But the issue I was replying to was that there are a number of people on this thread suggesting that there is something aesthetically wrong with the idea that mono-g deck could make g/b tokens. I propose that these are the same thing. It doesn't really matter, as I don't have any aesthetic problems with it at all, but I think you have misunderstood what I'm saying.
Arguing about a person's aethetic is probably a bit pointless, though if I am honest I have no interest in the aesthetics of the game state. Heck, I use proxies that look like this (see below) mixed with genuine cards when I am testing or if I don't want to pull the card from another deck. That creates a game state that looks pretty ugly to some, but works well. Spoiler:Show
Shalom! ------------------------------ "That's the trouble with the Multiverse: the inability to easily make holes."- "Marky" Mark Rosewater
Thanks for the insight. That raises the number of problematic hybrids to 8, or 12 if you care about the color of tokens you produce. It looks like I forgot about the Ravnica hybrid commons too, so I guess the total number of hybrids is higher than 206.
No problem. It was interesting to take a look at all of them. Thanks for clarifying the Groundling Pouncer . It would make a lot more sense in green if it got reach instead of flying, but the card as is makes Hybrid that much more interesting.
So, while the majority of hybrid cards do fit into both colors very well, there are some that don't, which is totally ok (and makes for some awesome stuff in mono colored play), but I still couldn't justify it in Commander.
Creakwood Liege in a mono green Commander deck gets around Fear, which would be kind of strange to me. I realize this is a minor issue, but it also would create some interesting deckbuilding choices, especially dependent on one's meta.
That being said, I'm in support of the current rule, but if it changed, I wouldn't be that upset. I might sit for a moment and say "Huh", and then figure out what I new options my Commander deck would have. That's the fun of the format.
Fear Of The Dark, Fear Of The Dark, I Have A Constant Fear That Something's Always Near; Fear Of The Dark, Fear Of The Dark, I Have A Phobia That Someone's Always There- Iron Maiden
Fear of the Dark shall be feared no longer! Let him be praised instead! (Many, many thanks for all your hard work!) - darkwarlock
I'm both instinctive and emotional. I value my own instincts and desires, and either ignore or crush anything that stands in my way; planning and foresight are unnecessary. At best, I'm determined and fierce; at worst, I'm headstrong and infantile.
Check out my DnD blog! www.artificersintuition.blogspot.com
That doesn't even count the shenanigans you could pull cheating overcosted off-color cards into play with Elvish Piper effects and reanimation.
I appreciate MaRo's desire to streamline the rules, but this solution would just remove too many restrictions, and restrictions are what give a format like this its character.
"We will all be purified in Wurm. What is good will be used to heal Wurm, or grow Wurm, or to fuel Wurm's path. What is vile will be extruded, and we will be free of it forever." --Prophet of the Cult of Wurm
That doesn't even count the shenanigans you could pull cheating overcosted off-color cards into play with Elvish Piper effects and reanimation.
I appreciate MaRo's desire to streamline the rules, but this solution would just remove too many restrictions, and restrictions are what give a format like this its character.
Actually, the rule that barely matters is rule 4. The only barely useful use it prevents is to activate an opponent's Mtenda Lion's drawback. Rule 3 prevents you from casting all those alternate-cost spells.
So obvious. I don't know what I was thinking when I put that.
Fear Of The Dark, Fear Of The Dark, I Have A Constant Fear That Something's Always Near; Fear Of The Dark, Fear Of The Dark, I Have A Phobia That Someone's Always There- Iron Maiden
Fear of the Dark shall be feared no longer! Let him be praised instead! (Many, many thanks for all your hard work!) - darkwarlock
I'm both instinctive and emotional. I value my own instincts and desires, and either ignore or crush anything that stands in my way; planning and foresight are unnecessary. At best, I'm determined and fierce; at worst, I'm headstrong and infantile.
Check out my DnD blog! www.artificersintuition.blogspot.com
That doesn't even count the shenanigans you could pull cheating overcosted off-color cards into play with Elvish Piper effects and reanimation.
I appreciate MaRo's desire to streamline the rules, but this solution would just remove too many restrictions, and restrictions are what give a format like this its character.
I'm sincerely trying to come up with a more eloquent answer than "I don't care" but nothing is coming.
"You must be able to play the mana costs of cards in your deck with your general's mana, if they have a mana cost." That solves most of the problems people are saying, although still requires rule 4 to stay around.
And that's why you, like Scott Evil, do not understand Commander. =) You're too focussed on the goal and not enough on the journey.
You're right, of course, in saying that the Scott Evils of the world are focused on the goal, rather than the journey. But I think that if one needs to artifically pad the journey with fake challenge, then the journey wasn't worth undertaking in the first place. Furthermore, a journey is meaningless without a destination; otherwise, it's just wandering.
That's not true for casual kitchen tables. Regular 60-card casual decks have to be manually restrained too. You can build the sickest deck that blows everything away but that's not why the others sit down to play with their elephant tribal or hybrid-only decks.
I'm not sure I understand which point you're objecting to. Regular 60-card decks are restricted by explicit rules such as card pools for particular formats (and the other things like requiring mana for spells). Playing with a theme isn't quite the same as an objective or subjective restriction, though; it's an option that the rules allow. If the game is balanced well, options like "elephant tribal" or "hybrid-only" should be just as viable as any other option, and there shouldn't be a "sickest deck that blows everything away."
You're saying Garfield didn't do his job from day 1.
Well, yeah, that's what I'm saying. Contrary to his portrayal on Richard Garfield, Ph.D. , he's human and can make mistakes.
...Okay, to be fair to Garfield, I'm not familiar enough with Magic's history to know exactly which aspects of the game he was and wasn't directly responsible for. But my general argument remains:
A game is a competitive activity, defined by rules, which is intended to be fun.
Some games aren't fun if played according to the official rules, so players impose additional rules. (These rules might be objective, such as the Commander ruleset, or subjective, such as "People shouldn't use combo decks that win on Turn 2.")
Changing a game's ruleset changes the intent of the original game designer, and therefore suggests that he or she didn't do a good job.
It's the same with any other art form. If everyone agreed that the Venus de Milo needed a paper bag over its head to be worthy of viewing, then obviously the original sculptor wouldn't have done a good job.
It's not about improving, it's a deliberate choice. The player knows that improving the bad deck will make it less fun to play, so he won't.
Well, is the deck fun to play because it's bad or is it fun to play because it's interesting? If players have to resort to playing suboptimally in order to have fun, then the game has balance issues.
I am happy someone can relate to this sentiment I have.
Me, too! It's tough being a half-Spike. So many people treat you like you're some kind of villain...
I think that what he proposes goes just a little too far in this context. If commander/EDH multiplayer was the format for the next PTQ season, then what he right would apply, but for now, Commander is not a that serious a format.
You're right, of course. Sirlin's philosophy applies mostly to tournament gaming, but I don't think it's totally irrelevant to gaming in general.
Let me take another analogy to illustrate my point. One evening a few years ago we had some friends over for a little get-together. At one point in the evening, we decided to play a "party game" called Democrazy.
Well, the fact that you're referring to it as a "party game" suggests to me that it doesn't stand up to rigorous levels of play. A game that has a kingmaker scenario like that isn't very well designed. On the other hand, if your guest was so bored that he or she was sabotaging the game, it probably would have been best for you to play something else instead. There's no point in playing to win if the game isn't fun to begin with.
Intentionally making bad decks to me is rather similar. It goes against the golden rule. I am not doing the best I can. Ok, so while I am at the table and playing, yes, I am doing the best I can with what is available to me, but the challenge has lost its meaning and immediacy since I have intentionally crippled myself to play in a way that other consider "fun". I'd rather have everyone bring the meanest, nastiest deck they can muster within the agreed deck-construction rules. But since those rules allow for such broken decks, that is frowned upon.
I completely agree with this. It shouldn't be up to the player to intentionally cripple himself or herself in order to play in such a way that his or her opponents consider "fun." Challenge should arise naturally from the rules of the game, not from players performing self-sabotage. Furthermore, unless the players explicitly agree on the extent to which they are to sabotage themselves, there will inevitably be arguments over what's "fun" and what's "cheap."
The problem as it is now is that Commander isn't really a format, it's a ruleset. Branching it into, among others, a solid competitive format is something that simply still needs to happen. (Standard, Block, Legacy, Vintage, Pauper are different formats but all have the same ruleset)
What exactly is the distinction you're making here between a format and a ruleset? Isn't a format's list of allowable cards part of its ruleset?
Also, on the issue of colored token creation, I should point out that there are many ways to make off-color tokens that are legal in Commander; for example, Day of the Dragons , Riptide Replicator , or anything with living weapon.
Kavu Chameleon is Green with an activated ability using only Green mana. Its color-shifting ability cannot be used to justify plopping Green-X or non-Green cards into your deck, simply because it can become another color. This is because only a card's color outside of play matters, and why Wayward Angel or Repentant Vampire cannot be used as examples, either. They have abilities that only work when in play.
With respect to color restrictions, I don't see how a card with the potential to change colors is different from a card that actually has multiple colors. If your Isao, Enlightened Bushi commander refuses to work with Creakwood Liege because it's partially black, I don't see why he'd want to work with a Kavu Chameleon that could become black. (Of course, that's just my flavor argument. I totally agree with you in terms of the game mechanics.)
MaRo's flavor issue would have us treat hybrid costs as they they were either color, but not as though they were both colors, because of the way he concepted the hybrid effect.
A single hybrid mana symbol represents an "either" cost. A card with more than one (matching) hybrid mana symbol can thus be payed with either or both colors. Hybrid color alignment has a subtly different flavor than gold color alignment. I'm not aware that hybrid has an "effect" recognized by the rules, though; you're correct in saying that the rules treat them identically to gold cards.
In the sense that hybrid cards should only have abilities that both colors share, it was my thought on the concensus on Adept that it would be treated as a multicolored card, and should (as MaRo argued) been costed . Alas, no.
Everyone seems to agree that Augury Adept should have been gold. It's a poor example of hybrid, but it's not like there weren't color philosophy mistakes with non-hybrid cards in the past.
Adept's Augur Creature - Kithkin Wizard 2/2 (Adept's Augur is white or blue, but not both.) If you didn't pay when casting Adept's Augur, it has "Whenever this creature deals combat damage to a player, reveal the top card of your library. You gain life equal to its converted mana cost," and is white. If you didn't pay when casting Adept's Augur, it has "Whenever this creature deals combat damage to a player, draw a card," and is blue.
I think you're on the right track, but I agree that this design is a bit inelegant. This version of the Adept might as well just be a separate white card and a separate blue card, which defeats the purpose of hybrid. I think that hybrid plays an important role in the flavor of the game, representing the overlap between two colors. From a mechanical perspective, it might be a good place to put the Planar Chaos "actually, these abilities belonged in this color the whole time" abilities.
Arguing about a person's aethetic is probably a bit pointless, though if I am honest I have no interest in the aesthetics of the game state. Heck, I use proxies that look like this (see below) mixed with genuine cards when I am testing or if I don't want to pull the card from another deck. That creates a game state that looks pretty ugly to some, but works well.
I don't think stealthbadger was talking about the aesthetics of the cards, especially since he was referring to tokens; he was talking about how some people might view multicolored tokens produced by a monocolored deck as a flavor violation.
