Is there a variant of Commander that doesn't take 4 fucking hours where the entire gameplay is everyone racing like sedated snails to set up some big autistic combo to fuck everyone else over and win through autism alone? Or is that just how it is?
You either get a different playgroup, or you stop giving a shit about the feelings of autists and you run fair stax pieces that punish greedy combos and solitaire-players.
In my take there's 3 distinct levels of play: casual, competitive, and 'tuned.' You shouldn't see retarded solitaire combos in casual play, but you should expect it in tuned play. You either need to be able to utterly annihilate combo players by flooding the board early and killing their ass, or you need to run Arcane Laboratory or Drannith Magistrate effects to shut them down. Combo players in CEDH pods run interaction, because they actually expect to have to play the game.
Combo players in 'tuned' tend to run absolutely zero interaction, and they instead rely on being insufferable, whiny bitches the moment that you target them to rattlesnake-whinge at you: they intentionally abuse the social contract, because they're the primary source of whining about land destruction, discard, counters, and stax... which are all the primary counters to greedy combos. People say casuals whinge about this shit - nowhere near as much as shitty combo players.
My main commander deck is Ghalta of course.
Ghalta rules. There are a lot of budget lists that are surprisingly strong, because as it turns out being able to cheat both on mana and on commander tax is wicked good.
If you're struggling with combo, figure out what the combo is and what breaks it.
Titania's Song annihilates dockside loops and treasure faggots.
Viridian Revel similarly shits on treasure players.
Damping Sphere fucks with solitaire-storm and Ghalta's cost-reduction effect can offset the symmetry of it.
Choke is completely kosher if someone is running thoracle outside of a CEDH pod.
Emerald Dragon's adventure is one of the few ways in mono-green to shit on combo specifically as well without breaking the bank.
Green Slime is also madly underrated for its ability to do this, though it's more restrictive.
Heroic Intervention is one of the few cards I'd call a staple, since combo-solitaire players will often try to pressure other people at the pod to use board wipes on you, and novice players don't tend to grasp how easy it is to win with a 2-card infinite. If you can turbo out mana,
Nullstone Gargoyle is fun tech because removal-free solitaire players literally can't get it off the board. Those who say green lacks board wipes aren't being entirely honest, as
Oblivion Stone,
Disk,
Boompile, and
Perilous Vault all work just as well in G as they do in colorless.
Not of This World feels like an auto-include in Galta to me.
This set is really bad, but it's stupid easy to draft.
Eh, every set of the last 5 years has been pretty easy: figure out the most-aggressive color pair, force it for the first month, then swap to the second-most aggressive for the second month, and the third-most aggressive for the final one. Do this all while avoiding the designated 'bad' color. So here it's been WR->WG->UR. Obviously, what bombs you get will in part sway or pivot you, but there's a reason people try to splash Izoni or Rakdos instead of committing full-throttle to black, which as a color sucks shit in this format. Just as it was the worst by a country mile in LCI.
I regularly compete with a vorinclex and Toxrill on turn 1, while the resident blue player is looking to go infinite on turn 3. I play a Jhoira weather captain cheerios and try to mill myself out on turn 2 or 3 and blow them out with aetherflux reservoir or thassa's oracle.
Sounds like a cEDH meta. However, if everyone is playing at that power-level, there's way less whining in competitive pods than there are in casual, because people will realize that even if t1 vorinclex is annoying as shit, homie had to have ritual or a mox + entomb + reanimate to get it going, and now that swords-to-plowshares is a 3-for-1.
But most people they don't care about her or the jank cards that could work, they only care about making a casual format into a competitive one.
I mean, if they can't compete in the actually competitive formats, where else would they go?
But it's sortof like. The issue isn't so much cEDH players, who just want to optimize everything because they're autistic. They tend to stick to their own pods, and if wizards stopped upping the power level, it isn't like they'd give a shit. They aren't the issue, and they aren't why wizards keeps printing all this shit. Casual players don't want all this shit printed into commander, either, because... they don't play enough to actually make use of it.
Seriously: if you play maybe 3 times a month (which is a generous estimate even then), why would you care that there's 80,000 new options for commanders in each set release? And when you look at how many hoops you have to jump through with 90% of the commanders... gee, maybe the reason the Ur-Dragon has been one of the most popular commanders ever for a long fucking time is because it's retard-easy to build and pilot, as opposed to shit like the new
Kellan.
No, the reason there's 80,000 commander product releases a year is because retarded autists with spending addictions who literally cannot stop themselves from buying product want to shitstomp new players, and sometimes they lose. Those are the ones who have like 30 commander decks that all have a full suite of shocks and fetches and whatever, who refuse to use proxies because it makes them "better," who shit themselves and chimp out in public if they ever lose or get targeted by removal when they have an infinite on-board. The "I never get to have fun" retards. The second a Trouble In Pairs drops, they're buying 50 copies to shove into all of their W-including decks, because they sure as shit don't have families they could be spending that credit card debt on.
