Gentle Giant wrote: ↑1 year ago
Although your reaction came from duducrash's suggestion, you responded with a broader point: "I don't understand, this is that clash of are we building a specifically suboptimal deck, or are we working together to build the best we can as a group?". My response to that ended with a question you didn't really answer: What's fun about making it the strongest version if there's not that much creativity needed to make it anymore?
For this example, you mention not seeing an end game for the deck. But isn't that an interesting thing to explore? It apparently isn't as clear cut to see what lines such a deck could have, thus we need to get creative to find them.
That's what I was hoping you'd respond to given your questions throughout this thread concerning building sub-optimally (as you said you were interested in coming to understand that perspective).
This feels like it's slipping into some sort of netdeck vs homebrew debate, and that never ends well. Except worse because there's no commander "metagame" to netdeck from. Even "average lists" from EDHrec are just piles of etb creatures and ramp, which was a natural outcome of such a homogenized resource that crawls select websites for data. Imo, EDHrec isn't "usable" anymore, it's just a shopping hub to get kickbacks from buying cards from their sponsors. Even their "synergy %" is meaninglessly arbitrary.
But, in D&D terms, I'm what's called an optimizer. A min-maxer, I guess would be the slang more commonly referred to term. It's natural selection on my part to seek out the best I can do, barring price because no one is buying a
Tawnos's Coffin for non-sanctioned play, let alone with no cash on the line. In the example above, there's not that many ways to generate bodies off instants and sorceries, they're one shot and often times mana heavy. If they're permanents like
Mobilization or
Dragon Roost, they're mana heavy in exchange for being repeatable. So to me, this context of a hypothetical non-creature Najeela, sounds like a solved deck because you're putting yourself into such a narrow restriction. If I'm wrong, I'm wrong, but the burden of proof is on the person suggesting it could work.
Gentle Giant wrote: ↑1 year ago
3drinks wrote: ↑1 year ago
Gentle Giant wrote: ↑1 year ago
I think (please correct me if I'm wrong) you find the challenge in theme-agnostic deckbuilding puzzles (optimal ramp package, trimming CMC, balancing removal suit, etc.).
This is not an untrue assessment. I find a good deal of value in looking into ways to extract maximum value from my decks and make optimum plays.
Did the other end of this paragraph (the point about liking different kinds of puzzles) also help you see why we'd suggest wholly non-optimal but strongly on-theme cards?
And what is your perspective on @Crazy Monkey's idea of 75% (as opposed to your own). I can imagine you feeling very uneasy about playing
Hour of Need instead of
Pongify in
Unesh, Criosphinx Sovereign deck, but that's probably the type of suggestions which will come up frequently in these threads.
I've played
Angelic Ascension before, and it is an efficient way to exile two card types. That's good. But giving out a free 4/4 with evasion is such a massive drawback, and you're the one that's gonna eat the 4/4 so it's not really dealing with the threat. In a vacuum, I don't think I'd play
Hour of Need though I won't say it doesn't have it's uses - clearly sometimes giving someone an
Air Elemental is something you're much more okay with than what you're targeting. And the card does ...
scale up... so it has that going for it.
3UU isn't an unreasonable cost to exile two guys. I'd be hesitant about spending five to give someone eight power of evasive beatsticks, but I wouldn't go so far as to call it
unplayable trash.
Am I making sense? I feel like I'm talking around the point and not actually answering questions.