No, I mean the game in general. You're new, take you ass kickings and get the fuck over it and stop being a bitch cause you got your ass kicked.
Let's pretend, just for a moment, that we aren't consoomers with bad impulse spending control. You spend $40 on a preconstructed deck, then you sit down next to a guy whose first two turns are:
Polluted Delta -> Underground Sea -> Vampiric Tutor / Watery Grave -> Mana Crypt -> Talisman of Dominance -> Thoracle -> Consultation -> Force of Will
There's substitutions you could do here (Sea could be any UB land, Crypt could be Dark Ritual, etc), but you don't know that as a new player. You see one guy drop several car payments to utterly crush the table on turn 2, decide that this game is expensive as shit and frankly uninteresting, and spend your time on the literally thousands of other potential card games, board games, or whatever else exist as alternatives. All because one guy who couldn't cut it in a cEDH pod wanted to pubstomp.
I learned to play in Scars limited. I was a free win well into RTR, and the first time I even top 4'd was when I got a Nicol Bolas in M13 and splashed the blue for it, something I had learned about from talking to people. Despite several years of getting stomped, not once did I feel like anyone in that arena was winning because they dropped a mortgage payment on cardboard.
It's legit that these people just don't know how to play and honestly are the reason the game is turning into faggot shit.
Do you think that it's hard to play Kinnan (fat lol) or Zirda into Monolith? Monolith into Rings? Witherbloom into Chain? Just Godo?
These combos are not complicated, hard, nor do they require any finesse. In 1v1 formats, Combo is an archetype that requires skill to pilot because your opponent is focusing entirely on you, and you will have to engage with them. Aggro is actually a viable strategy here, rather than being the exclusive realm of Edgar Markov.
In a 4-player game, you get to play solitaire until you have your combo ready, and the interaction you were holding up to stop your opponent's combo now is interaction to protect your own combo. The decisions that you make are purely about when to pull the trigger, either on your tutors or on your combo. Against good players, you read open mana for counters, shadow of doubt, opposition agent, stifle effects, etc. Against people whose decks don't cost >$300, you fire and forget and you'll win most of the time.
It's plenty possible on a budget if you quit trying to jam every 8 drop monster you think looks cool in there.
I would say that the average CMC of a budget deck is around 3.5, maybe 3. The thing is, these decks also tend to win with: combat damage, commander damage, milling the opponent, draining the opponent, etc. but don't do so with infinite combats, infinite turns, infinite sacrifices, or infinite mana. Some can go infinite, but can't afford tutors to consistently pull these off by turn 3.
Expensive, tuned decks that run shittons of tutors into multiple 2-card tutors will stomp these fair budget decks without fail. The most effective way to deal with combo, stax, is a faux-pas outside of cEDH pods, which is something that pubstompers know and take full advantage of.
The reason the people that are "good' have expensive cards in most cases is that they have been playing years to get good and just know how to use the shit.
Or, or, they look up a deck that pilots itself, and it turns out that the deck pilots itself. Go ahead - go on and tell me what's complicated about a cEDH Krark-Sakashima list.
Look, in a cEDH pod, a deck like that has to pick and choose when to fire its tutors, when to hold and use removal, and so-on, and so-on. Against decks that are clearly far less powerful, it fires and forgets and doesn't need to worry. I prefer formats where the combat step actually matters, and I don't really care to play Edric turns to pretend that swinging with unblockable 1-1s is "making use of the combat step."
*attempts Karlov Draft runs into an uncommon that shuts off the ability to flip face down cards 3 games in a row*
Watchdog? Bear in mind that's only during your opponent's turn, so you can flip while it's on the stack. It gets rid of ambush potential, but so long as you have the mana to do it, you can flip on the stack or on your own turn.
The dog itself also isn't an amazing card, with it having pretty average WR stats on
17lands (the average winrate here is not 50%, but rather around 54-55%). The fact that it eats shock and galvanize without ward definitely dings it, but it's mostly buoyed by the fact that it's in White, and that Dog Walker -> Flip & 2-drop -> Watchdog is pretty nasty. This is one of the fastest formats they've ever made, after a year of retardedly fast formats. White is also stupid fucking good in this format, there was zero reason inspector couldn't have been upshifted to uncommon. There's even less reason to print inspector at common and then to push the everloving fuck out of every white card that was under 4cmc.
That is one thing about a multiplayer format is that it is VERY hard to run as the archenemy against the entire pod.
If you're playing fair. If you care about your opponent's life totals, their commander damage, their cards in library, then playing archenemy is difficult and usually results in you dying.
If all you need to do is put the square block in the square hole and cast a two-card infinite (or, as is the case for Godo, a one-card infinite), then it really doesn't matter how many people are ganging up against you, so long as they don't all have countermagic.
Even then, I see people running Myrel in decks with 0 other soldiers specifically for her Grand Abolisher effect, so even then it might not really matter.
