:Mono colored decks have a huge advantage in commander in some ways
Don't you think that is offset for the most part by the huge disadvantage of being monocolored, a much more limited card pool that lacks access to cards to deal with at least some threats due to the color pie?
Mono colored decks have a huge advantage in commander in some ways and Blue is king of mono color with permission, bounce, destruction/exiling, and hard to target evasive creatures to boot. I am not saying it is a better commander than Arcanis. Though I suspect Arcanis would find himself tucked/killed pretty early on if no counter was forthcoming.
It is a lot harder to deal with a PW that is well protected from combat. And if your only answer is KILL the commander, it comes back eventually. True you can't attack creatures with creatures (usually though fight is a thing). But there are myriad ways to deal with creatures some of which are incidental. Oh player x has 2 creatures I don't like and then there is Y's token horde and oh over here is Arcanis...yeah don't mind if I do wrath/supreme verdict, what-not.
And creatures come into play normally with summoning sickness. That is a real thing. It is more the potential for abuse that worries me about Teferi than that he is more broken than any other mono blue commander. Mono blue commanders don't typically suck. And that's in multiplayer. 1v1 it is an even bigger advantage, considering that there are no sideboards.
I am not saying it should never have been printed. I am saying "what were they thinking by printing this particular card??" It seems like a mistake but then again maybe there will be answers in the set among the other decks.
Yeah, but what I'm saying is, why should Teferi feel more broken than, say, Arcanis the Omnipotent, who for the same cost gives you 3 cards per turn (or many more if you have something like Mind Over Matter), and whom you don't have to defend against the entirety of the opponents' armies?
Honestly, this one's good, but I feel like the old Teferi still has more of an impact on the board.
Mono blue seems pretty well suited for defensive play. It isn't an unbeatable commander, nothing is. Everything has answers. So in that sense nothing is entirely broken.
I actually love the transformational sideboard. It addresses the post-board weakness of the deck: drawing the wrong anti-hate card or facing hate cards to which you don't have an answer. You don't have to worry about drawing an Ingot Chewer when facing down Rest in Peace or Leyline or drawing Wispmare to an opposing Cage. Tormod's Crypt, Nihil Spellbomb, and Ravenous Trap do exactly nothing. The Marit Lage plan allows you to simply invalidate their sideboarding plan instead of trying to fight through it. Plus, if it does come down to a game 3 and you suspect your opponent is reconfiguring to combat Dark Depths, you can always go back to your game 1 Dredge plan
You would think that the complexity scares away newcomers. I thought that would be the case myself. In reality, it doesn't. We had more newcomers coming to the event since when we had a steady rotation of subformats. Hell, we had 2 newcomers today alone!
With this logic, you can look at a recent Regular event where everybody was playing Elf, Goblin or Human, and conclude that Regular is not a worthy format. These are anomalies. We had Singleton events that almost achieved singularity.
You sure a pw is that hard to kill? It seems to me like, you drop Teferi, then everybody at the table attacks Teferi, because why not, pws always get attacked regardless, so you'll either have a pretty good defense for him or he'll just get wiped out before he can do much. As I wrote, that ultimate doesn't look like easy to get to.
Whereas you can't get rid of Uril or Momir by attacking them with your zombie tokens.
Besides family issues cropping up on Saturdays at times, two items have largely kept me away.
1) The deckbuilding screen in the new client.
2) I lost over 100 Tribal decks (about 98%) when my automated online backup system (copy.com - boo!) permanently deleted my hard drive copies when I deleted the online copy (apparently a known bug). I haven't had the heart to recreate all the work yet, though at least some is still saved on Gatherer.
Paul: Agree with your point, Singleton is either Red Deck Wins wGoblins or ProRed hate deck. So would be good to change that back to regular, since the format is Legacy Tribal Wars.
I think more regular events can attract new players since all the other varieties are so complex it scares away new comers.
I don't believe that we have a major Goblin issue in the Singleton events. Yes, there were 6 goblin decks last week, but that was independent from previous meta trends.
I remember that, there were some serious talks about banning Vampires from singleton during the first 3-4 events, as they were so dominant. Then meta shifted to new possibilities and the waters calmed.
Some major tribes like; Zombies, Goblins, Humans, Elves, Walls, Shamans, Knights, Soldiers, Wizards will always attract the spotlights. All we have to do is, find a way around them and shift the meta. Isn't the continuity of MTG about that?
Yeah that is my feeling as well just from watching events/games and stats. Goblins are really pretty much top dog in Tribalton as the rules stand. Unfortunately the only good fix is to just ban them. And then something else becomes top dog.
Tribal is hard enough to find parity since people have different access levels to cards and it is much easier for new players to play the budget tribes that have a good chance of winning rather than invest some amount of tix on cards they won't use elsewhere (unless they are me or AJ) and risk not winning anything.
Tribalton adds to the complexity by reducing consistency of the tribes that are not ubiquitous and thus making Goblins and their ilk the favorited choice. Not to say they can't be beat without heavy metagaming but the chances are not great to start with. Pile on top of that skilled players playing them and the odds become very low indeed.
So, Skill does play a part (a good thing) but mostly to shut out other tribes. That sounds like a format in need of serious repair or sidelining.
As much as people seem to dislike KTribal I don't think it has the same level of problems and the problems it does have can be fixed by WOTC printing more cards for it. That can't really be said for Tribalton.
On the other hand as another poster said, just bring back more regular events and see how people respond to just playing Vanilla. If the lack of flavor is boring to them, there will always be some spikes willing to play x.dec (whatever boring flavor of the year is in vogue) vs y.dec (whatever boring flavor of the year was in vogue, prior).
Can't wait for Modern Masters II. I pretty much only play modern now, and hope they re-print the fetch lands so i can be competitive without sacrificing my mortgage.
I've already thought of a few builds that could take advantage of the new Teferi as a commander.
But those would all likely run smoother off of The scry God anyway.
Most likely he'll only be used as a random card in the deck for multi-color "super friends" builds.
It's not just you. To my mind it breaks the whole paradigm of the format. The general/leader/commander as a creature is highly dealable with. Even if it is as broken as Uril, or Animar or Zur. Planeswalkers are more killable than they were 2-3 years ago but that isn't saying a lot. They still duck much of the removal that is common in commander. Having a very hard to kill non-creature as a commander is just ugly.
A mono blue planeswalker commander seems most readily abused. I don't know what they were thinking.
It's funny you should mention Lord Erman in your review of my articles. While I was on my break from writing, he came back to the site and started writing again. There were several of his articles that were so thoroughly enjoyable that they evoked in me that same feeling you described. They made me want to play this fun side of Standard that I kept reading about. Also, his articles were so well written, it made me miss writing all the more. I kept thinking "I want to be the one putting out stellar articles like this guy".
I take the comparison as an extreme compliment.
For those that missed Lord Erman's series, I suggest the UB Heroic and Angelic Accord articles. Brewing articles at their best!
Re: attendance issues, I know I've been pretty scarce this year, but I've had to be out of town a lot for personal reasons. When I was in town, and had nothing else going on, I was playing in the event, even when it was a format (like Singleton) that I really don't like. Nothing about the event has gotten worse for me. The time, mid-day on a Saturday for us in the US, remains horribly inconvenient for me, but I've just dealt with it up to this point. I do know the time is a factor for some other American players, when I would suggest the event to somebody in the Casual room, and tell them the time, they'd be "oh, no way I could ever make it for that." But obviously it works better for our Euro players, and we've had a diverse population through the years.
I don't know how you could look at this week's results and conclude Singleton was a worthy format. There was an absolutely ridiculous volume of Goblins decks, to the point that the winning deck had to be heavily metagamed against them. I think the correct way to play Singleton going forward is to build pro-red Tivadar's Crusade.dek and just hope to play Goblins all day long. I was playing one of the most uninspiring, generic, spikey decks I've ever played in this event in a desperate attempt to snag some invitational points in my little time remaining to play this year, and I still had very little hope when paired against Goblins. You're either playing the Goblin deck or you're playing a devoted anti-Goblin deck, or you're going to have some troubles in Singleton.
I would suggest bringing back a second regular event and cutting Singleton. If nothing else, it reduces complexity. Maybe Singleton could be a one-a-year thing in a month with 5 saturdays.
Not a fan of the "planeswalker as Commander" but maybe that's just me. Seems unnecessary, was there really that big an outcry to have this? Just seems like they are sort of running out of ideas, but I'm fine with that. There's no reason to come up with something crazy each time a new product comes out.
Tx- cool article with a lot of relevant and vivid content. It even makes me missing playing more-
Unfortunately, my experience with V4 is much worser than what I read here so that I am out.
Anyway, more time for Fly fishing- enjoyed reading and maybe try a comeback in some weeks.
I cant really speak for others but I mostly quit playing due to the constant rotation sub formats and then the tribe based lockouts for only specific players.
Between the two the format just wasn't nearly as fun for me anymore.
:Mono colored decks have a huge advantage in commander in some ways
Don't you think that is offset for the most part by the huge disadvantage of being monocolored, a much more limited card pool that lacks access to cards to deal with at least some threats due to the color pie?
Mono colored decks have a huge advantage in commander in some ways and Blue is king of mono color with permission, bounce, destruction/exiling, and hard to target evasive creatures to boot. I am not saying it is a better commander than Arcanis. Though I suspect Arcanis would find himself tucked/killed pretty early on if no counter was forthcoming.
It is a lot harder to deal with a PW that is well protected from combat. And if your only answer is KILL the commander, it comes back eventually. True you can't attack creatures with creatures (usually though fight is a thing). But there are myriad ways to deal with creatures some of which are incidental. Oh player x has 2 creatures I don't like and then there is Y's token horde and oh over here is Arcanis...yeah don't mind if I do wrath/supreme verdict, what-not.
And creatures come into play normally with summoning sickness. That is a real thing. It is more the potential for abuse that worries me about Teferi than that he is more broken than any other mono blue commander. Mono blue commanders don't typically suck. And that's in multiplayer. 1v1 it is an even bigger advantage, considering that there are no sideboards.
I am not saying it should never have been printed. I am saying "what were they thinking by printing this particular card??" It seems like a mistake but then again maybe there will be answers in the set among the other decks.
Yeah, but what I'm saying is, why should Teferi feel more broken than, say, Arcanis the Omnipotent, who for the same cost gives you 3 cards per turn (or many more if you have something like Mind Over Matter), and whom you don't have to defend against the entirety of the opponents' armies?
Honestly, this one's good, but I feel like the old Teferi still has more of an impact on the board.
Mono blue seems pretty well suited for defensive play. It isn't an unbeatable commander, nothing is. Everything has answers. So in that sense nothing is entirely broken.
I actually love the transformational sideboard. It addresses the post-board weakness of the deck: drawing the wrong anti-hate card or facing hate cards to which you don't have an answer. You don't have to worry about drawing an Ingot Chewer when facing down Rest in Peace or Leyline or drawing Wispmare to an opposing Cage. Tormod's Crypt, Nihil Spellbomb, and Ravenous Trap do exactly nothing. The Marit Lage plan allows you to simply invalidate their sideboarding plan instead of trying to fight through it. Plus, if it does come down to a game 3 and you suspect your opponent is reconfiguring to combat Dark Depths, you can always go back to your game 1 Dredge plan
You would think that the complexity scares away newcomers. I thought that would be the case myself. In reality, it doesn't. We had more newcomers coming to the event since when we had a steady rotation of subformats. Hell, we had 2 newcomers today alone!
With this logic, you can look at a recent Regular event where everybody was playing Elf, Goblin or Human, and conclude that Regular is not a worthy format. These are anomalies. We had Singleton events that almost achieved singularity.
You sure a pw is that hard to kill? It seems to me like, you drop Teferi, then everybody at the table attacks Teferi, because why not, pws always get attacked regardless, so you'll either have a pretty good defense for him or he'll just get wiped out before he can do much. As I wrote, that ultimate doesn't look like easy to get to.
Whereas you can't get rid of Uril or Momir by attacking them with your zombie tokens.
Besides family issues cropping up on Saturdays at times, two items have largely kept me away.
1) The deckbuilding screen in the new client.
2) I lost over 100 Tribal decks (about 98%) when my automated online backup system (copy.com - boo!) permanently deleted my hard drive copies when I deleted the online copy (apparently a known bug). I haven't had the heart to recreate all the work yet, though at least some is still saved on Gatherer.
Paul: Agree with your point, Singleton is either Red Deck Wins wGoblins or ProRed hate deck. So would be good to change that back to regular, since the format is Legacy Tribal Wars.
I think more regular events can attract new players since all the other varieties are so complex it scares away new comers.
Since Modern season ends tomorrow (8/24/14) I wonder how much the prices will fall. I can't wait to see next weeks article.
I don't believe that we have a major Goblin issue in the Singleton events. Yes, there were 6 goblin decks last week, but that was independent from previous meta trends.
I remember that, there were some serious talks about banning Vampires from singleton during the first 3-4 events, as they were so dominant. Then meta shifted to new possibilities and the waters calmed.
Some major tribes like; Zombies, Goblins, Humans, Elves, Walls, Shamans, Knights, Soldiers, Wizards will always attract the spotlights. All we have to do is, find a way around them and shift the meta. Isn't the continuity of MTG about that?
Yeah that is my feeling as well just from watching events/games and stats. Goblins are really pretty much top dog in Tribalton as the rules stand. Unfortunately the only good fix is to just ban them. And then something else becomes top dog.
Tribal is hard enough to find parity since people have different access levels to cards and it is much easier for new players to play the budget tribes that have a good chance of winning rather than invest some amount of tix on cards they won't use elsewhere (unless they are me or AJ) and risk not winning anything.
Tribalton adds to the complexity by reducing consistency of the tribes that are not ubiquitous and thus making Goblins and their ilk the favorited choice. Not to say they can't be beat without heavy metagaming but the chances are not great to start with. Pile on top of that skilled players playing them and the odds become very low indeed.
So, Skill does play a part (a good thing) but mostly to shut out other tribes. That sounds like a format in need of serious repair or sidelining.
As much as people seem to dislike KTribal I don't think it has the same level of problems and the problems it does have can be fixed by WOTC printing more cards for it. That can't really be said for Tribalton.
On the other hand as another poster said, just bring back more regular events and see how people respond to just playing Vanilla. If the lack of flavor is boring to them, there will always be some spikes willing to play x.dec (whatever boring flavor of the year is in vogue) vs y.dec (whatever boring flavor of the year was in vogue, prior).
Thank you for the commentary guys. :)
AJ back at you, with your help I am often inspired to write the things that you say inspire you so full circle.
Bartimaus I hope you do play more. Do not give up on v4, it is merely unfinished as of yet.
Procrastination, I suspected as much as I sensed an affinity in your writing for LE's style and sensibilities.
Can't wait for Modern Masters II. I pretty much only play modern now, and hope they re-print the fetch lands so i can be competitive without sacrificing my mortgage.
I've already thought of a few builds that could take advantage of the new Teferi as a commander.
But those would all likely run smoother off of The scry God anyway.
Most likely he'll only be used as a random card in the deck for multi-color "super friends" builds.
It's not just you. To my mind it breaks the whole paradigm of the format. The general/leader/commander as a creature is highly dealable with. Even if it is as broken as Uril, or Animar or Zur. Planeswalkers are more killable than they were 2-3 years ago but that isn't saying a lot. They still duck much of the removal that is common in commander. Having a very hard to kill non-creature as a commander is just ugly.
A mono blue planeswalker commander seems most readily abused. I don't know what they were thinking.
It's funny you should mention Lord Erman in your review of my articles. While I was on my break from writing, he came back to the site and started writing again. There were several of his articles that were so thoroughly enjoyable that they evoked in me that same feeling you described. They made me want to play this fun side of Standard that I kept reading about. Also, his articles were so well written, it made me miss writing all the more. I kept thinking "I want to be the one putting out stellar articles like this guy".
I take the comparison as an extreme compliment.
For those that missed Lord Erman's series, I suggest the UB Heroic and Angelic Accord articles. Brewing articles at their best!
Re: attendance issues, I know I've been pretty scarce this year, but I've had to be out of town a lot for personal reasons. When I was in town, and had nothing else going on, I was playing in the event, even when it was a format (like Singleton) that I really don't like. Nothing about the event has gotten worse for me. The time, mid-day on a Saturday for us in the US, remains horribly inconvenient for me, but I've just dealt with it up to this point. I do know the time is a factor for some other American players, when I would suggest the event to somebody in the Casual room, and tell them the time, they'd be "oh, no way I could ever make it for that." But obviously it works better for our Euro players, and we've had a diverse population through the years.
I don't know how you could look at this week's results and conclude Singleton was a worthy format. There was an absolutely ridiculous volume of Goblins decks, to the point that the winning deck had to be heavily metagamed against them. I think the correct way to play Singleton going forward is to build pro-red Tivadar's Crusade.dek and just hope to play Goblins all day long. I was playing one of the most uninspiring, generic, spikey decks I've ever played in this event in a desperate attempt to snag some invitational points in my little time remaining to play this year, and I still had very little hope when paired against Goblins. You're either playing the Goblin deck or you're playing a devoted anti-Goblin deck, or you're going to have some troubles in Singleton.
I would suggest bringing back a second regular event and cutting Singleton. If nothing else, it reduces complexity. Maybe Singleton could be a one-a-year thing in a month with 5 saturdays.
I saw that Dredge list a few weeks ago and I've been a massive fan of it.
I really dislike the transformational sideboard, and question a few other choices, but it's a base list I've started tinkering with.
Not a fan of the "planeswalker as Commander" but maybe that's just me. Seems unnecessary, was there really that big an outcry to have this? Just seems like they are sort of running out of ideas, but I'm fine with that. There's no reason to come up with something crazy each time a new product comes out.
Hopefully Hurkyl's Recall will get a reprint. And wow, there are only two pieces of power above Mox Opal...
Tx- cool article with a lot of relevant and vivid content. It even makes me missing playing more-
Unfortunately, my experience with V4 is much worser than what I read here so that I am out.
Anyway, more time for Fly fishing- enjoyed reading and maybe try a comeback in some weeks.
Good stuff! Helpful, informative, creative and thought-inspiring in one article.
I cant really speak for others but I mostly quit playing due to the constant rotation sub formats and then the tribe based lockouts for only specific players.
Between the two the format just wasn't nearly as fun for me anymore.