EDH Land Destruction/Stax
Commander (EDH) forum
Posted on Nov. 24, 2013, 10:12 p.m. by FalkensteinAZ
So, around Ice Age when I stopped playing there wasn't a ton of land destruction cards, but my meta played them and nobody complained. It was just another facet of the game. Now I've been back for a year or so, and there seems to be a lot of of hate for land destruction and stax effects in the EDH community everywhere. People are banning Armageddon effects entirely, and there seems to be negative points for land destruction in a lot of league points tallies. It seems like people hate this even more than combo, and I don't think I understand why people feel this way.
I enjoy playing control, and naturally I don't like it when people attack me with creatures, so I build my decks to deal with it. Poison seems pretty broken to me, but I'll play against it. I'm not down with mana ramp, so I'll blow up your lands. It's all part of the game I enjoy playing.
So EDH community, I know it's a casual format and a lot of you hate geddon/stax, but why? How is playing against this archetype any worse than a deck that ramps to drop creatures you can't deal with, or anything else?
So you are saying that it is an inconvenience and thus worthy of the banning/negative points? Seems a bit harsh? I don't like Counterspells But I get dazed, FoW, etc...
I have a Kaalia deck with land destruction. I keep a healthy bit of artifacts for mana as I don't have Crucible of Worlds. I could build it insanely better, but it is fun the way it is.
Each deck has its own strategy, if you have land destruction to troll, then I see the reasoning behind it all, but if its actually the strategy, then you can't really be angry about it. It's not an auto win style after all.
It is a casual format. As soon as you put too many rules on a casual format it can become way less fun.
November 24, 2013 10:32 p.m.
I have absolutely no problem with Armageddon like effects what so ever and I keep them in my deck/SB for mana rampers especially. People calling it unfair are just burned by it, how is it fair for people to get a 7 drop creature (example) out on turn 2 or something? That's like complaining when you run into someone who (and I have played against this) a deck with soo many counterspells and extra turn taking spells (9 turns on the stack anyone?) Stealing your tutor effects for themselves? It's all apart of the game and just something you have to deal with. R&D had no issues making the cards, why should we have issues with people using them? The worse thing is when you have to sacrifice your lands and then it's an unfair un balanced situation. A seasoned player can come up with a plan B on the fly if they have to.
November 24, 2013 10:32 p.m.
I'm ok with a little land hate in my meta. You need cards like armageddon to punish those guys who over extend with boundless realms and endless ramp.
And if all you are packing is big heavy creatures and the 'geddon comes around, it sucks to be you.
That said, I think the aspect of land destruction on that scale that is the most annoying aspect is that it tends to happen later in the game when hands are mostly exhausted. It always leaves a nasty threat or two on the board behind it. It can be a long slog out of that situation back into something more constructive. It can totally be a buzz kill.
But, I feel like metas need to have the possibility of a land wipe to keep players on their toes and keep the game from getting to be a game of predictable, ramp until it hurts then drop some spells.
November 24, 2013 10:37 p.m.
I feel like the problem is that EDH was created as a much more social and casual format. While playing around, say, infect, or creatures, is a back-and-forth (play some blockers, make some pillowfort, use some removal, whatever), cheap mass land destruction, more often than not, becomes one person playing Magic and three to however many others... not playing Magic. Sitting there, stuck behind forever. And saying "oh, these people should just run more artifact ramp, or try not to get their entire landbase on the board by turn 3" or whatever feels, to me, like you're excluding certain strategies or types of players just as much as saying "don't play MLD or Infect", just less obviously.
November 25, 2013 12:38 a.m.
In regular, non-EDH, Magic there has been a significant trend away from Land Destruction cards/strategies. In Theros you have Demolish
and Ember Swallower
as the main ways to get rid of lands, and Peak Eruption
if you want to destroy mountains. That's three cards out of 250+ that destroy lands. The reason behind this is because LD isn't fun. EDH is supposed to be a fun, social, format. It's not supposed to be the realm of competition and winner-take-all strategies.
However, in the end, Magic is a game and there can only be one winner. So I think that LD should be a part of the game, just not a major part. Besides, if you run a LD strategy you'll be the target from Turn 1. There are some strategies that I don't like: Land Destruction, Prison Locks, Token decks, etc. And, personally, I won't build decks like that. But I won't say that someone can't run an LD deck just because I won't.
And as far as creatures go, each color has their own ways of dealing with them. Usually at a cheaper mana cost. White: Wrath of God or Pacifism . Blue: Counterspell or Control Magic . Black: Murder or Toxic Deluge . Red: Fireball or Act of Treason . Green: BIGGER CREATURES, RAWR! Although I get the feeling you don't like Green decks because they do get all the ramp.
November 25, 2013 8:17 a.m.
FalkensteinAZ says... #8
I'm playing mostly Esper these days, but it's not that I don't like the Green or Red slices of the pie, they're just not as exciting for me to play. Although I do miss goblins...
I guess this is where I become confused: Wrath of God vs. Armageddon If you empty your hand of creatures, you're left with nothing when Wrath drops, Geddon is the same thing but with lands. It seems like players accept that Wrath may be in an opponents hand, plan ahead, hold some creatures, and have a backup plan, but Geddon is always horrible and unexpected. It's like lands have become sacred and players feel entitled to play them out and keep them there, unlike any other permanent. I guess I've become used to keeping lands I don't need in my hand, but I see people topdeck a land and play it where is sits untapped for turns.
Oppression is a rough play, and gets some flak, Mana Breach makes one a jerk, and Desolation loses friends. What gives? These are all global, so they're troubling the person who played them too. Of course their deck is prepared for it, but that's the point of MTG, right, to create a game state where one has an advantage? And I'm not even talking about Crucible of Worlds here. Leave that in the deck for casual games. Something as simple as a few mana rocks and lower average CMC can create advantage.
Mana ramp creates a game state where one player has access to a larger mana pool than the others. Land destruction creates the exact same state with less lands on the board. 6-4 is the same as 4-2, the difference being the curves and CMC avg of the decks.
People always claim there's a way to deal with whatever they're playing with their bloated mana pools, just drop a Wrath, or a counter, or whatever. Cool, drop a Geddon and now only answers that are known and comfortable and prepared for are fair. I've heard that EDH is the format where all my opponents plays are broken, while all my own are very clever. I don't want that to be true.
Is it just that land destruction, while it has always been a part of play, is just not a regular enough threat in the meta that people are uncomfortable with it, and when it shows up they get frightened and defensive? That totally happened to me coming back to MTG when my brother says cool, I'll play my poison deck. Wait, I get 10 life and you get 20, lifegain is irrelevant, and I have to save all my counters for Skithiryx, the Blight Dragon , that's bullshit! I was frustrated by something I don't normally have to deal with. Is that what's going on with LD these days, or is there something else?
November 25, 2013 11:32 a.m.
nobu_the_bard says... #9
I think in my meta the reason behind it is it bogs games down. There's roughly a three-hour window when most of the players are available. Land destruction often slows a large game down massively; the player running it often can't completely eliminate all opponents upon using their Armageddon or whatever (though this may be because of the quality of LD decks I have seen, including the one I tried to make), instead just chipping down a couple opponents, and it takes roughly four complete rounds for everyone to start getting back to speed. They will rarely win for this strategy, as it usually gets the table to unite against them, for fear of it happening again; often their land wipe is answered with a creature or artifact wipe.
Also, the less experienced players or less well made decks may be effectively completely out of the competition, despite the players not being dead. And Crucible of Worlds is pretty expensive to have in every deck as an answer. (Myself I have discovered Life from the Loam and have started bringing it and those sac lands like Evolving Wilds to bring it utility even if nobody land wipes, but I am a mediocre deckbuilder).
Creature destruction doesn't cause this so much, probably because it doesn't disrupt players' ability to make plays and move the game forward, although it occasionally has also resulted in bogged down games when every player in turn played a creature wipe every round.
That doesn't mean it doesn't happen sometimes. If it didn't happen occasionally I'd be disappointed. But the Land Destruction EDH decks are a "sometimes play" not a "play every game" sort of event.
I think there's more hate in my meta for infect, based on the fact hardly anyone uses it. Not hate, maybe, more like, "it's too easy".
November 25, 2013 12:16 p.m.
I agree with nobu_the_bard in that it can and does bog down games. Recovering from a land wipe can take some time.
IMHO follows:
That said... I think it's important not to leave it out of your meta completely. Every strategy is a check and balance against another strategy. And if this strategy is taken off the table completely, you open your play group up to be abused by the strategies land destruction are most effective against.
Taking the Rock out of Rock, Paper, Scissors upsets the eco system. Sure Scissors will really like the outcome but Paper suffers.
November 25, 2013 12:56 p.m.
FalkensteinAZ says... #11
Ok, I totally get why people fear bogged down games. It's one of my only real dislikes for multi-player. I'm always loathe to play in a pod larger than four; five is barely playable, but six becomes tedious after 3 turns. So, I can see how an arbitrary, I don't like your ramp, Armageddon followed by 3 long turns of nothing could piss people off. It would piss me off too if it didn't just save me 3W.
In a four man pod, though, if we help each other keep track of things, we should be able to get around the table in 2-3 minutes, no problem. Especially after Geddon, nothing new is coming in. If anything, it seems like some LD and lockdown tidys up the game a bit and streamlines gameplay for a while. What I really fear is the player who needs to add up all the combat math for his 10 creatures before deciding that he won't attack after all. That dude gets a Pendrell Mists .
Anyway, let me ask you all this: If the LD a defensive measure with something like Ghostly Prison or is followed by the player who dropped it doing something constructive, is that an acceptable line of play. Is all the Armageddon hate just because some fools are trolling with it?
November 25, 2013 1:19 p.m.
Bobgalarneau says... #12
Land destruction is ok, the thing i don't like with mass land destruction/stax effects is that it only slow the game..... I got no problem if you kill all my lands and kill me in the next 10 minutes so we can start a new game..... But most of the time i've seen land destrcution used as a way to restart a bad board position..... Same goes with tax decks.... Or lock down deck... Your strategy is valid, but dammit... Win the game so we can start anew.... And no i will not concede.....
November 25, 2013 2:17 p.m.
FalkensteinAZ says... #13
So people are playing LD/Stax/tax without a win-con, or a way to get one out? That seems a little silly, but I believe it. Kind of like playing ramp when you curve out at 4. Except you're screwing up the game while you look like a fool. Seems boring on both sides...maybe there's some kind of social defect involved. ;-)
I'm getting the sense the dislike is more for the way people are playing the cards than the cards themselves, as these things usually are. Thanks for your input, everyone!
November 25, 2013 3:44 p.m.
I think the problem with mass LD is the same as the problem with Annihilator. It's just plain not fun to play against.
Most people, internally, want to play a game where you do a thing, and I do a thing, and we see whose thing ended up working out better/faster/stronger than the other one's.
In that dynamic, LD feels less like you are doing something and more like you're just undoing something I did, and that feels crappy. That's the same reason people tend to get upset about someone playing heavy countermagic.
I took a 4-player multiplayer deck out to a 1v1 French List tournament, fully expecting to get hammered because that's how you learn a meta, you go in and lose until you figure out how to win, but my three rounds were Bye, Geist, Geist. As I recall, one of the geist players was running something like 22 counterspells and the other was running 18. Nobody I play 4-player casual with would ever do that. Maybe in a controlly build they'd run 3 or 4 of the really good ones.
The answer, as always, is that EDH is a SOCIAL format, not a CASUAL one. The important thing is that the group be on the same page socially. If you really enjoy playing a deck with lots of taxing and counters and LD, and nobody else you play with does, you either need to find a new style of deck you find fun, or find people who are also okay with you playing that way.
It's the difference between playing against me using Help Everybody and playing against Epochalyptik using Dominus - Dreamcrusher Edition
If you play Armageddon against my friendly silly group-hug deck, I'm going to wonder what your problem is. If you play it against Dominus, you're going to run into one of his 13 counterspells plus recursion.
November 25, 2013 5:57 p.m.
I agree with the general consensus. The only real problem with land destruction is that most people don't do it right so it just stalls the game wasting everyone's time. That is basically the biggest violation of the casual game social contract you can make.
"No fun allowed" is arguably the other violation of the casual social contract that is made by this activity. This is only really a valid argument if there is no follow up game plan made by that player to keep the game progressing towards a conclusion. Unfortunately this happens more than it should.
I have played against several land destruction decks which I thought were fine and appropriate for causal play. Sometimes mass land destruction is the only appropriate answer to twenty mana in play by the end of turn 2.
November 25, 2013 6:08 p.m.
Didgeridooda says... #16
I hate playing against land destruction. So I use it. My group realizes that it is a way to win, and they learn to play against it. Some of them have worse land killer decks. You learn to adapt or lose. Just part of the game.
Wait you use Hatred with your infect trample guy? Well I need to prepare for it, and deal with it.
November 25, 2013 6:10 p.m.
i am playing pox in my cao cao,lord of wei...its simple...if someone can cast big dude on turn 2-3 then i can cast my pox. because wurmcoil engine turn 2 is not fun but i will play around it :P
GoldGhost012 says... #2
It's annoying as hell. You built up your beautiful land base, with some of the most powerful lands in your deck, and BAM! they're gone with one spell. Now you can't cast spells until you draw around 4 more lands, depending on where you are in the game. It's especially annoying in EDH, since you have all these huge creatures that could win the game and now you can't play them!! They're pretty killer to heavy ramp decks. Also, since the player who cast the land wrath is probably packing Crucible of Worlds , they they get their lands back. So unfair.
November 24, 2013 10:20 p.m.