Hard to Play EDH Decks
Commander (EDH) forum
Posted on June 6, 2014, 8:56 a.m. by Atsuma
Looking to in general get better at EDH deckbuilding and general card mechanics. I'm interested in what types of decks you might consider "difficult to pilot" and the synergies and card mechanics that make them so. I'll start off by saying it seems that large numbers of precision triggers and activated abilities, such as blink control decks, seems to be some of the hardest to play.
Hjaltrohir says... #3
Mono-Blue control can be hard to play. Sometimes. But it is the one of the best archetypes in edh
June 6, 2014 9:17 a.m.
MartialArt says... #4
Group Hug decks that aim to win can be pretty hard to play.
You need to make sure that everyone profits but you profit the most throughout the game.
A example (there may be better but I like it a lot) is my deck Braids' Bestiarium with Braids, Conjurer Adept .
June 6, 2014 9:37 a.m.
Combo-control is hard to play.
General synergistic builds are the easiest, such as flicker Roon.
June 6, 2014 11:17 a.m.
Speaking towards the mono-blue control.... I'd say it is as powerful as your knowledge of your opponent.
You really need to be able to identify how the opposing deck works and what you actually need to control - should you target the mana base to cripple them or hold off to handle the bombs?
I think that is what goes towards the difficulty in piloting it and it's also why I enjoy the archetype in this format - given equally matched deck quality, you really have to develop an understanding of other decks and find their weak points.
June 6, 2014 11:26 a.m.
Storm decks are almost impossible to play perfectly, as they have so many bazillions of options that matter a lot in the long run, and evaluating those choices can be difficult because of how much variance there can be in 100 card singleton.
Also, GY decks can be pretty tricky. Again, the late game just gives you so many lines, and the correct one isn't always obvious.
June 6, 2014 11:41 a.m.
vampirelazarus says... #8
I would love to see a storm commander deck, if you have an example, Blakkhand
June 6, 2014 1:22 p.m.
vampirelazarus & Blakkhand, here's my 5 Color ANT deck- Rainbow Nauseum. It's a fucking blast to pilot. I recently played it in my local edh league and beat out 2 Grixis and a Mono Blue in a 4 player pod.
June 6, 2014 1:45 p.m.
I personally don't have a storm build on the site, and the ones I have off-site are kind of unusual, Mono U and Mono G (don't ask, just accept). The average storm deck will play all the good tutors, artifact acceleration, cheap draw spells, and recursion (think Yawgmoth's Will , Past in Flames , Recoup , etc.). Toss in a few win cons (Tendrils of Agony , Brain Freeze , Empty the Warrens , etc.) and you've got yourself a deck.
Grixis is the best and most common choice, it has all the best storm spells, with Jeleva, Nephalia's Scourge being the best commander. UR is also pretty good, as it has some more applicable commanders. Green adds a few rituals as well as Oath of Druids , which can either dump your library into the GY or fetch up a sweet creature (Rune-Scarred Demon , Jin-Gitaxias, Core Augur , etc.).
June 6, 2014 2:12 p.m.
okay, i can see what you are getting at blackhand, i might actually try a nephalia storm deck, could be fun.
as for people talking about control making it hard to pilot i can see that, but I've been playing control since time spiral so it isn't so much what i was trying to ask about. i guess i'm more asking about a deck that will have all kinds of combat tricks and triggers to do a bunch of separate synergies that might be unintuitive, such as Batterskull + Stoneforge Mystic or Temple of the False God + Wargate or Rings of Brighthearth + Tezzeret the Seeker with artifact land. I'm thinking about what my next deck will be and i figured i wanted to make it a high skill deck so i would become a better player building and playing it. my previous deck was Ramp, Ruse, Repeat with every synergy in the deck explained in the description, and would probably be considered difficult to pilot by some.
June 6, 2014 7:21 p.m.
Epochalyptik says... #12
@Atsuma: My point in saying that combo-control is hard to play was not that control is inherently hard to play, or that it makes a deck inherently hard to play, for everyone. Rather, combo-control is hard to play because the archetype tends to involve many minute interactions, decisions, and dependencies that aren't exhibited to the same extent in other archetypes. I've had career-long control players ask me about my Damia deck; the archetype is too complex to assess completely at first or even second glance.
None of the example combos or interactions you listed are really all that complicated in comparison. Temple of the False God + Wargate doesn't even deserve to be considered a combo or interaction.
June 6, 2014 7:39 p.m.
it involves someone having looked at the deck and remembering every single permanent you run, and unlike a search spell where you get to cast and choose, you need to know what you are grabbing at cast with Wargate . That fact makes it easy to overlook land being 0 and there being a land that taps for 2. i was looking at the damia deck and whilst i can tell you run things like Tooth and Nail to grab Deadeye Navigator combos or and search to assemble other pieces. Pact of Negation + Tolaria West Dryad Arbor + Green Sun's Zenith Crucible of Worlds and any of the self sacrificing lands, Arbor Elf + Utopia Sprawl , there's alot of stuff like that in there, but i am trying to find synergies that rely on a knowledge of the stack and maybe even the order of state based effects to work, such as Tidehollow Sculler + Master Transmuter or a knowledge of exactly what you are doing with an unknown zone at cast such as Wargate or banking on a specific Bribery target.
June 6, 2014 8:03 p.m.
Epochalyptik says... #14
You and I appear to have different opinions of what makes a deck hard to pilot, then. You're looking for decks that are complicated on a functional level. I'm looking for decks that are complicated on a strategic and tactical level. There's some overlap, sure, but they are also different qualities.
June 6, 2014 8:13 p.m.
yeah, i will agree with that. i also consider tactical and strategic skill a huge part of what makes it hard to pilot, but in terms of deck building the functional skill is the biggest factor you can improve. strategic and tactical skill doesn't really come into play till you are in a game, though it does still have use in knowing the meta and properly accounting for situations whilst deckbuilding. i guess i consider "piloting" and "playing" a deck to be slightly different, if you put a well constructed control deck that a very skilled control player has never seen before into their hands and tell them the win cons and major points, they can probably win games with it, but if you give them something full of search, tricks, and synergistic combo, unless they built it, they will have a nightmare figuring it out as they play.
June 6, 2014 8:28 p.m.
Epochalyptik says... #16
I disagree strongly with the idea that functional skill is the biggest department for improvement. Functional skill is certainly important, but it's meaningless without overarching vision and in-the-moment judgement. Functional skill is equitable to technical skill, but strategic and tactical skill are then equitable to raw theory and prowess. It's the strategic and tactical skill that informs functional decisions. That skill persists outside of the game. It influences deckbuilding, out-of-game assessments, and perception as a whole.
June 6, 2014 8:36 p.m.
Atsuma Searching, tricks and combos do make a deck harder to play but along the lines of what epoch was saying. It's extremely difficult to get the feel for the minute detail without having a significant amount of builder skill and knowledge. It's not just a case of telling someone about the synergies because all of the possibilities run into the thousands when we're talking about combinations of events.
June 6, 2014 8:48 p.m.
@epoch i possibly could have phrased that better, in a sense you just said what i was trying to get at in a more concise way, i completely agree that strategic decision making and tactical skill are huge, I play chess, SCII, and control style decks due to my love of those things. But what i was trying to get at is that the skill that can be most easily cultivated on tappedout.net, in lieu of actually playing games, is an understanding of deck-building mechanics, and the functional skills behind them.
@chiefbell that is what makes it hard, and thus why i am looking towards people who have decks like epochalyptik's Damia deck to see examples of well constructed and highly synergistic decks. i love the feeling of after a game realizing i lost because i overlooked some synergy, and then remembering every game thereafter to do that, because i know i just became a better player. 8 years later and it still frequently happens.
Epochalyptik says... #2
In general, combo-control decks will be the hardest to learn and play because they tend to have many, many minute interactions, especially once you introduce backup strategies and secondary win conditions. On top of that, the card choices and applications may not be readily apparent to players who didn't build the deck themselves.
I've gotten reports from other users that some people have copied Dominus - Dreamcrusher Edition (which I don't mind), but have trouble piloting it or make nonsensical changes to the list because they don't have the decision and playtesting experience I have from building the deck. The deck is designed in web-like fashion such that it can sustain itself even after losing critical pieces.
June 6, 2014 9:08 a.m.