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Jun 13, 2010 -- 8:43PM, Tich wrote:

It's been proven mathematically that there really isn't much deck thinning at all provided by fetch lands. What they give you is choices. I don't think having more choices available to you can ever be thought of as a bad thing, and I would 100% use any fetchlands I had in my multiplayer decks. Unless you're playing a monocoloured deck, there's really no reason not to use them. You don't need to play with more land than normal and they're really no worse than a regular land when your color is "fixed," so I'm a little confused as to why anyone would argue that they're bad. 1 life is nothing. Trading life for a game advantage has always been by far the best trade because you start off with plenty of life and it doesn't matter if you win with 1 or a trillion as long as you win. Paying life doesn't ruin your tempo or set you behind on turns to get combos and locks out. I gladly throw life away like it's nothing in multiplayer, because frankly it ist. You're not going to grind the life total out from everyone else in a compettive MP game, you either go off before someone else does or you lose. Odds are your life total won't matter at all when the game ends because the winner will simultaneously kill everyone else anyways.

Your multiplayer games are clearly very different from mine, Tich.  People trying to "go off" and win are relatively rare; various flavors of creature, control, and lock decks are much more common.  That's not to say that no one plays combos, but when they do, there are plenty of Counterspell s and Disenchant s waiting for them, and they'd better be prepared to defend themselves from an awful lot of creature attacks.  That sort of hate keeps the pure combo decks relatively rare (as opposed to creature or control decks that just happen to have a combo thrown in), which I don't think is a bad thing.  If your metagame is different, though, that explains your dislike of spot removal.

That said, I don't think fetch lands would be bad in my metagame, either.  Establishing a solid defense is much more important than a few points of life, and often people with higher life totals are more appealing targets.  Paying one life to go to 19 might get someone who's still at 20 attacked by that 3/3... it's like draining three of their life, and getting someone else blamed for it!

Jun 14, 2010 -- 6:16AM, fractal wrote:

If your metagame is different, though, that explains your dislike of spot removal.

I hate spot removal from a theoretical perspective. You say that spot removal "stops" combos, but I've never fully understood that argument. If you had to face 8 players playing a combo deck, how far will spot removal take you? You may hinder 1 or 2 decks at best, but the other 6 will still go off. I'd take a card like Contamination or Delirium Skeins any day of the week because they simultaneously stop EVERYONE. That, to me, is what separates real MP decks from glorified duel decks. My deck might not goldfish faster than every deck at our table, but I pack plenty of ways to disrupt/slow the game down to a pace that I can compete in. I've said it 100 times and I'll say it 100 more, but MP decks need to be competitive just like duel decks need to be competitive. If your deck has an abysmally slow clock and no meat, you're going to lose to Jund or Planeswalker Control 99.99% of the time. If you go into an MP game with a duel deck (a deck with an incredibly slow clock and very little meat relative to the format) then you're probably going to lose most of the time. It's no differant from duels. Build solid decks or you're gong to come up short.

A lot of people talk about about MP games that go on for hours, because frankly everyone is playing a duel deck. Duel decks are not able to effectively beat mutliple opponents. Killing one player leaves you vulnerable to lose to another, so there's these big stalemates. If every deck is designed to beat any number of players, games are just as fast as regular duels.

When people support the use of spot removal, they support card disadvantage. I'm surprised that so many players think that card disadvantage is a good thing. If you're facing 10 people, and your Terror kills 1 creature, 8 other players are up a card on you. You're using your mana and your precious cards to stop a single threat from a single player when you could have easily been using Earthquake or Pestilence and the like to not put yourself at a disadvantage. Even better, cards like these have reach that extends beyond creatures to life totals, so even players without creatures are directly affected.