TheGildedGoose wrote: ↑3 years ago
It also doesn't help that Dirk can be abrasive and condescending. Telling someone they need therapy is dismissive and marginalizing.
I can see how it reads that way in the context of the rest of it, but I didn't mean that part as an insult. To me it does genuinely sound like he's had some bad experiences and might need help recovering from them. Being too worried about thieves to bring a third deck - full of proxies - and believing that doing so would paint a big target for thieves does sound kinda worrying to me. I could be wrong and maybe it's more justified than I think it is, but in my (extremely not-expert) opinion it sounds like the sort of thing that might be impacting daily life, and worth talking to someone about. Probably not my business though.
3drinks wrote: ↑3 years ago
They and I have been on opposing ends many, many times over the years, and will likely continue so in the future. It can't be helped I guess. But that's not important. I lose my points when I start these discussions, and end up down a rabbit hole of a rant that's distanced myself from the attempt at making a reasonable, open contribution. Let's try this again.
I did go a bit overboard, and I'm sorry about that. I'll try to do better.
I, in my experience, play the cards I play because I've been in the bad experiences I have. I've watched hundreds of masturbatory Azami decks over the years and in turn, it's time to make them sit and watch with no lands, rather than I sit and watch the whole "in response, I draw a card, in response, I draw a card, in response, I draw a card..." ad infinitum that happens with the deck. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. When this happens over years, it's impossible to have trust that others doing this won't do the same thing you've seen before, especially when you've never met the person prior. If you see someone playing Yuriko, responsibly you have to treat them as though they're playing some variant of ANT and if you don't pressure them, they're going to win. It just, in this case helps that these colours are so omnipresent that such hoser cards are seldom dead. I expect the worst and thus prepare for the worst - I wouldn't be shocked to see someone touting around a
Douse or
Chill if they regularly expected me to pop up, either. This format is very, very flawed, and it's so easy for things to go sideways really quick, and you can either be on the right side of that, or the losing side.
While I can sympathize with not enjoying those sorts of games, I think the attitude you've taken away from that sounds kinda angry. It sounds like you're playing these cards out of some kind of vengeance, and that's probably not a good reason to play those cards, nor the game in general tbh. I can only speak for the places I've played in, but while some small percentage of people may be pubstomping with powerful decks, the vast majority are not, and bringing a nuclear missile in that's going to
Boil both the urza and the
Tetsuko Umezawa, Fugitive decks alike is just perpetuating the cycle of unpleasant games imo.
Incidentally (ad time?) this was part of my intention behind building Phelddagrif. You can blow cEDH decks up nice and pretty by killing all their stuff and countering all their spells, but you're not obliterating casual decks. The response is always proportional. Boil isn't going to be proportional unless you're playing cEDH, imo. It's also just a lame way to lose. It's like if your name is Kevin and someone has a card that says "target Kevin loses the game". I guess the card isn't OP because it's dead a lot of the time, but it's not exactly the sort of exciting back-and-forth gameplay I usually look for. Boil and geddon are appropriate in roughly the same metas I guess, but I'd find losing to boil way more obnoxious even in a high-powered game because it feels like you just got a lucky matchup. (let alone omen of fire which hates on white, I mean c'mon that's just rude)
Especially in pickup games where there's no telling when you're gonna run into the sweet
Kess, Dissident Mage deck that shelled out for an Arabian Nights City of Brass, or the
Hans Eriksson that wants to cheat their
Flameblast Dragon onto the battlefield.
Not really relevant, but I'm confused - what does an arabian CoB have to do with how fun a deck is to play against? I generally consider kess to be fairly un-fun (hello infinite time warps...) regardless of which expansion their lands are from. Or was that supposed to be an example of a hard matchup in contrast to the Hans example which is relatively casual, in which case why are we focusing on the lands instead of the relevant cards? I'm confused.
In MY experience with Alesha over the years, I find a very hard time swinging past
Big Dumb Green Things™, ergo I opted to add
Perish and
Nature's Ruin to my deck. That doesn't seem hateful or spiteful, that's sound strategy to cover my deck holes. If I struggle with interaction, by that same token, sneaking an
Omen of Fire in there can help mitigate that, if it resolves (it should never resolve).
Perish is less obnoxious than boil at least - after all, they should anticipate their creatures could die to a damnation or cyc rift or whatever, whereas most people wouldn't anticipate their lands getting blown up, let alone asymmetrically - but I would still find it an irritating card on both sides of the fence. From the recipient side, it feels like you got punished just for playing a color. On the caster side, it's a coin flip whether the card is useful or dead weight.
For alesha, I would think a much more satisfactory experience on both sides would be something like
Retribution of the Meek or
Citywide Bust, or even
Meekstone. For one thing, someone playing mono-green can actually shore themselves up against that weakness by running some smaller creatures, whereas with perish there's usually a lot less they could do (they could run artifact creatures I suppose but those might not really fit with what they're trying to do). For a second thing, it's actually targeting your weakness - creatures of large size - rather than something relatively arbitrary - their color.
(I will say that I think weak color hosers are basically fine, stuff like
Sanctifier en-Vec which (1) have a use outside of color hate and (2) don't completely shut down the targeted colors)
Too often, I feel people are attached to their decks and don't want to change things because it wouldn't be "their's", or they couldn't play pet card x. And so they make up excuses to themselves why they shouldn't have to "well people don't use MLD because I don't think it's fun" or "People don't use counterspell decks because it's boring" or whatever, insert strategy here. Then when people run into that strategy, they blame the person for being a jerk because they don't play or build the same exact way as they do. Look, I hate counterspell decks as much as the next person, probably more as has been well documented. But they do have a place as much as everything else that isn't banned. Bring your Baral, Yawgmoth, Golos, Chulane, or whatever that's legal. It's fine. But at the same time you can't be surprised when you face strong hate for your strong cards. That's also fine. Suddenly your Chulane doesn't like sawft locking itself because my Korvold can balance
Tainted Aether huh? Well we don't like watching you do cloudstone curio things for the umpteenth time either. I'm getting into rant territory, lem'me stop.
While I agree that people can be whiny about, well, everything, I feel you're conflating a lot of separate types of players and assuming that every player represents all of those things. The Baral counterlock player is probably a lot less likely to get upset over an armageddon because they probably built their deck with a high-powered mindset. Whereas the players who are saying "counterspells aren't fun" are probably much more casual. This is why it's really useful to have multiple decks, or at least to have decks that aim closer to the middle in terms of power level and social contract. There are players who are doing degenerate things but who will welcome you retaliating in kind. There are players who want to play a chiller game. It's hard to make a deck that's going to satisfy both opponents at once (except Phelddagrif
![Halo :halo:](./images/smilies/27-halo-fb.png)
).
Now, commanders like Golos can end up in an unpleasant spot because they're "casual" but they're also very strong with relatively little effort. A golos player is likely to get a bit salty if you counter golos 3 times in a row because that's "not fun", even if that was almost objectively necessary to stop them from running out of control. You've got my sympathy on that one. The best you can really do, imo, is to explain your threat assessment and tell them that if they don't want to get targeted, they should run a less powerful commander.
On the subject of not bringing lots of cards because I don't want to appear to be a target? Even as I use mpcautofill a lot more these days, money is still money, I work 50hr weeks to earn that, I'm not going to throw that away because I walked into a store with a bunch of decks - you can only play one at a time anyway. Not to mention the excess space that stuff takes up both on your person and inside the LGS. No, I'm gonna be respectful to others that need some space too. I can bring two decks in my nice DEX Protection box, with a handful of dice, tokens, and maybe a couple of cards to switch out between games. I don't need to bring a giant suitcase of a 32 deck chromatic project though.
There's a fairly big gap between 32 and 2. I'm not suggesting you should bring in a duffel bag full of decks, but maybe like 3-4? Sure, you can only play 1 at a time, but having multiple options to match enemy strength is really helpful to creating a good game and you can't really know in advance which one you'll want to use. At the very least, having a competitive deck and a casual deck is probably going to go a long ways towards meeting audience expectations. If 2 extra deck boxes is cutting into other people's personal space then you should probably stop playing in a crawl space.
The idea that you're "throwing [money] away" because you brought a handful of decks into a store is the sort of thinking that I do think is a bit worrying. Look, a certain amount of risk is unavoidable. If you're already proxying your decks, I'd say you've done about everything you reasonably can to eliminate it, and frankly a bit beyond. Taking a tiny risk is not the same thing as throwing money away. Think of it like an EV calculation - the risk of a deck getting stolen is probably on the order of 1 in at least a thousand (probably a lot lower actually but it's roll with it). So if it's worth $40, that means on average you're losing 4 cents to bring it. I think the increased enjoyment you'll get from having a deck to match the level of your opponents is worth more than 4 cents.
And also hopefully restore some of your faith in your fellow man. A lot of what you're saying sounds really bitter and distrustful, both within the game and without, and I think if your goal is to enjoy this hobby more those are things you might want to work on (I've got things I work on too, btw - we've all got our %$#%).