Your controversial opinion

[WWolfe]

Cedh is infinitely better than casual and it teaches you how to actually convert cards in hand into resources like mana to actually play the game. All of edh is drawing cards and ramping to play spells.

Cedh doesn't include on average more fast mana (ie, ramp) and more card draw as a way to play their spells? 

I could argue the opposite point. A Cedh deck takes less skill to play as the deck looks to win virtually the same way every time whereas casual edh played without tutors takes more skill to play as it can win a variety of ways each game due to the nature of the singleton format.

[ApothecaryGeist]

My controversial opinion:


We do NOT need more 4-color commander.  We do NOT need any 4-color commanders at all.  Nor the partner commanders that enable 4 colors. 


Restrictions breed creativity.  the spirit of the format is to build large, creative decks.  Having access to 4, or even all 5, colors gives a builder too many options.


Commanders should be restricted to 3 colors or less.

[boncoswoll]

It's also worth mentioning that from a flavour perspective, one could argue that the "lose when no cards in library" rule makes perfect sense.

From a flavour point of view, playing a game of Magic is supposed to represent two (or more) Planeswalking wizards having a magical battle. The library is supposed to represent the individuals mind, made up of the spells they know how to cast.

It does, until you actually think about it.

Sure, my deck represents the spells I know. I can't cast anything not in my deck. That makes sense. But then, what does it mean to have four copies of a spell in my deck rather than only one? Surely, knowing more spells is better... but putting more spells in my deck is not. Rather, the power of my deck is more like the average of the spells in it.

It also doesn't explain why you would lose. So I forgot all my spells... so what? How is this different to having only five land cards left in my deck? If my board state is still sufficient that I can win, why do I even need to cast spells?

Perhaps more importantly, what then does it mean to draw cards? I no longer "know" the cards in my hand... but I can't cast them unless they are in my hand? Drawing too many cards is the same as forgetting all my spells (except I have to draw them to cast them)? They've moved into some sort of short-term memory but my lower-level brain functions have shut down?  Honestly, it makes very little sense, and that's fine because it's just a game with a bit of theming and a lot of abstraction, but in that case I don't think one should make silly game rules off the back of it.

*shrug* I may be the only person who sees it this way but, hey, you asked for unpopular opinions.

You definitely make some good points here.

From my point of view, I think there are a few things at play here.

I think a library representing a wizards mind is supposed to me more of a representation than a one to one comparison. It's more of a thematic way to explain what is going on "in universe" and doesn't need to answer every single eventuality with a concrete comparison. Playing four of a card doesn't mean "I can remember how to cast this spell exactly 4 times and once I've done that I will forget how". It's more in line with "this is a spell I am comfortable with and can cast with relative ease". If we look at it like this, I feel that it makes more sense.

I also don't think a library is supposed to represent memory, but ability. It's not a case of "what can I remember to cast" but "what do I have the ability to cast". If my opponent has driven me insane (milled me), my ability to cast spells is gone. It's not that I don't have the memory, it's that I don't have the capacity.


I kind of see it like this:


I run 4 copies of opt = I'm a wizard capable of quick thinking and decision making. I can assess my capabilities and limitations quickly to help me better find the right answer for my current situation.

I run 3 copies of Genesis Ultimatum = This is a spell I have studied extensively as I believe it will help my beat my fellow wizards. But it is harder to cast. I have to exert a lot more resources to do it.

I run a copy of Lurrus = It's a spell I've read about, but it's not key to my plan. Might come in handy one day though.



Within the context of this flavour analysis, I see drawing cards as simply thinking. If my opposing wizard has just cast a spell that summons a dragon, I need to think of what I can do about it. I might already have the answer at the forefront of my mind (in my hand). I might think of a way to kill it (draw a removal spell), think of a way to summon my own creatures to fight it (draw my own dragon spell), or might not think of anything relevant by the time it has killed me (draw nothing that helps). Again, to me it's not a case of memory, but ability, and isn't a direct one to one comparison.


I also think losing the game with 0 cards in your library is absolutely the right choice from a gameplay perspective too. Milling yourself out entirely is incredibly easy if you are trying to, and a lot of cards, decks and archetypes look to make use of a stocked graveyard. The potential to mill yourself out and lose as a result does a lot of work for balancing these kinds of decks. If you could just dump your whole library in your graveyard and not be punished for it, you'd be at a significant advantage. I see it as a similar rule to the maximum hand size rule. The game needs inherent ways to balance it, and if you want to flout those rules, you need to play specific cards to allow you to do so (for example Lab Man and Reliquary Tower respectively).

Also, I hope it comes across in my replies, but I am by no means saying that my view point is the correct one and anyone else who holds a different view point is wrong. This is just how I see it, both from a flavour and gameplay perspective. It's all personal conjecture.

[anjinsan]

Theme-wise, sure, but I don't think it makes sense to use the flavour as a reason for the rule, because once you start trying to apply the theming that strictly it breaks down. If drawing cards is thinking, drawing 100 cards should really let you come up with an answer - but before you can cast that answer you lose? It just doesn't make sense to me. Perhaps if you lost when your deck and hand were empty (though mechanically that wouldn't work because you'd just not play your last card(s)), and even then I don't really see why I would lose when I've forgotten all my spells - I'd just not be able to cast any more spells.

As for the mechanics of it, I guess I can see that, but I'm not sure that that was really a deliberate decision or that it's really necessary or sufficient. The decking rule doesn't do a whole lot to balance graveyard-type strategies in most cases and, as I said, does it in a "cliffhanger" sort of way which personally I don't really like; it's a very all-or-nothing effect which doesn't at all curb those strategies until they just lose.

[ApothecaryGeist]

The fact that there were cards in Alpha that made the opponent draw cards (like Ancestral Recall and Braingeyser) show to me that the possibility to mill out the opponent was considered legitimate from the very beginning of the game.

The original text of these cards even say "force opponent to draw", which kinda tells me that they knew it could be a "bad" thing for your opponent in some situations.

I don't see the rule of losing when you have 0 cards in your deck as any more "random" than the rule of losing when you have 0 life. They are just two different ways you can lose the game.

As someone who was playing back then ... you're giving "they" and "them" an awful lot of credit. 


"They" were Richard Garfield and a group of four or five of his friends who playtested the game.  That's it.  Each game piece was intended to be as flexible as possible as the target market was RPGers.  (In person play, as the internet was barely a thing prior to 1993.)


I can also say that in 1993 the concept of losing a card game when your deck ran out of cards was quite novel.  The expectation for card games at the time is that you play to a specific endpoint.  If you run out of cards before that, you just shuffle up the discard pile and keep going.  Alternatively some games would make an empty deck an endpoint, but you would score the game at that point.  Either player could still win. 


Draw from an empty deck equals game loss was a very new concept.  As such there was a lot of discussion about it at the time.  The story was that during playtesting, the game would come to a stall on a not infrequent enough basis.  So this was their solution.  The entire concept exists just to make the game eventually end in the early days.


So did they know that you would want to end the game by Brainstorm-ing your opponent.  Maybe?   They also wanted all the cards to be as modular as possible.  Maybe not? 


It's very hard to discern the intent from the early cards.  Standard templating was almost non-existent.  Each card was worded on its own merits.  And this was a time when Ante was still very much a part of the game.

[Potato Chop]

Perhaps if you lost when your deck and hand were empty (though mechanically that wouldn't work because you'd just not play your last card(s)), and even then I don't really see why I would lose when I've forgotten all my spells - I'd just not be able to cast any more spells.

As for the mechanics of it, I guess I can see that, but I'm not sure that that was really a deliberate decision or that it's really necessary or sufficient. The decking rule doesn't do a whole lot to balance graveyard-type strategies in most cases and, as I said, does it in a "cliffhanger" sort of way which personally I don't really like; it's a very all-or-nothing effect which doesn't at all curb those strategies until they just lose.

*sighs*

I have a story for you, sir.

Once, I was a noob. I didn't know about the draw death rule, and neither did my opponent. We were both really bad at the game with a half-cooked understanding, but we knew how to cast spells and do combat. That was basically it. We were using the free "welcome decks" that game stores hand out to get people hooked, and we were having a good time. The only problem was that there were no board wipes and very limited removal in those decks, and it got to the point when there was no reason for either of us to attack, because whoever attacked first would just lose a bunch of creatures on the other person's blocks, and then die on the crackback.

We ran out of cards in our decks, neither of us were attacking, and there were no cards in our hands, and no activated abilities on our creatures to sink mana into. It was hell. The game ended in a draw (no pun intended) because we were sick of sitting there and just passing the turns to each other.

Frankly, it doesn't matter if you don't think that the flavor of it makes sense. The function and the flavor agree with the "draw death" rule, and it would be painful if games like the one described above could happen in professional Magic. Personally, I love boncoswoll's explanation of the flavor and think it makes complete sense. If you won't agree with that, then you should at least agree that the stale nature of a card game with no cards in it is worth avoiding with a useful rule such as this.

But in the end, this whole thread is about controversial opinions! So, I do not look down on you. Your opinion is as valid as anyone else's, and if you choose not to agree with mine, that's okay with me.

EDIT: The noble ApothecaryGeist posted just seconds before I did, so this might seem like a copy-post. I assure you, it is not: Two people thinking the same thing is just further consolidation of our shared opinion.

[anjinsan]

Honestly, I don't see why a draw isn't the right outcome for that situation.

I have a similar but different story from when I'd just started Magic, which perhaps influenced my own opinion on the matter. I was playing essentially a lifegain vs lifegain deck matchup on Arena. Then suddenly I lost. I had no idea why. Looking back, I assume I ran out of cards, but nobody had ever told me that this was a rule and I'd just assumed that it wasn't, because why would you have such a rule? I honestly hadn't really thought about it, but I think had some vague idea that you'd just shuffle your discard pile back in, like in Dominion or something (I now realise that this has its own problems, primarily lands). This was also a pretty bad feeling for a new player!

The "it's necessary to the end the game" line is also bogus. I don't think you need that in most cases - these matchups are fairly unusual, and a draw makes perfect sense. Chess by the way has the same problem and they just have a three-ply repetition rule. It also doesn't actually solve the problem - there are plenty of reshuffle effects, so it's still possible for a game to go on forever (in fact, it's mathematically impossible to determine even whether a game will end, in general). I hadn't considered the case of new players so much, I guess; those won't deliberately be building decks to go on forever, which you kinda have to do. It still feels like, at best, an ugly hack - to me, anyway. As I said, a surprising number of people seem to disagree with me. 

[boncoswoll]

Honestly, I don't see why a draw isn't the right outcome for that situation.

I have a similar but different story from when I'd just started Magic, which perhaps influenced my own opinion on the matter. I was playing essentially a lifegain vs lifegain deck matchup on Arena. Then suddenly I lost. I had no idea why. Looking back, I assume I ran out of cards, but nobody had ever told me that this was a rule and I'd just assumed that it wasn't, because why would you have such a rule? I honestly hadn't really thought about it, but I think had some vague idea that you'd just shuffle your discard pile back in, like in Dominion or something (I now realise that this has its own problems, primarily lands). This was also a pretty bad feeling for a new player!

The "it's necessary to the end the game" line is also bogus. I don't think you need that in most cases - these matchups are fairly unusual, and a draw makes perfect sense. Chess by the way has the same problem and they just have a three-ply repetition rule. It also doesn't actually solve the problem - there are plenty of reshuffle effects, so it's still possible for a game to go on forever (in fact, it's mathematically impossible to determine even whether a game will end, in general). I hadn't considered the case of new players so much, I guess; those won't deliberately be building decks to go on forever, which you kinda have to do. It still feels like, at best, an ugly hack - to me, anyway. As I said, a surprising number of people seem to disagree with me. 

I 100% agree with you that this rule is not intuitive in the slightest. It is so far removed and different from how most games handle this scenario that it is very jarring when you first come across it.

Similarly to a lot of people, my first interaction with this rule came about when I was relatively new to the game. My friends and I were playing some casual kitchen table magic and I happened to get through my entire deck. None of us new what the ramifications were of this. We assumed you'd either shuffle everything back in or just stop being able to draw new cards, so we searched for the answer and nope. Turns out I lose. Cool.

That said, it being so unconventional is partly why I love it as a rule. Magic in general is a game that comes under a relative amount of criticism due to its archaic rulings. Resource management is the big sticking point here. A lot of newer games handle resources in far more graceful and intuitive ways that Magic does, and we've all been in situations where we've been mana screwed. But I love this aspect of the game. I love that no matter how well my deck is built, variance always plays a part and I am never guaranteed for that not to happen. For me, these little quirks leftover from the early days that are too ingrained in the game to ever be changed give the game so much character and give us so much insight into the games history and growth that I love them, even if they are weird or counterintuitive.

I also like the "can't draw you lose" rule as it makes things like Mill and Lab Man viable win conditions. Variety is the spice of life as they say, and being able to close out games in ways other than combat is only a good thing in my opinion. Magic as a game is often praised for being inherently well balanced (as a set of rules, not talking about individual busted cards here). Every archetype has strengths and weaknesses. If you were never in danger of being milled out, suddenly things like life gain become incredibly more powerful (obviously there are other ways to beat life gain decks too, this is just and example).

I personally think that having the game result in a draw would feel more like an ugly hack. I would feel incredibly unsatisfied as a player playing games that ended in a draw after what would likely have ended up being a prolonged and extensive game. I like that there are consequences to this kind of game, and even when games devolve into "who is going to draw themselves out of the game first", I find that kind of race as equally exciting and fun as the race to reduce life totals to zero. Again, this is just me though. I'm not trying to convince others to agree with me, just enjoying the conversation.

[Bonethousand]

That said, it being so unconventional is partly why I love it as a rule. Magic in general is a game that comes under a relative amount of criticism due to its archaic rulings. Resource management is the big sticking point here. A lot of newer games handle resources in far more graceful and intuitive ways that Magic does, and we've all been in situations where we've been mana screwed. But I love this aspect of the game. I love that no matter how well my deck is built, variance always plays a part and I am never guaranteed for that not to happen. For me, these little quirks leftover from the early days that are too ingrained in the game to ever be changed give the game so much character and give us so much insight into the games history and growth that I love them, even if they are weird or counterintuitive.

I play a lot of tabletop games, but admittedly Magic is the only TCG I've really invested time into, aside from Pokemon when I was a lot younger. The one thing that has made for the most enjoyable gaming experiences, in my opinion, is clearly defined parameters and expectations. I love that Magic has a pretty much guaranteed, definitive end to every game. There are only some niche scenarios that I've ever seen where a game has truly ended in a draw, and they're so one sided in who initiated the situation that we usually consider that person the loser (e.g. establishing an infinite loop with no win con). These parameters definitely inhibit "ideal" gameplay of pure strategizing and lead to frustrations, but I think it's these warts (and all) that are indicative of the true success of the overall game: having to come up with creative solutions to combat these limitations and the variance it fosters.

[anjinsan]

Magic doesn't have a clearly-defined end state; games of Magic can literally go on forever. It's arguable that it has the least guaranteed end of any game ever.

I'm not sure I buy that decking is a necessary counter to lifegain decks. Mill isn't even considered a serious strategy most of the time, and I don't think that lifegain decks are super-powerful in all other conditions. I'm all for rock-paper-scissors type setups, but I don't think anyone says we need infect or poison for that same reason.

[Korlich]

Commander games are long enough to allow mill, infect and commander damage as alternative wincons. Also lifegain needs to have reasonable answer.