A Magical Gathering

[Büge]

[Mongrel]

Any excuse to repost

[Büge]

[Mongrel]

That blown-up background texture makes me think of those Spongebob screens with the faux French accent narration.

"A FEW YEARS LATER"

[Mongrel]

I rediscovered this

[Friday]

yeah man Tempest, the set where really advanced strategy was dominant, like white weenie with red splash for removal and turning your white cards sideways, or having a bunch of dauthi shadow creatures and getting them out fast with ritual and then turn them sideways, or Slivers, where you play creatures and turn them sideways.

And uh, Cursed Scroll.

[Mongrel]

Either way, make sure you cackle and scratch yourself somewhere unusual.

[Niku]

when i started playing magic i had no idea about the "four card per deck" rule or the idea that you wanted a slim deck where you could find things at a regular tempo

which is to say

my sliver deck fucking RULED.

[hngkong]

Sliver decks always rule.

[Friday]

They actually allow you to do the whole "20 forests, 40 muscle slivers" bit with Relentless Rats, so there is that. Of course, Rats being 3 mana instead of 2 mana makes a very very large difference in terms of how fast you can get your shit going.

I'm not sure if you could make a viable legacy deck out of like 20 forests and 40 muscle slivers, but it would probably beat like... 30% of the field.

Hell, CounterSliver IS a viable legacy deck so there is that. It runs 12 musclesliver-alikes (including 4 of the original) 4 crystalline sliver (all slivers gain shroud) and 4 galerider sliver (winged sliver, but 1 mana instead of 2.) Then some disruption with Daze, Force of Will, Swords to Plowshares, and card advantage with Aether Vial and Brainstorm. Some add Phantasmal Image to beef up the Muscle Sliver count.

It's generally considered an inferior version of Legacy Merfolk, but it does have some slight upside in terms of specific niche slivers you can have in your sideboard. And Crystalline Sliver, which is just so, so busted. Merfolk has "all my shit gains shroud" options but they're not as good as that little bastard.

[Friday]

Also, if you somehow survive long enough to get out Thrumming Stone in a RR deck, you will be able to feel the absolute glee of putting 20+ rats out all on one turn.

Thrumming Stone is one of those cards that sucks though because it's (way, way) too slow for competitive play and if you use it in casual bullshit against your friends they will hate you.

[Niku]

i wanna say my sliver deck was like 200 cards or something

like when i say me and my friends did not know or give a shit about how to REALLY play we really did not give a shit

except for the one kid who gave a lot of a shit and thus hated the rest of our insane nonsense

[Niku]

there was a kid with a lisp who thought someone had stolen his Crash of Rhinos card and we spent like the next year or two throwing each other into paroxysms of laughter just by someone yelling out CWASH OF WINOS

[Friday]

Complete and utter bullshit magic is superior to all other kinds of magic.

You can tell because the EDH format tries to emulate "utter bullshit" as best as it can and it's universally lauded as the most fun form of (ruled) magic.

[Mongrel]

You can tell because the EDH format tries to emulate "utter bullshit" as best as it can and it's universally lauded as the most fun form of (ruled) magic.

There was a time that was true, but IMO that vanished ages before my interest in playing had died down to the nothing it is now. EDH is a horrible garbage format now.

If it's still fun to play where you are, consider yourself very lucky.

[nosimpleway]

Thrumming Stone is one of those cards that sucks though because it's (way, way) too slow for competitive play and if you use it in casual bullshit against your friends they will hate you.

This is exactly the sort of card that I'd build a deck around, play it every game until I got the gimmick to work once, then retire and dismantle the deck.

Yes my friends did hate my particular brand of bullshit

[Friday]

There was a time that was true, but IMO that vanished ages before my interest in playing had died down to the nothing it is now. EDH is a horrible garbage format now.

If it's still fun to play where you are, consider yourself very lucky.

I haven't played Magic since Covid, but the local shop had a bunch of players (about 12 or so) who all had very fun and silly EDH decks. No Geist of Saint Traft "I play to win" bullshit.

(I have no idea if Geist is still the top Commander in EDH. But regardless he's an excellent example of Spikes taking a format meant for fun and trying to turn it into cutthroat competitive nonsense.)

i wanna say my sliver deck was like 200 cards or something

Allow me to introduce you to one of the best cards in MTG. And yes, there exist decks that are just a pile of like 225 cards that are all delay effects and tutors to get that card out so you can win.

[Mongrel]

Geist of Saint Traft "I play to win" bullshit.

(I have no idea if Geist is still the top Commander in EDH. But regardless he's an excellent example of Spikes taking a format meant for fun and trying to turn it into cutthroat competitive nonsense.)

That's basically the problem. Not just people playing to win, but even casuals can build decks to win by accident because WotC deliberately caters to the format with cards but doesn't preserve the expected playstyle by keeping such equal care with the rules and banlists (and whole awkward bullshit about deferring to Sheldon Menery's NO COUNTERS NO LD NO DISCARD, EXCEPT FOR THE STUFF THAT GOES IN MY FAVOURITE DECKS method of arranging the format rules for what is and isn't acceptable. It's the rule rather than the exception that playgroups will have conflicting strengths of deck and expectations for the format.

TBH I don't really blame players trying to win at EDH or buy the "unwritten house rules of chivalric play" paradigm. Even people who want to play casually have different interpretations of what constitutes casual play, so without a central basis for agreement it's almost impossible to come to anything close to agreement for what constitutes a fair playing field. So the fallback becomes to just play by the rules as written, as it's the easiest way to force agreement. The REAL dick players are the ones who threaten to complain to WotC if a store has weird house rules, since that is a thing they can do (though one player's complaints won't make much difference there).

EDH being a de facto multiplayer format always helps mitigate power imbalances between decks, but only to a point, and Wizards having printed so many "All players" and worse "Each other player" cards just ramped that problem up to 11 [Ramped? Tron joke goes here].

If you want house rules you really have to have actual structured store-level enforcement with actual bannings, extra rules, etc. or similar very rigid group enforcement, which can be hard to muster since players come and go from playgroups all the time if they're store-based. Players' ability to demand this of their group or venue can be limited and so you get wildly different levels between groups and if you visit multiple stores, again, it's easy to imagine that the only reasonable basis to start with can be the rules as written.

On top of that the format's just easier to play now in the sense that so many EDH cards have been printed that it's been a decade since EDH players were at all forced to play with "bad" cards, which IMO was what made the format great. Even most low-powered casual decks resemble a moderately-tuned 60-card tournament deck more than they do a 100-card stack of draft chaff.

So again, if you have a group with a stable consensus on a restricted power level, you are very fortunate to have that level of agreement.

[Friday]

Our group wasn't perfect, of course. I WAS lucky though. I've also been lucky in my tabletop experiences. I know shitty DnD players exist (and I have met my fair share of them) but my core group that I play with is all on the same page as to what we want from the experience. There's no rule lawyers, no "I'm an evil character so i will constantly try to fuck over the party" and no "DM vs Player" mentality, the three most common causes of bad roleplay groups.

Like, I run a campaign with 4 players (at one point for a brief period, 5) and the players have changed over the years. Only two of us have been there since the very beginning (me and one player) at this point.

Anyway, of the 4 players, two of them are playing evil aligned characters. And somehow, through the magic of not being a stupid dicknozzle, they don't constantly try to murder or fuck over the rest of the party. The Mage is a classical "these meatshields are useful to me so I will keep them around" and the Rogue is just a merc who can best be described as Bronn from Game of Thrones. Doesn't mean he's incapable of making friends.

It also doesn't mean that the party doesn't have the occasional conflict. Which, every once in awhile, can be interesting. Should this captured enemy be outright executed? The Mage says absolutely yes, the Rogue doesn't care but probably kill him to be on the safe side, the Warrior says it's dishonorable, and the Priest says are you crazy that's evil and bad fuck you Mage I told you I was gonna beat your ass. Come outside.

[Grath]

There was a time that was true, but IMO that vanished ages before my interest in playing had died down to the nothing it is now. EDH is a horrible garbage format now.

If it's still fun to play where you are, consider yourself very lucky.

In my experience, playing with random people is... very hit or miss, but playing with a relatively consistent group is good. I've been doing ~weekly games of EDH via XMage with friends on my own private server and it's quite fun still because none of us take it too seriously. (Don't use the official servers, they're basically unmoderated and have a lot of jackasses unfortunately.) I haven't bothered digitizing my two sweatiest tryhard decks (one of which is probably gonna just get retired/dismantled now that my local game store no longer gives out prizes for winning, which is the #1 fastest way to ruin EDH for everyone) and generally if I've won in the last couple games I make sure to play a more low-to-middle end deck; we have one player who has a bit more tendency to play to win, but because everyone knows he plays to win we also tend to bully him first by default if there's no more compelling reason to attack someone else.

(I have no idea if Geist is still the top Commander in EDH. But regardless he's an excellent example of Spikes taking a format meant for fun and trying to turn it into cutthroat competitive nonsense.)

Last time I paid attention to competitive EDH (previously mentioned financial incentives to being That Guy, although I tried to limit it to spiking the occasional game to be able to coast through on store credit for entry fees) Geist wasn't even in discussion at all thanks to Sheldon trying Protean Hulk in a deck with zero optimization for Protean Hulk, and deciding that clearly it's fine. This lead to several years of competitive EDH being "who can pull off the classic Flash Hulk legacy combo faster, with a more efficient and redundant payoff?" until the cEDH community complained long enough/loud enough that Sheldon agreed to ban Flash, and at that point it was no longer safe to go play at my local game store/they stopped doing prizes for winning when they reopened with mandatory vaxx + mask. (Local game store's EDH crowd is also still less fun to play with than my friend group.)

If people are interested, I'd be happy to introduce folks to my group; we currently have four fairly regular players and an occasional fifth doing games on Thursday nights at 8pm Eastern, but six players (splitting into two groups of three) is more fun than five in my experience; I could also try to put together an alternate more California-friendly time if I get interest.