pokken wrote: ↑3 years ago
And again since you didn't catch it somehow I'll reiterate I think that group hug decks win a decent number of games against underpowered opponents. But that's because the playstyle convinces people it's okay to punch down.
I didn't miss anything. I could just spend volumes digging into a single statement like this. You think group hug decks win a decent number of games, though only one you've ever been in, so why would you think that? You accuse the playstyle of punching down against underpowered opponents, but if it's a fair match where everyone participates and can win, in what sense is it punching down? What sort of thought process do you have to be going through to think "well, that deck can never keep up against me, but maybe it does ok against weaker opponents" and assign that situation an implication of wrongdoing by the player you supposedly almost never lose to?
The truth is almost certainly that you don't like playing against group hug personally and don't enjoy the play patterns. Which is fine. Lots of people do enjoy the play patterns made by group hug decks. All the nonsense about kingmaking (which in this discussion isn't actually kingmaking, it's just not winning), or not being able to win the game, or what have you, that's all you rationalizing why your subjective preferences are objectively correct. And there's no need for that.
materpillar wrote: ↑3 years ago
My opponents drawing multiple cards per turn makes it basically impossible to actually stick
Gishath, Sun's Avatar because no one is ever going to run out of removal. So that basically never wants to play against
Howling Mine ever.
That is perfectly well reasoned, and in the situation made by your deck choice, that decision makes sense. What I don't like is treating that differently than any other subset of cards. Your Gishath deck is bad against Howling Mines. Graveyard decks are bad against graveyard hate. Storm decks are bad against a bunch of hate bears. Like, your Gishath deck, by your argument, would probably have a bad time with my Zedruu at the table. At the same time, my Zedruu deck has a real bad time if someone sits down with
Lavinia, Azorius Renegade. It would be piss poor of me to then say "well, now we're hardly even playing Magic, this doesn't tell me anything about how my deck works, I wanted a normal game of Magic and you've ruined it."