The goal of a competitive game is to win, if a game becomes less varied, textured, and interesting when you play to win this is a failure of game design.
1 Like
i bounce off of the whole idea of edh tbh and don’t play it but i’ve been around a lot of people playing it and frankly i don’t think a single one of them ever gave a shit about winning
I haven’t found magic to be straight forward at my skill level. I am playing BG adventures and since every card is two cards its a lot of choices
1 Like
This is all just a little too hyperbolic for me.
It’s true that prepackaged decks are never as well-tuned as those identified as best by the community, but an experienced player using one of those prepackaged decks will usually beat an inexperienced player using a tier-1 metagame deck.
It’s also true that a vast majority of Magic’s complexity comes from the combinatorial explosion of card interactions, and therefore deck-building is necessarily orders of magnitude more complex than decisions made during the game. But it’s a mistake to say that means that deck-building is the hard part; the fact that more-skilled players win even with objectively inferior decks proves as much. But we can see this demostrated even more starkly with Hearthstone, which uses 30 card decks, far fewer card types, and no option to play cards during the opponent’s turn. Even with so many fewer options available to players, you start with two or three viable options per turn and escalate to dozens of options: order and position of minions played to the board, which minions to attack with and in what order, whether to play the cards you can, and in what order. You still see people get caught up be analysis paralysis, and you still see superior players rewarded for taking the same deck and just playing it better than others can. Magic presents an even greater complexity of choice.
But, to end on an agreeable note again, I concur that Magic’s play complexity seems worse than it is, and I think it’s actually less than a lot of competitive games’ complexity of choice. RTS and even some fighting games probably overtake it. It’s just, that complexity of mass in the form of thousands of individual cards and rules obstructs the simplicity of the choices you’re actually making.
1 Like
I still like it though
1 Like
This is my standard deck pretty much:
1 Like
I think that’s AutomaticTiger’s point: that of the dozens of possible actions, only a few of them move the game state to one where you’re more likely to win. Part of the skill of an experienced player is a strong, adjustable filtering heuristic that they can quickly apply to order the actions, and then choose from the most viable ones.
1 Like
I think also knowing what cards the opponent is likely to play.
I’m not seeing anthing to disagree with!
https://edhrec.com/commanders/gur
These seem ok
Maelstrom Wanderer is a pretty fun deck if you build it with no tutors and otherwise all cards you can cascade into (including cards that you can cascade into that also have cascade). Generally it’s representative of the EDH decks that I find most fun to play/play against, which are decks that don’t have a set line, i.e. I get card A, then I get card B, then I win unless you stop me, instead relying on having a bunch of roughly similar synergistic cards.
I have an Animar deck, that’s just so I can fill it full of Morph cards and call it Ani-morphs. I haven’t found the sweet spot between it being too reliable (and therefore too good, and therefore immediately hated out of the game ASAP) and being reliable enough to be enjoyable to play.
Having a group where everybody is already friends and you can play 4P games seems to be pretty ideal for EDH, since having four decks opens up the possibility space, especially in terms of politics, and there’s a lot of social engineering that’s necessary in order to have a good time with it.
I have a Yasova deck since her archetype leans on a weird Voltron/Steal Em and Eat Em hybrid that I don’t see much of with other colors as well besides Grixis. Issue I have with other RUG commanders is that they’re fine on paper, I’ve even built lots of different Riku lists because he is pretty open ended but I prefer more niche/weirder archetypes, commanders that play with more obscure cards and produce interesting interactions.
Actually I’ll just link my deck since I have it online tho it is not the same as my paper version since I always tinker with it but most of the cards are the same:https://archidekt.com/decks/267307#Yasova_Temur_Trader
Dope deck yo
How do you all keep track of what cards you own?
I don’t, which is horrible! Anytime that I have a few spare days, which is what it would take to organize it at this point, I usually have something far more pressing to do.
I take solace that if the ridiculous speculation-led price curve continues, my idleness is in the long-run making me money.
1 Like
vague recollection
it also helps that I haven’t added or removed any cards from these boxes in, like, five years
1 Like
I have a big spreadsheet with one worksheet per set where I keep track of every card I have, how many I have, where/when I got it from, and if it’s actively being used in something, where it’s being used.
It comes in really handy when I want to build something out of my existing collection and can’t figure out where the one copy of a card I have disappeared to.
2 Likes
I keep having opportunities to buy or trade for cards on a whim but I can’t remember if I have 3 or 4 or whatever
Yeah I use conditional formatting to highlight anything I have over 4 of already, spreadsheets are my best friend
The main thing I need to do and I’ve never done is get rid of all my chaff. I’ve drafted from nearly ever set ever printed and as such I have a ton of cards that are pretty much worthless. I’d be much better off taking them all down to a store and selling them in bulk. This would require sorting through them and pulling out all the worthwhile cards though.
1 Like