Dunharrow wrote: ↑2 years ago
Clearly, from our discussion, I think flexibility is very powerful. Also, in more casual games, I have always favoured flexibility over efficiency. I don't believe I am alone in this. Certainly, reading this thread I have the impression others feel the same way.
Of course. So people who favor flexibility tend to play wishes, and people who favor efficiency don't.
I don't see a problem here?
My land tutors can get
Scavenger Grounds. My RG deck has a LOT of land tutors. But I cut scooze because I have a proactive deck and I personally do not see a lot of GY decks (outside my own decks that is).
And yes
Klothys, God of Destiny could be a better inclusion - I don't own one as of yet.
okay well if you have a lot of land tutors and a scavenger grounds then it seems like you're pretty well covered on grave hate anyway? Maybe run more deserts if you want multi-use scavenger grounds, they're a pretty low commitment to run and there's a fair number of options. I do it that way in my Phelddagrif deck.
Idk why you're running scooze if scooze is bad in your deck. Don't run it if you hate it so much? There are a ton of grave hate cards and/or strategies to find and use them, just pick something else, whether it's klothys or not. Most decks can find at least a few cards with incidental grave hate that do something proactive they care about.
Trample.
Malignus doesn't have trample...?
Or is there some complete board state you're imagining in your head that you're not telling me about giving him trample? Well fine, in that case I'm imagining that the karador deck has
Phyrexian Splicer to disable the trample. GG2EZ.
Seems like a more reliable solution, yes. Although I think grave hate would be even better, and more versatile. Look at us, building a deck together
Of course you would, if you didn't have artifacts and enchantments. But let's say, you do! Then Bane of Progress is a decent wish target, but not a great main deck card.
I think I'd rather have targeted removal in the main if I'm worried about collateral damage. And probably a global wipe like
Oblivion Stone that can solve a wider array of board-clogging problems. Sure, sometimes bane would be a better tool because I don't have any artifacts/enchantments, or because I really don't want to blow up my creatures with o-stone but you can't always have the perfect answer for everything. You put bane in your wishboard, and if that particular case doesn't come up often enough, then you're wasting a wish slot. And if you're wasting your wish slots, then the extra cost of the wish becomes not worth it.
It's really down to the specifics of the deck, whether it cares about tempo or efficiency, which kinds of answers it wants and how often it wants them, which proactive plays can be wished for and how viable those plays are with extra mana attached...these are all really complex things to think about when building a deck. So why oh why oh why oh WHY are you acting like wishes are some extremely simple, one-size-fits-all solution that's an easy include for everyone?
Wishes have seen 60-card play but afaik they've never been remotely close to an auto-include. Why should commander be any different?
(And 60-card has the advantage of being able to turn wishes into additional copies of a single crucial card, which doesn't really work in commander - tutors and functional reprints are the only way to functionally increase your number of copies)
Come on, are you being stubborn on purpose? What about the majority of games where I don't want scooze. Yes, I would pay an extra 2 mana so it isn't a dead draw. I am not replacing a card I want every game!
Ugh, more scooze stuff. Look, scooze is good because it offers a body, lifegain, and grave hate in one package. It already has versatility baked in, that's why it's good. If you only care about the grave hate, then you should probably play something else. Stop acting like you including the wrong grave hate option for your deck means that somehow wishes are OP. Just find a better grave hate piece that isn't a "dead draw" when you aren't playing against grave decks.
Again, stubborn on purpose. Use your demonic tutor to get Relic of Progenitus or Scavenger Grounds. I am not saying Ooze is your only GY hate you have access to.
Then cut the scooze for %$#%'s sake! If you hate it so much then cut it!
Oh boy. Are you a person who refuses to Demonic Tutor for a land? Sometimes you can't tutor your win condition and you need to stop your opponent.
The last time I played demonic tutor it was for a turn 2
Snuff Out on an
Orvar, the All-Form that had been ramped out via sol ring. So don't go preaching to me about how to use tutors responsibly. And I don't even play win conditions, haven't you read my title?
My point about wishes is that a lot of the strength of tutors - and a lot of what's problematic about tutors - is that they can hit the same win conditions over and over again. They're a functional second/third/etc copy of your combo pieces (even if sometimes they'll need to get other things). Wishes don't - generally - work like that, because your combo pieces are in your mainboard.
Also you usually can't wish for a land so that's another knock against them relative to (black, and some green) tutors. You can put one into your pile with living wish, ofc, but then you only get 2 creature targets, so now you've only got one reactive and one proactive card available. Three wishes really makes you carefully consider every single card you put into your wishboard.
Also, I am saying cut a marginal card, or 2, for a wish, and make your 3rd wish target a card that is always good, but maybe not as good as other main deck options. For example, Terastradon would always be good in my RG deck (because I have insane amounts of ramp), but I don't play it over
Vorinclex, Voice of Hunger or
Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger.
Sure, do it.
It seems like you're under the impression that suggesting a reasonable approach to using one wish in one specific deck means that wishes are therefore unfairly powerful in every deck and will engulf the entire format.
And, uh...no. That's not how that works.
In a vacuum, this has merit. In reality, I think most of my decks have about 10-20 cards that are good enough to be included but cut due to 100 card limitation. My RG deck would play living wish instead of
Caustic Caterpillar. I have other disenchant effects, but I think this is the weakest. I would also add to wish board something like Scavenging Ooze, and probably Terastadon (but maybe card draw). I think my deck is massively improved like this.
And when others catch on to it the wishes will become too strong to ignore in deckbuilding.
See above. Maybe your ramp deck is just so rampy that it makes the mana tax of wishes irrelevant (which it doesn't, but whatever), but that doesn't mean those costs are irrelevant to every deck. They will merit inclusion in some decks but not all of them, depending on what those decks care about, much like every other card in existence.
Also idk that having 2/3 of your slots be dedicated to blowing up noncreatures it really the best way to benefit from the versatility of a wish, but that's part of the fun. Try out different combinations until you find a trio that reliably has a good target.
Maybe I'm wrong and the difference in mana costs justifies it, even though you're ultimately paying 5 to kill something with caterpillar which seems pretty steep. But who knows!
You pick cards that were banned because the RC thought they would be problematic, not because they are problematic.... Why not mention any cards banned recently? Prophet of Kruphix? Hullbreacher?
You know you are being disingenuous to suggest that ubiquity is not grounds for banning. But obviously that is not always enough (see StP and Sol Ring).
I think if you'd read my whole response you could have saved yourself some typing here.
Ubiquity isn't a problem in itself, it's a multiplier onto how problematic the effect is. Stasis hits 10% it gets banned instantly because the effect is so annoying.
Rakdos Signet hits 100%, nobody gives a %$#% because it's fine.
exactly
exactly.
I highly doubt that wishes would pass 10%, but let's assume they do for sake of argument. Why is that a problem? They're just card selection. If
Impulse gets to 50% usage, do you give a crap? I know I wouldn't.
Lol. Obviously unbanned, then price jumps. Then people feel like they can't compete without spending money on wishes. And either WOTC starts printing them as often as they print StP and Sol Ring, or the price stays pretty high.
Price has jumped on all the other cards that got unbanned too, and it's fine. The sky has not fallen. There's a hell of a lot more living wishes out there than
Metalworker, I'll tell ye that. And they'd probably reprint them again fairly quickly (as quickly as they do anything at least).
Imperial Seal is pretty damn expensive, are people freaking out that they can't compete without it? I rarely even hear people talk about it. Hell,
Mana Crypt is literally the most powerful card in the entire format and it has only 14% use almost entirely from price (and that's on EDHrec - irl my experience says it's much, much lower). Honestly, I hear very little complaining. There's always cards that are out-of-budget for most people, and wishes don't even come close to the power and utility of mana crypt or seal.
I said Karn CAN go into every deck. Not SHOULD. I just meant to say that even without access to the better wishes, Karn is still an option and a pretty good one too.
I don't see how there being another planeswalker which is a "pretty good option" is problematic to the format.
I could imagine getting karn getting axed for his synergy with lattice, but if he gets banned I'm 100% a-o-fine with that.
I have said many times that I want the best tutors banned. I think they should be for many reasons:
1. They go against the spirit of a singleton format
2. They make games more repetitive
3. They are often too expensive to be considered auto-includes, which I think hurts the format. Playing Diabolic Tutor because Demonic is too expensive feels bad.
As to the first two, I think wishes don't have those problems at all, though. As far as being singleton, they're more like SUPER-singleton, since each card in your wishboard is only 1/3 of a card, from a certain perspective. They also make games even less repetitive, since you can't search your most-common-wincon, and increase the number of possible cards which can be played.
Can't speak to the third one as it relates to wishes, but I think any opinion on it is pure speculation.
Ubiquity is not enough. But nobody wants to sit down to a game, have their opponent cast
Wish, and then lose to a narrow hate card in the wishboard. That feels bad on so many levels.
Ugh, back to this again. What "narrow hate cards" are you so worried about? All the ways you've said that you would use wishes were generally in the format [semi-narrow targeted removal that would be reasonable in the main] [general purpose value card] [flex slot? but generally something else that would be viable in the main]. I think that's a pretty reasonable approach, pretty close to what I'd do and what I think most wishers would do. So tell me, where are we fitting in
Flashfires,
Boil, and
acid rain? And why are we assuming players would suddenly love playing those cards when they see virtually zero play? Sure, they're sometimes bad draws in the main, but there are plenty of commanders like
Anje Falkenrath who could just loot them away when they aren't helpful, and they don't get played there either.
And if wishes become as played as I think they would be, it would be unbearable.
You know what they say about assumptions. And catastrophizing. It makes a...cat...out of...the greek letter phi...and...zing?
brb flagellating myself.
Also, you won't see Living wish at 50% of decks. People will only play 1 wish per deck, so an RG deck would have to pick from one of 3-4 wishes the one they like best (assuming 3 card sideboard).
You have successfully found another reason that wishes are fine.
Admittedly, one of the reasons why wishes leave such a sour taste in my mouth are that when the rules were vague, I was adamant that my opponents not use wishboards. I thought it was very unfair that they could play with the advantage while I didn't because I adhered to official rules.
So if wishes were made 100% legal, it would be way better than it was before.
I'm 100% in agreement with this. I haaate asking for special allowances and I hate letting other people have them too. I'm fine with people using MLP promos or whatever, because I would never choose to use an MLP promo even if they were officially legal (and I've never seen an MLP deck be remotely good), but when someone wants to use a banned card or "some un-card somewhere in their deck" they can GTFO. If I knew we were playing that way, I would have taken advantage of it myself. Start a special rules-optional league, invite me, give me a week to build a deck, and then we'll talk.
But I think also a bit worse than if they were left as non-functional in commander.
You're allowed to have that opinion.
The other option, and tell me what you think - is to let 3 card sideboards exist, but premptively ban the best wishes. I don't care about Learn cards. I don't care about the two cards that search outside the game for Eldrazi.
I would just say preemptively ban Living Wish, Burning Wish, Glittering Wish,
Wish... and to keep the 4cmc options closely watched.
Personally I think the actual scariest wish might be
Mastermind's Acquisition, simply because you don't need to dedicate any slots to general-purpose value/answer cards since they're already in the deck. If I wanted to build a douchebag niche-hate wishboard, that's how I'd do it.
But I'd be absolutely fine with that as an implementation. I think over time people would chill and unban those cards too, but even if they didn't I think it'd still be fine. It's the errata that gets my hackles up way more than the overestimation of wishes - it's just that the overestimation of wishes is how the errata is justified.