Is 4 Horsemen socially acceptable in cEDH?
Posted: Thu Jul 11, 2019 2:31 am
Ok, this is a bit of a complicated lead-in, and I know it's been discussed on reddit and other venues, but I still feel like it's worth bringing up here to set-up a precedent. So here's the question... how do we feel about 4 Horsemen Gitrog combos for this sub-forum?
Here's a quick rundown if you're not familiar with it... Four Horsemen became popular in EDH after The Gitrog Monster was released. It's not an intuitive combo: you need (in play) The Gitrog Monster + any free discard outlet (Putrid Imp, or your cleanup step if you have 8+ cards in hand), (in hand) Dakmor Salvage, (in library) Kozilek, Butcher of Truth, (anywhere) Dark Ritual, (anywhere) a "payload" card (Geth's Verdict, maybe)
Discard Dakmor Salvage to the discard effect, triggering Gitrog. Replace the draw with Dakmor Salvage's dredge effect, milling two cards. Repeat. As you dredge lands from your library into your graveyard, you accumulate additional Gitrog triggers. You now have an arbitrary number of draw triggers, with Kozilek to reshuffle your deck. At some point, your draw triggers will find you Dark Ritual. Cast it, and your reshuffle + draw triggers will find it again. You now have an arbitrary amount of black mana to go with your arbitrary card draws. Use your black mana to kill the table with your payload.
Here's where the combo runs into tournament rules: "at some point" is not a legal shortcut. Ordinarily, if a player wants to create a loop, they have to say how many times they execute that loop, and how the board will look once it's done. For example, if you have Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker and Zealous Conscripts, you can say, "I will tap and untap Kiki-Jiki a hundred times, so I have a hundred Zealous Conscript tokens." You can't do that with 4 Horseman, since you don't know exactly how many times you want to discard Dakmor Salvage, or what the board state will look like along the way. (As an aside: every once in a while some knucklehead shows up to a Legacy tournament with some 4 Horsemen variant, and a judge gets stuck explaining that they don't have a combo, they have a "slow play" penalty.)
Now admittedly, most cEDH games still happen in casual, unsanctioned settings, and sometimes it's fine to say, "Ok, you got your combo, you win." But the other problem is that sometimes a player has an instant speed answer, and without knowing the board state, there's no way to know when to play it. For example, I was playing Lord Windgrace against my friend's Gitrog deck. When he went to combo, I actually had him cold -- Crop Rotation at the ready, with Bojuka Bog in my library. When do I play it though? The strategically correct play is to wait 'til his graveyard's huge, and he discards Kozilek for the shuffle-in, so I can Rotate for Bog and exile most of his library. But we could sit, draw, and shuffle 'til the suns burns out waiting for that particular board state to happen. We talked it over, and agreed that I'd Crop Rotate after his first draw trigger to save game time.
This situation doesn't come up that often for casual groups... since they often don't have much instant speed GY removal, the combo usually just wins. But in more competitive groups, I feel like it's problematic. I don't think it's reasonable for the Gitrog player to be able to say, "Yeah I know you could exile a chunk of my library, but there's no way for us to know exactly which cards or how many." It feels like an unfair amount of leeway to grant someone who probably knew they were building something to take advantage of an unsanctioned setting.
So here's the question for the group: are we building cEDH decks that people could take to a sanctioned tournament (like a GP side event or something)?
If not, should we still accept potentially problematic combos like this one as legitimate decks to discuss?
Here's a quick rundown if you're not familiar with it... Four Horsemen became popular in EDH after The Gitrog Monster was released. It's not an intuitive combo: you need (in play) The Gitrog Monster + any free discard outlet (Putrid Imp, or your cleanup step if you have 8+ cards in hand), (in hand) Dakmor Salvage, (in library) Kozilek, Butcher of Truth, (anywhere) Dark Ritual, (anywhere) a "payload" card (Geth's Verdict, maybe)
Discard Dakmor Salvage to the discard effect, triggering Gitrog. Replace the draw with Dakmor Salvage's dredge effect, milling two cards. Repeat. As you dredge lands from your library into your graveyard, you accumulate additional Gitrog triggers. You now have an arbitrary number of draw triggers, with Kozilek to reshuffle your deck. At some point, your draw triggers will find you Dark Ritual. Cast it, and your reshuffle + draw triggers will find it again. You now have an arbitrary amount of black mana to go with your arbitrary card draws. Use your black mana to kill the table with your payload.
Here's where the combo runs into tournament rules: "at some point" is not a legal shortcut. Ordinarily, if a player wants to create a loop, they have to say how many times they execute that loop, and how the board will look once it's done. For example, if you have Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker and Zealous Conscripts, you can say, "I will tap and untap Kiki-Jiki a hundred times, so I have a hundred Zealous Conscript tokens." You can't do that with 4 Horseman, since you don't know exactly how many times you want to discard Dakmor Salvage, or what the board state will look like along the way. (As an aside: every once in a while some knucklehead shows up to a Legacy tournament with some 4 Horsemen variant, and a judge gets stuck explaining that they don't have a combo, they have a "slow play" penalty.)
Now admittedly, most cEDH games still happen in casual, unsanctioned settings, and sometimes it's fine to say, "Ok, you got your combo, you win." But the other problem is that sometimes a player has an instant speed answer, and without knowing the board state, there's no way to know when to play it. For example, I was playing Lord Windgrace against my friend's Gitrog deck. When he went to combo, I actually had him cold -- Crop Rotation at the ready, with Bojuka Bog in my library. When do I play it though? The strategically correct play is to wait 'til his graveyard's huge, and he discards Kozilek for the shuffle-in, so I can Rotate for Bog and exile most of his library. But we could sit, draw, and shuffle 'til the suns burns out waiting for that particular board state to happen. We talked it over, and agreed that I'd Crop Rotate after his first draw trigger to save game time.
This situation doesn't come up that often for casual groups... since they often don't have much instant speed GY removal, the combo usually just wins. But in more competitive groups, I feel like it's problematic. I don't think it's reasonable for the Gitrog player to be able to say, "Yeah I know you could exile a chunk of my library, but there's no way for us to know exactly which cards or how many." It feels like an unfair amount of leeway to grant someone who probably knew they were building something to take advantage of an unsanctioned setting.
So here's the question for the group: are we building cEDH decks that people could take to a sanctioned tournament (like a GP side event or something)?
If not, should we still accept potentially problematic combos like this one as legitimate decks to discuss?