[SCD] Sol Ring

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Post by Rumpy5897 » 4 years ago

There's going to be a degree of samey'ness even if you flog Sol Ring. Stuff like ramp, removal, card advantage etc. tends to be ubiquitous, and decks will gravitate towards the best available options for those in their colours regardless of what said "best" may be. Take out current fast mana and non-greens will uniformly jam Arcane Signet (budget permitting - damn you, Gavin) as that's gonna be the best available option. So the minor benefit won't really ultimately be a benefit.
 
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Post by Skello496 » 4 years ago

tstorm823 wrote:
4 years ago

a) It cuts your deck down to 98 cards + Sol Ring.
That, in my mind, is essentially the same thing as calling it a "must-play". At least that's how I understood it when I read the OP.
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Post by Cow31337Killer » 4 years ago

Rumpy5897 wrote:
4 years ago
There's going to be a degree of samey'ness even if you flog Sol Ring. Stuff like ramp, removal, card advantage etc. tends to be ubiquitous, and decks will gravitate towards the best available options for those in their colours regardless of what said "best" may be. Take out current fast mana and non-greens will uniformly jam Arcane Signet (budget permitting - damn you, Gavin) as that's gonna be the best available option. So the minor benefit won't really ultimately be a benefit.
I would love if that happened. Arcane Signet is a fair and balanced card and I personally think it should replace Sol Ring in the Commander precons each year.
Skello496 wrote:
4 years ago
When it comes down to it, my biggest issue is that people claim Sol Ring is a must-include. My Nylea deck is crazy good and doesn't use Sol Ring, and honestly all of my decks would be almost as good without Sol Ring. Sure, it's super nice being able to get that down T1, but it's not making my deck that much worse to not run it. Fast mana isn't a problem in EDH. We're playing 7-10 drop spells consistently, and they just allow for us to get to those spells 5 minutes earlier when we draw them. It's one out of 99 cards, and one card doesn't usually break a deck if the deck isn't built around it. Cards that break decks are things like Paradox Engine, not things like Sol Ring.
Sol Ring costs a single colorless mana, can be played in any deck, can be tapped immediately, and nets positive mana the turn it comes down without any restrictions. Show me a deck that can't benefit from that. It's the Commander staple that all other staples want to be when they grow up. Very, very few (if any) EDH decks have a good reason to not run the card. Your decks are no exception. Whether it's banworthy is definitely debatable, but there's little merit to the argument that it's not "good enough" to be put into just about every deck in the format.

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Post by Vertain » 4 years ago

Rumpy5897 wrote:
4 years ago
There's going to be a degree of samey'ness even if you flog Sol Ring. Stuff like ramp, removal, card advantage etc. tends to be ubiquitous, and decks will gravitate towards the best available options for those in their colours regardless of what said "best" may be. Take out current fast mana and non-greens will uniformly jam Arcane Signet (budget permitting - damn you, Gavin) as that's gonna be the best available option. So the minor benefit won't really ultimately be a benefit.
The Numbers on EDHREC show Sol Ring in 78% of decks that could play it. The next colorless card is Lightning Greaves at 30%. There are no numbers for Arcane Signet yet, so I'll have the numbers of the most popular classic Signet (Izzet Signet at 45%) serve as an educated guess. Even together, they don't add up to Sol Ring. These numbers are consistent throughout last week, last month and last 2 years, with a maximum deviation of 2%.

When we now look at any given 4-player table using these numbers, there is a chance of ~96.4% that two or more of those players are playing Sol Ring and a chance of ~70,8% of two or more Arcane Signets. You are more than eight times more likely to not encounter multiple copies of the (hypothetically) next most played card than multiple Sol Rings. This is a significant difference.
Skello496 wrote:
4 years ago
tstorm823 wrote:
4 years ago

a) It cuts your deck down to 98 cards + Sol Ring.
That, in my mind, is essentially the same thing as calling it a "must-play". At least that's how I understood it when I read the OP.
That's because it's pretty much true. I myself don't play Sol Ring in my decks out of pure spite, but I am well aware that it would perfectly slot into every one of it and just make them better. Players that don't play it are either deliberatly foregoing its power for whatever personal reason (like me, who thinks it has no right to be in this format), or have some form of extreme anti-synergy (like being waaay more color hungry than average). And that is as close to "auto-include" as it gets.

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Post by umtiger » 4 years ago

Vertain wrote:
4 years ago
The Numbers on EDHREC show Sol Ring in 78% of decks that could play it. The next colorless card is Lightning Greaves at 30%. There are no numbers for Arcane Signet yet, so I'll have the numbers of the most popular classic Signet (Izzet Signet at 45%) serve as an educated guess. Even together, they don't add up to Sol Ring. These numbers are consistent throughout last week, last month and last 2 years, with a maximum deviation of 2%.
[...]
That's because it's pretty much true. I myself don't play Sol Ring in my decks out of pure spite, but I am well aware that it would perfectly slot into every one of it and just make them better. Players that don't play it are either deliberatly foregoing its power for whatever personal reason (like me, who thinks it has no right to be in this format), or have some form of extreme anti-synergy (like being waaay more color hungry than average). And that is as close to "auto-include" as it gets.
"Numbers on EDHREC" are sort of strange.

Take for instance Swords to Plowshares. It's less expensive than Sol Ring and there is absolutely no "pure spite" or "extreme anti-synergy" argument for not including it. So how come it's not at 100%? There are definitely other cards that are played or "should" be played just as much as Sol Ring.

And to be honest, if I was playing a deck with white and a playgroup asked me to choose between keeping one of either Sol Ring or Stp in my deck? I'd choose to keep StP. It's going to matter in more games for me. And I'd make the same choice for a large number of other cards as well when presented the choice between them or Sol Ring.

That lots of people play it or should be playing it is not a good enough reason to ban Sol Ring or any card for that matter.

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Post by ISBPathfinder » 4 years ago

umtiger wrote:
4 years ago
Vertain wrote:
4 years ago
The Numbers on EDHREC show Sol Ring in 78% of decks that could play it. The next colorless card is Lightning Greaves at 30%. There are no numbers for Arcane Signet yet, so I'll have the numbers of the most popular classic Signet (Izzet Signet at 45%) serve as an educated guess. Even together, they don't add up to Sol Ring. These numbers are consistent throughout last week, last month and last 2 years, with a maximum deviation of 2%.
[...]
That's because it's pretty much true. I myself don't play Sol Ring in my decks out of pure spite, but I am well aware that it would perfectly slot into every one of it and just make them better. Players that don't play it are either deliberatly foregoing its power for whatever personal reason (like me, who thinks it has no right to be in this format), or have some form of extreme anti-synergy (like being waaay more color hungry than average). And that is as close to "auto-include" as it gets.
"Numbers on EDHREC" are sort of strange.

Take for instance Swords to Plowshares. It's less expensive than Sol Ring and there is absolutely no "pure spite" or "extreme anti-synergy" argument for not including it. So how come it's not at 100%? There are definitely other cards that are played or "should" be played just as much as Sol Ring.

And to be honest, if I was playing a deck with white and a playgroup asked me to choose between keeping one of either Sol Ring or Stp in my deck? I'd choose to keep StP. It's going to matter in more games for me. And I'd make the same choice for a large number of other cards as well when presented the choice between them or Sol Ring.

That lots of people play it or should be playing it is not a good enough reason to ban Sol Ring or any card for that matter.
I don't play Swords to Plowshares in a lot of decks actually and I own a lot of copies. If a deck doesn't have enough draw then narrow use 1 for 1 removal can be hard to make a lot of room for. Sure, its super cheap to cast but it also doesn't have much for versatility in that it can only target creatures.

Cheap and narrow spot removal tends to grow in importance as you see more combo wins or as you push the card draw of a deck to be higher. The worse the draw of a deck is, you tend to want to have diverse answers and or get bigger return for your answers (like sweepers).

I actually cut Sol Ring from a Sisay, Weatherlight Captain recently because I didn't value the colorless contribution for what the deck was doing. It was a bit unique but what I really needed there was generally colored mana rather than colorless. There have been a few other decks where I also think it is possible to cut it from as well but most cases its because you value a high color intensity usually revolving around running a bunch of cheap drops and needing to fix colored mana quickly and have lots of colored mana. Edric, Spymaster of Trest and Edgar Markov are two other such commanders where I have engaged similar questions.

I do agree though that 78% on Sol Ring sounds suspiciously low. I suspect budget decisions being made rather than optimal pruning. I think if you were looking at optimal numbers the number likely should be somewhere around 90-98% inclusion with Sol Ring.
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Post by Vertain » 4 years ago

umtiger wrote:
4 years ago
"Numbers on EDHREC" are sort of strange.

Take for instance Swords to Plowshares. It's less expensive than Sol Ring and there is absolutely no "pure spite" or "extreme anti-synergy" argument for not including it. So how come it's not at 100%? There are definitely other cards that are played or "should" be played just as much as Sol Ring.
That's not really owed to the "strangeness" of EDHREC, since Commander Decks are notoriously light on removal in general, at least in my experience.
umtiger wrote:
4 years ago
And to be honest, if I was playing a deck with white and a playgroup asked me to choose between keeping one of either Sol Ring or Stp in my deck? I'd choose to keep StP. It's going to matter in more games for me. And I'd make the same choice for a large number of other cards as well when presented the choice between them or Sol Ring.

That lots of people play it or should be playing it is not a good enough reason to ban Sol Ring or any card for that matter.
This fallacy has been adressed numerous times already. When building a white deck, you're not going to end up having to choose between Swords to Plowshares and Sol Ring, it's 99% between Sol Ring and Plains. And you'll have a hard time arguing in favor of the land.

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Post by tstorm823 » 4 years ago

Skello496 wrote:
4 years ago
That, in my mind, is essentially the same thing as calling it a "must-play". At least that's how I understood it when I read the OP.
I can see how you could interpret that one line in that way, but I used a whole bunch of other words that I feel should make it clear I was speaking in a descriptive sense, as in what people are doing, rather than the prescriptive sense of what people should be doing. I'm sure you'll get plenty of pushback from others for saying your decks are better without Sol Ring, but I'm ultimately not concerned with the question of what should you be playing. That's a question for competitive formats. The important question here rather is what people want to play. Cards are banworthy in competitive formats when they worsen the gameplay patterns and are powerful enough to warp the format with their presence. But here, it's about worsening gameplay and being popular enough to warp the format. The numbers dont lie, people want to play sol ring, regardless of if it's always right to, and I believe gameplay is worse with it.
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Post by umtiger » 4 years ago

ISBPathfinder wrote:
4 years ago
I don't play Swords to Plowshares in a lot of decks actually and I own a lot of copies. If a deck doesn't have enough draw then narrow use 1 for 1 removal can be hard to make a lot of room for. Sure, its super cheap to cast but it also doesn't have much for versatility in that it can only target creatures.

Cheap and narrow spot removal tends to grow in importance as you see more combo wins or as you push the card draw of a deck to be higher. The worse the draw of a deck is, you tend to want to have diverse answers and or get bigger return for your answers (like sweepers).
The rate and effect on StP is almost too good to pass up. Sure it's "narrow" (even though many decks in the format are built around one creature staying in play or recursion from the graveyard); but unless you know all of your opponents' decks ahead of time, I don't see why StP wouldn't be a good candidate for ~75% use among decks with white even if you play sweepers.

Spot removal like StP definitely warps the format too. You think long and hard about building a deck around a 7 cmc commander. And that's why cards like Lightning Greaves are staples.

I just don't think universal adoption is grounds for banning.
Vertain wrote:
4 years ago
That's not really owed to the "strangeness" of EDHREC, since Commander Decks are notoriously light on removal in general, at least in my experience.
Well, I didn't want to go as far to say that many people build decks badly, so lets just say many decks posted online can be vastly improved And it's not a budget or power-level thing, decks just can be tuned much better.

In decks with white, StP should be just as high as Sol Ring. And even if the real numbers don't match Sol Ring, I find it hard to believe that less than ~75% of white decks shouldn't be playing StP. And that's the threshold for concern that you mentioned for Sol Ring. The point is that universal adoption doesn't make something ban worthy.
Vertain wrote:
4 years ago
This fallacy has been adressed numerous times already. When building a white deck, you're not going to end up having to choose between Swords to Plowshares and Sol Ring, it's 99% between Sol Ring and Plains. And you'll have a hard time arguing in favor of the land.
We are not talking about the same thing. I know that Sol Ring vs StP aren't at odds during deck building consideration. I am not committing that fallacy.

I'm talking about if you were in a playgroup situation where each player has to pit another card in their deck vs Sol Ring.
For instance, a night where everyone agrees to extra stipulations in their decks. Like, player on my right goes through my deck and proposes that if I play a deck with Swords to Plowshares I'm not allowed Sol Ring or I get to play Sol Ring but aren't allowed Swords to Plowshares. And I go through player of my left's deck and go keep Craterhoof or Sol Ring...so on and so on...

I'm pretty sure that in most games that I play, I would feel more comfortable with StP in my deck w/ no Sol Ring than vice versa.

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Post by Vertain » 4 years ago

umtiger wrote:
4 years ago
Vertain wrote:
4 years ago
That's not really owed to the "strangeness" of EDHREC, since Commander Decks are notoriously light on removal in general, at least in my experience.
Well, I didn't want to go as far to say that many people build decks badly, so lets just say many decks posted online can be vastly improved And it's not a budget or power-level thing, decks just can be tuned much better.

In decks with white, StP should be just as high as Sol Ring. And even if the real numbers don't match Sol Ring, I find it hard to believe that less than ~75% of white decks shouldn't be playing StP. And that's the threshold for concern that you mentioned for Sol Ring. The point is that universal adoption doesn't make something ban worthy.
I 100% agree with your last sentence. I don't want Sol Ring and Mana Crypt gone for being "everywhere" (Crypt evidently isn't), but because they produce too much mana for too little investment. If Sol Ring was as scarce as Mana Crypt, I would still firmly believe they both had to go.
To clarify, I was merely chiming in on the discussion of samey-ness of decks with or without Sol Ring
umtiger wrote:
4 years ago
Vertain wrote:
4 years ago
This fallacy has been adressed numerous times already. When building a white deck, you're not going to end up having to choose between Swords to Plowshares and Sol Ring, it's 99% between Sol Ring and Plains. And you'll have a hard time arguing in favor of the land.
We are not talking about the same thing. I know that Sol Ring vs StP aren't at odds during deck building consideration. I am not committing that fallacy.

I'm talking about if you were in a playgroup situation where each player has to pit another card in their deck vs Sol Ring.
For instance, a night where everyone agrees to extra stipulations in their decks. Like, player on my right goes through my deck and proposes that if I play a deck with Swords to Plowshares I'm not allowed Sol Ring or I get to play Sol Ring but aren't allowed Swords to Plowshares. And I go through player of my left's deck and go keep Craterhoof or Sol Ring...so on and so on...

I'm pretty sure that in most games that I play, I would feel more comfortable with StP in my deck w/ no Sol Ring than vice versa.
I checked again and have to admit that I, in fact, didn't read your post as thoroughly as I should have and prematurely jumped to conclusions. Sorry about that. I too would, in that case, pick interaction over ramp. I guess we can agree that it's preferable to play with your opponents rather than "at" them. However, the described scenario is basically house rules, which are perfectly fine on their own, but unfortunately have proven to not work among my playgroup, which is the reason I'm posting in this very Thread.

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Post by TheGildedGoose » 4 years ago

It's difficult for me to believe that in this foul Year of Our Lord 2019 there are people who still don't think that Sol Ring et al. should be banned. I recently had a game where I had a turn 1 land, Sol Ring, Talisman followed by another land, Signet, and Talisman on turn 2. Untapping with 7 mana on turn 3 is dumb. While I had the novel fun one might have while wearing a beer helmet in that game, trampling over my opponents by burying them in both mana and card advantage, I know for a fact that it was a miserable experience for my opponents. I've been on the receiving end of it and the only memories I have of those games aren't the things that killed me, they're of the cards that enabled them to make degenerate plays while I still had my pants down.

I understand that it's debatable as to whether or not Ring meets the banlist criteria since the RC doesn't account for power level (which is another argument for another thread). I'm just frustrated and here to express one simple thing:

Sol Ring is not fun to play with or against.
Sol Ring is not fun to play with or against.
Sol Ring is not fun to play with or against.

Look at it this way: what positives does Sol Ring bring to the format? On average, are games where an early Sol Ring comes out more or less fun than games where Sol Ring doesn't show up? If the format was birthed with Sol Ring already on the banlist, would there be as much clamor about unbanning it as there is for, say, Coalition Victory? I can't astral project into alternate universes, but I think anyone suggesting that it be unbanned would be met with derisive laughter because the card is quite clearly extremely powerful.

At the end of the day, though, I recognize that the card is grandfathered in and will likely never get the banhammer, which renders this thread naught but screaming into the void. Cathartic, maybe, but ultimately pointless.

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Post by umtiger » 4 years ago

GloriousGoose wrote:
4 years ago
I recently had a game where I had a turn 1 land, Sol Ring, Talisman followed by another land, Signet, and Talisman on turn 2. Untapping with 7 mana on turn 3 is dumb. While I had the novel fun one might have while wearing a beer helmet in that game, trampling over my opponents by burying them in both mana and card advantage, I know for a fact that it was a miserable experience for my opponents. I've been on the receiving end of it and the only memories I have of those games aren't the things that killed me, they're of the cards that enabled them to make degenerate plays while I still had my pants down.

Sol Ring is not fun to play with or against.
Sol Ring is not fun to play with or against.
Sol Ring is not fun to play with or against.

Look at it this way: what positives does Sol Ring bring to the format? On average, are games where an early Sol Ring comes out more or less fun than games where Sol Ring doesn't show up?
Well, that kind of opening hand can also get punished extremely hard. Land + Sol Ring + Signet + Land + Signet + Talisman is six cards. Unless your payoff is having a stupid card like Maelstrom Wanderer in your command zone, you could get counter'd and end up top-decking.

Players/people tend to recall negative experiences much more than positive ones, even if the positive ones vastly outnumber the negative ones. More often than not, Sol Rings (even early ones) have not negatively affected games I've played.

As a veteran of the format, I'm also sure that you've seen numerous sketchy 1 land hands kept solely on the basis of promises of Sol Ring.

"Fun" is an undefinable phrase in MTG. I think it's fun to have Sol Ring and be able to play a 7 cmc commander like Gisela on turn 5. Gisela and any damage based strategy is extremely weak in EDH. You might respond and say that I could still use other ramp cards. Why can't I use Sol Ring? Critical mass is important.

Personally, I'd much rather experience games where my opponents have early mana than experience games that end in infinite loops.

Besides, if "fun" is your ban criteria, go make some threads about cards like Scrambleverse.

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Post by tstorm823 » 4 years ago

umtiger wrote:
4 years ago
Players/people tend to recall negative experiences much more than positive ones, even if the positive ones vastly outnumber the negative ones. More often than not, Sol Rings (even early ones) have not negatively affected games I've played.
Disagree here. People in general may tend to hold strongly on to particularly negative experiences, but if you look at this format and think people remember the negative moments over a sea of positives, you have it entirely backwards. Because this is a mostly multiplayer format, arguably negative experiences dominate your time: waiting for 3 other players to pass turn before you get to do anything, having your best laid plans smothered by triple the opposition, winning half as many games as you would with 1 opponent while playing games that take like 5 times as long to finish, having "unfair" outcomes based on kingmaking and collusion... I could go on. The list of complaints people have about EDH is long, and often understandable, though I'd hesitate to say justified because we all keep playing for a reason: one good story makes an entire game worth it.

You think Sol Rings have not negatively effected the games you play, but it seems you're coming from the perspective that a negative effect is an event, a moment you can look at and say "man, that card ruined the whole game". And Sol Ring definitely makes games like that. But there are also bad games of Magic where everyone just goes through the motions, nothing exciting happens, nobody gets to make any particularly interesting decisions, and nobody goes home with a story to tell and may as well have played Parcheesi. Sol Ring absolutely makes those games too. That's the comeback to "but people can team up on the player with Sol Ring!" Having your hands forced like that isn't more interesting. There are far less opportunities for exceptional decisions if the board hasn't developed yet but people are being put into "check" back and forth every turn.

Sol Ring isn't a unique exciting experience. Even if you enjoy the power of super fast mana, how many times are you gonna get a good story out of it? "I had this crazy game where I had a Sol Ring and won on turn 3!" *Yawn* Could you even brag about a single Sol Ring win without feeling a pinch of shame? Conversely, you'll almost never know the amazing moments Sol Ring has taken away from you.
Besides, if "fun" is your ban criteria, go make some threads about cards like Scrambleverse.
If I ever saw Scrambleverse resolve more than a half dozen times, I'd make the thread myself. As it stands, it doesn't seem like there are very many people playing Scrambleverse against unapproving opponents.
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Post by onering » 4 years ago

GloriousGoose wrote:
4 years ago
It's difficult for me to believe that in this foul Year of Our Lord 2019 there are people who still don't think that Sol Ring et al. should be banned. I recently had a game where I had a turn 1 land, Sol Ring, Talisman followed by another land, Signet, and Talisman on turn 2. Untapping with 7 mana on turn 3 is dumb. While I had the novel fun one might have while wearing a beer helmet in that game, trampling over my opponents by burying them in both mana and card advantage, I know for a fact that it was a miserable experience for my opponents. I've been on the receiving end of it and the only memories I have of those games aren't the things that killed me, they're of the cards that enabled them to make degenerate plays while I still had my pants down.

I understand that it's debatable as to whether or not Ring meets the banlist criteria since the RC doesn't account for power level (which is another argument for another thread). I'm just frustrated and here to express one simple thing:

Sol Ring is not fun to play with or against.
Sol Ring is not fun to play with or against.
Sol Ring is not fun to play with or against.

Look at it this way: what positives does Sol Ring bring to the format? On average, are games where an early Sol Ring comes out more or less fun than games where Sol Ring doesn't show up? If the format was birthed with Sol Ring already on the banlist, would there be as much clamor about unbanning it as there is for, say, Coalition Victory? I can't astral project into alternate universes, but I think anyone suggesting that it be unbanned would be met with derisive laughter because the card is quite clearly extremely powerful.

At the end of the day, though, I recognize that the card is grandfathered in and will likely never get the banhammer, which renders this thread naught but screaming into the void. Cathartic, maybe, but ultimately pointless.
Yeah, casting 5 rocks by turn 3 is pretty dumb. It's also extraordinarily unlikely. I get that you're trying to show a worst case scenario, but its so extreme that its only effective at preaching to the choir. Anyone who likes Sol Ring in the format is going to look at it and laugh because of how good signet double talisman already is and how absurd it is to draw all that in your opening 7, while anyone on the fence is going to see the same.

Thinking that Sol Ring is unfun is an opinion, no matter how many times you post it. I think it adds to games more often than not, because more often than not its not cast turn 1-2 but later, and later it serves as a way to cast your commander again, catch up on mana after missing lands, or try to keep up with the green player. Trinket Mage grabbing Sol Ring is a common play, and leads to fun more often than turn 1 sol ring ruins it.

I do think your right that fewer people would want to unban sol ring than CV, because CV is a flavorful card depicting an epic moment in the game's history. Less charitably, a lot of people don't really know what they're talking about and have deluded themselves about how problematic cards like CV are (check out those threads and their arguments always degenerate into "well, it won't even be played that much so the fact that all it does is win out of nowhere shouldn't be counted against it"). I've yet to see an argument for unbanning CV that actually describes what it adds to the format beyond "I want to play it", while there's been plenty written on what Sol Ring adds.

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Post by onering » 4 years ago

tstorm823 wrote:
4 years ago
umtiger wrote:
4 years ago
Players/people tend to recall negative experiences much more than positive ones, even if the positive ones vastly outnumber the negative ones. More often than not, Sol Rings (even early ones) have not negatively affected games I've played.
Disagree here. People in general may tend to hold strongly on to particularly negative experiences, but if you look at this format and think people remember the negative moments over a sea of positives, you have it entirely backwards. Because this is a mostly multiplayer format, arguably negative experiences dominate your time: waiting for 3 other players to pass turn before you get to do anything, having your best laid plans smothered by triple the opposition, winning half as many games as you would with 1 opponent while playing games that take like 5 times as long to finish, having "unfair" outcomes based on kingmaking and collusion... I could go on. The list of complaints people have about EDH is long, and often understandable, though I'd hesitate to say justified because we all keep playing for a reason: one good story makes an entire game worth it.

You think Sol Rings have not negatively effected the games you play, but it seems you're coming from the perspective that a negative effect is an event, a moment you can look at and say "man, that card ruined the whole game". And Sol Ring definitely makes games like that. But there are also bad games of Magic where everyone just goes through the motions, nothing exciting happens, nobody gets to make any particularly interesting decisions, and nobody goes home with a story to tell and may as well have played Parcheesi. Sol Ring absolutely makes those games too. That's the comeback to "but people can team up on the player with Sol Ring!" Having your hands forced like that isn't more interesting. There are far less opportunities for exceptional decisions if the board hasn't developed yet but people are being put into "check" back and forth every turn.

Sol Ring isn't a unique exciting experience. Even if you enjoy the power of super fast mana, how many times are you gonna get a good story out of it? "I had this crazy game where I had a Sol Ring and won on turn 3!" *Yawn* Could you even brag about a single Sol Ring win without feeling a pinch of shame? Conversely, you'll almost never know the amazing moments Sol Ring has taken away from you.
Besides, if "fun" is your ban criteria, go make some threads about cards like Scrambleverse.
If I ever saw Scrambleverse resolve more than a half dozen times, I'd make the thread myself. As it stands, it doesn't seem like there are very many people playing Scrambleverse against unapproving opponents.
This is ridiculous. The post is one giant strawman.

No dude, people remember getting burned by a card more than when things go well, but there are built in expectations in a multiplayer format that you adjust to. You expect to wait more than you play, you expect to lose more than you win, because you already know there are multiple players. Because people already expect this, those negative aspects don't register. That says jack %$#% about other negative experiences vs positive experiences, especially fast starts that lead to getting steamrolled vs fast starts that peter out. And people get really, really pissed about king making and other shenanigans to the point they hold grudges and set ground rules to prevent it.

Your middle paragraph confuses your opinion with fact, and you presume to tell the other poster that he's confused about his own opinion before being melodramatic for the rest of the paragraph. This is why this thread is getting crappier the more people post in it, because we've long passed the constructive argument phase and entered the "YOUR OPINION AND SUBJECTIVE EXPERIENCE IS WRONG" phase. A game where people archenemy against the guy who gets out to a fast start until things balance out isn't a %$#% game, you just think its %$#%. You're entitled to have that opinion, but it doesn't make it fact, and it means that your argument is going to get dismissed by anyone who doesn't already share your opinion. Yeah, it forces your hand, in the same way that someone puking out a bunch of creatures forces you to wrath, or someone trying to land Splinter Twin on any of its combo partners forces you to kill its target. Its counter play, the thing that keeps this game from being multiplayer solitaire. = And guess what, most magic games, even commander games, aren't going to be legendary. Most aren't going to be going through the motions either. Most, including games with early sol rings, are going to fall in between, because most people try to build their decks as well as they can and follow their deck's gameplan as well as they can. That makes things a bit samey, with or without fast mana, with the variance coming from counter play. You want gee whiz stories every game where everything is fresh and unexpected, go play a chaos deck, then watch everyone %$#% hate it, because people WANT some degree of predictability, they WANT their decks to work, and Sol Ring is a card that gets played because it helps make that happen.

And finally, your argument collapses in that last paragraph. You know where turn 3 wins off of Sol Ring happen enough to get old? By that I mean more than once in a blue moon off a god hand? cEDH, and yes they do want that experience and don't feel any shame about it, because surprise, playing super tuned decks that aim to win ASAP against each other can be really fun.

Basically, your entire post is a waste, as it only insists people they should share your opinion without making the case for it, and this thread has been degenerating into that level of discourse.

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Post by Cow31337Killer » 4 years ago

onering wrote:
4 years ago

This is ridiculous. The post is one giant strawman.

No dude, people remember getting burned by a card more than when things go well, but there are built in expectations in a multiplayer format that you adjust to. You expect to wait more than you play, you expect to lose more than you win, because you already know there are multiple players. Because people already expect this, those negative aspects don't register. That says jack %$#% about other negative experiences vs positive experiences, especially fast starts that lead to getting steamrolled vs fast starts that peter out. And people get really, really pissed about king making and other shenanigans to the point they hold grudges and set ground rules to prevent it.

Your middle paragraph confuses your opinion with fact, and you presume to tell the other poster that he's confused about his own opinion before being melodramatic for the rest of the paragraph. This is why this thread is getting crappier the more people post in it, because we've long passed the constructive argument phase and entered the "YOUR OPINION AND SUBJECTIVE EXPERIENCE IS WRONG" phase. A game where people archenemy against the guy who gets out to a fast start until things balance out isn't a %$#% game, you just think its %$#%. You're entitled to have that opinion, but it doesn't make it fact, and it means that your argument is going to get dismissed by anyone who doesn't already share your opinion. Yeah, it forces your hand, in the same way that someone puking out a bunch of creatures forces you to wrath, or someone trying to land Splinter Twin on any of its combo partners forces you to kill its target. Its counter play, the thing that keeps this game from being multiplayer solitaire. = And guess what, most magic games, even commander games, aren't going to be legendary. Most aren't going to be going through the motions either. Most, including games with early sol rings, are going to fall in between, because most people try to build their decks as well as they can and follow their deck's gameplan as well as they can. That makes things a bit samey, with or without fast mana, with the variance coming from counter play. You want gee whiz stories every game where everything is fresh and unexpected, go play a chaos deck, then watch everyone %$#% hate it, because people WANT some degree of predictability, they WANT their decks to work, and Sol Ring is a card that gets played because it helps make that happen.

And finally, your argument collapses in that last paragraph. You know where turn 3 wins off of Sol Ring happen enough to get old? By that I mean more than once in a blue moon off a god hand? cEDH, and yes they do want that experience and don't feel any shame about it, because surprise, playing super tuned decks that aim to win ASAP against each other can be really fun.

Basically, your entire post is a waste, as it only insists people they should share your opinion without making the case for it, and this thread has been degenerating into that level of discourse.
Oh boy this post doesn't come off as condescending or aggressive at all.

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Post by tstorm823 » 4 years ago

onering wrote:
4 years ago
This is ridiculous. The post is one giant strawman.
No it isn't. That post is describing my own perspective and contrasting it to someone else's argument. I didn't misrepresent something just so I can prove it wrong, I didn't attempt to prove the logic wrong, I did exactly what I said in the first word of the post: disagree.
No dude, people remember getting burned by a card more than when things go well, but there are built in expectations in a multiplayer format that you adjust to. You expect to wait more than you play, you expect to lose more than you win, because you already know there are multiple players. Because people already expect this, those negative aspects don't register. That says jack %$#% about other negative experiences vs positive experiences, especially fast starts that lead to getting steamrolled vs fast starts that peter out. And people get really, really pissed about king making and other shenanigans to the point they hold grudges and set ground rules to prevent it.
Here's the thing: I don't think people remember either of those types of Sol Ring games. I know I've had games blown out by fast starts, and I know I hated them, but I don't remember them specifically. The only Sol Ring start story I could recall for you specifically was a game where I was playing a red deck so my removal was burn+creature damage, and I kept being exactly 1 damage short of killing a turn 2 Kolonian Hydra every turn until I died, and that's like a comedy and tragedy all at once. Otherwise, it's like "oh, that happened, let's move on." Nor could I tell you about Sol Ring games that peter out. But I could talk for hours about all the amazing things that have happened without Sol Ring.
Your middle paragraph confuses your opinion with fact, and you presume to tell the other poster that he's confused about his own opinion before being melodramatic for the rest of the paragraph. This is why this thread is getting crappier the more people post in it, because we've long passed the constructive argument phase and entered the "YOUR OPINION AND SUBJECTIVE EXPERIENCE IS WRONG" phase. A game where people archenemy against the guy who gets out to a fast start until things balance out isn't a %$#% game, you just think its %$#%. You're entitled to have that opinion, but it doesn't make it fact, and it means that your argument is going to get dismissed by anyone who doesn't already share your opinion. Yeah, it forces your hand, in the same way that someone puking out a bunch of creatures forces you to wrath, or someone trying to land Splinter Twin on any of its combo partners forces you to kill its target. Its counter play, the thing that keeps this game from being multiplayer solitaire. = And guess what, most magic games, even commander games, aren't going to be legendary. Most aren't going to be going through the motions either. Most, including games with early sol rings, are going to fall in between, because most people try to build their decks as well as they can and follow their deck's gameplan as well as they can. That makes things a bit samey, with or without fast mana, with the variance coming from counter play. You want gee whiz stories every game where everything is fresh and unexpected, go play a chaos deck, then watch everyone %$#% hate it, because people WANT some degree of predictability, they WANT their decks to work, and Sol Ring is a card that gets played because it helps make that happen.
Someone puking out a bunch of creatures doesn't force me to wrath. Nor does someone trying to land Splinter Twin force me to to kill the target. The further you go into a game, the more likely it is you have the option not to do those things. If it's turn 4, chances are the only answer to splinter twin is kill the target. If it's turn 10, a fog can save you and you might kill the player before they get to untap. If boards are developed, you get situations where you let a huge threat resolve on the calculation that if someone else is the first target, you can steal the game. If someone has 60 power on turn 4, you wrath. If someone has 60 power on turn 10, you might have other options. Great plays happen when you have other options.

I do want gee whiz stories every game. I build my decks with that hope. I play Zedruu, and the vast majority of opponents love it. And in the rare case someone doesn't like playing against zedruu, I've got a half dozen other decks ready to go. All of them can make for a good story, and none of them play Sol Ring. Because Sol Ring doesn't make good stories. It makes "well, I had Sol Ring to power that out, so who cares" moments. Playing with Sol Ring is playing a game I don't want to win. When someone plays a turn 1 Sol Ring, the best chance of people enjoying the game is that player losing. That is a tragic thing to do to yourself, and 3/4 of the decks in the format are doing it.
And finally, your argument collapses in that last paragraph. You know where turn 3 wins off of Sol Ring happen enough to get old? By that I mean more than once in a blue moon off a god hand? cEDH, and yes they do want that experience and don't feel any shame about it, because surprise, playing super tuned decks that aim to win ASAP against each other can be really fun.
I think you're entirely misunderstanding the appeal of competitive magic. The appeal is playing at peak performance against equal competitors. If you banned Sol Ring, cedh players would continue to do that, just at a lower peak without Sol Ring. The appeal of tuned competition has nothing to do with the power of cards in a vacuum. People play cedh and vintage, they also play legacy, and modern, and standard, and pauper. And if a card is too powerful, it's the competitive players who want it banned most. Competitive modern players weren't saying "don't ban Hogaak, it's powerful and therefore fun!" They were saying "ban Hogaak, it's too powerful and it's making things boring."

Playing super tuned decks against one another would still be fun if all the cards were half the power level. Sol Ring is not the drawing power of cedh, not even close.
Basically, your entire post is a waste, as it only insists people they should share your opinion without making the case for it, and this thread has been degenerating into that level of discourse.
If my post is a waste, you're basically just yelling at a trash can. If you really thought it was a waste, you wouldn't have spent so many words responding. And if putting "This is just my perspective," at the start of every sentence would improve the level of discourse in your mind, I don't know what to tell you.
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Post by pokken » 4 years ago

tstorm823 wrote:
4 years ago
make for a good story, and none of them play Sol Ring. Because Sol Ring doesn't make good stories. It makes "well, I had Sol Ring to power that out, so who cares" moments.
Obviously all of these threads are about opinions but I would be cautious about making this argument as if it were a strong case. I don't agree, and find that Sol Ring often makes pretty good stories. The stories about how someone leaped ahead early and then had to fight the whole table and either claw out a win or get knocked out. I have a lot of "gee whiz" stories about busted starts people had and how the game responded to them.

I'll always remember this one game where I started with the most busted start imaginable for my deck (turn 1 mana crypt into as foretold) then ended up losing to humility out of nowhere, despite drawing a billion cards I never found an answer for it and got ground out by a Karn Liberated that I almost managed to kill with a Sword of Fire and Ice but didn't quite get there.

I'm not sure how the split happens between who enjoys sol ring and who doesn't. My best guess would be if you threw up a poll it'd probably end up 50/50 or so on "Does Sol ring make exciting games of commander that create cool stories?" as a question. I absolutely disagree with treating your statement as fact that everyone agrees on.

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Post by TheGildedGoose » 4 years ago

onering wrote:
4 years ago
Thinking that Sol Ring is unfun is an opinion, no matter how many times you post it.
I actually laughed out loud at this line. I forgot other people were expressing the gospel truth. I apologize and will refrain from posting my opinion in the future, sir.

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Post by onering » 4 years ago

tstorm823 wrote:
4 years ago
onering wrote:
4 years ago
This is ridiculous. The post is one giant strawman.

Here's the thing: I don't think people remember either of those types of Sol Ring games. I know I've had games blown out by fast starts, and I know I hated them, but I don't remember them specifically. The only Sol Ring start story I could recall for you specifically was a game where I was playing a red deck so my removal was burn+creature damage, and I kept being exactly 1 damage short of killing a turn 2 Kolonian Hydra every turn until I died, and that's like a comedy and tragedy all at once. Otherwise, it's like "oh, that happened, let's move on." Nor could I tell you about Sol Ring games that peter out. But I could talk for hours about all the amazing things that have happened without Sol Ring.
And I'm sure I could talk for hours about great games that had Sol Ring in it. A card doesn't have to create memories on its on to be worthwhile. There are plenty of great games that are made possible by Sol Ring letting someone stay in a game when they get mana screwed or letting someone get an extra cast of their commander, or letting them have enough mana to answer a combo. Its a mana rock. Mana rocks are never going to be the flashy stars of stories. That's not a valid argument against them.

Someone puking out a bunch of creatures doesn't force me to wrath. Nor does someone trying to land Splinter Twin force me to to kill the target. The further you go into a game, the more likely it is you have the option not to do those things. If it's turn 4, chances are the only answer to splinter twin is kill the target. If it's turn 10, a fog can save you and you might kill the player before they get to untap. If boards are developed, you get situations where you let a huge threat resolve on the calculation that if someone else is the first target, you can steal the game. If someone has 60 power on turn 4, you wrath. If someone has 60 power on turn 10, you might have other options. Great plays happen when you have other options.

I do want gee whiz stories every game. I build my decks with that hope. I play Zedruu, and the vast majority of opponents love it. And in the rare case someone doesn't like playing against zedruu, I've got a half dozen other decks ready to go. All of them can make for a good story, and none of them play Sol Ring. Because Sol Ring doesn't make good stories. It makes "well, I had Sol Ring to power that out, so who cares" moments. Playing with Sol Ring is playing a game I don't want to win. When someone plays a turn 1 Sol Ring, the best chance of people enjoying the game is that player losing. That is a tragic thing to do to yourself, and 3/4 of the decks in the format are doing it.
And yet another strawman. Turn 1 Sol Ring doesn't force you to kill the player, it forces you to rein them in. Just like any other powerful play. In reality, this tends to mean removing some of their early plays until the table catches up. Turn 1 ring makes you less likely to win because opponents are vigilant against its power and people tend to overextend into that. That's not destiny, that's playing poorly. And please, Splinter Twin Pestermite combo or any other 2 card combo generally necessitates an immediate response or game over. There are situations where it doesn't, but they are rare, and there are situations where turn 1 Sol Ring doesn't as well (like the guy having mulled to 4).

I think you're entirely misunderstanding the appeal of competitive magic. The appeal is playing at peak performance against equal competitors. If you banned Sol Ring, cedh players would continue to do that, just at a lower peak without Sol Ring. The appeal of tuned competition has nothing to do with the power of cards in a vacuum. People play cedh and vintage, they also play legacy, and modern, and standard, and pauper. And if a card is too powerful, it's the competitive players who want it banned most. Competitive modern players weren't saying "don't ban Hogaak, it's powerful and therefore fun!" They were saying "ban Hogaak, it's too powerful and it's making things boring."

Playing super tuned decks against one another would still be fun if all the cards were half the power level. Sol Ring is not the drawing power of cedh, not even close.
Another strawman. I never said that cEDH players don't enjoy playing anything else, only that they enjoy playing cEDH. And comparing Sol Ring, a utility card that doesn't harm deck diversity, to Hogaak, a centerpiece of a deck that dominated a format and severely curtailed deck diversity, is ridiculous, verging on dishonest. A better comparison to Sol Ring would be Brainstorm in Legacy. Its powerful and omnipresent, but its not hurting the format. A comparison to Hogaak in EDH is Flash, which actually is causing similar issues in cEDH and which cEDH ARE actually clamoring to ban.
If my post is a waste, you're basically just yelling at a trash can. If you really thought it was a waste, you wouldn't have spent so many words responding. And if putting "This is just my perspective," at the start of every sentence would improve the level of discourse in your mind, I don't know what to tell you.
Maybe not just dismissing other people's opinions and experiences would be nice. That's my main reason for posting what I did in the first place. One thing I notice on the pro Ring side is acknowledgement that some people don't like it and acknowledgement of the validity of that opinion, but what I'm getting from you, and in a much crasser and less articulate way from Goose, is that liking Sol Ring or even not thinking its a problem, is an invalid opinion. Its more aggravating to have your opinion dismissed out of hand and then expected to swallow esoteric arguments about stories as somehow more valid. And you are capable of better than that, pretty much always except right now when the discussion around your bugaboo has run out of any new material to discuss. So yea, when a post is a waste, it helps to reply as to why, especially if you expect a little bit better from the poster.

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Post by Cow31337Killer » 4 years ago

onering wrote: Strawman
Image

onering wrote: Maybe not just dismissing other people's opinions and experiences would be nice.
but then onering also wrote:
This is ridiculous. The post is one giant strawman.

Basically, your entire post is a waste.
Gotta love that sweet sweet hypocrisy

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Post by onering » 4 years ago

I'm not dismissing his dislike of Sol Ring. His post was a waste because it did nothing but discount the opinions of people who don't find Sol Ring to be a problem. I happen to hate Meren and T&N, but I know people like those cards, so I don't expect them to start disliking them just because I don't, nor am I going to make an argument for their banning just because I don't like them. Tstorm has, earlier in this thread, made legitimate arguments for banning Sol Ring that aren't based on him disliking it or nebulous ideas about stories and his personal feeling about what the format should be. The reason he's resorted to the latter isn't because he sucks at arguing, it's because both sides have exhausted their points and are now trying to persuade using their personal biases, which leads to crap.

Oh, and nice gif. Too bad it does actually mean that. He's arguing not against what I am saying, but setting up a straw man to knock down. Lecturing me that competitive players play more than one format is a straw man, because I never argued otherwise. Comparing Hogaak, a format warping card that greatly reduced deck diversity and invalidated strategies, to Sol Ring, a card that obviously does not do that, is a straw man in the context he did it in, trying to imply that I was arguing that competitive players never want to ban powerful cards. I of course never said that, but it was easier to create an imagined argument that he could attack rather than what I was actually saying. That is the definition of a straw man. So is his entire argument around turn 1 Sol Ring, first by laughably implying that 3/4 of decks make themselves the archenemy and putting themselves in a bad position by running Sol Ring (making the false assumption that all of those decks are going to be hitting turn 1 Sol Ring consistently and drawing subsequent hate, turning a statistic, that 3/4 of decks run Sol Ring, into a fabrication, that 3/4 of players are misplaying Sol Ring and thus it's ruining games, thats easier to argue against than reality). He's then setting up a straw man that the counter to turn 1 Sol Ring being provided is to just kill that player, when the real argument is to deal with that player to enable everyone to catch up, with examples having been given throughout the thread such as blowing up Sol Ring, answering his early plays, punishing for overextending, etc. Obviously basic counterplay isn't ruining games, and that's not convenient to his argument, so he pretends that the answer being provided for turn 1 Sol Ring is for everyone else to just kill the player, allowing him to argue that it creates bad play experiences. That is a classic straw man. It's not reality, and it's not what the pro Sol Ring side is arguing, but it sure makes it easier for him to make his argument.

"A straw man is a form of argument and an informal fallacy based on giving the impression of refuting an opponent's argument, while actually refuting an argument that was not presented by that opponent. One who engages in this fallacy is said to be "attacking a straw man"."

When you googled the gif, you should have googled the definition of a straw man argument instead.

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Post by tstorm823 » 4 years ago

pokken wrote:
4 years ago
Obviously all of these threads are about opinions but I would be cautious about making this argument as if it were a strong case. I don't agree, and find that Sol Ring often makes pretty good stories. The stories about how someone leaped ahead early and then had to fight the whole table and either claw out a win or get knocked out. I have a lot of "gee whiz" stories about busted starts people had and how the game responded to them.

I'll always remember this one game where I started with the most busted start imaginable for my deck (turn 1 mana crypt into as foretold) then ended up losing to humility out of nowhere, despite drawing a billion cards I never found an answer for it and got ground out by a Karn Liberated that I almost managed to kill with a Sword of Fire and Ice but didn't quite get there.

I'm not sure how the split happens between who enjoys sol ring and who doesn't. My best guess would be if you threw up a poll it'd probably end up 50/50 or so on "Does Sol ring make exciting games of commander that create cool stories?" as a question. I absolutely disagree with treating your statement as fact that everyone agrees on.
I suppose you may disagree, I think it would lea my way more than 50/50, but I think that poll would be interesting not just to find the results, but also because I don't think most people think about their card choices that way. I think most people building decks take a handful of cards they personally enjoy and then prop them up with a pile of staples because the things they enjoy don't matter if the deck doesn't function. I can't dispute that, a deck that never does its thing is worse than one that does sometimes, but I think people leaning on staples without questioning whether the good cards are going to make the experience they want happen is a large contributor to people building decks and going "it worked a couple times, but it got boring fast so I took it apart."

Sure, I'll concede others may think Sol Ring makes good stories, but I'll point out all your examples of good Sol Ring stories are the Sol Ring player losing or almost losing. If having a turn 1 Sol Ring makes you more likely to lose a game, I suspect this is the reason: not just because 3 other players have the power to make that the case, but also because the Sol Ring player losing is the most desirable outcome. You make a good story out of a fast mana start only by tearing down the player with the fast mana. I just have no desire to play that type of game.
onering wrote:
4 years ago
And I'm sure I could talk for hours about great games that had Sol Ring in it. A card doesn't have to create memories on its on to be worthwhile. There are plenty of great games that are made possible by Sol Ring letting someone stay in a game when they get mana screwed or letting someone get an extra cast of their commander, or letting them have enough mana to answer a combo. Its a mana rock. Mana rocks are never going to be the flashy stars of stories. That's not a valid argument against them.
Mana rocks can be the flashy stars of stories. I have absolutely killed people with mana rocks before.

But I'll point out, like Pokken's examples where Sol Ring was good because the Sol Ring player got beat up, your examples of Sol Ring being good for a game are all being used by a player on the crap side of things. I know that having a crappy game happens whether we want it to or not, but if the best games made by Sol Ring are people having a bad time otherwise, encouraging people to play Sol Ring feels to me like encouraging people to be in bad positions to justify Sol Ring's presence.
And yet another strawman. Turn 1 Sol Ring doesn't force you to kill the player, it forces you to rein them in. Just like any other powerful play. In reality, this tends to mean removing some of their early plays until the table catches up. Turn 1 ring makes you less likely to win because opponents are vigilant against its power and people tend to overextend into that. That's not destiny, that's playing poorly. And please, Splinter Twin Pestermite combo or any other 2 card combo generally necessitates an immediate response or game over. There are situations where it doesn't, but they are rare, and there are situations where turn 1 Sol Ring doesn't as well (like the guy having mulled to 4).
I would like for you to explain how something is a strawman next time you use it. Please be explicit. Say "I said this, but you pretended that I said this instead, and that isn't my position." If someone explains your side poorly, it could be a strawman, but it's more likely just a misunderstanding. I promise, if I misstated a position you hold, it was a misunderstanding, not misrepresenting you on purpose. But I can't identify where the problem is to tell what you think I'm lying about because you're just throwing out an accusation of malice against me without identifying where.

Moreover, I never said the only answer to a turn 1 Sol Ring is killing the player. I said the best chance for people to enjoy the game is the turn one Sol Ring player losing. I don't think you disagree with that, an underdog story where people overcome the fast mana opponent is a more interesting game than someone leading off with a head start and carrying that to the finish line. Regardless, I think it's a bit of a stretch to equate saying that a game is likely better if the fast mana player loses to saying that killing the Sol Ring player is the only answer to Sol Ring. The argument you're refuting is not the argument that I made. I could call that a strawman, but I'd far rather believe it's a simple misunderstanding. And I think that's true of this whole conversation: I don't think you're trying to be mean-spirited, but I think you are reading the worst intentions into my words and it's making real communication difficult.
Another strawman. I never said that cEDH players don't enjoy playing anything else, only that they enjoy playing cEDH. And comparing Sol Ring, a utility card that doesn't harm deck diversity, to Hogaak, a centerpiece of a deck that dominated a format and severely curtailed deck diversity, is ridiculous, verging on dishonest. A better comparison to Sol Ring would be Brainstorm in Legacy. Its powerful and omnipresent, but its not hurting the format. A comparison to Hogaak in EDH is Flash, which actually is causing similar issues in cEDH and which cEDH ARE actually clamoring to ban.
My point wasn't that cEDH players play other formats. My point was that formats with less powerful card pools aren't less competitive. If the appeal of competition was dependent on the power level of cards, there'd be fewer calls for bans and nobody playing pauper. But that's not the appeal of competition, the appeal is the thrill of challenging others also trying their hardest to win, regardless of the card pool. If you want to take a comparison from Legacy, how about comparing to Sol Ring in Legacy. That's right, it's banned. That does not make legacy less competitive. That does not make Legacy less attractive to competitive players, and I highly doubt you'd find much support for unbanning Sol Ring in legacy.
Maybe not just dismissing other people's opinions and experiences would be nice. That's my main reason for posting what I did in the first place. One thing I notice on the pro Ring side is acknowledgement that some people don't like it and acknowledgement of the validity of that opinion, but what I'm getting from you, and in a much crasser and less articulate way from Goose, is that liking Sol Ring or even not thinking its a problem, is an invalid opinion. Its more aggravating to have your opinion dismissed out of hand and then expected to swallow esoteric arguments about stories as somehow more valid. And you are capable of better than that, pretty much always except right now when the discussion around your bugaboo has run out of any new material to discuss. So yea, when a post is a waste, it helps to reply as to why, especially if you expect a little bit better from the poster.
I mean, if you go back a page, you can quote me saying:
tstorm823 wrote:
4 years ago
Even if not a single person changes their stance overall, I would consider this a productive discussion if the end result is the same stalemate but with better arguments. I don't think I could be convinced through argument that the format is better with Sol Ring, that just completely contradicts my own experience. It'd be wrong of me to deny anyone else their own experience. But if I can help make a world where nobody ever says "Sol Ring is fair because it's a bad top deck late game", count me in, because that's just bad analysis.
Bolded emphasis added. I certainly didn't intend to dismiss other people's experiences. I think the most productive thing for me to do here is rewind a bit and look at my own post that instigated all of this.
tstorm823 wrote:
4 years ago
umtiger wrote:
4 years ago
Players/people tend to recall negative experiences much more than positive ones, even if the positive ones vastly outnumber the negative ones. More often than not, Sol Rings (even early ones) have not negatively affected games I've played.
Disagree here. People in general may tend to hold strongly on to particularly negative experiences, but if you look at this format and think people remember the negative moments over a sea of positives, you have it entirely backwards. Because this is a mostly multiplayer format, arguably negative experiences dominate your time: waiting for 3 other players to pass turn before you get to do anything, having your best laid plans smothered by triple the opposition, winning half as many games as you would with 1 opponent while playing games that take like 5 times as long to finish, having "unfair" outcomes based on kingmaking and collusion... I could go on. The list of complaints people have about EDH is long, and often understandable, though I'd hesitate to say justified because we all keep playing for a reason: one good story makes an entire game worth it.
umtiger argues that people dislike Sol Ring because they remember negative experiences more than positive ones. I argue that people actually remember good experiences more than bad ones. I guess that's generalizing on all players and may be dismissive of your experience if you remember negative experiences over the good ones, but at the very least, it's less dismissive of you than umtigers post was of me. I'm definitely among the most against Sol Ring here, and I also have way more memory devoted to my favorite edh moments than I do to the bad times So like, my existence refutes umtigers point even without bringing anyone else into it, and I apologize if talking about "people" steamrolled you into it. I was likely just writing parallel to the argument I was disagreeing with.
You think Sol Rings have not negatively effected the games you play, but it seems you're coming from the perspective that a negative effect is an event, a moment you can look at and say "man, that card ruined the whole game". And Sol Ring definitely makes games like that. But there are also bad games of Magic where everyone just goes through the motions, nothing exciting happens, nobody gets to make any particularly interesting decisions, and nobody goes home with a story to tell and may as well have played Parcheesi. Sol Ring absolutely makes those games too. That's the comeback to "but people can team up on the player with Sol Ring!" Having your hands forced like that isn't more interesting. There are far less opportunities for exceptional decisions if the board hasn't developed yet but people are being put into "check" back and forth every turn.
Most of this is just me stating my own perspective. I can see how, as written, it might seem look like condescending jerkiness to tell someone "you think something, but", but I promise I did not mean it in a sense of "you don't know your own experience", I meant it in the sense of "we're not talking about the same thing". It's the question of what constitutes a "negative effect". umtiger had given examples of things they found negative, they were infinite combo finishes and Scrambleverse. If I ask someone if Sol Ring has negatively effected a game, and they say no, it's not actually a meaningful answer if I'm thinking of pushing games toward undesirable play patterns as negative and their concept of a negative effect only includes things as in-your-face as Scrambleverse. Someone can say "Sol Rings haven't negatively effected games I've played", but if that translates to "Sol Ring hasn't Scrambleversed any games I've played", it's not really as meaningful. I'm not dismissing the experience, in fact I'm confident Sol Ring has factually never Scrambleversed any of umtiger's games, I would just suggest a slightly broader scope for considering what is a negative effect.
Sol Ring isn't a unique exciting experience. Even if you enjoy the power of super fast mana, how many times are you gonna get a good story out of it? "I had this crazy game where I had a Sol Ring and won on turn 3!" *Yawn* Could you even brag about a single Sol Ring win without feeling a pinch of shame? Conversely, you'll almost never know the amazing moments Sol Ring has taken away from you.
Yes, this is sort of stating my opinion as fact... but it's totally right. Sol Ring isn't a unique exciting experience. It is likely the second most represented card in any major format, next to Black Lotus in vintage. I personally think its the least exciting card in the format, I'll admit that's opinion, but dear god, where is the excitement left in a card that pops up every other game at any given table. Just, :sick: .

I don't know if any of that helps, (probably not that last part), but I hope so.
Zedruu: "This deck is not only able to go crazy - it also needs to do so."

onering
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Post by onering » 4 years ago

Ok, now that's a big change for the better from earlier. I can better understand where your coming from after this, and some of the things that came off as strawmen no longer do after further explanation and making it clear what you meant. I go more into explaining why I felt certain points were strawmen in my response to cow, so I won't repeat them here, I'll address the ones I no longer consider such due to your most recent post. The point about competitive players and other formats: your initial post regarding Hogaak came off as a straw man because it was comparing apples to oranges and made it seem like the argument you were trying to refute was the idea that competitive players don't want to ban powerful cards, which would obviously be incorrect and was not the argument I was making. The specific point about Hogaak took away from the point you just explained you were trying to make, that competitive players will still play competitive formats if powerful cards are banned. That doesn't really address the point I was making, that cEDH is the only place that the sort of steamroll plays off of Sol Ring regularly occur and that the meta is not only able to handle it but it's a positive there. Sure, they'd still play cEDH without fast Mana, but if cEDH is where these kind of starts are most likely to happen and most likely to be capitalized on, and yet it isn't causing problems there, that's an argument against banning it. As for Legacy, it's a different format with half the life, more consistency, and where fast Mana is even more powerful than in commander. Meanwhile, there are cards that are legal in Legacy and perfectly fine there but rightly banned in commander. Brainstorm is the apt comparison because it is a card that is borderline too powerful for the format, yet doesn't break the format (while other similarly powerful cards do). It's something that on paper seems bannable, but in practice isn't causing deck diversity to suffer or centralizing the meta around an archetype. That's the way I see Sol Ring acting.

For the turn 1 Sol Ring response, I failed to see much a difference between "turn 1 Sol Ring player losing" and "kill the turn 1 Sol Ring player" especially given "That is a tragic thing to do to yourself, and 3/4 of the decks in the format are doing it." The game can still be fun if the turn 1 Sol Ring player wins, because stopping him from steamrolling out of the gate is the key, for me, as to whether the game is fun. If, after people catch up, he ends up winning anyway, that's fine. Maybe someone else became the threat in the meantime and he rebuilt. Maybe he just kept getting great draws. Same with stopping a combo, the combo player winning with a different wincon when the combo gets handled is plenty fun, same for a turn 1 Sol Ring start getting handled and that player coming back. I hope you can see how presenting that argument as "it's only fun if the Sol Ring player loses" could appear like a strawman argument without the further clarification you later gave. As a side note, I disagree that Sol Ring saving you from a bad position means that you were necessarily putting yourself in a bad position because of Sol Ring. This morning I drew into a turn 4 Sol Ring off a 3 land hand while I was stuck on 3 lands, and it let me cast some card draw that eventually let me dig into more land. I ended up winning, but was dead in the water without it because my next land was 3 cards down and I was facing Edgar Markov. Sure, Ancient Tomb would have worked just as well there, but it would have been a garbage game without Sol Ring, and ended up being pretty good with it (and not just because I won) and it was a Sol Ring I wasn't planning on. This doesn't happen all the time, but neither does someone going crazy off of a turn 1 ring into multiple rocks. But I also have an extension collection on modo so I don't have to rely the fast Mana to bail out my deckbuilding. Lots of players though play with precons, or moderately upgraded precons, and when you have a relatively meager collection you don't have the luxury of fine tuning your decks and Sol Ring is more likely to bail them out of bad situations caused by their limited card pool, at least until they expand it.

The last part I just think is a bit melodramatic. I get that it's not new or exciting, but few things are in magic, because unless your thinking really outside the box (like zedruu crappy aura Voltron) deck builders tend to go with what works, because people like to win. Banning Sol Ring, or even all the fast Mana won't change that. Personally, I find flavor of the month commanders and overused commanders a lot more tiring than fast Mana. Because when I see Meren, I know exactly how Meren is going to play out, while turn 3 Sol Ring looks different depending on what's in the cz. Same with Purphoros. Same with Omnath 2.0. it's the same commanders over and over that most drive the sameyness of commander. I do try to build outside the box a lot in search ot novelty. The deck i was playing this morning was Lu Xun human tribal in a control shell. I've been running Grixis Group hug, Munda, Djeru, etc because little used commanders and strategies are fun. I sigh a lot harder when I see Edgar Markov in the CZ than when an Etali player drops Sol Ring turn 2.

umtiger
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Post by umtiger » 4 years ago

tstorm823 wrote:
4 years ago
Disagree here. People in general may tend to hold strongly on to particularly negative experiences, but if you look at this format and think people remember the negative moments over a sea of positives, you have it entirely backwards.

You think Sol Rings have not negatively effected the games you play, but it seems you're coming from the perspective that a negative effect is an event, a moment you can look at and say "man, that card ruined the whole game". And Sol Ring definitely makes games like that. But there are also bad games of Magic where everyone just goes through the motions, nothing exciting happens, nobody gets to make any particularly interesting decisions, and nobody goes home with a story to tell and may as well have played Parcheesi. Sol Ring absolutely makes those games too. That's the comeback to "but people can team up on the player with Sol Ring!" Having your hands forced like that isn't more interesting. There are far less opportunities for exceptional decisions if the board hasn't developed yet but people are being put into "check" back and forth every turn.

Sol Ring isn't a unique exciting experience. Even if you enjoy the power of super fast mana, how many times are you gonna get a good story out of it? "I had this crazy game where I had a Sol Ring and won on turn 3!" *Yawn* Could you even brag about a single Sol Ring win without feeling a pinch of shame? Conversely, you'll almost never know the amazing moments Sol Ring has taken away from you.
You may disagree, but all of human psychology has shown that negative experiences remain much more strongly than positive ones. It often does take a sea of positives to cancel out one tiny negative. Hence, why you're focusing on that.

Early Sol Ring or fast mana does impact games, and that has been your main focus. In the middle of the game, Sol Ring is a stronger Skyshroud Claim that can be removed. And that case is much more likely than T1 Sol Ring. But you only bring up early Sol Ring. b/c a Sol Ring with a Serra Avenger clause wouldn't cause much of a fuss.

I don't think playing Sol Ring diminishes any game win, whether it's T1 or T5 or T14 (hey, we got to pay CMDR-tax, right). Mainly because I also don't think an early Sol Ring guarantees that a game won't be back-and-forth. It might be a dimir deck, that sans their T2 Sol Ring, won't have any meaningful acceleration for the rest of the game. Some players might think they're on easy street after T1 Sol Ring. Heck, you might even feel that way [about other players, because you don't play Sol Ring]. But if you're playing me and you feel that way, you have another thing coming.

Are some games more memorable, sure! Is every game memorable, no! And that's not on Sol Ring or any card for that matter. You bringing up the "you'll never miss what you never had" existential argument against Sol Ring reminds of the flavor text on Wand of Denial. Man, if I don't know how much I'm missing out...how exactly are you able to make that calculation for me?

I'd say that Sol Ring is an unique experience in and of itself, one that is uniquely EDH. Have you seen players keep crappy hands just b/c of T1 Sol Ring? That's a quite a common tale in EDH. Fast mana and the preponderance of land ramp informs a significant part of EDH, big mana plays will be allowed. Playing powerful cards is absolutely a part of the experience in EDH. And less than 0.001% of MTG players will ever play Sol Ring if not for EDH. Super fast mana can and does lead to crazy stories and Sol Ring doesn't always mean T3 wins.

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