• 7 Posts
  • 12 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 30th, 2023

help-circle















  • First, I’d like to say you sound like a very uncomfortable person and I’d probably not want to play any games with you, regardless of the format.

    Still your point stands and I’m growing increasingly frustrated with commander just like you. I think commander is bad for the game for multiple reasons:

    1. It creates bad incentives for WotC. When everyone is playing commander, which is essentially legacy but without any tournament backing to enforce cards are genuine, wizards has to make sure to create incentives to buy new products instead of sticking to yesteryears cards. This leads to the constant powercreep which has ruined yugioh gameplay among others. Modern players complain about this, where every modern horizons set warped the format. You can read jokes that the former top tier splinter twin deck would be a good tier 3 contender should they unban it now in times of ragavan and bowmasters. I imagine this will get much, much worse for commander as long as it stays the premier format. Standard circumvented this problem.

    2. Commander is horrible for new players. Since every deck play around 80-90 different cards, picked from a random janky pool of 30 years of game design, new players have to wrap their minds around 300+ cards just to play the game. To play the game good is another thing entirely. Every time we have new players in the store, the owner recommends they buy a precon and get going on commander friday. When these players sit down they have no idea what is happening, they don’t understand who is ahead. Suddenly they are dead after the urza player sucessfully convinced them the other precon is the problem five minutes ago.

    3. Four player free for all is boring. After the first few turns the turn length goes wayy up and suddenly you look at a ten to fifteen minute break between each of your turns. This gets worse as the boards get filled with value engine permanents, where any game action will put approximately fifteen triggers on the stack. Naturally, the two blue players want to consider their option for each of those triggers and stare at their hands and the board for minutes at a time. I have on multiple occasions started a second 1v1 game with either bored players on other tables or the guy next to me in the same game. Unfortunately most chess clock aren’t designed for more than two players.



  • I’ve also been experimenting with an equipment deck lately but it never seemed like a good enough contender for anything but the most casual games. My effort is here, I’m going for a double strike theme as you can see. I try to get more value from the saboteur effects.

    I’d consider removing the benevolent blessings in favour of apostles blessing if you’re afraid of losing your creatures. Goblin gabeleer seems like a bad creature to me except when it’s able to end the game as it will die before providing you enough value otherwise.