This alone wouldn't have gotten me to play Ruhan, but then a certain someone started slandering the good name of Ruhan and motivated me to actually brew a Ruhan deck.
Voltron is my favorite strategy in EDH, it's unique to the format, reasonably powerful, and can be taken a number of different ways. However, it does have some drawbacks. I would say the primary drawbacks are 1) Sometimes you're commander get's removed twice and you're more or less out of the game even though you technically aren't dead and 2) Sometimes you come out the gate swinging and kill one player in the first few turns, then the table catches back up and the game goes on for quite a bit longer, and the murdered player has to sit and watch.
1 and 2 could also just be lumped together into "can create unfun experiences" but they are two different problems that need to be solved individually.
Ruhan doesn't really do anything to solve the first problem, aside from coming with good colors to defend him, but he solves the second problem, can't target a player if your attacks are random! Admittedly, you might just roll the same player 3 times in a row, but even then, that just adds to the suspense!
Now I know some people are of the opinion that when someone dies to a fast voltron start they just need to suck it up. A common attitude seems to be that maybe the experience will teach them to play more early-game interaction, and it's not like voltron is a particularly strong strategy. I feel like that attitude kind of misses the point of Commander though. Smallpox is a moderately playable card in Legacy, no one thinks it's a problem because Legacy is a competitive format, and Smallpox is very beatable, it might be kind of miserable to play against, but no one is suggesting it gets banned because, for the most part, legacy isn't trying to create an environment where people can't do things other people find frustrating, it's trying to create a well-balanced format (emphasis on trying). If there are a wide variety of decks at a Legacy tournament, many of which have reasonable odds of winning the event, then the format is in a good place. Commander, however, is a casual format, if 4 decks of equal power-level sit down for a game, that doesn't guarantee that everyone is having fun.
I feel kind of dumb explaining what casual EDH means on a forum that's pretty much exclusively about casual EDH these days, but I see so many people defend fast voltron, MLD, stax, etc. by talking about its weaknesses or about how it "forces the table to play fair." No one cares, if the table doesn't want that experience, then you've failed to make a good casual commander deck.
I realize I left out a lot of nuance in my previous two paragraphs, if your playgroup is unwilling to compromise with you to find some sort of balance between what you want to play and what they want to play against, then that's partly their fault and it's probably not a good fit. Also, I called out MLD and stax because they are pretty commonly disliked, there's nothing "special" about those strategies. If your playgroup doesn't mind MLD but hates it when someone plays Aristocrats or something, then play MLD, not aristocrats. However, this isn't really suppose to be an essay on the ethos of casual commander, and I've already spoken on this tangent for long enough.
Of course, their is one fairly obvious solution to the problem of knocking one player out of the game early: just don't do it. Even if it's tactically correct to finish off one of your opponents, you could always just swing at someone else anyways. However, I feel this often leads to situations where you're kind of disrespecting your opponents. If someone is set up to win the game next turn, or if they have a play next turn that will take you out of the game, of course you're going to finish them off. After all, no one can complain that you killed a player too early when they obviously were about to do the same thing on their turn. However, in practice this just means that, when you're likely to win anyways, you make a show of letting your opponents live a bit longer, but when it actually matters, you play just as ruthlessly.
It also moves the strategy from: "kill each individual as fast as possible before moving on to the next." To "put each opponent into 1-hit range as far as possible before moving onto the next." Which just feels like playing with your food.
To take a more clear cut example, I once played against a player that managed to put infinite +1/+1 counters on a Walking Ballista, but then didn't kill the table because he "wanted to keep the game going." Of course, if someone started threatening him later, he will just laser them with Ballista in response. In my eyes, this is poor sportsmanship, and the rest of the table agreed and resigned on the spot.
It's a little less obvious when you choose to spare a player while playing Voltron, as it's a lot more likely that you underestimate your opponents and they manage to beat you because you let them live, but the core concept remains the same.
Of course, you could make it a hard rule. Just start every game by telling your opponents that you will roll for who to attack every combat. And this would work perfectly, there's no rule in the game saying you can't play all or some of the creatures in your deck like it has Ruhan of the Fomori's textbox. As long as you let the table know your rule at the start of the game, and you follow through with it, no matter what, even if it kills you, then you're in good shape.
However, if you ARE going to go through all of that, why not just actually play Ruhan of the Fomori? While I've certainly played decks with self-imposed regulations before, if there's an option that makes it an official rule, rather than an arbitrary one that I set up, I'd prefer that option. There's a certain simplicity in letting your cards speak for themselves that I prefer. Secondly, if you ARE going to play your commander like it has Ruhan of the Fomori's textbox, then Ruhan becomes a pretty compelling option. Still probably not the BEST, I think a commander with some evasion would help a lot, but a 4 mana 7/7 is a decent reward for forcing a pretty severe downside onto your commander.
TL;DR: Ruhan of the Fomori isn't particularly good, but in my eyes he's a masterfully designed casual voltron commander, 👍👍from me, and honestly, the only reason I haven't brewed him yet is because he's pretty mainstream and I am a special snowflake.
Pretty sure his popularity has been steadily dropping for years however (I can't find historical EDHrec data, so it's just a guess), while the number of good spells for him (particularly protection spells) have gone up, so I'm willing to make a deck with him now.
So yeah, I did that, here's the list:
v2.0
Approximate Total Cost:
v1.0
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The final question is whether I'm actually going to get the secret lair cards. On the one hand, I don't like secret lairs, on the other hand the secret lair indirectly inspired this deck, I have a lot of respect for the late Sheldon, and the proceeds are going to the American Cancer Society. Hmmmm......
