Your controversial opinion

[Aetherium Slinky]

I think infect has a very divided fan base. Some hate it, some love it. There doesn't seem to be a consensus except that people feel strongly about the camp they're in. So the "unpopular opinion" can go either way as far as I can tell.

[Morganator 2.0]

Most of my controversial takes are very heavy stuff that could be entire discussions on their own. If you're really interested... I'll think about it. For now, some of the lighter stuff.

...

I also think the alphabet is in the wrong order, but that's this whole other thing.

I'd like to hear more about both of these.

The alphabet one is this quick thing. I think the letters should be ordered by their frequency in the english language. You do the six vowels first (including "Y") and then all the consonants, and they're ordered by how often they show up. The current order of the alphabet is completely arbitrary. The new order should be:

E A O I U Y T N S R H D L C M F W G P B V K X Q J Z

The other topics I'm still on the fence about. Deckstats has shown itself to have a mature group of users, so I certainly have higher hopes of a quality discussion here as opposed to anyone else. Still, there are always risks to sharing opinions online, and these are truly controversial, so there's no going back once they're posted.

I'll probably do them over the next week as their own topics. The first one is a conspiracy hypothesis of mine, so it will be the least controversial. The second one is on a touchy subject so I hope that everyone can be respectful about it. The third one is the worst, which I might not do depending on how the other two go.

[WizardSpartan]

The alphabet one is this quick thing. I think the letters should be ordered by their frequency in the english language. You do the six vowels first (including "Y") and then all the consonants, and they're ordered by how often they show up. The current order of the alphabet is completely arbitrary. The new order should be:

E A O I U Y T N S R H D L C M F W G P B V K X Q J Z

That's a cool idea. Only problem is that the frequency of letters would change over time, right? Certain words fall out of use, new words are introduced, etc. so the ordering of letters would have to change, which would be a major pain for alphabetizing, learning the language, etc.

[Bonethousand]

E A O I U Y T N S R H D L C M F W G P B V K X Q J Z

I hate that this still works to the tune of Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star

[Elan Morin Tedronai]

The English alphabet is based on the Latin alphabet, which is foundation of all Germanic and Romance languages. From all I can speak English, French, Portuguese and Dutch with the daughter language Africans. I'm not good with Italian, Spanish, German and any Scandinavian language as they're pretty similar. Bulgarian alphabet? Bulgaria invented the Cyrillic alphabet as written in Wikipedia and widely known by educated people I believe all over the world. So, all other languages that use it owe us "Language and Alphabetic Foundation". All? Russia, Mongolia, Kazakhstan and all other former Soviet republics as Belarus and Ukraine, albeit that Belarusian language can hardly be described as a language at all, but mere Russian with some variation. I am not good however with Russian speaking itself. I can understand Mongolian "gibberish", for real, but Russian is a weak point. Also the Kazakh language is "армаган юмлурган кольнктюруан" and hardly to believe I can understand it as well, but I am not good with grammatical cases in Russian and I can speak modestly well, but so most educated Bulgarians, and many Russian philologists or with classes at Sofia University can speak way better than me. It's great language. А Б В Г Д Е Ж З И Й К Л М Н О П Р С Т У Ф Х Ц Ч Ш Щ Ъ ь Ю Я. That's our Alphabet. We invented it way back in 9th century. Mongolia conquered the world for it. Toktai came for it. But before that Kiev Russia came with the Varyaz, had wars with Bulgaria and exchanged and traded but took the alphabet as well. For which they're going with generational in Slavonic and Alphabetic from the Balkan Kingdom or Princedom Bulgaria. The Russians have "мяхкий знак" (ы) and Ë (ë). Their only umlaut/diaresis. Like (йо/yo). But most of their general dictionary is directly taken from Bulgarian, however the grammatical cases are killing it for me as Bulgarian language doesn't have any grammatical cases, but many educated Bulgarians can speak it very well. Enough with the lecture.

I think about Infect and such abilities as Poison and Wither, that they could be easily confused with one another in a Proliferate deck, but I don't think that most people here in Bulgaria play them on EDH table. Poison is the worst in my opinion. It kills you for sure no matter what and on FNM it was disaster for me, but at other points I have turned the tide. And I have to agree that these abilities are underpower in EDH, but they have presence in Modern.

Back to the topic: I can only want to disallow the usage of Eldrazi in FNMs. It just kills the game for me and other Tribal players. I can hardly scramble for a win at the event. Therefore, I haven't been at any event also owing to the pandemic. I am also lazy a bit and Fridays pass and go, so I hope and suppose to go at the end of the year, p'haps? My mother is in Bulgaria for several weeks and I doubt that I'll frequent in the next couple of events. Don't know. Hopefully, I'll go at the Crimson Moon days.
Regards:
Chavo

[anjinsan]

Mill is a perfectly fine strategy and totally not a feel bad. Actually, I play a lot of graveyard decks so... Keep them mill decks coming 

Funnily enough, my apparently-unpopular opinion is that mill is the worst thing ever. Not just because it's "feelbad" and makes for unfun play patterns (it does), but because I just think the decking rule makes no sense. The idea that trying to draw a card should lose you the game seems completely random to me (particularly given that in most formats, there is no limit on deck size!), and the fact that this weird oddity then became a semi-feasible wincon is particularly galling. It's like, why didn't someone say "oh, ha, yes, you can win with Millstone, that was a really stupid oversight of us when we wrote the rules, let's go and fix that or at least not keep printing mill cards"?

Apparently, not many other people agree with me. They tend to say things like "well, it's necessary to stop the game going on forever!" (which obviously makes no sense). It literally makes me want to quit Magic and find a game with less stupid rules!

That, and it's super un-fun because it's almost completely separate to everything else about Magic (doesn't synergise with most things, rarely countered, easy to counter but rare enough that you don't usually bother, etc - just like poison, by the way) which is just in general bad game design.

[anjinsan]

I don't understand why CEDH is a thing. Just play Modern or Legacy (Vintage if you are that lucky).

I don't understand why so many people strive towards CEDH levels. EDH used to be a casual format, some how it rarerly is any more.

I half agree. My own controversial opinion is that EDH is cEDH, because playing cEDH-style is legal by the EDH rules and just more effective. If you want EDH to be what EDH is "supposed" to be, you need to change its rules so that it actually is. Honestly, I think they should just split the format. Then again, EDH would probably need a really big ban list to satisfy me... 

[Shelkin]

The only thing controversial about infect is how badly infect players take it when the game turns into 3 on 1. Two weeks ago I literally had an infect player start swearing when I showed my hand to the player next to me who was at 6 infect on turn 4 and said "I have two options to wreck captain infect, which do you prefer?"

[The Golgari Guy]

Mill is a perfectly fine strategy and totally not a feel bad. Actually, I play a lot of graveyard decks so... Keep them mill decks coming 

Funnily enough, my apparently-unpopular opinion is that mill is the worst thing ever. Not just because it's "feelbad" and makes for unfun play patterns (it does), but because I just think the decking rule makes no sense. The idea that trying to draw a card should lose you the game seems completely random to me (particularly given that in most formats, there is no limit on deck size!), and the fact that this weird oddity then became a semi-feasible wincon is particularly galling.

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.

[boncoswoll]

Mill is a perfectly fine strategy and totally not a feel bad. Actually, I play a lot of graveyard decks so... Keep them mill decks coming 

Funnily enough, my apparently-unpopular opinion is that mill is the worst thing ever. Not just because it's "feelbad" and makes for unfun play patterns (it does), but because I just think the decking rule makes no sense. The idea that trying to draw a card should lose you the game seems completely random to me (particularly given that in most formats, there is no limit on deck size!), and the fact that this weird oddity then became a semi-feasible wincon is particularly galling.

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.

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's why so many card draw/cantrip spells are themed around concentration and clearing the mind and why so many mill cards are themed around insanity. Mill is your way of confusing your opponent, unraveling their mind,  so that they can't access the spells they know. If your library is empty, so is your mind. You have nothing left to cast, so you lose the battle.

Obviously this role playing aspect of the game doesn't mean anything in modern competitive magic, but it makes sense when you consider how old the rule is and how much more of a thing the flavour representation was back then.

[WWolfe]

I agree with the comment about needing more four color commanders. I'd love to have access to a WUBR zombie commander with a zombie-centric effect where I could really grind out some zombie mayhem. To finally have access to adding the red Nehebs, Anathemancer,  and Dreadhorde Twins to Corpse Knight, Grimgrin, Gray Merchant, and the rest. Oh man. Talk about heaven! 

I know, I'm practically the only one that thinks this. I don't care. Infect is great.

I love infect. Just like Commander damage, it is a valid win condition. I use to love suiting my Daxos of Meletis up with Grafted Exoskeleton, another buff or two, and swinging for lethal.

[The Golgari Guy]

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's why so many card draw/cantrip spells are themed around concentration and clearing the mind and why so many mill cards are themed around insanity. Mill is your way of confusing your opponent, unraveling their mind,  so that they can't access the spells they know. If your library is empty, so is your mind. You have nothing left to cast, so you lose the battle.

Obviously this role playing aspect of the game doesn't mean anything in modern competitive magic, but it makes sense when you consider how old the rule is and how much more of a thing the flavour representation was back then.

Wounderfully explained.

The part about the importance of flavor makes me think about the playtest version of Swords to Plowshares, which stated that a creature would "take up farming"

[anjinsan]

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'm dubious of this. It seems more likely that those were intended to be used on yourself and were just written more permissively, either by accident or "just in case". There are, after all, punishing effects. Very early mill cards seemed more like anti-scry or anti-tutor than anything. You may be right, of course; that was well before my time. It wouldn't improve my estimation of it... in fact, it being a deliberate decision seems worse. 

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.

It is, because lowering someone's like to 0 is very much the aim. More life is good, less life is bad. Your deck is completely different; in every other situation, drawing cards is good. It's not even like a punishing effect (like Nekusar) because a) it's the normal rules of the game and b) it creates a cliffhanger scenario, where drawing cards is good until, suddenly, you lose. A cliffhanger scenario is potentially interesting, but usually just makes for bad gameplay.

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.

[robort]

Ummm... unpopular opinion... I will go into a complete category of the "you can't" cards. Everything from MLD, Stax, Tax, and anything in between. Cards that don't allow you to do a normal game of magic. The cards that make you think "F@%k" when they come into play. I personally don't mind them if they come into play. However there has to be a strategy as to why you are playing them compared to just playing them for smite or just because you think they are cool. Some of these strategies are indeed to slow your opponents down. Just how slow though do you need to slow them down? I would think there is an unwritten rule to what the general consensus to how long a commander game should be. If it is continually going beyond the consensus then you should re-evaluate your strategy.

[pizzacat]

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.