Im curious, why is a ban for cEDH that doesn't affect "regular" EDH so bad. What does it matter?
Yeah this is exactly my thinking.
Flash isnt really played in casual EDH. There are better ways to give your creatures (and other spells)
flash. RIP
Prophet of Kruphix. You can run
vedalken Orrery,
leyline of anticipation,
alchemist's refuge,
winding canyons, I think a new vivian and some others I'm sure that are better than the one shot effect of
flash. So banning
flash doesnt help cEDH, but
hinder casual play, it just helps cEDH.
I saw a post that I really liked, and I wanted to quote it because I do agree with it a lot, but at the same time, this isn't the intention of the EDH ban list, but I think that is a conversation that needs to be had. Okay, so I'll post Soren's post.
The entire point of a banlist is competitive. You can't say your format is solely casual and also have a banlist. I think the banlist should 100% be based around cEDH, because of the house rules thing. cEDH doesn't use house rules, and casual does. Therefore all bannings should be made for cEDH and casual tables can do whatever they want.
While I like this idea, there are some problems. We need to have a baseline, so when I invite Todd from school over for magic, I don't need to give him a printout of the 2 dozen cards that are house banned. Then poor Todd needs to change his decks to comply with our rules and potentially change them again if he wants to play in another pod. Also, the ban list has saved my ass. I was the first to drastically ramp up the power levels of our decks in the playgroup. building a decent Urza deck when it was released, and after the first night of playing him, there was a consensus that
Winter Orb and
Static Orb should be banned. Our strict adherence to the ban list stopped this, but if we were making our own ban list, then this absolutely would have happened, but now Urza doesn't completely stomp their faces in, in fact, it is no where close to a guaranteed win anymore. (I still get groans from
Winter Orb,
Static Orb,
Back to Basics and
Mana Maze. Surprisingly not
Mana Web.)
So why do cEDH players object to breaking off into their own format with a banlist that will work for cEDH and people managing the format who will listen to the player base and make decisions specifically for the good of cEDH?
If you see some of my other posts, some even in this thread I believe, I thought like this, but as Morganator said, not everyone wants to play cEDH, they just want the best chance of winning. These are the people that make nearly cEDH level decks without realizing it so they can
smash the crap out of their playgroups (guilty, but I've gotten better). The formats I know are Modern, Standard, Legacy, Vintage and EDH along wiith most of its variants. This frontier, pioneer stuff is new and i have no clue what they are, so I'll disregard them, but looking at the 5 that I am familiar with, they all have, as you mentioned, distinctly different card pools. They are all (except commander) competitive. The formats aren't defined by competitiveness, except for commander, again. Imagine being poor (don't have to, living it) and deciding to build a budget modern deck to play against your friend. When you say modern, you really just mean you are using the modern card pool and ban list. So you can make a poor person's modern deck that won't be competing at even FNMs, but are fun for you and your friend. It is still modern. It is the same thing for commander. cEDH is still EDH, but really with just a higher budget and more optimized decks.
We worry that it would just be a bandaid over a deeper wound and that we would all end up in the same position again in six months or a year.
This quote has been bothering me. I am not sure how to explain it, but I'll do my best to put it into words. I don't want to say that "bandaids" don't exist for these kinds of problems, but a solution is a solution. So first I want to discuss the difference between options and solutions. We have several options, ban
flash, separate EDH and cEDH and do nothing are the big 3. Now I think an option becomes a solution when it solves the problem without making matters worse, but the problem, I don't think is clearly defined, so I will define it as best I can.
I am struggling a little bit here, so please help me out. This is what I have:
The printing of
Thassa's Oracle makes a
Flash Hulk pile that is nearly immune to disruption outside of stifling the
Protean Hulk trigger. While powerful, what makes the combo broken is the ability to
Flash out
Protean Hulk as early as turn 1 and go off and win before anyone has even played a land.
So the options again are, ban
Flash, separate EDH and cEDh and do nothing. Let's add a fourth, ban Oracle.
Judging from the cEDH and even EDH communities' responses to the issue, I don't think doing nothing and separating EDH and cEDH are solutions because these cause too many problems. In the case of the former,
backlash from the communities, and in the case of the latter, well just read the subreddits. So we have ban
Flash or ban
Thassa's Oracle. Either of these options could be considered a bandaid I guess, but sometimes all you need for a
flash wound (hahaha see what I did there) is a bandaid. Sorry, I just really want to fit that in. But back to my statement, "A solution is a solution." I think either of these solves the problem, so now it is a matter of picking the least worst one, which in 2016, turned out to be Donald Trump. I think the choice is simple.
Flash just pushes
Protean Hulk over the edge as it defeats the entire downside of having to get 7 mana. You are getting 6 mana worth of cards for 2 mana.
Okay so this last part was probably hard to follow, I digressed a lot and deleted stuff to digress less, and I think it makes sense, but I'm kind of confused in my head now, happens a lot. So the point was that doing nothing is an option, but not a solution, and banning
Flash, while maybe being a bandaid, is the best/least worst option here. Maybe a bandaid is all we need, maybe this is the cure, maybe its poison, but it is not as poisonous as the other options.
Before I confuse anyone further, I am ending my post.