cast for.

You could always do both. Pay the tax to get it in your hand at sorcery speed or pay the full cost as normal.

Another one I kinda liked was when you have priority you can pay the tax to move it *back* to the zone then freely move it to your hand at sorcery speed from the zone.

Lots of problems with all of the approaches but I do feel like the current rules could be improved to be more flexible and elegant - probably worth spending some energy on that at some point.

[freelunch]

Both

I guess? But that would nerf the commander tax to an extent, and I'm not sure if that's the right thing to do. There are many commanders who really should not be allowed to remain on the field under proper threat assessment. Allowing the pilots of those commanders to split the commander tax over two turns does not sound like a buff that we should give those commanders.

Another one I kinda liked was when you have priority you can pay the tax to move it *back* to the zone then freely move it to your hand at sorcery speed from the zone.

So, what happens when I Thoughtseize you? That setup doesn't seem fair at all. Moving the card (whether commander or companion) between zones must remain at sorcery speed.

[pokken]

Yeah like I said there are bugs to work out and discussion needed. hence why I said:

Lots of problems with all of the approaches but I do feel like the current rules could be improved to be more flexible and elegant - probably worth spending some energy on that at some point.