EDH Pub-stompers

[Soren841]

Vintage and Legacy aren't turn 3 formats and cEDH decks are almost exclusively not viable strategies in other formats.

[Morganator 2.0]

cEDH decks make up level 9 and 10, which I think is a fair assessment. Judging these decks based on their turn count isn't always reliable. Proactive combo decks (Flash Hulk, Food Chain, storm decks) will try to race as fast as possible, and will only interact with other decks for the sake of protecting their game plan. Disruptive decks don't race to win as quickly as possible, but instead use removal, counterspells, and stax effects to mess up their opponents, before setting up their own win. Adaptive decks are the sort-of grey area in between. They try to switch between both tactics.

As you can probably guess, each of these types of decks win at different speeds, but they are all viable tactics for competitive commander.

As a general rule, most decks will try to threaten a win by turn 4, with many proactive decks trying to do it sooner. What's more important is the speed that these decks set themselves up. Turns 1 and 2 are your set up turns to play mana ramp, card advantage, and light stax effects. Turn 3 is when people make their big move (usually casting their commander). Turn 4 is when people try to win, or start taking steps to stop others from winning.

If you have a deck that does any of what's described, it could very well be a cEDH deck.

The problem is with rankings 8 to 1. It's pretty common (at least with me) that I have people that overrate their Atraxa, Praetors' Voice deck. They think it's a 10, because they haven't seen what a 10 deck can actually do. After someone played against my Krenko deck, they said "Yo, Krenko is one of the top 10 commanders of all time." To which I said "He's not even in the top 50".

This is probably also why I rate my decks lower than everyone else. Even though Krenko and The Scarab God are both well built, there is a massive power gap between the two decks.

[Soren841]

I'd rate Sliver Hulk a 10.. Marwyn a 9. Those are my 2 main cEDH decks

[Aetherium Slinky]

I also feel like I rate my decks lower than other people. Then again I do see some of the competitive people in my country so maybe I have a better understanding of what a cEDH deck can do.

They tried to do this 'focused' 'optimised' classification some time ago but I don't think it got any traction?

[vesstan]

In My experience the issue is combo decks. There are so many fun combos to play in edh and I love to play combos. I used to play the tawnos paradox engine deck. But there is more fun to be had when you manage to take a dozen or so turns with a convoluted board state of artifacts for the merchants dockhand to be able to find nexus of fate repeatedly. Or a multi card combo of scrap trawler, myr retriever and mindslaver to infinitely take my opponents turns. And my playgroup loved when those combos went off. The issue is 2 card combos that win turn 2. One of my players decided to build the thrasios/kydela deck. Which ran every possible tutor and revival spell with each and every combo in the simic colours. The issue is this played didn’t really read their cards and just googled the list of combos, thinking they were interchangeable. So this player for a while was able to fool us into thinking he’d won on turn 3 with any of his combos. This was fixed in 2 parts. Firstly we as a group started to monitor and read every card they played. To ensure that the combo was correct. And then secondly when this player went off we would not concede the game as his combo required him to use thrasios and sort his deck into cards and lands. This annoyed the player into destroying the deck. And unfortunately led to kess today. Which we have resorted to running banned cards to combat the combo solely to show that we as a playgroup do not enjoy those games.

I have played the bad guy in this way too. As I said I like combos. I have the anje deck and I have the greven voltron. My solution is that I make it clear when I play those decks. And play stuff like pheldagriff other games

[Marshstepper78]

I've been playing with more or less the same group of friends since Revised and we don't have to deal with people like that. I count myself lucky.

[Slyvester12]

My experience is almost opposite to Vesstan's in some ways. People I play with are fine with comboing off T3, but a Mindslaver lock would get the deck hated out immediately. With rating decks, I think the main problem is perception. I've played with people who think the precons are anything from unplayable garbage to "pretty strong." I'm not sure there's a good cure for pubstomping aside from everyone agreeing to not intentionally thrash weaker decks with their most degenerate combo experiments.

[WWolfe]

There's people at the LGS that say my Harvest Animar deck is a 9 or 10, to me it's a high 7-low 8. All depends on what you've seen or played against power wise as to what you base the ratings on.

[Blong]

There's people at the LGS that say my Harvest Animar deck is a 9 or 10, to me it's a high 7-low 8. All depends on what you've seen or played against power wise as to what you base the ratings on.

I never really got what the ratings mean lol. To me, they seem pretty arbitrary.

But going into the whole pub-stompers thing, I hate them.  I honestly do. I had a friend of mine quit commander because he got pub stomped a bunch of times and they just didnt seem to care at all.