[MCD] Wishes

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tarotplz
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Post by tarotplz » 4 years ago

Cow31337Killer wrote:
4 years ago
Okay people seemed to ignore this in order to keep arguing with Legend but I gotta say this is an A+ post. Honestly if there's anything that could convince me that wishes would be good for the format it's this post here. Great example of a well thought out and respectfully persuasive argument concerning wishes (which is what a lot of people were asking for *cough* tarotplz *cough*)
I originally didn't reply to this, because the vast majority of these arguments had already been covered in discussion with Legend, but if you're gonna call me out like that, I'll get right on it.
Impossible wrote:
4 years ago
The idea that Wishes will invariably lead to nothing but degenerate color-hosers and the like is kind of self-defeating, in that it assumes players' only intentions are to win at any cost instead of, I dunno, follow the format philosophy. One of my most hated phrases ever rears it's ugly head here, but this time I get to invoke it's nonsense in defense of my point instead of the other way around: "fair use". There are numerous cards that should almost certainly be banned but they skirt the list because of their so-called fair use value. The idea being that because these cards have the potential to be used in a fair and fun manner, any concerns that said cards are also combo machines and can end games the moment they're resolved tend to be glossed over. So sure, it's possible to do awful things with Wishes. But it's also possible to do awesome things. The question becomes why don't WIshes get the same benefit of the doubt that other cards seem to get?
First up, the main reason why wishes are often equated to narrow answers like color hosers and the like is that they do those sort of effects better than any other kind of card. If you want to put a card like Choke into your deck, there is the inherit downside of what will happen if you run into a table without a blue deck (or just small blue splashes, you get the idea).
In that situation your narrow hoser will be a dead card and this is why they don't actually see play in general. Even looking into the direction of cEDH, those kind of cards are maybeboard inclusions in certain stax builds at best. (for example Blood Pod would very occasionally run it in the bluest of blue metas)
If you can wish for a narrow answer however this downside completely disappears. If one of your narrow hosers is dead in the matchup, your wish can still get you one that works in the given circumstances. This is a big upside.
Note that a normal tutor does not have this upside. You still need to put the potentially dead card into your deck. Sometimes you'll still draw it and it will do nothing. The downside is definitly still there.

When people say that wishes will lead to narrow answers they don't simply mean that people are jerks and will hate on their friends with those kind of cards, but instead they worry about the increased temptation to get these cards & them often being the optimal play as they work so well with wishes. At this point it is more than just wish opponents assuming player intentions and instead becomes a prediction based on the function of the cards in question.

To adress your second point about cards that get the "fair-use" benefit of the doubt. I'm assuming you're referring to cards like Protean Hulk etc. I would argue that many of these card don't in fact get the benefit of the doubt at all. At least not as far as a big chunk of the playerbase is concerned. I'm sure you didn't miss the outcry of when Paradox Engine was banned, but Flash and Protean Hulk were allowed to stay in the format.
Impossible wrote:
4 years ago
There is also the argument that @papa_funk mentioned that he believes the current rule is the easiest and cleanest version they could make and thus far has proven fine, but I fairly strongly disagree. I cannot accept that a rule that allows cards to be legally played but have no actual rules text on them is anything but a disaster of common sense. I firmly believe that at a fundamental level cards should do what they say they do. Rule 13 is essentially format-specific errata that doesn't need to exist. Are Wishes simply too powerful of a mechanic that they need to be banned? I don't think so, but if the RC does then Wishes should be explicitly banned by name, like any other card. If Wishes don't actually need to be banned and the only problems with them are logistical, blanket banning them anyway via errata seems completely unnecessary. The point is that right now, at least to me, it feels very much like the RC simply couldn't be bothered to make Wishes work and just soft-banned them instead of dealing with it. I would very much prefer either an explicit ban on each "outside the game" card with a reason why -- not a reason why for each card, but a general reason why they're unsuitable for EDH -- or for them to be set free and actually do what the cards say they do. This middle ground of legal-but-do-nothing is the worst possible option in my opinion.
Legend raised pretty much the exact same point. Ultimately this is purely opinion based though. I get the bit about it being unintuitive, but think about what would happen if the wishes were actually placed on the ban list today.

It would be significantly harder for playgroups that want to use them to house-unban them, as at that point your going against the direct "will" of the RC. Play groups that make their own ban list are often looked down upon by large chunks of the community and personally I feel like there definitly is a sort of stigma on custom bans and unbans in EDH.
The current solution might not be perfect, but what it does do is leave the most freedom possible to the people that actually want to use wishes in their games. A banlist solution has less freedom and them being legal in the format is problematic for those people that don't want to use wishes.

The word easy can be interpreted in many ways in this context. One way could be the ease of understanding the rules regarding wishes, but another could be the easy acess to wishes in your own EDH games should you want them.
Impossible wrote:
4 years ago
Something that has also been floated (and in my personal opinion appears to be the sole reason Wishes are 'banned') is the notion that making Wishes legal would require a significant overhaul of the rules, as things would need to be explicitly spelled out to prevent confusion, and that ultimately making a small handful of cards work isn't worth the effort. I touched on this topic a little bit already, as it is pretty inextricably linked to the idea of having the simplest rules be the best a la papa_funk, but I think this is worth diving into as a full topic. Mainly because I think the idea is being wrongly applied in this instance. While I agree that when it comes to rules, simple generally means best. But this idea that rewriting Rule 13 to explain how Wishes work is bad seems to be based on an idea that adding rules is a negative no matter the context, because more rules is bad. And that's what I would like to push back against.
I disagree with that being the main argument against wishes. As you said, we are effectively talking about an unban here. There are certain conditions that need to be met in order for an unban to be actually viable.

1.) The unban can't unbalance the format. This would happen if the unbanned card is significantly stronger than the rest of the field and would therefore overcentralize gameplay. I don't think that most wishes fall into this category, but Karn, the Great Creator definitly does in my opinion. Maybe if we excluded Karn we could argue that this condition might be met, but the 2nd one is quite a bit more relevant, especially regarding EDH.

2.) There needs to be a good reason to believe that the unbanned card would improve the format by causing "good gameplay" rather than "bad gameplay". This is the main category I see wishes struggle with. They are certainly capable of both, I don't think anyone could deny that, but coupled with the fact that they do narrow answers better than other cards and more importantly the fact that they DID cause bad experiences in the past when they were allowed, I simply can't agree this condition is even close to being met.
If you have an argument to present that would make me believe that there is a good chance wishes would improve the format, I would love to hear it, but as it stands I have yet to see anything remotely convincing in this regard.
Impossible wrote:
4 years ago
I assume most of us are familiar with the word grok, as MaRo likes to use it frequently? For the quick and dirty version I'm going to just steal cite his definition of the word from his article Between a Grok and a Hard Place:
"The usage that I'm most interested in is the idea that people understand something so intimately that they are not even conscious why they understand it. To grok something by this definition means that you understand it in a way that is more intuitive than intellectual. You get the essence of what it means, but mostly because it just feels right – not because you've been formally taught anything about it."
I bring this up because I think we should examine the prospect of adding more rules in the context of, not how long they are or how many sentences they add, but instead how grokkable they are. So a hypothetical version of Rule 13 that spells out exactly what players can or cannot get with Wishes should be judged on how easy it is for an average player to grok. And, in my opinion, I think it will be pretty easy for most players to grok because it is most likely just restating the deck construction rules that everyone is already familiar with. Do we really think it's so difficult for players to grok something like "Cards that search 'outside the game' instead search a 15-card pre-constructed Wishboard. The WIshboard must conform to all Commander deck-building restrictions: [list of color identity/singleton/legality rules here]". Because I personally don't think so.
I agree with this to the extent that I think, that if wishes were to be allowed in the format, the logistical aspects of a wishboard would not be that big of a problem. The concept is pretty straight forward.

What it would do however is piss people off. Especially those that don't plan to use wishes. They now essentially have to build a wishboard for almost no reason. If they don't, they'll be at a disadvantage if they gain control of a wish or due to the fact that their opponents now know they're not playing any wishes.
This leaves us with it being an inconvenience for the playerbase. Of course if wishes were a huge benefit for the format, it might be worth it, but like I said, as things are now, that seems unlikely.

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Post by Legend » 4 years ago

Hermes_ wrote:
4 years ago
Legend wrote:
4 years ago
Hermes_ wrote:
4 years ago
the problem with that example is that he main decks it. Why not just main deck whatever card you're going to wish for?
The point of bringing up Sheldon's use of Protean Hulk was to show that people (even a member of the RC) play cards for a variety of suboptimal but personally gratifying reasons that don't have to suit anyone else - A.K.A., "value". It wasn't a proposal of a perfect parallel between Wishing and tutoring.

The question itself and its typical answer ("silver bullets or bust"), posed as a rhetorical argument against Wishing in Commander, is rife with fallacies as seen in Spoiler 12. It's a personal question that the individual makes while constructing a deck, not while constructing a format.

Also, everything @Impossible said.
Maybe my reading comp isn't that great but I'm not seeing an answer to the question of "why not main deck?"
Personal preference. In other words, "Because I don't feel like it."

Also consider that a typical collection is a relatively small sampling of cards. They simply don't have a large selection of high quality cards. Consequently, a single Wish card may literally be the best choice they have access to, which can single-handedly increase the quality of their game play experience despite a their having a small/weak card pool.
“Comboing in Commander is like dunking on a seven foot hoop.” – Dana Roach

“Making a deck that other people want to play against – that’s Commander.” – Gavin Duggan

"I want my brain to win games, not my cards." – Sheldon Menery

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Post by Hermes_ » 4 years ago

Legend wrote:
4 years ago
Hermes_ wrote:
4 years ago
Legend wrote:
4 years ago

The point of bringing up Sheldon's use of Protean Hulk was to show that people (even a member of the RC) play cards for a variety of suboptimal but personally gratifying reasons that don't have to suit anyone else - A.K.A., "value". It wasn't a proposal of a perfect parallel between Wishing and tutoring.

The question itself and its typical answer ("silver bullets or bust"), posed as a rhetorical argument against Wishing in Commander, is rife with fallacies as seen in Spoiler 12. It's a personal question that the individual makes while constructing a deck, not while constructing a format.

Also, everything @Impossible said.
Maybe my reading comp isn't that great but I'm not seeing an answer to the question of "why not main deck?"
Personal preference. In other words, "Because I don't feel like it."

Also consider that a typical collection is a relatively small sampling of cards. They simply don't have a large selection of high quality cards. Consequently, a single Wish card may literally be the best choice they have access to, which can single-handedly increase the quality of their game play experience despite a their having a small/weak card pool.
so basically a way to get around lazy deck building.....,if the card isn't already in your main deck, then it's too narrow to be used outside of being a hate card IMO
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Post by Legend » 4 years ago

Hermes_ wrote:
4 years ago
Legend wrote:
4 years ago
Hermes_ wrote:
4 years ago

Maybe my reading comp isn't that great but I'm not seeing an answer to the question of "why not main deck?"
Personal preference. In other words, "Because I don't feel like it."

Also consider that a typical collection is a relatively small sampling of cards. They simply don't have a large selection of high quality cards. Consequently, a single Wish card may literally be the best choice they have access to, which can single-handedly increase the quality of their game play experience despite a their having a small/weak card pool.
so basically a way to get around lazy deck building.....,if the card isn't already in your main deck, then it's too narrow to be used outside of being a hate card IMO
"Laziness" is not a valid argument against Wishes.
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“Making a deck that other people want to play against – that’s Commander.” – Gavin Duggan

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Post by Impossible » 4 years ago

tarotplz wrote:
4 years ago
First up, the main reason why wishes are often equated to narrow answers like color hosers and the like is that they do those sort of effects better than any other kind of card. If you want to put a card like Choke into your deck, there is the inherit downside of what will happen if you run into a table without a blue deck (or just small blue splashes, you get the idea).
In that situation your narrow hoser will be a dead card and this is why they don't actually see play in general. Even looking into the direction of cEDH, those kind of cards are maybeboard inclusions in certain stax builds at best. (for example Blood Pod would very occasionally run it in the bluest of blue metas)
If you can wish for a narrow answer however this downside completely disappears. If one of your narrow hosers is dead in the matchup, your wish can still get you one that works in the given circumstances. This is a big upside.
Note that a normal tutor does not have this upside. You still need to put the potentially dead card into your deck. Sometimes you'll still draw it and it will do nothing. The downside is definitly still there.

When people say that wishes will lead to narrow answers they don't simply mean that people are jerks and will hate on their friends with those kind of cards, but instead they worry about the increased temptation to get these cards & them often being the optimal play as they work so well with wishes. At this point it is more than just wish opponents assuming player intentions and instead becomes a prediction based on the function of the cards in question.

To adress your second point about cards that get the "fair-use" benefit of the doubt. I'm assuming you're referring to cards like Protean Hulk etc. I would argue that many of these card don't in fact get the benefit of the doubt at all. At least not as far as a big chunk of the playerbase is concerned. I'm sure you didn't miss the outcry of when Paradox Engine was banned, but Flash and Protean Hulk were allowed to stay in the format.
I'm not going to argue against the idea that WIshes specialize in being flexible answers, as that's clearly true. But I disagree with your premise that the reason players don't put Choke and other cards of it's ilk into their decks is because of the possibility they'll be dead cards. I believe the reason players don't play cards like Choke is because they're frankly awful cards to play with and are widely understood to be unfun for the majority of the playerbase. They're basically in the same category as MLD. Armageddon is never really a dead card, but most players still tend to shy away from using it despite how objectively powerful of an effect it is because it often leads to unfun games. Just because the option exists to Wish for Armageddon doesn't mean it is an inevitable, or even a likely, outcome. I think this falls firmly under the social contract; we should trust players to mostly police themselves when it comes to matters of what they find fun.

Regarding fair use, considering P Hulk was one of the cards I used as an example, I think it's a fair assumption on your part that I am referring to it. But I'm not particularly sure of your point. My impression is that P Engine got tagged because it has a tendency to accidentally break games in unfun ways, meaning players put it in their decks thinking it would be a cool value engine and instead their turns end up taking 15 minutes while they cast 30 spells and try to maintain a running count of floating mana. Even without trying to combo with it, it ends up making other players miserable because it leads to an almost insurmountable resource advantage while also slowing the game to a crawl. It's very difficult to use Paradox Engine in anything resembling a fun manner.

P Hulk is a different matter entirely. It's problem is that it is perhaps one of the easiest combo enablers ever printed. If you choose to do so, it is trivially easy to combo kill the table with P Hulk. But that's the key difference here: if you choose to do so. If we judged Hulk entirely on what it can do, it never would have been allowed off the list. Same thing with Tooth and Nail. It's kind of a joke to ramp to 9 and then Mike and Trike the table without warning. But those aren't the only things those cards can do. They can just as easily be used to get sweet value creatures like Acidic Slime or something. And that's why, despite being objectively powerful combo machines, these cards and others like them avoid ending up banned; because the RC trusts players to use the social contract to keep games fun instead of just assuming the worst case scenario. Except for Wishes, apparently. So I don't think it's fair to use the worst case scenarios for Wishes (getting stupid-narrow color hosers, basically) as the yardstick by which we measure them.
tarotplz wrote:
4 years ago
Legend raised pretty much the exact same point. Ultimately this is purely opinion based though. I get the bit about it being unintuitive, but think about what would happen if the wishes were actually placed on the ban list today.

It would be significantly harder for playgroups that want to use them to house-unban them, as at that point your going against the direct "will" of the RC. Play groups that make their own ban list are often looked down upon by large chunks of the community and personally I feel like there definitly is a sort of stigma on custom bans and unbans in EDH.
The current solution might not be perfect, but what it does do is leave the most freedom possible to the people that actually want to use wishes in their games. A banlist solution has less freedom and them being legal in the format is problematic for those people that don't want to use wishes.

The word easy can be interpreted in many ways in this context. One way could be the ease of understanding the rules regarding wishes, but another could be the easy acess to wishes in your own EDH games should you want them.
Okay, but if the Wishes are actually hard-banned there would presumably be an accompanying announcement with the reasons why, right? Like, this is kind of the point of asking the RC to commit either way on the Wishes instead of leaving them in this middle ground. Does the RC actually think Wishes are too powerful and shouldn't be played for reasons that are not related to logistical reasons of "what am I allowed to get with my Wish?". It would be great to know that information, as that would help playgroups decide if that's something they want to deal with. Maybe I just didn't read closely enough, but my impression of the RC's responses in this thread have been "Wishes caused a lot of problems early on" without much in the way of explanation.

On the other hand, if Wishes are soft-banned for mainly logistical reasons, that means the RC believes the Wishes are generally fine for EDH from a gameplay perspective but require some specific rules to make sure everyone is on the same page regarding the scope... but then they don't provide any rules for us. I understand the idea -- leave it a blank slate and let players figure it out themselves -- but I disagree that it is the best course of action available here. Despite the fact the RC goes out of their way to emphasize that their rules are more guidelines than hard-and-fast rules, I think the vast majority of players treat them as the rules.

Now, this is obviously just my own experience, but over the course of my EDH life, I've found that it is far easier to socially pressure legal-but-unwanted behavior out of a group than it is to socially pressure an illegal-but-harmless behavior into a group. So when Rule 13 sets the default that Wishes have no rules text, that is more often than not seen as a definitive ruling that Wishes are banned and it becomes overly difficult to houserule it in the other direction. Thus, regardless of the RC's intention to just leave it up to the playgroups, I've found it's basically never actually up for debate. Compare that to if Wishes were simply legal. Everyone that can use them responsibly is freely able to do so, and if they do end up causing problems with people WIshing for 'Geddon, it is significantly easier to ask them to tone it down because it is having clear negative effects on games, the same way you'd ask someone to please stop T&Ning for Mike and Trike. The question stops being just a hypothetical ("please let me play with these banned cards I promise I'll use them fairly") and instead becomes easily demonstrable ("Wishing for color hosers/MLD isn't fun would you consider removing them?").
tarotplz wrote:
4 years ago
I disagree with that being the main argument against wishes. As you said, we are effectively talking about an unban here. There are certain conditions that need to be met in order for an unban to be actually viable.

1.) The unban can't unbalance the format. This would happen if the unbanned card is significantly stronger than the rest of the field and would therefore overcentralize gameplay. I don't think that most wishes fall into this category, but Karn, the Great Creator definitly does in my opinion. Maybe if we excluded Karn we could argue that this condition might be met, but the 2nd one is quite a bit more relevant, especially regarding EDH.

2.) There needs to be a good reason to believe that the unbanned card would improve the format by causing "good gameplay" rather than "bad gameplay". This is the main category I see wishes struggle with. They are certainly capable of both, I don't think anyone could deny that, but coupled with the fact that they do narrow answers better than other cards and more importantly the fact that they DID cause bad experiences in the past when they were allowed, I simply can't agree this condition is even close to being met.
If you have an argument to present that would make me believe that there is a good chance wishes would improve the format, I would love to hear it, but as it stands I have yet to see anything remotely convincing in this regard.
I'm not really here to argue about individual cards, but I have to ask why you think Karn is so problematic? Is it because it would be able to Wish for Mycosynth Lattice?

But on to the next point; I can't really agree. Asking what any individual card adds to the format is a folly in my opinion. What does Kokopuffs add? What does Staff of Domination add? What does Metalworker add? What does Protean Hulk add? What does Painter's Servant add? The people who enjoy these particular cards rejoiced when they were unbanned, and everyone else just sorta shrugged and moved on. The criteria here should be "legal until proven problematic" not "illegal until proven fun".

And I agree, the fact that [mention]papa_funk[/mention] said Wishes originally caused problems is a bit of a red flag, but as I just not so subtly demonstrated, cards the RC once thought were problematic enough to be banned are now just... kinda mediocre to be honest. I don't exactly know what time frame he was referring to, but his mention of "it's a rule we started with" dates it not even this decade. Times change. Not to mention it was a little vague exactly what kind of problems Wishes caused in the first place. Were they power-level problems? Or were they problems that could be fixed with some clear rules about what can be Wished for?

But either way, we now live in a brave new world in which there are currently 3 different cards (Vivien, Arkbow Ranger, Mastermind's Acquisition, Karn, the Great Creator) that reference "outside the game" in Standard now. This appears to be a design space that WotC is interested in using more of in the future, So I think it's time for us as a community to take a long hard look at why these cards are 'banned' and whether the original reasons for the decision still hold true today.
tarotplz wrote:
4 years ago
I agree with this to the extent that I think, that if wishes were to be allowed in the format, the logistical aspects of a wishboard would not be that big of a problem. The concept is pretty straight forward.

What it would do however is piss people off. Especially those that don't plan to use wishes. They now essentially have to build a wishboard for almost no reason. If they don't, they'll be at a disadvantage if they gain control of a wish or due to the fact that their opponents now know they're not playing any wishes.
This leaves us with it being an inconvenience for the playerbase. Of course if wishes were a huge benefit for the format, it might be worth it, but like I said, as things are now, that seems unlikely.
This feels like a bit of a reach. We're not playing at a Pro Tour. If adding up those infinitesimal percentage points is what you seek, I think this might be the wrong format for you. Nobody will actually be forced to build a Wishboard if they're not planning on use Wishes. This kind of feels like railing on someone for putting their Commander in a different colored sleeve because it is theoretically possible for it to get shuffled back into their deck.
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Post by tarotplz » 4 years ago

Impossible wrote:
4 years ago
But I disagree with your premise that the reason players don't put Choke and other cards of it's ilk into their decks is because of the possibility they'll be dead cards. I believe the reason players don't play cards like Choke is because they're frankly awful cards to play with and are widely understood to be unfun for the majority of the playerbase.
This is why I brought up the lack of play these cards see in cEDH. According to your reasoning, they should see play in an environment without the social contract . However they don't. Choke as a maybeboard consideration for Blood Pod for very specific metas is all there is. The reason for this as stated by the cEDH crowd is that they are often dead cards and can therefore only be meta picks.
Impossible wrote:
4 years ago
They're basically in the same category as MLD. Armageddon is never really a dead card, but most players still tend to shy away from using it despite how objectively powerful of an effect it is because it often leads to unfun games.
I disagree with this. MLD effect are in actuality not that powerful. Again, they see little play in an environment without the social contract holding them back. There are cEDH land destruction decks, most prominent probably Ruric Thar Stax, but those are very fringe and haven't been all that relevant for a good while now.
I agree that the social construct is what keeps MLD out of casual games. There people often don't pair them with proper wincons or don't understand that they need to break parity on an effect like this, for example by pairing it with tons of mana dorks. This can cause games to come to a grinding halt, which is no fun for anyone.

MLD and narrow answers are very different things however. I wouldn't expect Armageddon to be a very popular wish target tbh. If your deck is built to take advantage of an effect like this, it'll be in the main, if not, you're unlikely to ever want to play it.
Impossible wrote:
4 years ago
I'm not particularly sure of your point. My impression is that P Engine got tagged because it has a tendency to accidentally break games in unfun ways, meaning players put it in their decks thinking it would be a cool value engine and instead their turns end up taking 15 minutes while they cast 30 spells and try to maintain a running count of floating mana.
Impossible wrote:
4 years ago
P Hulk is a different matter entirely. It's problem is that it is perhaps one of the easiest combo enablers ever printed. If you choose to do so, it is trivially easy to combo kill the table with P Hulk. But that's the key difference here: if you choose to do so. If we judged Hulk entirely on what it can do, it never would have been allowed off the list
You're absolutely right on the reasons for the Paradox Engine ban. The point I was trying to make is that most people simply don't consider Protean Hulk or even Tooth and Nail as fair cards or cool value engines either (which is why there was some outrage after the bannings due to Flash remaining legal). When was the last time you saw a "fair" Hulk trigger resolving? Personally I've never seen that happen.
I think that the value Hulk that people always tend to bring up is mostly a myth. Even the few casual decks that run Hulk usually include some sort of pile for it. They're just much much slower, because they're casual decks and might not have ways to cheat Hulk into play, not enough sac outlets etc.
Impossible wrote:
4 years ago
Okay, but if the Wishes are actually hard-banned there would presumably be an accompanying announcement with the reasons why, right? Like, this is kind of the point of asking the RC to commit either way on the Wishes instead of leaving them in this middle ground. Does the RC actually think Wishes are too powerful and shouldn't be played for reasons that are not related to logistical reasons of "what am I allowed to get with my Wish?". It would be great to know that information, as that would help playgroups decide if that's something they want to deal with.
I get that. I wouldn't mind having the wishes on the actual banlist. People would probably complain about it being overcrowded, I don't know how many wishes ther are exactly, but it'd probably double in size overnight, no?

Clear guidelines on how wishes should be used in case certain people want to could be nice i guess, but looking at it from the RCs perspective, that could be seen as somewhat of an endorsement of wishes, which I think is something they're trying to avoid. I think they are comfortable with the rules as ´they are today, because people wanting to play wishes is rather rare and those few playgroups should be able to manage things the way they want to by themselves.

In my opinion this shouldn't really be used as an argument for allowing wishes to be legal in the format though, as it really doesn't make any statement on how they would affect the format, which is the bit that's most important here.
Impossible wrote:
4 years ago
Maybe I just didn't read closely enough, but my impression of the RC's responses in this thread have been "Wishes caused a lot of problems early on" without much in the way of explanation.
From what I've gathered it was mostly people disagreeing with eachother about what woud be appropriate to wish for under the social contract. Not everyone sees eye to eye in that regard. There are thousands of playgroups out there, all of them have different powerlevels and resistances to the "unfun" shenanigans that can be pulled off in this format.
Impossible wrote:
4 years ago
understand the idea -- leave it a blank slate and let players figure it out themselves -- but I disagree that it is the best course of action available here. Despite the fact the RC goes out of their way to emphasize that their rules are more guidelines than hard-and-fast rules, I think the vast majority of players treat them as the rules.
I agree. I also think that is is exactly why they don't want to completely ban wishes (aka actually put them on the ban list). In their eyes that would make things much harder for the few players that decided they want to use them.
Impossible wrote:
4 years ago
Now, this is obviously just my own experience, but over the course of my EDH life, I've found that it is far easier to socially pressure legal-but-unwanted behavior out of a group than it is to socially pressure an illegal-but-harmless behavior into a group.
I think the crux of the issue here is that I can't agree that wishes are "illegal-but-harmless" in this context. It's my firm opinion that they would be incredibly damaging to the format.
Impossible wrote:
4 years ago
Compare that to if Wishes were simply legal. Everyone that can use them responsibly is freely able to do so, and if they do end up causing problems with people WIshing for 'Geddon, it is significantly easier to ask them to tone it down because it is having clear negative effects on games, the same way you'd ask someone to please stop T&Ning for Mike and Trike.
The problem I see with this is that while it might work in a tightly knit playgroup, it definitly won't work at the GP side event level, probably not even at a slightly bigger LGS. Sometimes you simply play with strangers and that's the point where a lot the mismatched powerlevel stuff happens.
Impossible wrote:
4 years ago
I'm not really here to argue about individual cards, but I have to ask why you think Karn is so problematic? Is it because it would be able to Wish for Mycosynth Lattice?
It's the main thing, but imo the problem goes beyond that. It's a colorless card, that can be run in any deck. In conjunction with Mycosynth Lattice it can then provide (potentially) every single deck with a 1 card combo wincon with minimal deckbuilding cost (1 slot in your wishboard). However, we're not done yet, that same card can also provide you with 14 (I'm assuming 15 card wishboards here) answers for situations that might come up. That's enough for a silver bullet vs any kind of strategy you can imagine. These answers are never dead and you have access to all of them by tutoring only 1 card form your deck (Karn).
This is of course taking Karn to the extreme, but I think if he were legal with wishboards (or even worse unrestricted wishes), he would represent a format warping threat.
Impossible wrote:
4 years ago
The criteria here should be "legal until proven problematic" not "illegal until proven fun".
Perhaps I didn't phrase it perfectly. The criteria should be "illegal until proven non-detrimentall to the format" This can be accomplished in many ways, for example adding a new strategy to the format or improving one that previously struggeled or maybe by simply being a mediocre card that certain players really like.

Unbanning a card only to make the format worse is definitly not where we want to be, I'm sure you can agree with that.
Impossible wrote:
4 years ago
And I agree, the fact that @papa_funk said Wishes originally caused problems is a bit of a red flag, but as I just not so subtly demonstrated, cards the RC once thought were problematic enough to be banned are now just... kinda mediocre to be honest.
Even now there are many cards on the banlist that could come off if we were only considering powerlevel as the metric. Imho there are some on there that could come off even considering the opinion of the RC that they might be "unfun" Coalition Victory and Biorythm for example.

It's just that that deosn't really mean anything for wishes. Could you argue that the RC has been wrong about the banlist in the past? Absolutely. Does that mean that wishes are part of that phenomenon? No, actually they seem to have caused problems before, that's more than many other cards on that list have in terms of a reason to be (effectively) on there.
Impossible wrote:
4 years ago
But either way, we now live in a brave new world in which there are currently 3 different cards (Vivien, Arkbow Ranger, Mastermind's Acquisition, Karn, the Great Creator) that reference "outside the game" in Standard now. This appears to be a design space that WotC is interested in using more of in the future, So I think it's time for us as a community to take a long hard look at why these cards are 'banned' and whether the original reasons for the decision still hold true today.
Yes, unfortunately WotC is revisiting this design style to make Arena BO1 sideboards not useless. I agree that there should be discussion about wishes in EDH because of that. Isn't that exactly what we're doing here though? Personally I think the reasons from back then do in fact hold true.
Impossible wrote:
4 years ago
This feels like a bit of a reach. We're not playing at a Pro Tour. If adding up those infinitesimal percentage points is what you seek, I think this might be the wrong format for you. Nobody will actually be forced to build a Wishboard if they're not planning on use Wishes. This kind of feels like railing on someone for putting their Commander in a different colored sleeve because it is theoretically possible for it to get shuffled back into their deck.
It's true that my playgroup is quite a bit more competitive than the average one, but that doesn't mean this format isn't for me. If the wishboard is really just a wishboard, then the disadvantage is very slight. One might get away with not building one. I'd somewhat equate this to playing a graveyard deck in a format like Modern. You gain the additional resource of the yard as an advantage, while someone on a non-grave synergy deck doesn't have this.
The difference there is that in Modern grave-hate is something that exists, while there is no such thing as wishboard hate. That means that there is absolutely no downside to having one.

How would you explain to a new player who just picked up his first precon and sat down to play with a table that all these other guys have 15 extra cards they get to use just because they run a certain type of card in their deck, while he doesn't get to do that?

If the wishboards are actually considered sideboards and the rules allow for sideboarding after the games to better adjust to your pods, then it would be a very significant disadvantage.


One last point about wishes in EDH to close this out:

One thing I've noticed in this discussion is that most wish proponents focus on the logistical aspects and the problems with the current rules of wishes, whle the wish opponents mostly focus on wishes creating bad gameplay.

What I'd be very interested to see is a wish proponent to answer to these few points:

1.) Try to explain to me how they think wishes would be fine in the format and not be problematic again by disagreements about what is appropriate to wish for. Sure, wishboard rules solve a few of those problems, but you can't exactly make a rule of "you can't wish for narrow answers". It's just simply not specific enough.

2.) Unbanning that many cards would surely have a massive impact on the format. What do you think would change and why? How would you feel about certain wishes being banned if they are too abusable?

3.) Do you actually think wishes would improve things?

4.) If we assume wishes were to be problematic again, would you still want them legal just due to not liking the way the rules are now?

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Post by pokken » 4 years ago

meh I don't need no crystal ball to know people are gonna wish for shatterstorm. people please. :)

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Post by Hermes_ » 4 years ago

Legend wrote:
4 years ago
Hermes_ wrote:
4 years ago
Legend wrote:
4 years ago

Personal preference. In other words, "Because I don't feel like it."

Also consider that a typical collection is a relatively small sampling of cards. They simply don't have a large selection of high quality cards. Consequently, a single Wish card may literally be the best choice they have access to, which can single-handedly increase the quality of their game play experience despite a their having a small/weak card pool.
so basically a way to get around lazy deck building.....,if the card isn't already in your main deck, then it's too narrow to be used outside of being a hate card IMO
"Laziness" is not a valid argument against Wishes.
Nor is it really an argument for wishes, in fact it isn't really an argument at all IMO,just an observation.
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Post by Impossible » 4 years ago

tarotplz wrote:
4 years ago
This is why I brought up the lack of play these cards see in cEDH. According to your reasoning, they should see play in an environment without the social contract . However they don't. Choke as a maybeboard consideration for Blood Pod for very specific metas is all there is. The reason for this as stated by the cEDH crowd is that they are often dead cards and can therefore only be meta picks.
The RC has made it abundantly clear that cEDH is not a factor at all in regards to the ban list. cEDH is an entirely different animal than regular ol' EDH and should be treated as such. It has no bearing on this particular discussion.
tarotplz wrote:
4 years ago
MLD and narrow answers are very different things however. I wouldn't expect Armageddon to be a very popular wish target tbh. If your deck is built to take advantage of an effect like this, it'll be in the main, if not, you're unlikely to ever want to play it.
Popular? Maybe not. But it would be effective. There are a ton of times where one ends up ahead on board and thinks "now if nobody has an answer soon I win" and do you know what prevents people from playing answers? Blowing up all their lands.

But all of that is beside the point. As you said:
tarotplz wrote:
4 years ago
I agree that the social construct is what keeps MLD out of casual games.
...and that's what the discussion was about. The point was there are already tons of ways to build such as to lock opponents out and prevent them from playing: Armageddon, Stasis, Static Orb, Winter Orb, Smokestack, so on and so forth. And the reason these effects are relatively rare in EDH is because most players understand them to be counter to the social contract. And I don't think being able to Wish for Boil or Acid Rain is going to change that, as most people understand those cards are in the same category.
tarotplz wrote:
4 years ago
You're absolutely right on the reasons for the Paradox Engine ban. The point I was trying to make is that most people simply don't consider Protean Hulk or even Tooth and Nail as fair cards or cool value engines either (which is why there was some outrage after the bannings due to Flash remaining legal). When was the last time you saw a "fair" Hulk trigger resolving? Personally I've never seen that happen.
I think that the value Hulk that people always tend to bring up is mostly a myth. Even the few casual decks that run Hulk usually include some sort of pile for it. They're just much much slower, because they're casual decks and might not have ways to cheat Hulk into play, not enough sac outlets etc.
I don't particularly disagree. As I said in my original post, I think the "fair use" argument is nonsense. But unfortunately, that seems to be a legitimate criteria for banning and unbanning so we have to take it seriously. And in this case that means we have to assume that people can use Wishes responsibly the same way people can choose to get 2 value creatures from T&N instead of ending the game.
tarotplz wrote:
4 years ago
I get that. I wouldn't mind having the wishes on the actual banlist. People would probably complain about it being overcrowded, I don't know how many wishes ther are exactly, but it'd probably double in size overnight, no?
The size of the ban list is a fairly minor concern. The cards are essentially banned right now anyways. It wouldn't be difficult to basically move Rule 13 onto the actual ban list, change the text from "[...]do not function in Commander" to "are banned" and then list out the relevant cards. Yes, technically this would be increasing the size of the banned list a considerable amount, but in terms of functionality it would be a fairly minor change. What it would do, however, is force the RC to commit to a reason for why these cards are banned.
tarotplz wrote:
4 years ago
Clear guidelines on how wishes should be used in case certain people want to could be nice i guess, but looking at it from the RCs perspective, that could be seen as somewhat of an endorsement of wishes, which I think is something they're trying to avoid. I think they are comfortable with the rules as ´they are today, because people wanting to play wishes is rather rare and those few playgroups should be able to manage things the way they want to by themselves.

In my opinion this shouldn't really be used as an argument for allowing wishes to be legal in the format though, as it really doesn't make any statement on how they would affect the format, which is the bit that's most important here.
And this is really the crux of the problem. It's almost impossible for us to argue whether Wishes should be banned or not because we don't know what the problem with them was in the first place. Because the only information the RC gives us is that Wishes caused problems at the start of the format, problems that were serious enough that WIshes needed a special rule added, but problems that were not serious enough to warrant outright banning. So what, exactly, is causing them to be held in this purgatory that no other card has ever required?
tarotplz wrote:
4 years ago
From what I've gathered it was mostly people disagreeing with eachother about what woud be appropriate to wish for under the social contract. Not everyone sees eye to eye in that regard. There are thousands of playgroups out there, all of them have different powerlevels and resistances to the "unfun" shenanigans that can be pulled off in this format.
If you're talking about simply what kind of power level of cards people should be Wishing for, that's a function of the social contract and as such should be left for playgroups to define for themselves what they deem too powerful. If you're talking about logistically what exactly am I allowed to get with a Wish (i.e. am I searching a Wishboard, my binder, my entire collection, etc) that could be solved by the RC establishing some clear rules. The most obvious answer is making a 15-card Wishboard, because that mirrors how Wishes work is basically every other format in existence.
tarotplz wrote:
4 years ago
I agree. I also think that is is exactly why they don't want to completely ban wishes (aka actually put them on the ban list). In their eyes that would make things much harder for the few players that decided they want to use them.
Seems like a distinction without a difference to me. Imagine saying to your playgroup "hey can I play with Wishes" and they say "well, what's the official RC stance?" What's the difference between your reply of "the RC says they're banned" and "the RC says they don't function"? Because I don't really see one.
tarotplz wrote:
4 years ago
I think the crux of the issue here is that I can't agree that wishes are "illegal-but-harmless" in this context. It's my firm opinion that they would be incredibly damaging to the format.
I understand you think people will do nothing but color-hose with them, but that's not really up to us to decide. Players can already color-hose if they want. Hell, they can do it easier than ever now with Painter's Servant free. But we have to assume that players can find the mythical "fair use" until proven otherwise. If Protean Hulk can be free, I think Wishes deserve a chance too.
tarotplz wrote:
4 years ago
The problem I see with this is that while it might work in a tightly knit playgroup, it definitly won't work at the GP side event level, probably not even at a slightly bigger LGS. Sometimes you simply play with strangers and that's the point where a lot the mismatched powerlevel stuff happens.
Isn't this just an inherent problem of playing with randos? I went to a different game store than the one I normally visit in order to attend a special event, and between rounds I joined an EDH game. I sat down and asked what kind of game we were looking for and got told "pretty casual" and I saw one opponent had an Athreos, God of Passage as his general, so I pulled out my Athreos deck as well. I played 3 lands and a Burnished Hart before I got combo killed by Shadowborn Apostles and Carnival of Souls. Apparently that was a pretty casual game for them. %$#% happens.

If anything, Wishes would perhaps reduce some of that friction. If I misjudge the power level of the table, I can Wish for a more appropriate target. Instead of Wishing for Armageddon I can get Warp World and have some fun. The people that are going to Wish for Acid Rain are the people that I'm not going to want to be playing with in the first place, but I can't really know that until I play with them at least once, right?
tarotplz wrote:
4 years ago
It's the main thing, but imo the problem goes beyond that. It's a colorless card, that can be run in any deck. In conjunction with Mycosynth Lattice it can then provide (potentially) every single deck with a 1 card combo wincon with minimal deckbuilding cost (1 slot in your wishboard). However, we're not done yet, that same card can also provide you with 14 (I'm assuming 15 card wishboards here) answers for situations that might come up. That's enough for a silver bullet vs any kind of strategy you can imagine. These answers are never dead and you have access to all of them by tutoring only 1 card form your deck (Karn).
This is of course taking Karn to the extreme, but I think if he were legal with wishboards (or even worse unrestricted wishes), he would represent a format warping threat.
That's fair I guess. But building off of my previous point, players that would put Karn and Lattice in their main deck (something that is currently legal without Wishes) are already players I try to avoid. Maybe Karn in particular would have to be banned if Wishes were legal, after all Tinker left but Natural Order stayed. But overall, I don't see a major difference between Karn now and Karn when he can -2.

As for the other things... honestly it would probably be better for the format if more people had access to solid hate cards. If every deck had access to Relic of Progenitus and Torpor Orb and Grafdigger's Cage we'd probably see generally better deck building, in the sense that people would hopefully become less reliant on powerful linear strategies and would instead have to diversify. Players would have to ensure that their deck doesn't just fold up and die to a single piece of moderate hate.
tarotplz wrote:
4 years ago
Perhaps I didn't phrase it perfectly. The criteria should be "illegal until proven non-detrimentall to the format" This can be accomplished in many ways, for example adding a new strategy to the format or improving one that previously struggeled or maybe by simply being a mediocre card that certain players really like.

Unbanning a card only to make the format worse is definitly not where we want to be, I'm sure you can agree with that.
Obviously I agree that making the format worse is not what we're aiming for, but "worse" is such a nebulous concept here. Did Protean Hulk make the format worse? There's certainly an argument to be made that it did; it enables some of the most powerful combos available. But it was also one of the most recent unbannings, meaning the RC saw some reason(s) to believe it wouldn't be detrimental. So simply pointing out potential ways a card can be used problematically (whether that means P. Hulk combo killing the table or Wishing for Acid Rain) isn't really enough to show that a card is ban worthy. Especially once you consider the counterpoint, that Wishes are extremely unique, add great flexibility, and are overall just pretty cool (imagine, you'd be able to say the phrase "I Wish for a Miracle"), I don't really believe adding WIshes would make EDH worse.
tarotplz wrote:
4 years ago
Even now there are many cards on the banlist that could come off if we were only considering powerlevel as the metric. Imho there are some on there that could come off even considering the opinion of the RC that they might be "unfun" Coalition Victory and Biorythm for example.
Ah, a kindred spirit I see.
tarotplz wrote:
4 years ago
Yes, unfortunately WotC is revisiting this design style to make Arena BO1 sideboards not useless. I agree that there should be discussion about wishes in EDH because of that. Isn't that exactly what we're doing here though? Personally I think the reasons from back then do in fact hold true.
I don't even know what the reasons are. Did the RC post an explanation somewhere?
tarotplz wrote:
4 years ago
It's true that my playgroup is quite a bit more competitive than the average one, but that doesn't mean this format isn't for me. If the wishboard is really just a wishboard, then the disadvantage is very slight. One might get away with not building one. I'd somewhat equate this to playing a graveyard deck in a format like Modern. You gain the additional resource of the yard as an advantage, while someone on a non-grave synergy deck doesn't have this.
The difference there is that in Modern grave-hate is something that exists, while there is no such thing as wishboard hate. That means that there is absolutely no downside to having one.
I didn't mean to offend, by the way. I was merely suggesting that EDH isn't really a format in which the average player concerns themselves with such tiny factors that might be the difference between winning and losing. Compare it to cracking an Evolving Wilds at your opponent's end step. It's technically the correct play because it bleeds as little information as possible, but on the whole it never actually matters in EDH. I'd much rather have the game move at a faster pace and do my searching while everyone else is going than concern myself with maximizing my win percent. I view Wishboards the same way. You want to play with Wishes? Cool, but I'm not going to bother building a Wishboard on the ridiculous off chance I somehow gain control of a Wish or something.

Maybe this matters to you, and you also never crack a fetch before the end of the opponent to your right's end step, but I don't think it applies to the majority of EDH players. I don't really see it being a serious concern in that regard.
tarotplz wrote:
4 years ago
How would you explain to a new player who just picked up his first precon and sat down to play with a table that all these other guys have 15 extra cards they get to use just because they run a certain type of card in their deck, while he doesn't get to do that?
Is it a brand new player? Or are they just new to EDH? Because if they've ever played a Standard/Modern/Legacy tournament they probably know how WIshes work already.
tarotplz wrote:
4 years ago
If the wishboards are actually considered sideboards and the rules allow for sideboarding after the games to better adjust to your pods, then it would be a very significant disadvantage.
I don't really understand this. I can freely change my deck between games right now, can't I? Or are you talking about an EDH tournament or something? In that case I think it would be up to the TO to decide if you're allowed to make changes to your deck mid-tournament.
tarotplz wrote:
4 years ago
One thing I've noticed in this discussion is that most wish proponents focus on the logistical aspects and the problems with the current rules of wishes, whle the wish opponents mostly focus on wishes creating bad gameplay.
I can't speak for others, but I focus mostly on the logistical aspects because that appears to be the biggest hurdle towards Wishes being legal. Obviously this is just my own impression, but I don't think the RC truly believes Wishes are problematic from a gameplay perspective, or else they would have just banned them from the get-go. And if that's the case, the problem obviously rests with this idea that players cannot agree on the scope of what Wishes are allowed to search, whether it is a Wishboard or their entire collection, etc.
tarotplz wrote:
4 years ago
1.) Try to explain to me how they think wishes would be fine in the format and not be problematic again by disagreements about what is appropriate to wish for. Sure, wishboard rules solve a few of those problems, but you can't exactly make a rule of "you can't wish for narrow answers". It's just simply not specific enough.
The goal isn't for the RC to police what people can do with Wishes, in the same way they're not trying to police what people do with Protean Hulk. If you come at it with the mindset of "how can this help me win as efficently as possible" then yeah, P Hulk is kind of a broken card. But it doesn't have to be. Getting Viscera Seer and Karmic Guide to go infinite isn't fun, but getting Reclamation Sage and Eternal Witness to do it once more next turn is just good value.

How Wishes are used is very much a choice. Nobody accidently Wishes for Acid Rain. If you (note: these are generic "you"s) put Acid Rain in your Wishboard you obviously have the intention to use it. And frankly that says more about you as an EDH player than it does about if Wishes are problematic or not. So obviously, if you believe that players will only Wish for Acid Rain or other similar cards, you'll think Wishes are problematic. I believe that players are generally smart enough to regulate their own power levels, so I think Wishes will be mostly fine.
tarotplz wrote:
4 years ago
2.) Unbanning that many cards would surely have a massive impact on the format. What do you think would change and why? How would you feel about certain wishes being banned if they are too abusable?
Well, I would expect people to play Wishes. In order of popularity: Cunning, Living, Burning, Mastermind's Acquistion, Golden, Glittering, then the rest in no particular order.

I also expect people to be more concious of playing linear strategies, or specific combos/synergies that can easily be hated out via Wish. It's a lot less appealing to play Purphoros when opponents can Wish for Nevermore and then the entire deck just falls apart. Good riddance, in my opinion. Purphoros is fine in the 99 but he's super obnoxious as a General. Likewise, if someone wants to play a reanimator strategy, they should be prepared to fight through a Rest in Peace or Relic of Progenitus.

It'll help prevent individual players from dominating games because opponent's weren't prepared with/didn't draw their one copy of relevant disruption. I've actually personally caused this phenominon at our LGS not too long ago. I made a K&T lands deck that wasn't supposed to be very competitive, but after a few games multiple people in our group realized they were almost completely outless to Glacial Chasm. If they were able to Wish for a Strip Mine or Sinkhole it wouldn't have been a problem.
tarotplz wrote:
4 years ago
3.) Do you actually think wishes would improve things?
I mean... define "improve"? I think Wishes will be fun for people that want to use them in the spirit of the format, and giving players access to flexible answers is usually good to prevent certain lines of attack from dominating a game because nobody thought to include the correct niche answer in their deck.
tarotplz wrote:
4 years ago
4.) If we assume wishes were to be problematic again, would you still want them legal just due to not liking the way the rules are now?
If having them be legal turned out to be an oopsie, I'd rather they were officially added to the banned list instead of being errated like a footnote under an entirely different rule as they are now. Either yes or no, none of this legal-but-unplayable stuff please.
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Post by pokken » 4 years ago

The problem with banning them is having to ban every single new mechanic that pulls stuff from outside of the game. It's not a reasonable default position, and would require lots of gymnastics. You wind up having to ban some of them but not all of them, vs. just disabling the mechanic.

Golden Wish is probably fine because it sucks. Burning Wish less so. How do you differentiate and draw the line? Even wishing for Rest in Peace at 5 mana could really be annoying, even if it's mostly fine.

Then a new card comes along. You have to really carefully observe power and prevalence and decide whether it's bannable.

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Post by Legend » 4 years ago

pokken wrote:
4 years ago
The problem with banning them is having to ban every single new mechanic that pulls stuff from outside of the game. It's not a reasonable default position, and would require lots of gymnastics. You wind up having to ban some of them but not all of them, vs. just disabling the mechanic.

Golden Wish is probably fine because it sucks. Burning Wish less so. How do you differentiate and draw the line? Even wishing for Rest in Peace at 5 mana could really be annoying, even if it's mostly fine.

Then a new card comes along. You have to really carefully observe power and prevalence and decide whether it's bannable.
Does incorporating 13 similar cards into a format with over 20,000 disparate cards really seem like an insurmountable proposition to you? Sure, some effort would be required of the RC+CAD, but nothing approaching "problematic gymnastics". Like every other effect, some cards with a Wish effect could simply be banned if necessary, while others wouldn't be, in the same vein that Time Walk is banned (for being a hyper-efficient auto-include), while Time Warp is not, and Time Stretch is on every popular "watch list" despite costing 5x Walk and 2x Warp. There's really no need to set a blanket rule for Wishes akin to that of Conspiracies and Ante cards when they could easily be dealt with on a case-by-case basis.
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Post by tarotplz » 4 years ago

Impossible wrote:
4 years ago
The RC has made it abundantly clear that cEDH is not a factor at all in regards to the ban list. cEDH is an entirely different animal than regular ol' EDH and should be treated as such. It has no bearing on this particular discussion.
Impossible wrote:
4 years ago
But all of that is beside the point. As you said:
"tarotplz wrote:
I agree that the social construct is what keeps MLD out of casual games."
...and that's what the discussion was about. The point was there are already tons of ways to build such as to lock opponents out and prevent them from playing: Armageddon, Stasis, Static Orb, Winter Orb, Smokestack, so on and so forth. And the reason these effects are relatively rare in EDH is because most players understand them to be counter to the social contract. And I don't think being able to Wish for Boil or Acid Rain is going to change that, as most people understand those cards are in the same category.
Uhhh, I beg to differ. Your argument was "color hosers don't see play because of the social contract, not because they can be dead cards". I simply tried to show you that in an EDH environment without a social contract they still don't see play. This means that the social contract is not what keeps them at bay.

I'm not entirely sure why you originally brought up MLD, as it really doesn't have much to do with wishes (as I said, I don't think they're particularly good/suited for wishing) and the rest of these stax pieces are also basically the exact opposite of what I'm afraid of. Those are not narrow answers, they're broad answers. Nobody would wish for cards like that.
Impossible wrote:
4 years ago
I said in my original post, I think the "fair use" argument is nonsense. But unfortunately, that seems to be a legitimate criteria for banning and unbanning so we have to take it seriously. And in this case that means we have to assume that people can use Wishes responsibly the same way people can choose to get 2 value creatures from T&N instead of ending the game.
Imo the Protean Hulk unban was a mistake. I'm still suprised how "well" cEDH managed to absorb that monstrosity.

Tooth and Nail on the other hand is something I don't think is particularly broken even if you get a combo with it. It's so much mana, so easily disruptable and not even instant speed. I don't think that it can only exist because we trust players not to break it. I don't think it's broken in the first place.

Wishes imo fall into a different category, they don't just have 2 modes, 1 fair and one broken. There is a lot of inbetween there. Different people will find different things acceptable and it would likely be difficult to find the line between fair and unfair.
Impossible wrote:
4 years ago
Seems like a distinction without a difference to me. Imagine saying to your playgroup "hey can I play with Wishes" and they say "well, what's the official RC stance?" What's the difference between your reply of "the RC says they're banned" and "the RC says they don't function"? Because I don't really see one.
Except you would prefer to see them actually banned instead of having what we have now, so there must be a diffenrence, no?

Also it helps people by allowing them to use the argument "the RC wants to specifically leave this to the players"
Impossible wrote:
4 years ago
Is it a brand new player? Or are they just new to EDH? Because if they've ever played a Standard/Modern/Legacy tournament they probably know how WIshes work already.
Yes, let's assume a brand new player.
Impossible wrote:
4 years ago
I don't really understand this. I can freely change my deck between games right now, can't I? Or are you talking about an EDH tournament or something? In that case I think it would be up to the TO to decide if you're allowed to make changes to your deck mid-tournament.
Technically you can. I'm not sure how well a Meren/Muldrotha/Kess pod would take it if you suddenly started to fill your deck with Rest in Peace effects after the first game, but I guess you could do that.

Pretty sure that goes against the spirit of the format.
Impossible wrote:
4 years ago
Obviously this is just my own impression, but I don't think the RC truly believes Wishes are problematic from a gameplay perspective, or else they would have just banned them from the get-go. And if that's the case, the problem obviously rests with this idea that players cannot agree on the scope of what Wishes are allowed to search, whether it is a Wishboard or their entire collection, etc.
I have a feeling that they don't exactly think wishes are ok to be in the format.
papa_funk wrote:
4 years ago
Testing? No. It was the actual rule for a while; it's what we started with and it led to lots of arguments and feelsbad moments.
papa_funk wrote:
4 years ago
However, we have to consider the overall impact on the format of changes, and have found that this is not universally true and believe that wishing actually led to less net fun as people would argue over what was acceptable.
papa_funk wrote:
4 years ago
Wishes had no Commander-specific rules up until at least 2010, since there were lots of issues around Spawnsire of Ulamog. At some point around there, we decided that defining outside the game as containing nothing was the cleanest solution, and playgroups could set parameters from there.
papa_funk wrote:
4 years ago
We put in the cleanest rule when the first attempt wasn't great, and it's worked out fine.
papa_funk wrote:
4 years ago
Pointing out that when wishes were in the format it led to a lot of disagreeing is simply an observation.
People arguing about what should be allowed in their wishboards is still a problem and will inevitablely lead to many unfun moments. It's also a big part as to why I also don't want the lower powerlevel wishes in the format. While they might not be as breakable as the more powerful ones, they would still cause damage to the format in this other way.
Impossible wrote:
4 years ago
How Wishes are used is very much a choice. Nobody accidently Wishes for Acid Rain. If you (note: these are generic "you"s) put Acid Rain in your Wishboard you obviously have the intention to use it. And frankly that says more about you as an EDH player than it does about if Wishes are problematic or not. So obviously, if you believe that players will only Wish for Acid Rain or other similar cards, you'll think Wishes are problematic. I believe that players are generally smart enough to regulate their own power levels, so I think Wishes will be mostly fine.
I touched on this slightly before, but wishes have more than just a broken and a fair mode. Let's take a situation in which you're facing a graveyard deck as an example.

You could wish for Rest in Peace and completely shut them down. Clearly that's not going to be very fun for the gy player. He'd complain about being targeted etc. etc.

What if though, you don't wish for RiP but instead for Tormod's Crypt? Still gy hate, but not as powerful. That should be more acceptable, no? They player would still feel pretty bad.

Let's power this down even further. what if we get Nihil Spellbomb? It's like crypt, but it costs mana, so it's even worse. Ultimately the gy player will still dislike that a lot.

What if we don't take away all of their graveyard? Maybe we could wish for Scavenging Ooze. That only takes one card at a time, that's fair, right? Still, the gy player will feel targeted.

If we don't wish for gy hate, but instead get some random cool value card, like say Eternal Witness, we kinda sandbaged the wish. Might aswell just have put the actual card in the deck instead and saved ourself some mana,
Impossible wrote:
4 years ago
I also expect people to be more concious of playing linear strategies, or specific combos/synergies that can easily be hated out via Wish.
Does this mean you agree with wishes being mostly used for answers? This kinda goes against your entire argument, doesn't it?
Impossible wrote:
4 years ago
If having them be legal turned out to be an oopsie, I'd rather they were officially added to the banned list instead of being errated like a footnote under an entirely different rule as they are now. Either yes or no, none of this legal-but-unplayable stuff please.
There are other cards in the format that this applies to though, what about them? Should they also be banned? Battle of Wits for example.

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Post by pokken » 4 years ago

Legend wrote:
4 years ago
pokken wrote:
4 years ago
The problem with banning them is having to ban every single new mechanic that pulls stuff from outside of the game. It's not a reasonable default position, and would require lots of gymnastics. You wind up having to ban some of them but not all of them, vs. just disabling the mechanic.

Golden Wish is probably fine because it sucks. Burning Wish less so. How do you differentiate and draw the line? Even wishing for Rest in Peace at 5 mana could really be annoying, even if it's mostly fine.

Then a new card comes along. You have to really carefully observe power and prevalence and decide whether it's bannable.
Does incorporating 13 similar cards into a format with over 20,000 disparate cards really seem like an insurmountable proposition to you? Sure, some effort would be required of the RC+CAD, but nothing approaching "problematic gymnastics". Like every other effect, some cards with a Wish effect could simply be banned if necessary, while others wouldn't be, in the same vein that Time Walk is banned (for being a hyper-efficient auto-include), while Time Warp is not, and Time Stretch is on every popular "watch list" despite costing 5x Walk and 2x Warp. There's really no need to set a blanket rule for Wishes akin to that of Conspiracies and Ante cards when they could easily be dealt with on a case-by-case basis.
Yes, adding a new banning criteria is a problem for me. Especially when the future is likely to include more multi-purpose cards with the capability (see Karn).

We don't have any other banning criteria even remotely resembling it; no card since Griselbrand was banned immediately.

edit: Note, at first I ignored your time walk example because I think it's obvious that time walk is banned for reasons other than power level (Perceived Barrier to Entry being the #1 reason it's banned). But we have exactly two time magic effects banned, both of which are banned for perceived barrier to entry as much as power level (though both are issues in power level as well).

It's not really a comparable situation. Time magic has two banned implementations and 50 unbanned implementations. Wishes would have to be almost all banned and then some few would sneak through.

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Post by Impossible » 4 years ago

tarotplz wrote:
4 years ago
Uhhh, I beg to differ. Your argument was "color hosers don't see play because of the social contract, not because they can be dead cards". I simply tried to show you that in an EDH environment without a social contract they still don't see play. This means that the social contract is not what keeps them at bay.

I'm not entirely sure why you originally brought up MLD, as it really doesn't have much to do with wishes (as I said, I don't think they're particularly good/suited for wishing) and the rest of these stax pieces are also basically the exact opposite of what I'm afraid of. Those are not narrow answers, they're broad answers. Nobody would wish for cards like that.
Saying that "X card doesn't see play in cEDH thus it's not the social contract" is pretty meaningless. By that logic we could claim the social contract suppresses the play of Gitaxian Probe because it regularly appears in cEDH decks but not EDH decks. But we both know that's not actually why. cEDH is a completely different format than EDH and making comparisons between the two is pretty pointless.

This does raise the question though, what exactly are you afraid of Wishes getting?
tarotplz wrote:
4 years ago
Tooth and Nail on the other hand is something I don't think is particularly broken even if you get a combo with it. It's so much mana, so easily disruptable and not even instant speed. I don't think that it can only exist because we trust players not to break it. I don't think it's broken in the first place.

Wishes imo fall into a different category, they don't just have 2 modes, 1 fair and one broken. There is a lot of inbetween there. Different people will find different things acceptable and it would likely be difficult to find the line between fair and unfair.
I don't see the difference. T&N can get a wide range of targets, and I doubt everyone would agree at exactly what point it comes unfun. T&N for 2x Craw Wurm? For Eternal Witness and Acidic Slime? Craterhoof Behemoth and Avenger of Zendikar? Mikaeus, the Unhallowed and Triskelion?
tarotplz wrote:
4 years ago
Except you would prefer to see them actually banned instead of having what we have now, so there must be a diffenrence, no?

Also it helps people by allowing them to use the argument "the RC wants to specifically leave this to the players"
I'd rather have them banned because I abhor format-specific errata, not because I think there's any functional difference between "banned" and "don't function". The end result is the same: the RC went out of their way to specifically show that these cards were not to be used.

If they wanted to actually leave it up to the players they would make Wishes legal and let us figure out what to do with them.
tarotplz wrote:
4 years ago
Yes, let's assume a brand new player.
Just show them the card and explain that "outside the game" means a 15-card sideboard. To be honest, a brand new player probably shouldn't be starting with EDH in the first place, though.
tarotplz wrote:
4 years ago
I touched on this slightly before, but wishes have more than just a broken and a fair mode. Let's take a situation in which you're facing a graveyard deck as an example.

You could wish for Rest in Peace and completely shut them down. Clearly that's not going to be very fun for the gy player. He'd complain about being targeted etc. etc.

What if though, you don't wish for RiP but instead for Tormod's Crypt? Still gy hate, but not as powerful. That should be more acceptable, no? They player would still feel pretty bad.

Let's power this down even further. what if we get Nihil Spellbomb? It's like crypt, but it costs mana, so it's even worse. Ultimately the gy player will still dislike that a lot.

What if we don't take away all of their graveyard? Maybe we could wish for Scavenging Ooze. That only takes one card at a time, that's fair, right? Still, the gy player will feel targeted.

If we don't wish for gy hate, but instead get some random cool value card, like say Eternal Witness, we kinda sandbaged the wish. Might aswell just have put the actual card in the deck instead and saved ourself some mana,
I don't see a problem with any of these scenarios. If your deck rolls over and dies to a single Rest in Peace, it's probably a bad deck.
tarotplz wrote:
4 years ago
Does this mean you agree with wishes being mostly used for answers? This kinda goes against your entire argument, doesn't it?
I don't think I ever said otherwise. How does that go against my argument?
tarotplz wrote:
4 years ago
There are other cards in the format that this applies to though, what about them? Should they also be banned? Battle of Wits for example.
Battle of Wits doesn't have format-specific errata.
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Post by Legend » 4 years ago

pokken wrote:
4 years ago
The problem with banning them is having to ban every single new mechanic that pulls stuff from outside of the game. It's not a reasonable default position, and would require lots of gymnastics. You wind up having to ban some of them but not all of them, vs. just disabling the mechanic.

Golden Wish is probably fine because it sucks. Burning Wish less so. How do you differentiate and draw the line? Even wishing for Rest in Peace at 5 mana could really be annoying, even if it's mostly fine.

Then a new card comes along. You have to really carefully observe power and prevalence and decide whether it's bannable.
Does incorporating 13 similar cards into a format with over 20,000 disparate cards really seem like an insurmountable proposition to you? Sure, some effort would be required of the RC+CAD, but nothing approaching "problematic gymnastics". Like every other effect, some cards with a Wish effect could simply be banned if necessary, while others wouldn't be, in the same vein that Time Walk is banned (for being a hyper-efficient auto-include), while Time Warp is not, and Time Stretch is on every popular "watch list" despite costing 5x Walk and 2x Warp. There's really no need to set a blanket rule for Wishes akin to that of Conspiracies and Ante cards when they could easily be dealt with on a case-by-case basis.
pokken wrote:
4 years ago
Yes, adding a new banning criteria is a problem for me.
Are you saying you're on the RC or CAD? (I really don't know.)
pokken wrote:
4 years ago
Especially when the future is likely to include more multi-purpose cards with the capability (see Karn).
Griselbrand, Emrakul, and some other banned cards have features other than the those that resulted in them being banned, but sometimes you have to throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater.
pokken wrote:
4 years ago
We don't have any other banning criteria even remotely resembling it; no card since Griselbrand was banned immediately.
That's fine. We don't have anything like Rule 13 in the entirety of Magic. And what do you think will happen when WotC prints more Conspiracy like cards?
pokken wrote:
4 years ago
edit: Note, at first I ignored your time walk example because I think it's obvious that time walk is banned for reasons other than power level (Perceived Barrier to Entry being the #1 reason it's banned). But we have exactly two time magic effects banned, both of which are banned for perceived barrier to entry as much as power level (though both are issues in power level as well).
You must be joking. Have you looked at the cost of Commander cards lately!? The Perceived Barrier to Entry is a load of BS (Spoiler 10). Sure, it served its purpose for a very, very brief period of time, but that time has long since passed. If WotC mailed every Magic player 10 free copies of Time Walk tomorrow, it would still remain banned for power.
pokken wrote:
4 years ago
It's not really a comparable situation. Time magic has two banned implementations and 50 unbanned implementations. Wishes would have to be almost all banned and then some few would sneak through.
It is absolutely comparable. Nobody knows, nor can they know, that "Wishes would have to be almost all banned". That's just pessimism masquerading as realism.

EDIT: Fixed the quote boxes.
Last edited by Legend 4 years ago, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by tarotplz » 4 years ago

Impossible wrote:
4 years ago
Saying that "X card doesn't see play in cEDH thus it's not the social contract" is pretty meaningless. By that logic we could claim the social contract suppresses the play of Gitaxian Probe because it regularly appears in cEDH decks but not EDH decks. But we both know that's not actually why. cEDH is a completely different format than EDH and making comparisons between the two is pretty pointless.
This is not really the place to get into the philosophy of EDH and cEDH. They are the same format. This fact is paramount for the existence of cEDH and also why the format can't split off or create its own banlist.

The Gitaxian Probe thing has nothing to do with my point. Many casual players simply don't understand the power of that card. There are many others like it. Recently they've been catching on though, wouldn't you agree?
Impossible wrote:
4 years ago
This does raise the question though, what exactly are you afraid of Wishes getting?
I don't think I could've been clearer on this throughout this thread. Very matchup specific answers. There are some examples later on in this post.
Impossible wrote:
4 years ago
If they wanted to actually leave it up to the players they would make Wishes legal and let us figure out what to do with them.
No, in that case wishes would be legal and everyone would use them. We already agreed that most people consider what the RC says as THE rules for commander.
Impossible wrote:
4 years ago
I don't see a problem with any of these scenarios. If your deck rolls over and dies to a single Rest in Peace, it's probably a bad deck.
I think you'd be suprised how many decks actually lose to a single piece of well timed specific hate.

This problem affects the casual crowd significantly more than the more competitive one. The stronger a deck is, the more likely it is to be able to get rid of a specific answer. The weaker the deck is, the more likely it is for it to just lose outright.

Have you ever faced down a Rest in Peace with a Mono Black Reanimator list? Those run 1-2 pieces of enchantment removal at best. Usually Meteor Golem is all that's in there. Even if they manage to draw it AND cast it (they can't reanimate it anymore), their initial graveyard is still gone. That can be absolutely backbreaking for decks of lower powerlevels.

Have you ever been Shatterstormed while playing an artifact deck? Your entire board gone, everyone else still standing. Your ramp was manarocks, you're now also behind on mana massively. Not much you can do about it.

Did you ever play an enchantress deck and did someone cast Fracturing Gust? Most of those can't properly recover from something like that. Usually their ramp is in the form of land enchantments too.

Have you ever tried playing Storm through a Trinisphere or Rule of Law? Not all that fun, those really shut down your deck.

Token decks fold to Virulent Plague, +1/+1 counters are stopped by Solemnity, I could keep going, but I think you get the point.
All of these cards are not particularly good in the 99 of a deck. They don't see much play because they're so specific and often dead. With wishes legal cards like these would absolutely be wished for. Everytime one of these cards is wished up, there is a player on the other side of the table who gets his deck hard-countered and feels miserable. Especially in lower power groups where they might not even be able to deal with the hate piece and get back into the game.

I don't know about you, but that doesn't exactly sound like a fun play environment to me.
Impossible wrote:
4 years ago
I don't think I ever said otherwise. How does that go against my argument?
Maybe it's not. I just assumed that you, like other wish proponents would be convinced that people wouldn't get narrow answers to hard-counter other peoples decks, because that would be unfun. Social Contract and stuff, right?

I get that it sound kinda sweet to more easily be able to stop the broken combo decks by wishing for answers to use against them. Unfortunately weaker decks can be hated out just as easily. Usually actually much easier. That sounds like a problem to me, but maybe you'd be fine with that?
Impossible wrote:
4 years ago
Battle of Wits doesn't have format-specific errata.
Only because you consider rule 13 an errata but not rule 4. Both of them don't function in commander.

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Post by Legend » 4 years ago

tarotplz wrote:
4 years ago
Only because you consider rule 13 an errata but not rule 4. Both of them [Wishes and Battle of Wits] don't function in commander.
Comparing Rule 13 to any other rule of Commander is a false analogy. Format defining rules are not the same as a rule that redefines a subset of cards.
Legend wrote:
4 years ago
Limited deck size is a general rule of Commander without which the format has no identity. It's also a rule that applies to all cards equally. It's just that other cards don't care if there's more than 100 cards in a deck. Battle of Wits isn't subject to a special rule that was created to invalidate it. Wishes are. Commander doesn't have to be changed in order for Wishes to work in it.
EDIT: Whereas it would have to be changed for Battle of Wits to work in it.
Legend wrote:
4 years ago
Commander falls under the Singleton umbrella of Magic. From there, the core, defining, gestalt rules of Commander are: 40 Starting Life | 100 Card Limit | Commander | Color Identity. Add to, subtract from, or revise that set of rules and the result is a variant or a different format altogether.
EDIT: Or to put it another way, Rule 0 is the ground on which lies the foundation of "There Can Be Only One", on which stands each of the four pillars of Color Identity, 100 Card Limit, Commander, and 40 Starting Life. And on those sit every other rule.
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Post by Impossible » 4 years ago

tarotplz wrote:
4 years ago
This is not really the place to get into the philosophy of EDH and cEDH. They are the same format. This fact is paramount for the existence of cEDH and also why the format can't split off or create its own banlist.

The Gitaxian Probe thing has nothing to do with my point. Many casual players simply don't understand the power of that card. There are many others like it. Recently they've been catching on though, wouldn't you agree?
cEDH is literally a self-contradiction in that it attempts to be a competitive version of a format defined by it's lack of competition. It has no place in any discussion regarding the EDH ban list.

Git Probe was very on point, in that you're trying to make claims of causation where none exist. cEDH plays Git Probe because it is extremely efficient, not because of anything to do with the social contract. The inverse is also true; the amount of play (or lack thereof) that color-hosers, or any other cards you feel like picking as an example, see in cEDH has absolutely nothing to do with the social contract and everything to do with how well they help their owner win the game.

Which, you might notice, is entirely counter to EDH as laid out by the RC, in which the foremost concern should be the enjoyment of the game, not whether the game is won or lost. So I'll say it for the last time: cEDH has no bearing on this discussion.
tarotplz wrote:
4 years ago
No, in that case wishes would be legal and everyone would use them. We already agreed that most people consider what the RC says as THE rules for commander.
...yes, and? Wishes being legal doesn't force you to use them. That's literally what leaving it up to the players to decide for themselves means. As opposed to "no these cards don't work you can't use them" being the default rule of the land, in which I have little choice.
tarotplz wrote:
4 years ago
I think you'd be suprised how many decks actually lose to a single piece of well timed specific hate.

This problem affects the casual crowd significantly more than the more competitive one. The stronger a deck is, the more likely it is to be able to get rid of a specific answer. The weaker the deck is, the more likely it is for it to just lose outright.
This is only half-true. What you're really looking for is how linear a deck is, not how competitive it is. The more linear the strategy, the less likely it will be able to fight through disruption. And that's a risk one runs by building such a laser focused deck, one opens oneself up to having one's primary plan disrupted and then being left without a backup plan.
tarotplz wrote:
4 years ago
Have you ever faced down a Rest in Peace with a Mono Black Reanimator list? Those run 1-2 pieces of enchantment removal at best. Usually Meteor Golem is all that's in there. Even if they manage to draw it AND cast it (they can't reanimate it anymore), their initial graveyard is still gone. That can be absolutely backbreaking for decks of lower powerlevels.

Have you ever been Shatterstormed while playing an artifact deck? Your entire board gone, everyone else still standing. Your ramp was manarocks, you're now also behind on mana massively. Not much you can do about it.

Did you ever play an enchantress deck and did someone cast Fracturing Gust? Most of those can't properly recover from something like that. Usually their ramp is in the form of land enchantments too.

Have you ever tried playing Storm through a Trinisphere or Rule of Law? Not all that fun, those really shut down your deck.

Token decks fold to Virulent Plague, +1/+1 counters are stopped by Solemnity, I could keep going, but I think you get the point.
All of these cards are not particularly good in the 99 of a deck. They don't see much play because they're so specific and often dead. With wishes legal cards like these would absolutely be wished for. Everytime one of these cards is wished up, there is a player on the other side of the table who gets his deck hard-countered and feels miserable. Especially in lower power groups where they might not even be able to deal with the hate piece and get back into the game.

I don't know about you, but that doesn't exactly sound like a fun play environment to me.
It's starting to sound like we have very different definitions of "narrow answers" because I have main decked or been hit by every single one of those cards (or equivalent effect) except for Trinisphere. I play Rest in Peace and Vandalblast in basically any decks that can run them. Wave of Vitriol and Bane of Progress are mainstays. I see Arcane Laboratory and Eidolon of Rhetoric occasionally. I've never been Virulent Plagued but I've been Night of Souls' Betrayal and Curse of Death's Holded. And Solemnity is just a sweet card, but I only main deck it in 1 deck right now.

So your worse case scenarios are really just par for the course to me. I don't hate seeing any of these cards, in fact I actively push people in our playgroup to include more cards like these; we call it responsible deck building. If you want to sit down at our playgroup with Chainer and just abuse your graveyard, you better believe we're going to try and stop you. You're gonna have to work for your win. So if Wishes will let me grab whatever specific disruption I need to stop whoever is the current Archenemy, I'm all for that.
tarotplz wrote:
4 years ago
Maybe it's not. I just assumed that you, like other wish proponents would be convinced that people wouldn't get narrow answers to hard-counter other peoples decks, because that would be unfun. Social Contract and stuff, right?

I get that it sound kinda sweet to more easily be able to stop the broken combo decks by wishing for answers to use against them. Unfortunately weaker decks can be hated out just as easily. Usually actually much easier. That sounds like a problem to me, but maybe you'd be fine with that?
That stuff you listed? I'd be fine with it. Honestly, I fully expect to see most of those cards in any given game anyways. Those are the kinds of cards I would expect people to Wish for, and I wouldn't have a problem with them.

The cards I am referring to when I say Wishes can do some problematic things are mainly Acid Rain and friends, which basically serve only to prevent a single player from actually playing anymore. I think there's a pretty significant difference between those kind of hate cards (mainly MLD) and stuff like Rest in Peace. A graveyard-focused deck can power through a Rest in Peace and still meaningfully contribute to a game, but it's basically impossible for a mono-green deck to ever really recover from an Acid Rain. It's real hard to play the game without lands.

Those are the kinds of cards I'm afraid of people WIshing for, but fortunately I think the social contract would mostly stop that. Most players tend to agree that attacking mana bases isn't particularly fun.
tarotplz wrote:
4 years ago
Only because you consider rule 13 an errata but not rule 4. Both of them don't function in commander.
Legend covered this pretty well, but you're correct. I don't view rule 4 as errata because Battle of Wits still does exactly what the card says it does. Just because it's condition is more difficult to achieve due to the format rules doesn't change the fact that Battle of Wits functions exactly as it always has. If you would like another example, I also don't think Rule 7 (40 life) is errata towards Lightning Bolt, despite the fact that Bolting face is now half as effective. Bolt still bolts. That's not errata.
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Post by tarotplz » 4 years ago

Impossible wrote:
4 years ago
Git Probe because it is extremely efficient, not because of anything to do with the social contract. The inverse is also true; the amount of play (or lack thereof) that color-hosers, or any other cards you feel like picking as an example, see in cEDH has absolutely nothing to do with the social contract and everything to do with how well they help their owner win the game.
Yes, this is exactly what I was trying to say. It was not to make any points about the EDH banlist but simply me trying to refute your point that the social contract is the only thing keeping color hosers out of people's decks.
Impossible wrote:
4 years ago
...yes, and? Wishes being legal doesn't force you to use them. That's literally what leaving it up to the players to decide for themselves means. As opposed to "no these cards don't work you can't use them" being the default rule of the land, in which I have little choice.
I definitly can't agree with this.

For one thing you have no control over what your opponents are putting into their decks, so even if you don't use them yourself, they will show up in your games.

Next up assuming wishes were legal, some of them would definitly be very powerful cards. This means that not putting them into your deck definitly handicaps you in some manner. That's like not running any tutors because you don't like them.

Im addition, like we staed before, most players consider the rules of the RC as THE rules for EDH, which means there would be a significant incentive to use wishes, as it appears to be the will of the RC if they were to allow them.
Impossible wrote:
4 years ago
This is only half-true. What you're really looking for is how linear a deck is, not how competitive it is. The more linear the strategy, the less likely it will be able to fight through disruption. And that's a risk one runs by building such a laser focused deck, one opens oneself up to having one's primary plan disrupted and then being left without a backup plan.
Not every deck that can be easily shut down by hate pieces is by definition linear. Not every graveyard deck is linear and degenerate, not every enchantress deck is a menace that deserves to be hard-countered, not every artifact deck is a glass cannon combo machine.

It's true that in general linear decks might be a bit more susceptible to narrow answers, but there are definitly also non-linear decks that struggle significantly with them.

This is particularly true for those pieces of hate that have an effect even when removed. Rest in Peace still takes your initial graveyard when it resolves, Aura of Silence still takes something with it etc. Even the most interactive control decks can be significantly hindered by hate pieces like City of Solitude and Grand Abolisher
Impossible wrote:
4 years ago
It's starting to sound like we have very different definitions of "narrow answers" because I have main decked or been hit by every single one of those cards (or equivalent effect) except for Trinisphere. I play Rest in Peace and Vandalblast in basically any decks that can run them. Wave of Vitriol and Bane of Progress are mainstays. I see Arcane Laboratory and Eidolon of Rhetoric occasionally. I've never been Virulent Plagued but I've been Night of Souls' Betrayal and Curse of Death's Holded. And Solemnity is just a sweet card, but I only main deck it in 1 deck right now.

So your worse case scenarios are really just par for the course to me. I don't hate seeing any of these cards, in fact I actively push people in our playgroup to include more cards like these; we call it responsible deck building.
Looks like it. This is very interesting to me. It's definitly not the typical thing you see in more casual playgroups. [mention]Legend[/mention], how about you? Do you see a lot of these kind of cards in your playgroups?

Personally I think that my own playgroup would be fine even if wishes were unbanned. I know exactly which one of us would abuse Karn, but that'd probably get banned anyways, we could adapt to the rest. It's really the average casual playgroups not used to these hate cards that I worry most about.
Impossible wrote:
4 years ago
If you want to sit down at our playgroup with Chainer and just abuse your graveyard, you better believe we're going to try and stop you. You're gonna have to work for your win. So if Wishes will let me grab whatever specific disruption I need to stop whoever is the current Archenemy, I'm all for that.

Yeah, those Chainer decks are definitly the biggest menace of the format.....
Impossible wrote:
4 years ago
That stuff you listed? I'd be fine with it. Honestly, I fully expect to see most of those cards in any given game anyways. Those are the kinds of cards I would expect people to Wish for, and I wouldn't have a problem with them.

The cards I am referring to when I say Wishes can do some problematic things are mainly Acid Rain and friends, which basically serve only to prevent a single player from actually playing anymore. I think there's a pretty significant difference between those kind of hate cards (mainly MLD) and stuff like Rest in Peace. A graveyard-focused deck can power through a Rest in Peace and still meaningfully contribute to a game, but it's basically impossible for a mono-green deck to ever really recover from an Acid Rain. It's real hard to play the game without lands.

Those are the kinds of cards I'm afraid of people WIshing for, but fortunately I think the social contract would mostly stop that. Most players tend to agree that attacking mana bases isn't particularly fun.
I love how we're actually getting somewhere in this discussion. We definitly have the same idea of what people are gonna wish for. We just see the outcome of that differently.

I also agree that people getting things like Acid Rain would be worse than the other hate pieces. It'd probably be rarer due to the social contract and stuff, but facing down a mono green deck that's about to win is a pretty tempting incentive to actually go and get one of those, don't you think?
Impossible wrote:
4 years ago
Legend covered this pretty well, but you're correct. I don't view rule 4 as errata because Battle of Wits still does exactly what the card says it does. Just because it's condition is more difficult to achieve due to the format rules doesn't change the fact that Battle of Wits functions exactly as it always has.
I still see this as a matter of perspective. I tend to look at the outcome rather than the actual rules here. Ultimately both don't work, why exactly that is doesn't really matter much to me.

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Post by Impossible » 4 years ago

tarotplz wrote:
4 years ago
I definitly can't agree with this.

For one thing you have no control over what your opponents are putting into their decks, so even if you don't use them yourself, they will show up in your games.

Next up assuming wishes were legal, some of them would definitly be very powerful cards. This means that not putting them into your deck definitly handicaps you in some manner. That's like not running any tutors because you don't like them.

Im addition, like we staed before, most players consider the rules of the RC as THE rules for EDH, which means there would be a significant incentive to use wishes, as it appears to be the will of the RC if they were to allow them.
Well I don't have control over what my opponents put into their decks regarding anything, not just Wishes. There are a ton of cards I don't particularly want to play against (Armageddon, Stasis, Smokestack, etc.) that my opponents are very much allowed to play with if they so desire. The correct response is, as always, to either ask them to change cards/decks or simply find someone else to play with. And the same will be true for Wishes if you really cannot stand playing against them.

I already try to avoid putting tutors in my decks because I think they lead to repetitive gameplay.

Also, I think that's a pretty gross misinterpretation of what I'm talking about. Lets try an analogy: just because the FDA approves a new food as safe doesn't mean they are personally advising you to eat it. Thus, the RC saying Wishes are acceptable to play with is not an invitation to use them. It's simply them saying "this card won't kill you" but the ultimate choice to use it or not is always yours.
tarotplz wrote:
4 years ago
Not every deck that can be easily shut down by hate pieces is by definition linear. Not every graveyard deck is linear and degenerate, not every enchantress deck is a menace that deserves to be hard-countered, not every artifact deck is a glass cannon combo machine.

It's true that in general linear decks might be a bit more susceptible to narrow answers, but there are definitly also non-linear decks that struggle significantly with them.

This is particularly true for those pieces of hate that have an effect even when removed. Rest in Peace still takes your initial graveyard when it resolves, Aura of Silence still takes something with it etc. Even the most interactive control decks can be significantly hindered by hate pieces like City of Solitude and Grand Abolisher
I don't see a difference between any of those things and having all your creatures wrathed away. Do you also think playing Wrath of God against an Elf-ball deck is inappropriate? Because that seems like business as usual to me. If you're going to present a threat, be that reanimator shenanigans or Elf-ball or whatever, I don't see any problem with your opponents removing that threat. That's the game, isn't it? I don't play EDH to goldfish.
tarotplz wrote:
4 years ago
Yeah, those Chainer decks are definitly the biggest menace of the format.....
Well it was your example of a mono-black reanimator deck, and it's not exactly a weak deck. They can be quite strong.
tarotplz wrote:
4 years ago
I love how we're actually getting somewhere in this discussion. We definitly have the same idea of what people are gonna wish for. We just see the outcome of that differently.

I also agree that people getting things like Acid Rain would be worse than the other hate pieces. It'd probably be rarer due to the social contract and stuff, but facing down a mono green deck that's about to win is a pretty tempting incentive to actually go and get one of those, don't you think?
And that's what the social contract is for. Even though it might be a tactically strong move, we should consider whether that's going to lead to a fun game or not.
tarotplz wrote:
4 years ago
I still see this as a matter of perspective. I tend to look at the outcome rather than the actual rules here. Ultimately both don't work, why exactly that is doesn't really matter much to me.
I don't know what to say here other than you're wrong. Battle of Wits does work. If you play the card in a game of EDH, it's rules text functions. Whereas if you play Burning WIsh it does literal nothing because the RC erased it's rules text. That's a pretty significant difference.
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Post by tarotplz » 4 years ago

Impossible wrote:
4 years ago
Battle of Wits does work. If you play the card in a game of EDH, it's rules text functions. Whereas if you play Burning WIsh it does literal nothing because the RC erased it's rules text. That's a pretty significant difference.
So if we change rule 13 from its current text so something like "Sideboards don't exist in commander. Outside the game is defined as empty." you wouldn't be bothered by it anymore? Technically wishes would still function then, they'd just fail to find every time.

Regardless, I don't think this particular point will get us anywhere, so we can probably just agree to disagree here.
Impossible wrote:
4 years ago
I already try to avoid putting tutors in my decks because I think they lead to repetitive gameplay.
Considering this, don't you think wishes, which are essentially tutors, would have a similar effect?
Impossible wrote:
4 years ago
Also, I think that's a pretty gross misinterpretation of what I'm talking about. Lets try an analogy: just because the FDA approves a new food as safe doesn't mean they are personally advising you to eat it. Thus, the RC saying Wishes are acceptable to play with is not an invitation to use them. It's simply them saying "this card won't kill you" but the ultimate choice to use it or not is always yours.
Previously you said this:
Impossible wrote:
4 years ago
I understand the idea -- leave it a blank slate and let players figure it out themselves -- but I disagree that it is the best course of action available here. Despite the fact the RC goes out of their way to emphasize that their rules are more guidelines than hard-and-fast rules, I think the vast majority of players treat them as the rules.
Please help me out here, why exactly doesn't this go both ways? Looks to me like both ways give one group the option to go against the rules of the RC, which we both agree makes it harder to get your "way".
Impossible wrote:
4 years ago
I don't see a difference between any of those things and having all your creatures wrathed away. Do you also think playing Wrath of God against an Elf-ball deck is inappropriate? Because that seems like business as usual to me. If you're going to present a threat, be that reanimator shenanigans or Elf-ball or whatever, I don't see any problem with your opponents removing that threat. That's the game, isn't it? I don't play EDH to goldfish.
No, I don't think playing a boardwipe vs a go-wide deck is deck is problematic at all. I also don't think putting a narrow answer into you deck to then draw and play is fine (there's the downside of it being dead in some matchups after all). What I'm worried about is the added consistency these strategies gain from wishes.

Not gonna go over everything again, but as we seem to agree, wishes make these things significantly easier to do (no deckbuilding cost to narrow answers) and presumably much more common
Impossible wrote:
4 years ago
Even though it might be a tactically strong move, we should consider whether that's going to lead to a fun game or not.
Exactly, we agree on this.

If only there was a way to know how wishes would affect the game... Oh wait, there is:
papa_funk wrote:
4 years ago
Testing? No. It was the actual rule for a while; it's what we started with and it led to lots of arguments and feelsbad moments.
If you have arguments as to why wishes would create fun playpatterns and improve the format overall, please share them! As I said before:
tarotplz wrote:
4 years ago
If you have an argument to present that would make me believe that there is a good chance wishes would improve the format, I would love to hear it, but as it stands I have yet to see anything remotely convincing in this regard.

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Post by Impossible » 4 years ago

tarotplz wrote:
4 years ago
So if we change rule 13 from its current text so something like "Sideboards don't exist in commander. Outside the game is defined as empty." you wouldn't be bothered by it anymore? Technically wishes would still function then, they'd just fail to find every time.

Regardless, I don't think this particular point will get us anywhere, so we can probably just agree to disagree here.
It would bother me less. It would still bother me, though, because, although less explicit than the current version, such a rule still only exists to prevent Wishes from working. As opposed to the 100 card rule which has other functions like increasing game variety by reducing consistency, etc.
tarotplz wrote:
4 years ago
Considering this, don't you think wishes, which are essentially tutors, would have a similar effect?
Well just because I don't use tutors doesn't mean I want them all to suddenly stop working. But beside that, with the exception of Karn, I can't really imagine a scenario where Wishing for a proactive card is better than just including that card in your deck. To put it another way: Demonic Tutor acts as a second copy of whatever your best card is, thereby increasing deck consistency. On the other hand, Mastermind's Acquisition to Wish for your best card just means you took your best card out of your deck.

Wishes are good for getting reactive cards to deal with whatever the current problem of the table is. They're significantly less good at actually advancing your strategy every game in the exact same manner.
tarotplz wrote:
4 years ago
Please help me out here, why exactly doesn't this go both ways? Looks to me like both ways give one group the option to go against the rules of the RC, which we both agree makes it harder to get your "way".
Have you ever heard the phrase "It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission"? Because that's what instinctively springs to mind here. Assume that Wishes are banned but I want to play them. That means that I have to start every game I play by asking three other people if that's okay, and if even one of them says no I either can't play or have to fumble to change cards or decks. It's an enormous hassle. Combined with our previously agreed upon idea that players strongly tend to agree with whatever the official RC ruling is, I end up not being able to play Wishes a significant amount of the time without being given a fair chance to show I can play them responsibly because people are biased towards the RC's view.

Compare that to if Wishes are legal and I don't want to play them. I don't. But if someone else plays them and if that person uses them in a way I find unfun, then I can bring it up as an issue, while being able to point definitively to whatever aspect I found unfun in the game we just played as a way to convince the offending player. Basically the same as every other card. And if we again apply the idea that players are biased in favor of the RC's rules, because I know Wishes are legal, this player's use of them would have to be pretty egregious for me to bother going against that and ask the player to stop playing Wishes.

Sorry if I'm not explaining it well, but it's like the difference between night and day to me. Having them be legal by default is by far the more player-friendly option in my mind.
tarotplz wrote:
4 years ago
No, I don't think playing a boardwipe vs a go-wide deck is deck is problematic at all. I also don't think putting a narrow answer into you deck to then draw and play is fine (there's the downside of it being dead in some matchups after all). What I'm worried about is the added consistency these strategies gain from wishes.

Not gonna go over everything again, but as we seem to agree, wishes make these things significantly easier to do (no deckbuilding cost to narrow answers) and presumably much more common
Disrupting your opponent isn't really a strategy. Playing Rest in Peace probably isn't advancing my game plan. So I'm not really sure what the concern is. Other than graveyard decks should probably be built with the idea that they're almost certainly going to have to recover from having their graveyard eaten at some point, so maybe build in some redundancy and don't go all-in on the reanimation strategy.
tarotplz wrote:
4 years ago
If only there was a way to know how wishes would affect the game... Oh wait, there is:
papa_funk wrote:
4 years ago
Testing? No. It was the actual rule for a while; it's what we started with and it led to lots of arguments and feelsbad moments.
If you have arguments as to why wishes would create fun playpatterns and improve the format overall, please share them!
Forgive me, but I tend to take the things papa_funk says worth a grain of salt. Especially when the events he is referring to took place 10+ years ago. For example, he also said this in 2013:
papa_funk wrote:[Painter's Servant] is a card where most of the benign interactions are griefy and the less benign ones really suck. The number of OK interactions that aren't basically irrelevant is teeny and nobody can claim with a straight face that those are the ones that'll be used. Sounds like a totally awesome card to have in casual play.
And yet here we are in 2019 and Painter's Servant is free at last. Things change. Not to mention "it led to lots of arguments" isn't particularly descriptive. Why did it lead to arguments? What were the arguments about? Could these arguments be solved by creating some easily grokkable rules dictating how Wishes work? Do we honestly need to be told not to try and trade for or drive home and find 250 Eldrazi mid-Spawnsire of Ulamog resolution?
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Post by Sharpened » 4 years ago

Impossible wrote:
4 years ago
Could these arguments be solved by creating some easily grokkable rules dictating how Wishes work? Do we honestly need to be told not to try and trade for or drive home and find 250 Eldrazi mid-Spawnsire of Ulamog resolution?
But then you are creating rules specifically for the format and for a set of cards. Which is more disruptive than saying simply, that wishes work like they always do in sanctioned matches.

Powerlevel and crappy game play (Color/other hosers) aside, I think it is absolutely the logistics issue that defines the wishes current functionality. I've seen players stop midgame to buy a single to wish for. It's awful. So is being incentivized to bring a surplus of "extra" cards with you in case you want to wish for them. Or trying to deal with a person who can't find the card that they know they have somewhere. Or hearing, "if we were at my house, I would be able to get..."

Logistical issues are why people and previous versions of the rules talk about a "wishboard", And aside from being overly complex and mostly unnecessary, wishboards also eliminate the whimsical spirit that you would try to recapture with having wishes work.

It's unfortunate that the simplest and best rules implementation makes a casualty of the functionality of wishes. But the alternatives are overly complex and unpleasant.

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Post by Legend » 4 years ago

tarotplz wrote:
4 years ago
If only there was a way to know how wishes would affect the game... Oh wait, there is:
papa_funk wrote:
4 years ago
Testing? No. It was the actual rule for a while; it's what we started with and it led to lots of arguments and feelsbad moments.
[mention]papa_funk[/mention]'s answer is misleading. If you look into the history of Wishing, you'll find that it was messy, thanks to WotC. If you look into Wishes in Commander, you'll find that they were no less messy, and as a result and may have been among the first cards banned in Commander (all according to an article from [mention]Sheldon[/mention]) but they were certainly banned prior to 2004 (according to Sheldon), and hence not given a proper chance. Remember, Commander (like Magic itself) developed organically, without the homogenizing effect of smart phones. The so-called "rule" was more of a bunch of personal/tribal assumptions varying from person-to-person, group-to-group, and region-to-region. So of course "it led to lots of arguments and feelsbad moments". Those issues were not a result of what players were Wishing for as much as it was a result of how they were Wishing. But now that the general rules of Commander have been streamlined and are well-known, we know that the logistics of how to Wish are easily dealt with. To think otherwise is to live in the past.

Also, where is the data supporting the "moments"? I believe papa_funk and am not even suggesting that he's bearing false witness. But I'm not asking about statements and stories, I'm asking about "data" because after reading every article and bit of discussion about Wishing in Commander that I could find online, I've never read ANYTHING concerning this time period when Wishing worked from ANYONE until papa_funk just mentioned it in this thread. Also, the very word "moments" suggests that they're anecdotal - i.e., a very small, personal, subjective sample insufficient to represent or predict the actions and experiences of the global Commander community. It's clear that Wishing understandably got a handwave from the RC during a time when they were overwhelmed with Commander's barely manageable surge in popularity, but that time has passed and Wishing should get the chance that every effect deserves. (I know I said I retired, but I can't help myself.)
EDIT:
tarotplz wrote:
4 years ago
Impossible wrote:
4 years ago
Also, I think that's a pretty gross misinterpretation of what I'm talking about. Lets try an analogy: just because the FDA approves a new food as safe doesn't mean they are personally advising you to eat it. Thus, the RC saying Wishes are acceptable to play with is not an invitation to use them. It's simply them saying "this card won't kill you" but the ultimate choice to use it or not is always yours.
Previously you said this:
Impossible wrote:
4 years ago
I understand the idea -- leave it a blank slate and let players figure it out themselves -- but I disagree that it is the best course of action available here. Despite the fact the RC goes out of their way to emphasize that their rules are more guidelines than hard-and-fast rules, I think the vast majority of players treat them as the rules.
Please help me out here, why exactly doesn't this go both ways? Looks to me like both ways give one group the option to go against the rules of the RC, which we both agree makes it harder to get your "way".
Spoiler 3 covers this.
Sharpened wrote:
4 years ago
I've seen players stop midgame to buy a single to wish for. It's aweful.
That's a fine opinion. My opinion is that, though I wouldn't do it myself, I find it very funny and fun. Personal opinions are not an argument against Wishing working in Commander. Players should leverage Rule 0 to exercise personal opinions.

Griefers will cause grief with or without Wishing. "Griefers will cause grief" is not an argument against Wishing in Commander. Use Rule 0 to police jerks, not Rule 13.
EDIT:
Impossible wrote:
4 years ago
Wishes are good for getting reactive cards to deal with whatever the current problem of the table is. They're significantly less good at actually advancing your strategy every game in the exact same manner.
This is a rock solid summary argument in favor of Wishing in Commander (for those who feel the need for one, and especially for those who compare Wishing to tutoring). Wishing would serve a different role than tutoring, almost that of the exact opposite, in fact.
“Comboing in Commander is like dunking on a seven foot hoop.” – Dana Roach

“Making a deck that other people want to play against – that’s Commander.” – Gavin Duggan

"I want my brain to win games, not my cards." – Sheldon Menery

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Post by Sharpened » 4 years ago

Legend wrote:
4 years ago
Griefers will cause grief with or without Wishing. "Griefers will cause grief" is not an argument against Wishing in Commander. Use Rule 0 to police jerks, not Rule 13.
There are sanctioned commander matches. There will be sanctioned commander matches this weekend. Rule 13 states that Wishes in Commander work the way that wishes work in sanctioned matches (ie. they can only get cards from your sideboard).

You are asking for wishes to work functionally different than they do in any other match. Rule 13 doesn't exist to police jerks. Rule 13, with regards to wishes, basically says that these cards function according to tournament rules. A game of commander is a game of commander. Cards work the same way, whether it's a sanctioned Commander deck release event at your store or a casual game, UNLESS you override something in your casual game with Rule 0. I would argue that if Rule 13 did not exist, nothing would be functionally different (although there would be more confusion about the situation).

If I sit down to play a casual game with someone and specify a format, the expectation is that everything functions the same as if we were playing a sanctioned game of that format. Now, it's a casual game, so we can discuss and modify things (Rule 0), but otherwise things would function the same as in a tournament setting (Rule 13). If someone sat down to play legacy, and they cast Living Wish and got something other than a card in their sideboard, there would be surprise and confusion. The default expectation is that the format functions as the tournament rules dictate, even in casual settings, unless otherwise specified. Why would Commander games be any different?

If you wan't your nonsanctioned Commander games to function differently than the sanctioned ones, you are free to do so. Expecting the rules to treat sanctioned and nonsanctioned games of Commander differently is ridiculous. Expecting the rules to change the functionality of several cards so that they work differently depending on the format your playing is also ridiculous.

As far as the game of Magic is concerned, if you are playing an official game, wishes can only get cards in sideboards. This is true, regardless of format. If you are playing casual and wish to not play by the official rules, you are free to do so and then wishes function differently.

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