DirkGently wrote: ↑3 years ago
onering wrote: ↑3 years ago
The life total is fine where it is. Combo is only a problem when it goes off early, and lowering the life total to 30 won't fix that.
It can absolutely mitigate it. Especially since, with lower life totals, more people are likely to attempt more aggressive strategies, which means more players putting pressure on the combo players. It also means that each time the combo player is disrupted, it hurts more. If they're disrupted but still have a huge life total and nobody is zerging them down because it sucks, then they can easily regroup and try again.
It would be negligible. It would mostly effect slower combo decks, which aren't the problem and can already be disrupted easily enough. Fast combo isn't getting hated out by aggro at 30 life most of the time. If the table is all aggro and directs all fire at them, sure, but that's not going to be common at all. Aggro is still not going to be good enough at 30 life. That suddenly enough people will run it that gunning down fast combo will be realistic.
Aggro is viable, its just a bit more difficult. Aggro wouldn't suddenly become easy in multiplayer if the life total went down to 30 or even 20, what WOULD happen is that it would be easier for aggro to eliminate a single player early before getting handled by the rest of the table or running out of gas.
Aggro isn't viable. More aggressive strategies can work decently (mediocrely, really), but those decks aren't aggro decks by the standards of other formats.
Cavalcade of Calamity + a ton of hasty one-drops? Good luck making that strat work.
Commander's "aggro" decks are just midrange decks. True aggro doesn't exist (outside of 1v1).
Very low to the ground zerg rush aggro isn't viable, that doesn't mean that the full breadth of aggro isn't viable. Aggro control is viable, hatebears are viable, Those are still true aggro. Your argument relies on narrowly defining aggro to be a very specific subset of aggro (and the deck you gave as an example wouldn't be anymore viable in a 20 life format than hatebears or fish is in commander as it is now, and a bad joke in a 30 life format).
And I really don't follow the rest of the argument. Making it easier to eliminate each player makes it easier to eliminate all players. Sure, it's true that aggro is often incentivized to kill one player at a time, which might result in them sitting out for a bit, but honestly? Good. The idea that all games should only end when one player combos off or drops an absurd haymaker play and wins the game agnostic of board state is lame. Players should be whittled down one by one. Lower the life totals and at least they might not be waiting around for as long afterwards.
Your usually reasonable, but you fail here badly at understanding what I was saying. Go back and reread what I wrote, and you'll see that I said that sometimes taking someone out early is necessary, and that generally you won't knock out everyone in one big turn when playing aggro. I specifically faulted zerg rushing one player without a plan for actually winning the game, which is what I see too often from unskilled aggro players. Committing too many resources to the board to take out one guy then getting put on you ass by one wrath and finding yourself completely unable to be relevant the rest of the game.
Taking a player out IN THEORY raises your odds of winning based on generic statistics, but generic statistics don't matter when you apply context. We've had this conversation before, and it seems to be a blind spot for you. Bad aggro players play based on the generic statistics that removing a player means there are fewer players in the game, and thus the generic chance that they will win increases (say from 25% to 33.3333%). The reality is that the generic statistics are never relevant. Your chance of winning isn't related only to how many players are in the game at the moment. Other factors are usually more important. I know that you know this, because when you describe games you've been in and the choices you make they don't boil down to just taking out players whenever you can.
Playing aggro doesn't mean you forget politics, and it doesn't mean you ignore what other players are doing, and how they can help you, to just goldfish. As I said in the post you replied to, sometimes zerg rushing a player is correct, and rarely will you be putting everyone away in one turn, but everything is based on the context of what is happening in the game. Most of the time, whittling down everyone a bit early and then focusing fire based on what is happening in the game is correct, it makes it less likely that any one person will feel the need to commit everything to stopping you, it lets you find out who needs to be put away first, and it gets the other players to more manageable life totals for when you need to turn your focus to them. Other times, you have to be opportunistic. Context matters.
Again, I have no issue with taking someone out, or someone taking me out, if its actually contributing to victory. I take issue with people who blindly rush someone at random and succeed only in making sure they both lose. Discouraging lower skilled players from trying aggro makes this less likely.
The problem with aggro is that its a strategy that requires a lot of skill to play effectively
I mean, that varies a lot by the format, the deck, and is also true for other archetypes so this is just a weird generalization. There have certainly been effective aggro decks that were relatively low skill.
What's weird is that your bringing up how it varies by format. 1v1, aggro can require a lot less skill to pilot. It should have been clear however that I was talking about multiplayer, given that many of the reasons I gave for aggro requiring skill to pilot effectively only applying to multiplayer.
I think the 40 life total scares off a lot of lower skilled players that would otherwise be drawn to aggro, and I'm fine with that.
I'm not. This is a game about being able to play how you want to play, not being forced to play combo or ramp because those are the only two viable options.
Weak argument. You know that this format is never going to be in a place where every play style is equally viable at all levels of play. This is the one format where Battle Cruiser and other more durdly archetypes are at least somewhat viable, and they stand to lose the most from aggro getting better due to lower life totals, and will do so before aggro gets good enough to actually impact control or combo.
A low skilled player who likes combo will just lose.
Well that's plainly false. It doesn't take a big brain to play T&N for mike trike. Combo is easily the most tolerant of unskilled players and it's not remotely close.
Again, context matters. If your going to pick out things to respond to, do your due diligence and at least to attempt to understand what you are responding to. From the context, it should be clear that I wasn't saying unskilled players would be unable to win with combo decks. I was talking about how unskilled aggro play can hurt the enjoyment of other players, and comparing it to the effects of unskilled play of other archetypes. The effect of unskilled play of a combo deck just results, at most, in that player losing (due to trying to force through a combo at an inopportune time, or screwing up triggers, or not realizing that something on the board blanks the combo, etc). It doesn't usually ruin the game for anyone except the unskilled combo player if they screw up. Casting T&N into a Stranglehold or Aven Mindcensor is just a funny oof for the combo player. Zerg rushing someone out of the game at random then running out of gas and sitting around being irrelevant means the guy you took out lost because you were an idiot, and that feels a lot worse than losing because you were outplayed. You'll notice that I also compared it to poorly played control, which I said can be annoying because they don't answer the right threats, but that this tends to even out (because they usually will not just focus on answering only one player's things, so the effects of their misplays are evened out).
A low skilled player who likes aggro can ruin games, because its the low skilled player who likes aggro that is most likely to just zerg rush someone and take them out early with no chance of winning themselves, and that makes games worse.
I don't think I've ever seen another commander player bum-rush a single opponent from the word go to eliminate them in all the time I've been playing. When it happens, it's probably ME, because that is usually a good strategy when playing a more aggressive deck against someone threatening to combo or board wipe you.
You didn't see it so it doesn't happen is a piss poor argument. Obviously I wouldn't be concerned about this if its something that I haven't seen happen enough to be wary of it. I've had it happen to me, and I've seen it happen to other players while I reaped the benefits of aggro Andy being an idiot. And once again, if you are zerg rushing someone because it actually is going to help you win, that isn't a problem, and its pretty easy to tell the difference between the two. When i see someone dump their hand to kill someone and then just be out of the game the moment someone wraths, I see someone who shouldn't be playing aggro. If that person is playing a commander that easily refills their hand, I assume they have a way to keep the pressure on and the zerg rush is a viable strategy.
But also this distinction makes no sense in my experience. I've seen tons of players waste counterspells on insignificant spells only for another player to combo off. Yesterday, someone
negated my
Torpor Orb...and then literally zero etb effect creatures were ever played all game and I won off quite a few powerful noncreatures, any of which would have been excellent negate targets. Bad players can screw up games playing any archetype, it's not specific to aggro and your assumption that bad aggro players will single out a single opponent does not square with my experience playing commander.
(this is a bit of a tangent since it wasn't commander, but a month ago I got talked into a casual-ish 5-man FFA M21 draft at my LGS. One guy was clearly inexperienced because he was playing a lot of cards that were unbelievably awful in multiplayer, like
Liliana's Steward. I was in a good early position with a
Library Larcenist into
Rousing Read, which he immediately
Grasp of Darknessed. Fine, fair enough I suppose, but now my board state is pretty minimal and other players are becoming significantly scarier. He then proceeds to target me with multiple liliana's stewards, and I think a mind rot and another removal spell as well, when I am in 3rd place at absolute best, and likely 4th just ahead of him. At first I shrug it off because nobody likes a whiner and I assume he'll spread it around, but no, he just keeps going after me for no damn reason. I try to explain that this is a poor move for both of us, but he doesn't care, he's not really expecting to win anyway. And the rest of the table of course finds this hilarious, and eventually kill him, much to my relief.
I ultimately won the game - I was the least-important-target to the most powerful player which ensured I lived to the final two, and sandbagged a
Teferi's Tutelage into multiple draw spells to deck him right before he pulverized me. But I'll never play with those people ever again because that was an absolutely miserable experience for being unreasonably targeted, and aggro had nothing to do with it.)
I'm not against taking a player out, or focusing fire on a threat. Knowing when you have to kill a guy is important if you want to succeed at playing aggro. Sometimes spreading out the damage early on is right, sometimes targeting one person is right. The problem is that targeting one guy early is often the wrong decision, because they'll just spend all their resources against you to stay alive while the other 2-3 players build up and wait until you are done killing the first guy to wrath your board, leaving you in a crap position and the first guy salty. Its the path of least resistance, because only 1 player will try to interact with your stuff if only 1 player is at risk, but its usually not the path to victory. The exceptions are if one guy is clearly going to be the biggest threat to you and needs to die ASAP because you won't be able to beat him in a longer game, if you have an opportunity to one shot someone or finish someone off with a big turn without over-committing resources, or if there is some sort of incentive to smack the same guy until you cannot (your deck runs a lot of triggers from damaging opponents and he's the only one open, he's landed a card you can't deal with that threatens to shut you down, etc).
I don't think it's particularly material, but this all sounds like theorycraft to me. Why are the other players assuming you won't target them until you've killed the other player? What does spreading damage around have to do with not overextending to board wipes? If the targeted player has any experience, surely he could point out that the other players have become more serious threats and make a deal with the aggro player to be left alone - unless he's still the biggest threat, in which case the aggro player is still making the right call by killing him.[/quote].
Its not theory crafting, its from experience. When I am straight targeted by some idiot, or when I see it happen, people sit on their answers until he finishes killing the guy, and then answer him, because its sensible to hold your answers until you actually need to use them. Honestly, your smarter than this dude, because I've heard you make the same arguments when talking up your flying hippo deck. I'm not pathing any beater that isn't pointed at me, and if someone is telegraphing that they're aimed at one guy then I'll hold spot removal up but wait until they finish before throwing out a wrath. Spreading out damage doesn't make you a must answer threat to any one player, but is also more likely to bait out a wrath once you start swinging with a decent board. If you overextend, that's obviously going to be really bad, but if you don't overextend you can redeploy pretty quickly. The fact that you're just not going to be able to zerg rush the entire table is a disincentive to just vomit your hand onto the battlefield, unless you have some reliable way of refilling it (Sygg, Ephara, etc) or some way to protect against wipes. And you know that you can't just talk a bad player out of targeting you, as evidenced by the example you give above about dunce that made you discard everything. If you, master of magic politics, couldn't dissuade him, how's that going to go for average players? Oh, and if he was playing an aggro deck and decided to just spend everything to take you out instead of a bad control deck spending everything to attack your hand, you wouldn't have been able to sit back until you won.
I also play a lot of aggro online. 4 player, 40 life. I think I do well enough when the power level of the table is in the 75% range, and pretty well if its lower.
[quote
40 life doesn't make aggro hard, it just makes it obvious that aggro is hard.
-it does both.
-it's not really aggro.
Aggro has to be built with the long game in mind
-it's not really aggro.[/quote]
This particular No True Scotsman sucked the first time you made it, and it doesn't get any better here.
and played well to succeed in this format, but it can, and I think the format is better off for it being like this. Aggro is viable in basically every competitive format, this is the one format where aggro takes a bit of a back seat. Meanwhile, this format allows archetypes to exist that are generally weak to aggro, Battlecruiser style decks being the most obvious. This format being different is a feature, not a bug.
So I actually agree - losing to cavalcade on turn 4 or whatever is not a super fun experience, and I think commander is definitely better for making aggro harder than in other formats. But that argument could apply to ANY life total. Screw it, let's make the life total 500, then aggro will never ravage our shores and pillage our halls! Aggro shouldn't be a dominant force, sure, but think about how unbelievably hard aggro has it here:
-100 card singleton means a much diluted pool of strong aggressive creatures, and the prevalence of powerful oldschool tutors that enable consistency in other archetypes cost aggro valuable tempo which is its primary advantage.
-40 life is double the norm life total.
-3 opponents is triple THAT life total.
-if aggro is actually curving out strong enough to be the threat - which is kind of its goal - then it's got 3x the cards and 3x the mana getting thrown in its face to stop it.
So it's exceedingly obvious why cavalcade et al will never be a strong commander deck. But I think those numbers CAN be a bit misleading, because it looks like aggro has to do 6x damage against 3x resistance with a significantly worse deck, but that's not ENTIRELY fair. If the life total lowered, it'd likely increase the frequency of aggro decks, and suddenly the aggro deck isn't trying to deal all 120 damage on its own, nor taking all the heat - the more popular aggro is, the more effective it is. So a careful touch is absolutely reasonable.
We don't want cavalcade-style all-in turn-4-kill aggro to be a strong commander deck. But we want slightly midrangy aggro decks to have some kind of game, even if they're still a somewhat weaker archetype. So we're aiming for some kind of middle ground, presumably, between 500 life aggro-shall-never-raid-our-villages meta and the 20 life cavalcade-is-viable norm, which might result in an aggro takeover. But I really don't think 40 is the sweet spot. 30 or 35 are still a huge hurdle to aggro, and so long as aggro isn't dominant it'll almost always have the player multiplier going against it as well.
True, you could make an argument for any number, but it doesn't serve a purpose. Would 50 be absurd? Absolutely. Would 20? I think just as much. You think 40 is too high for the reasons you gave, I think 30 is too low for the reasons I gave. I of course think my reasons are more valid, or else I wouldn't be holding my position. 35 is more intriguing though. I think that's still high enough to scare off enough low skilled players from misplaying aggro. I think 30 might as well, but not well enough, while sub 30 its no longer a deterrent. At 40 life it still happens, but not often enough to be a problem for the format, so the answer to why I wouldn't go higher to stamp it out entirely is diminishing returns, you start having the problems caused by higher life totals become even worse while the situation with poor aggro play just doesn't have much room to improve. For 35 life, the benefits of lowering it may outweigh the negative effects of increased instances of poor aggro play, being that I don't think at 35 life we'd see that much of an increase. And many of the issues people cite with 40 life get taken care of by 35 life, while others are lessened. Shocks and Fetches usually do about 3-8 damage over the course of the game, so 5 life lower basically starts players off with the fetch/shock tax having already been payed. Its already 5 activations of necro, and more importantly your first extra card from sylvan library, and two activations of Ancient Tomb.
More importantly, I think what life total is right depends on how many players there are in a game. I think 40 is definitely too much when the game is large, 6+ players, but I think its about right with 4 or less, and I lean toward in being alright with 5. There should probably be a sliding scale with life totals decreasing as the number of players increases. 40 life for 4 or fewer, 35 for 5-6, 30 for 7-8.
I do also want to say - this "battlecruiser deck" idea is, imo, no longer worth supporting. Battlecruiser magic circa 2009 meant
Inkwell Leviathan was good enough to get on Sally's "top 50 blue cards" list (lol...it was wrong then too, but at least it seemed plausible). Battlecruiser magic in 2020 means T3
Jodah, Archmage Eternal into T4
Omniscience into
Expropriate. WotC has killed "battlecruiser" by making it so good that it's obnoxious. Aggro should absolutely be let off the chain to punish those decks - at least a little bit.
Well, you're not going to have much luck getting aggro to punish those decks at 30 life. If Omniscience into Expropriate is happening turn 4, then aggro is boned, sorry, probably even at 20 life. You need control to handle that. I also consider such decks to be more in the combo realm that Battlecruiser, because cheating out haymakers that give you a bunch of free spells or extra turns is combo territory. Not all combos are infinite. Show and Tell sure as hell wasn't but fell under the combo umbrella nonetheless. I still see more traditional Battlecruiser on mtgo, especially when people label the games casual or power 5-6, and before the Rona it would still pop up in my playgroup unless we went with our higher power decks. But, just as theres aggro/control with Sygg dumping 2 and 3 drops while countering answers, maybe Battlecruiser/combo is a better descriptor for Jodah dumping out Omniscience/Expropriate or similar decks.