#(9-4-23) What do you consider the line between casual, high power, and cEDH, and why?

190 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

finite otter
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Where do you prefer your decks to sit?

molten heart
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For me, the lines are very blurry. But I find I tend to expect out-of-nowhere infinite combo's to be mid to higher power decks. cEDH I don't have a good grasp on. I don't touch it.

But I find a lot of my decks tend to have telegraphed combos, where some of the decks I've run up against just suddenly go "I generate 10^30 treasures, play Nadier, you die"

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out of nowhere with zero build-up

royal island
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I consider cEDH just EDH without a budget, using the most optimal card for every slot, and the fastest possible win-cons.

Below that I don't have any distinction outside of tuned/themed decks with clear win-cons, or precon level that just kind of durdles and usually has multiple, overlapping, competing strategies, and almost always has swinging with creatures as it's only win-con.

hard garden
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I think the two are seperate questions

High to low power is a spectrum, and any dividing line is very very hard to place.
We've all seen someone with a deck where they just continually take out the worst card and slot in a card from the new set and look up in a few years and go "hey this isn't a low power deck anymore". It's hard to say when it became high power, and if you work backwards it's even harder to say when it stops being high power.

Casual to CEDH is about mindset though. Casual decks are built for something, a theme, a story, a joke, a love of a mechanic.
CEDH decks are built to win the game.
You can absolutely have a bad CEDH deck that isn't particularly successful, and will lose to a casual deck that's whoops all proliferate or I just love goblins ok.

It's about intent and why you built the deck and what you want the deck to achieve

finite otter
hard garden
crude viper
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I hate that my sarcastic answer is that I can finish the first draft of a cEDH list in an afternoon.

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Just because I don't have as much choice paralysis over cards there.

hard garden
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(and when I say really low I don't mean precon, I mean like beejlander bad stuff low)

crude viper
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My problem is when I build a deck I start from a "what do I want to do" with this deck and then, unless I know that thing should be cEDH I see where things shake out.

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And don't really start with a power level in mind.

crude viper
flint blade
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I think the line is drawn at mindset and intent. Casual has a mindset of I'm not concerned with picking the best possible cards, I just wanna goof off" and the intent is to be able to do your thing without stopping anyone from doing theirs intently. High power has a mind set of "I want to push the limits of deck building, and really get the best cards for what I want to be doing" and the intent is to get a reliable game plan going and have strong pay offs and turn patterns. cEDH has a mindset of "I want to play with the most powerful cards in magic at the absolute peak of player skill" and the intent is to get cutthroat and take every possible advantage to win.

I think high power I generally where I want to sit at with my decks, but I like having a few that reach into either of the other territories for the sake of it.

willow wolf
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The difference between low and mid power is when you stop assuming all the defaults (no stax, no combo, no mld, no fast mana, no tutors etc.) and when the average speed of a deck drops to a point that low power decks feel they cannot keep up. In terms of goals, the low power goal is for everyone to have a good time, and card selection and strategy is based around that.

The line between mid and high is when you stop asking or informing people about those things, and just assume that's all okay and is going to happen. The high power goal is to build a cool, powerful, reliable deck and execute on your gameplan.

High and cEDH are functionally the same thing usually just with more budget and understanding.

I like low power, very solidly. I have one high power deck.

crude viper
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I still don't know how to make it so that everyone has a good time in a game.

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There's a difference between that and making sure no one has a miserable time.

willow wolf
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The goal is for everyone to have a good time, it's not guaranteed to be effective!

crimson fable
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cedh is cedh.

casual varies person to person, but I generally stick to:
-few to no tutors
-no fast mana besides sol ring
-infinite combos require 3+ pieces and are pretty rare if they're even included.
-resource denial is generally frowned upon

high power is the most poorly defined and IMHO results in the most lopsided games and feelsbads. so I generally avoid it.

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I think high power being 'kinda like cedh but with less interaction and more inefficiency' is just... eh. don't love it.

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tbh I think even with casual ruleset, you can do very powerful and interesting things, and it's not just people bashing vanilla 10/10s into each other on turn 15. format's moved way past that these days even given the above restrictions

crimson fable
crude viper
rough reef
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The lines are pretty blurry on it but my personal lines are that casual excludes things like fast mana and tutors that aren’t in your theme (except fetchlands), high power is basically cedh mindset with worse strategies and card choices (as an example I’d consider jeska ishai prison high power as it’s control counterpart is much better) and cedh is no holds barred

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Oh, and no infinite combos in casual. Unless it’s ridiculous like 5 cards or it’s accidental

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Decks that specifically want to combo in casual is a big ick for me

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I played against a [[Merelen the mornsong]] deck that was one of those goofy “I win on turn 5 if you don’t counter this one thing I do” decks but he didn’t decide to tell us what it was, so when he did it I was wasn’t impressed, just extremely annoyed because if he was going to do that I might as wel have just watched him solitaire it rather than inject it into a real game

idle perchBOT
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No card found for “Merelen the mornsong”

rough reef
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[[The mornsong]]

idle perchBOT
crude viper
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A lot of this discussion is making me feel really self-conscious. And I know what I've said previously probably conveyed some of it. I'm sort of feeling like I should mute the conversation because of it.

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And I can hear my ex-sister in law saying "Well why are you bringing this up? Just do it."

willow wolf
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Can I ask why you feel self conscious?

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Assuming you dont want to mute?

rough reef
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I’m not trying to be rude if it’s coming across like that, just talking about my personal boundaries for the discussion topic

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I apologize if I did so

willow wolf
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Part of the point of chats like this is we often all have different boundaries, and we get to see where other peoples are and help calibrate our own

crude viper
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Just because the way I'm used to playing games with my family still runs counter to so much of what people say is casual but like 90% of my decks fit in that category.

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Part of learning to play go-fish was about figuring out how to take tricks by working out what people were collecting or what cards are likely left based on whats been shown.

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It wasn't just, asking for whatever you had.

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You were trying to remove the other player's resources.

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That was in preschool

willow wolf
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Okay, so you have played with a competitive mindset from a very young age and are used to optimising your play?

crude viper
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Yeah, but at the same time that's whether or not the game itself was based around it.

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There was this game we had called Wacky Blasters where you were trying to get a ball to the top of a plastic tower with a toy that blew air. People would try to blow you off the tower as well as their own balls.

willow wolf
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Reading between the lines, do you have trouble with the idea of pulling punches to make someone elses experience better?

crude viper
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Little bit yeah

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I still overcorrect and sandbag hard.

willow wolf
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So if you were playing with a young kid, maybe a nephew or niece, would you beat them at that game as hard as you can?

crude viper
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Based on the game I played against my niece. Yes. She won the game though.

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She was playing my husband's mono-U Braids deck.

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She was 10 or 11

willow wolf
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Even if the kid had never played the game before?

crude viper
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So, we'll play more where we talk through what's happening and our reasoning behind it

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And what we'd do to respond to it or how you could.

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But sort of, yeah.

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That's how my family, and my husbands family, both played.

rough reef
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You’re able to play no holds barred in casual, frankly casual appears more at the deckbuilding stage of the game

hard garden
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Casual tends to be more generous with takebacksies and missed triggers

crude viper
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Yeah, and that part I'm good with.

hard garden
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But yeah tbh I don't see the point of playing games where someone has the tools to win/gain significant advantage but is choosing not to

willow wolf
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If you found that an aspect of a game ruined your enjoyment of the game that you otherwise love dearly, what would you do? Stop playing the game entirely, or try to avoid the bit you hate?
Can you imagine someone doing the second?
If it helps, you can imagine a game other than Magic. Think about video games you play for example.

crude viper
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I'm thinking through that and what would actually qualify.

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The closest is probably disabling the Crimson Court expansion in Darkest Dungeon

rough reef
willow wolf
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It was a hypothetical, you don't need a concrete example of the situation

rough reef
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Always get master key and always do the new londo ruins skip

crude viper
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So, disabling if it's entirely optional. My planechase deck has been heavily edited to get rid of things that are too chaotic. Like the Eldrazi Hedron one.

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But that's more of a the "let's just play lands for 5 turns" at the start of the game is miserable.

willow wolf
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A concrete example again, I asked about a hypothetical

crude viper
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No, I get you. As I said I had to think of concrete examples first.

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But it's more of a "I can understand why people want to avoid things they don't like but this always becomes more things I wouldn't have expected."

willow wolf
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Okay, so you get why they do it but not why they do it on the particular topics?

crude viper
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Yes, as I said that's the part I was understanding of. It does sort of make me feel like I would have less stress by only playing precons for untrusted play.

willow wolf
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There is nothing wrong with only playing very high power / cEDH games

crude viper
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The majority of my games are at my LGS and, while some of us are trying to figure out game groups scheduling is a pain.

willow wolf
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Yeah, the majority of my games are at LGS's too

crude viper
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Like the last set of games I had there was the one where we had "the person who had a Nekusar deck who had been playing for like two weeks," the person with the Commodore Guff deck based around MLD, a modified version of the Eldrazi deck that now had Emrakul and me on Narci.

willow wolf
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Sounds like a high power playgroup

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Nothing wrong with that

crude viper
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I wish that was the case.

willow wolf
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What do you mean by that?

hard garden
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I haven't seen commodore Guff be particularly good tbh

rough reef
hard garden
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And depending on the nekusar build that could be anywhere from wheel and deel to some really not good stuff

crude viper
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There were disagreements on what cards did and it was the problem where there were sort of 3 Timmy griefers with different ideas of what's OK and didn't ask each other what they wanted.

hard garden
crude viper
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Nekusar was the attraction

rough reef
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I wasn’t part of that conversation

crude viper
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That was mine.

rough reef
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If I’m not talking in a chat it’s a fair bet I’m not reading it lol

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I’m not much of a lurker

willow wolf
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Ah, the mid-high power hellhole!
Where everyone has a different idea of which of the low power social norms are ignorable, and they all clash

crude viper
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And I'm sitting there being OK with all of it.

rough reef
crude viper
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And having to navigate people being upset, none of it at what I'm doing.

rough reef
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That sounds like an abysmally failed/nonexistent rule zero conversation

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Not that you were the one that failed at it of course. You being fine with anything means you actually did your part in it

crude viper
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That's part of why I say I wish it was a high powered table because they tend to be better about talking about what they want.

rough reef
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Which is interesting, you’d think it would be the other way around

crude viper
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I wish I could make people sit down and watch the Spike Feeders videos about how to have a conversation about power and what you actually want.

crimson fable
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Conflict aversion and social anxiety are big, I have those issues too

crude viper
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People also don't know about what they don't know until it happens

crimson fable
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I think modeling the behavior you want is probably the only thing you can truly control

crude viper
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But I also saw a conversation online about playing Rhystic Study in 2HG and based on some of the responses I was a monster over the weekend by playing the one I got.

crimson fable
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(It is wild to me to see rhystic go from bulk common in prophecy to the best card in edh)

rough reef
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I would’ve worked so dang hard to make it work in prophecy ngl

crude viper
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When I play precons it's funny because I see people be uncomfortable about it. I literally will tell people "I'm accepting all responsibility for my deck and knowingly go into this game understanding the limitations."

crimson fable
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Yeah not to add to the million things to worry about - sometimes I worry a deck won’t contribute enough to hold back an archenemy. Even if the pilot is okay with their own restricted toolset, it can lead to lopsided games.

willow wolf
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That's one where I would love if you can enlighten me: Whats the joy of taking a precon to a non precon game? I understand the appeal of "We all play precons and deal with the mess that is coming up" but outside of that for me its a last resort if no other possible deck fits a table.

crude viper
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No, I understand that too. I just sometimes have to because my alternative is a deck that doesn't work with someone else's (responding to godot)

rough reef
crude viper
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The last resort is the basic reason. If the option is between my Varina Shadowbag deck and my playing an unaltered precon? Sometimes the precon is the better choice.

willow wolf
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If that happens a lot, isn't it more fun to build a deck that plays at the level?

crude viper
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I just noticed I guess I wanted to play Orzhov tonight... I have Orzhov, Abzan and Esper decks with me

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There's no way to predict the level though.

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What I need to do is suggesting having seed pods

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Pauper edh is becoming more popular at my store because it's sort of being the new cEDH table.

rough reef
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Yea cPDH is a fantastic go-between when you don’t want cedh but you want the same vibe of it

crude viper
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And if we don't have enough to fire usually the deck does OK against normal decks.

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But there are enough people now we're getting to have pauper EDH events on the weekend and there's going to be one with prize support this month

rough reef
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Kiiiinda. If you’re going metabuster cPDH the decks can’t stand at all but something proactive and combo-y like tatyova can hang just fine

crude viper
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There are a lot of combo players at my LGS

rough reef
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That makes sense then

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My LGS is usually fine with combos but most if not all of us avoid specifically combo decks in non cedh

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I do wish we had some complete global scale idea of what people consider casual, high power and cedh

willow wolf
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I think threads like this partly help us try to centralise on that

rough reef
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Right, I just meant like the world votes on it or smth so we have something to point to as some kind of evidence

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But I know that’s not realistic

crude viper
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PSA shorts.

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The old films highlighting points of conflict where people may not know they exist. But entirely focused on Commander.

crimson fable
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Few combo players in my meta helps. People like to do powerful but bounded things.

crude viper
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It's not even so much combo players. It's the conflict over "my deck didn't get to do It's thing." When the thing is just winning. Whether or not it's with a combo

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And the player doesn't seem to see that's what they're saying

willow wolf
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Doing your thing, in casual, should probably be a way to win but should not necessarily be a win instantly

rough reef
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And imo it shouldn’t be the main goal but that’s just me

willow wolf
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For example, doing your thing can be generating a lot of hydra tokens (even if they get wrathed before you get to attack)

crude viper
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Yeah

crimson fable
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Yeah players being okay with losing isn’t really teachable outside of modeling that behavior imo

crude viper
idle perchBOT
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Sasaya, Orochi Ascendant <:mana1:292901508373282827><:manag:292901508654301185><:manag:292901508654301185>

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2/3

Sasaya's Essence
Legendary Enchantment
Whenever a land you control is tapped for mana, add an additional one mana of any type that land produced for each other land you control with the same name as it.

crimson fable
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The math on it is interesting. If you play a couple games a week and have about a 25% winrate it’s expected to go a couple months without winning a game now and then.

crude viper
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That's why I say it's the weird point where people know about something they want to do but then don't know the implications.

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It's sort of the "this is why EDH bans exist" area

hard garden
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I mean yeah
I've seen players at tables get frustrated because they didn't get to do anything
When what happened from everyone else's perspective is they pillowforted up for 10 turns and people tried to kill them to stop the wincon we knew was coming

crimson fable
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Yeah when a deck is trying to play a different game from everyone else don’t be surprised if it gets attacked

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Casual equivalent of always attack the naus player

hard garden
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I mean also 'i didn't get to do my thing' can be a real issue if your deck isn't actually designed to do that thing, it's designed to make it really hard for other people to stop you doing a thing/designed to kill opponents

rough reef
rough reef
# willow wolf If that happens a lot, isn't it more fun to build a deck that plays at the level...

Just want to point out to my fellow autistic/socially inept people that this is a great example of how one could help someone going through a situation or frustrated at something - just ask curiosity questions that lead them through their problem, basically getting them to answer their own question by talking them through it. It helped me to notice that during the discussion so it might help other to point it out 🙂

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Isn’t guaranteed to work but it’s a good strategy

crude viper
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Also, I wanted to say, the reason it isn't more fun for me to build for the level is because I sit for months on a pile of 150-200 cards

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While I try to figure out what's appropriate and also fun for me to play.

rough reef
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That’s fair

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So you typically build for the level of play you’re expecting rather than building expecting to match the level of others

crude viper
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Nope, I build for where the deck feels fun to play.

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Part of that includes thinking about how much interaction I want to deal with or how narrow a wincon needs to be.

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If I have a narrow wincon that needs to be protected it's skewing higher.

rough reef
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Right, that’s what the first part of my message meant I just wasn’t very clear

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I should’ve said “you’re wanting” rather than “you’re expecting” I think

crude viper
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I feel like I need to talk with my store's judge about having guidelines for Rule 0

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Because had what I thought was a good conversation and a guy who was OK with combos got angry because a person didn't say they had [[dig up]] in their deck

idle perchBOT
crude viper
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I wasn't playing it. It was an Izoni 1000 eyes deck that was maybe $40 all together

hard garden
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Is it cos it's a tutor?

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I mean I know the joke is 80% of the time it's a cheaper demonic tutor but come on

crude viper
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Yep, it's because it changes the random nature of the game.

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OTOH he decided to follow myself and my husband over Moxfield so that means I can see his lists too. And a card he loudly complained about me potentially playing was in the deck he played.

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This happened because he left for the third game and then when he came by he saw me going off with Varina and asked me how I could because his friend had told him she was impossible to keep enough cards in hand or graveyard to actually play

hard garden
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Wait so the person runs the card they complain about other people running?

crude viper
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Yep

hard garden
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I can't help but feel that complaint isn't in good faith

crude viper
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Yep

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He also had described it as mid power deck and calls it an 8 on moxfield. continues to heavily judge player

rough reef
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Sounds like that guys going to be a problem regardless of the store policy

molten heart
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^

crude viper
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I'm not talking about changing store policy.

rough reef
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I mean in reference to the rule zero stuff you were talking about

rough reef
crude viper
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Suggestions.

rough reef
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Right, that would make sense

crude viper
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I understand I can only change my behavior and try to guide only so much, but it's frustrating when I see people making assumptions about what they mean.

rough reef
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I mean to say if he deliberately lies about his power level and boo hoos about cards where he’s a hypocrite in, I doubt he’s going to care much about rule zero

crude viper
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I'm not talking about him specifically.

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And we can go to #social-contracts probably