Just Complaining... lol
Commander (EDH) forum
Posted on March 25, 2022, 8:49 p.m. by DrukenReaps
I've noticed as I've started looking into mostly newer cards there has been an ever increasing amount of "Whenever one or more other...." or "This ability triggers only once each turn." Perfect example is Welcoming Vampire that has both limits but is far from the only one. I don't know about y'all but I feel frustrated by these sorts of limitations. Especially when they start placing multiple on the same card. It just ends up with me looking over older and older cards and finding better things that don't have these limits.
Basically I'm just annoyed that there are so many new cards that just aren't worth picking up for me because I have other better cards already. Not to say this holds true across the board though. It just appears to be more and more common. /endrant lol
DrukenReaps says... #3
I don't think that I'd consider them to be all that similar really. Sure they draw cards and have 2 limitations but Mentor is much easier to get a lot more use out of. Welcoming will draw 1 card every turn if you push it to the ceiling of what it can do. The ceiling for mentor is much higher. The floor for both is pretty close to even too.
This is just kind of my point. The cards I already have are, in general, more interesting for me to build around. The limitations being used are harder to be creative around. Again it isn't across the board. I do find Olivia, Crimson Bride and Satoru Umezawa rather interesting to build for.
March 25, 2022 9:47 p.m.
I feel like the reason people get excited about Welcoming Vampire isn't because it's different or better than anything, but because it exists in the first place. For a long time, white has been considered - and still is - to be the weakest single color in Magic. It's a phenomenal second color, but a terribly weak main color because of it's lack of card draw. Welcoming Vampire is redundancy, and IMO it doesn't really need to be anything more than that. I run it in both mono-white decks I own to great success because it's just that - more card draw.
March 25, 2022 10:59 p.m.
Honestly, this has kind of always been true. In general, the powerlevel of newer cards is intended to be lower than the powerlevel of older cards because older cards were often problematic and degenerate. Restrictions like this are printed on newer cards because WotC intends to maintain a certain level of enjoyment potential for players and no one likes sitting down to a game, shuffling up, drawing a hand, losing the die roll to go first, then watching an opponent combo off an win before you've ever had a chance to draw your first card of the game on your fist turn. Which, honestly, is a good thing for the health of MtG as a whole.
@ AstroAA Step 1: Cast Norin the Wary Step 2: Cast Welcoming Vampire Step 3: ??? Step 4: Profit
March 25, 2022 11:28 p.m.
I think that maybe they are having a hard time balancing cards that might attract commander players with cards that can be not ovepowered in standard. The normal way to do this is with the cMc, but I feel like they really want to sell everything to everyone, and haven't quite worked out the kinks. I mean, they will always have some problems to print the same cards to try to appeal to commander and standard players rather than just print for standard and let commander players decide what is good.
At least that's what I think is going on with these cards. Sure, wizards could just wait to print good effects into commander sets, but if they can squeeze that Crimson Vow lemon twice at the same time, they're going to try to figure it out, and the fact that it doesn't really work leads to odd wordings and rules.
March 26, 2022 8:40 a.m.
FormOverFunction says... #7
I think Niko9 is right. I’m biased, as I only play commander, but it seems from the folks I talk to that standard is struggling pretty severely. I think the focus has been swinging from one format to the next (modern, standard, commander, etc) and doing so leaves the others wobbly and confused in the meantime. I think it’s probably going to take some time still before the pendulum settles down a little closer to the center between them all.
March 26, 2022 12:06 p.m.
Morbid Opportunist would be a similar card to Welcoming Vampire. Yet oftentimes I still prefer it to Grim Haruspex, which has a much higher ceiling. There is no limit on the latter except that it has to be non-token creatures, which is a pretty serious restriction indeed since oftentimes tokens are the fuel you want to use to draw cards and not the creatures you invested in hard-casting honestly. Haruspex is best in many decks when a boardwipre would blow you out and you can reload your hand. In most decks I'd rather play opportunist, but in my Meren deck both are great and Haruspex far better, because stuff is dying right and left. But it is true that while Welcoming Vampire is welcome, I mostly play it in white weenie decks where my draw options are limited. It is also true that Rhystic Study is totally off-color and should be white today, and I hardly think it would break the format to print a white version of it.
March 26, 2022 12:40 p.m.
Grubbernaut says... #9
I'll take the opposing view: rhystic is already a fundamentally broken card, we definitely don't need a white version. The best decks (or, the majority) will just play both.
March 26, 2022 2:12 p.m.
Grubbernaut My playgroup, a group of 4 individuals who've all played MTG at a professional level, has a nearly 4500 game sample size database where we track the performance of various cards, decks, and even in some situations turn specific play win rates.
Over that sample size of games in the last 5ish years Rhystic Study has posted a slightly net negative expected win rate potential at 24.7%, or -0.3%. Including this card in a deck, in a vacuum, one should expect to lose 3 more games per 1000 played because this card is included. Our playgroup tends to only run this card in mono blue, and this has been true for most of the last 3 years. Clearly the data does not support some of your conclusions. Believe me, it was a surprise to us as well.
March 26, 2022 4:57 p.m.
plakjekaas says... #11
I'm confused... wasn't power creep the biggest complaint about magic post 2020?
March 26, 2022 5:53 p.m.
jaymc1130 That's an interesting point of data. It touches on a theory I've had for awhile now about many so-called staple cards "that should go in any deck" that aren't quite as universally good as we think. Since I'm not a huge Rhystic Study savant I'll pick a card I have extensive experience with- Smothering Tithe. It was billed by many as an auto-include in any deck in white, but I haven't really found that this is the case. It is indeed a good card, but its strong in the right decks and mediocre to bad in the wrong ones. In low-to-the ground aggressive decks where you'd think the ramp would be welcome its actually pretty bad I've found. You usually don't want to pay the four to cast it early to mid-game when it would be good because you have something more urgent to do and your spells are cheap. In more grindy mid-range or control decks however, its great, building you a lot of value over the course of a game, and allows you to power game-winning moves, and to have enough mana to counter spells and control the board while still moving forward. I'd imagine these disparities would only be greater with Rhystic Study. In my experience players will rarely pay to stop you from getting a treasure token, but good players will always play whenever they reasonably can to stop you from drawing a card. It then makes even more sense that in a more competitive, experienced meta like yours why the card wouldn't work well.
March 26, 2022 6:16 p.m.
Guerric It's definitely interesting data, but we do have to remember this is a data set that includes inherent bias. It's ONLY our playgroup's worth of games and while I'd love to say we always play perfect and always know best, we simply don't. There are going to be flaws within it, and while it's gotten up to a good sample size, it's not what I would personally call truly "statistically relevant" yet. Think about all the games of Standard or Modern or Vintage where we have 100s of thousands of games worth of this data being collected by players from around the world in every possible scenario and circumstance. It's the discrepancy between those data sets and complete lack of same for EDH that led out playgroup to start at least tracking our own years ago. It's helpful, and yeah, we can start to make some very basic assumptions or judgements, but we have to be careful and recognize that this sample size is, by relative terms, comparatively tiny with respect to other formats.
I will definitely mention that before the ban of Paradox Engine Rhystic Study had an even lower win rate at around 23.5%. So it's actually been improving over time since that ban. One of the things this likely means is that our playgroup was often (or always) "paying it's taxes" and this is something the data seems to show decreases the powerlevel and impact of a card like Rhystic Study. Now that it's a bit more difficult for us to always pay our taxes Rhystic Study is performing better. This is just an example of the kinds of conclusions we can begin to draw from data like this, but I have to state it again, this process is still in it's infancy and with a larger sample size of games we might find that some early conclusions might not have been entirely accurate, or were conditional based on another factor. For example, when the average expected win rate of all (400) cards in a pod is at or below 25%, Rhystic Study win rates skyrocket to nearly 33%. This could likely be an indicator that Rhystic Study is a card that is only kept in check by the powerlevel of the format's most efficient and strongest performing pieces and in meta with a lower competitive threshold it could be a dominating performer.
The sad thing is the one person outside my playgroup I found who was also doing advanced analytics studies of the cEDH format like this was SynergyBuild and he's been less enamored with TO as of the last year and a half so a lot of our data sharing has slowed and halted. What I think the cEDH community really needs is more people doing this kind of stuff, it's tedious and time consuming, sure, but I feel like the efforts are worthwhile in the end.
March 26, 2022 6:38 p.m.
Grubbernaut says... #15
Is the data publicly available? And did that include casual as well, or competitive only?
March 26, 2022 7:22 p.m.
Grubbernaut There's a minimal amount of data that is available publicly (like stuff you can find on EDHrec for example), but it's not intended to be used in this kind of manner so trying squeeze the most out of it can be difficult and usually requires a lot of manual effort. Our playgroup's stuff is not available publicly, though I suppose we could upload spreadsheets to Github or something of that sort if I can convince the rest of the group it's a good idea. To be perfectly honest, they don't like me sharing info... old habits die hard and hiding information from others that might gain you a competitive advantage in a future Pro Tour event or something was pretty second nature to all of us back in the early 2000s. Mostly they think I'm just being silly when I post about it on sites like this and they assume no one will take anything seriously so they don't give me a ton of flack for it, but my point is none of us play at pro level events any more any ways so that aspect shouldn't be a factor at all. It's not like these are "secrets" that could impact "national security" or anything so I think they're just being ridiculous, but if I upset lil bro I'll literally never hear the end of it during holiday season... And since we store 90% of our group's collection in his garage... Yeah...
March 26, 2022 7:44 p.m. Edited.
It's a good thing your old cards are better. Power creep needs to slow way down. Since at least war of the spark power creep has been too much
March 27, 2022 7:29 a.m.
DrukenReaps says... #18
shadow63 I've often wondered if that is actually true. I mean look at decks used in legacy or vintage vs standard or modern. I'll state these are not formats I keep up with so someone correct me if I'm wrong. The decks I have seen in vintage/legacy are much stronger. And I'm not saying up the power level of cards. Just don't reduce it down so much. I already have an advantage over new players by having played the game longer. They don't need to be sold worse cards on top of that. Welcoming vampire could have been the literal same as mentor of the meek. It isn't like wizards has an issue with making the same card. Looking at you soul sisters lol
March 27, 2022 9:04 a.m.
DrukenReaps I can think of one specific reason, at the very least, for why Welcoming Vampire could not be functionally identical: Edgar Markov.
March 27, 2022 9:45 a.m.
DrukenReaps says... #20
You can just run Mentor in your Edgar deck and it does cost mana to keep it going. Mentor of the Meek not being a vampire isn't that big of a downside to Edgar. Nor would Welcoming Vampire being Mentor with vampire stapled on be that different from placing Mentor in that spot.
March 27, 2022 9:53 a.m.
The mana investment is a massive restriction, it has nothing to do with being a Vampire at all. Every 1cmc 1 drop is 2 mana for 2 creatures and a card, where as Welcoming Vampire with no restrictions is 1 mana for 2 creatures and a card. It's 100% more efficient in terms of mana expense without the restriction of triggering only once a turn. There would never be a reason to play Mentor of the Meek in Edgar Markov decks if Welcoming Vampire had been printed without a restriction. With a restriction players are offered a choice in deckbuilding, efficiency versus volume, and forcing players to make these kinds of choices in deckbuilding is an excellent thing to do as it makes the process much more enjoyable and deck lists less ubiquitous.
Edit: Erhm, sorry, Mentor nets 2 cards, one for each creature presumably, but you see the point. The difference forces a choice for players in deckbuilding mana efficiency or card draw efficiency.
March 27, 2022 10 a.m. Edited.
DrukenReaps says... #22
I'm mildly confused, maybe I wasn't clear in my communication? I wouldn't want Welcoming Vampire to have no restrictions. Just different ones. Same for Morbid Opportunist and so on. Although... Mesa Enchantress exists lol. Though the trigger being on cast is arguably a decent restriction itself. And I wouldn't consider any of these to be as busted as say Necropotence. Which is a card that I'm not sure should have been printed.
March 27, 2022 10:31 a.m.
Don't think it's you mate, it's almost 10 am my time and I woke up yesterday right around... 10 am. So I'm almost at 24 hours straight messing around on the ole interwebs watching League of Legends playoffs from around the world.
My only real point was that there are reasons why, specifically, Welcoming Vampire couldn't be functionally identical to Mentor of the Meek. If Markov decks had a choice between a Vampire or a non Vampire that do identical things there's no real choice to make, there'd only be one right answer. If the cards do slightly different things then being a Vampire isn't really as relevant, the choice a player has to make is more focused on which type of efficiency they want in that card slot, or, potentially even deciding to run both and then be allowed a choice in game when they decide to tutor it up based on what they need at that moment in that game state.
There are tons of functional reprints for tons of cards, so WotC is certainly willing to print cards of identical powerlevels with slightly different texture or flavor, but it's not something they can do all the time because certain circumstances sometimes need to be considered so that a functional reprint isn't actually just an outright upgrade for a specific archetype/format/whatever.
As for Necropotence, it's not a card that's personally on my list of "completely busted degenerate nonsense". Just the watch list, lol, and it's been on that list going on 3 decades now. You want cards that should never have seen the light of day? Look at Hullbreacher, Opposition Agent, Time Walk, Ancestral Recall, Paradox Engine, and the original Moxen (seriously, why play lands at all if I'm allowed to just run 20 Mox Sapphires instead per the original rules of mtg?).
March 27, 2022 10:46 a.m. Edited.
I'll put it in simple terms drunken reaps cards from standard should very rarely go into legacy or vintage as the power level of those formats is so high and standard should be weak by comparison but now almost once a year a standard card breaks one of those formats. That's a problem caused by power creep
March 27, 2022 10:55 a.m.
DrukenReaps says... #25
shadow63 considering that Wizards has been printing more cards, once a year seems pretty rare to me. How rarely should cards go into vintage/legacy in your opinion? Never? I don't want totally busted cards all the time either. They are boring and everyone plays them or they become too expensive for most people to buy and then only people with money play them. Wizards seems to ping pong between too strong and too weak. I don't think that's good either. I'd hope after all these years they could have found some kind of happy middle ground and I don't think the answer to power creep is to print bad cards. That just leads to an overall poor set that no one plays.
March 27, 2022 11:50 a.m.
DrukenReaps the issue isn't cards going into the formats it's that they're breaking formats. Lurrus is one of the prime examples of this. It warped every format it was in around it and now its banned everywhere
March 27, 2022 11:57 a.m.
DrukenReaps says... #27
shadow63 you seem to think I wanted busted cards when I've repeatedly said I don't. I also don't want trash. I don't know what else to say.
Lurrus of the Dream-Den is not banned from commander, vintage, or historic. It is banned from pioneer, modern, and legacy. It was not legal in other formats. So 3/6, I wouldn't call that an utter monster though my math teacher would have given it an 'F' I guess lol. I don't expect every card to work for every format either. (Was it in standard? I don't remember.)
So maybe I shouldn't even complain about the weaker cards in some of these sets. I just wanted to find interesting cards to buy and was largely disappointed instead lol. Regardless, I did find a few things.
March 27, 2022 12:40 p.m. Edited.
Luckily at least, power creep will always be somewhat mitigated in EDH by the fact that your playgroup is, in the end, king. Luckily I mean, because power creep in EDH will almost definitely keep getting worse. I feel like there is just kind of a disconnect between the players and wizards and it's inherent in commander.
Casual EDH has historically been like a brewer's haven. It's where you could combine all these things from across magic's history, and you didn't even have to make it incredibly powerful, but you always got to make it yours. That's something that a no other format really has; it's the special sauce on what's otherwise a slightly different same thing. The problem is that that game, the one where you take all your favorite old cards, wizards hates that game. So you take that, and you add in all the new hottness that you can, and where does it leave you? Muddy waters for literally everyone, kinda.
But again, everything in EDH comes down to your friends, your family, and your whoever you can get to play game with, and that's what keeps it from ever feeling too bad. I think we all get fatigued with power crept new stuff, or we get let down with the things that were almost awesome but got nerfed somewhere in design, and I mean, it's good to voice concerns about it. If all players were content with balance, it would probably be a boring game : )
March 27, 2022 4:52 p.m.
Gidgetimer says... #29
Unfortunately I have never found "but you always got to make it yours" to be especially true when I play with randoms. When I make a deck mine and do things that I enjoy the "casual" crowd likes to outright ban it. The level of decks I play is nowhere near cEDH and so that leaves me only being able to play with an established group. My last group just stopped playing over the pandemic and so now I am trying to slowly ratchet this new group up to where they realize that I honestly just love the puzzle to solve and silly interactions that combo provides and that if they interact with me I will not win more than my fair share of games.
March 27, 2022 5:40 p.m.
Gidgetimer That's fair : ) I guess the playgroup can be both the best part of the experience and the hardest part. Hopefully the new group works out better for you!
March 27, 2022 5:59 p.m.
SynergyBuild says... #31
jaymc1130 at this point I've felt a lot of my data, while useful, is outdated, and while I have great "legacy" data from old metas (even from a few months to a year ago), things change pretty fast now, which I appreciate playing from years of this format being stagnant.
AstroAA says... #2
I mean, yes it is annoying, but without those restrictions they'd be absolutely busted. Look at Mentor of the Meek for example - it does the exact same thing Welcoming Vampire does, except you can do it more times a turn and you have to pay one mana for it instead. Mentor is generally regarded as being really strong in token decks, and so is Welcoming Vampire. I personally think it's fine.
If you wanted to abuse it, find methods of playing creatures or making tokens on other people's turns so that you could draw more cards a turn cycle. Whitemane Lion is an example of a card that is pretty good for this. Welcoming Vampire is a card that works in pretty much all weenie decks, but is also a card that rewards good deckbuilding if you want to try and get the maximum value out of it.
March 25, 2022 9:23 p.m.