Camille Saint-Cyëns

this is one of the goofiest decks ive sketched out in a while archidekt.com/decks/204696...

having them ignore you until its too late and you can spring your combo on them is building on sand!

a lot of magic pros have written about playing to win being better than playing not to lose. these tricks fall squarely into the latter camp. rather than building your game plan around winning, your foundation is instead precedented on making your opponents look elsewhere

these commander tricks end up the same way. in addition to average win rate hovering around 25%, you're just infinitely more likely to run into a pug with a much better player thats seen your game before and wipes the floor with your "invisible" threat that can be seen from a mile away

but these decks, with their slow, grindy, post-lock play patterns get players to the point where they have the lead but can't reach the finish line, so all you have are games that end with everyone frustratedly scooping to the lock.

part of the reason genuine pillowfort, stax, or draw-go strategies don't make it up to high level commander play is that most players do not know how to close the game out. our idea of the end of a game as commander players is people scooping to combos or dying to a craterhoof.

i find it funny and depressing how people think the ultimate secret to winning at multiplayer magic is to gaslight your friends into playing poorly. please stop trying to trick your bros into blowing up someone else's commander! i guarantee you there's a counterplay that you won't see coming

youtube thumbnail for a video titled "Never Lose Your Commander Again" with the thumbnail text saying "protecting without protection"

the secret to these social engineering multiplayer magic tricks is that once people find them out, your cover is blown and the jig is up. you cannot outrun the need to play cards that win

those subtle early game pushes against parity can decide a longer game before the late game is even reached. you get a decent amount of advantage from just putting your commander on the board in the way she's written to be played!

forget calling it fairness, call it the necropotence effect!

against an opponent doing the same thing as you, whoever gets their yuriko out first is the first to gain advantage, and the other player is now The Control

another two or three mana legend in the command zone isn't drawing you cards and dealing bonus damage as soon as she hits the board. yuriko is! and that's how she breaks parity against other peoples turn 2 or 3 plays, she's cheap and gets you cards and extra damage.

these cards are strong because they give the owner an advantage on cast, in the cases discussed in the video by being cheaper than other cards at their rate

some of these cards are designed around this breaking of parity in order to reign in the shenanigans, while ones like yuriko and her predecessor derevi were experiments with the design space commander offers that don't necessarily pan out in as balanced a way as originally expected.

this is, in my opinion, a fundamental design choice related to making cards more powerful

i think this expression of power level isn't so much fairness as it is various degrees of breaking parity. most of the commanders mentioned in the video break parity in the command zone one way or another, usually thru breaking parity by way of mana cost.

snail coins the term "The Gesture" to describe this difference in practice, certain commanders make The Gesture by having their cost reduction still be tied to their status as a commander, like how Liesa costs more life every time you cast her. others do not, like how Yuriko always costs 2 mana

A Tale of Two Commander Tax Evaders YouTube video by Salubrious Snail

in "A Tale of Two Commander Tax Evaders" youtube.com/watch?v=rk3o-DWPVrI snail describes a concept of "fairness" about how certain legends' power, especially in relation to avoiding commander tax, makes the commanders feel more or less unfair across the table, giving the examples of yuriko and liesa

another salubrious snail video, another fundamental disagreement on how power level expresses itself in commander

cards that break parity are powerful like this because to answer them in most ways is to put yourself behind just to deal with it. dies to disenchant is not relevant here because if you can't pay the 1, now you're behind just for trying to answer rhystic study!

- someone who knows what's up always pays the 1, giving study's owner a huge leg up in tempo on them, because they're slowed down by about 1 turn
- someone who doesn't care never pays the 1, giving study's owner a huge leg up on card advantage

rhystic study is a great example of this because as soon as it hits the stack it's breaking parity. either:
- someone uses a single target removal spell on it, using up a potential resource they could have for later in the game

i feel like parity is such a sorely overlooked lens thru which to view magic cards' power level, because a good amount of powerful cards (not all of them, but definitely in commander) break parity in ways that are damaging to multiplayer environments

give me a break, please!

gavin's latest communique about the state of the commander format moving forward is driving me a little crazy. not because of the bracket changes or the proposed hybrid change but because they talked about banning rhystic study, but also didn't want to because it was "so iconic to the format"

abzan is the colors the old deck was in, and i can imagine a lower power variant taking the gy combo angle alongside interaction to stall the table out until it can secure the win. lots of options really

another thing is to shift into mardu and just go for more interaction while keeping bomberman or worldgorger as a centerpiece for huge mana. i hear celes is particularly interesting for cedh at this moment in time

there are a few different directions i could take the deck, and having white solely for bomberman feels kind of lame to me, so i could shift to jund alone, and try to work in some other infinite mana combo that lets me storm out or play a huge x spell that way

been working very recently on my dredge edh concept again, trying to see what the most dedicated list for turboïng out a gy combo looks like, this is what i have so far:
archidekt.com/decks/14005951

even the old old stuff for the dojo from the mid to late nineties is shockingly relevant today imo. there's always something to learn or a perspective that shaped years of competitive Magic

i've noticed sometimes people tend to write off or be sceptic of the relevancy of older Magic writing because the environments being written about are much different than the ones we have today, but in reading them i can't help but see their reverberating impact and continuous applicability