Magic the Gathering XXII: Where Puns Go to Die

[Tvtyrant]

Who plays mill in commander :P? I kid, but they only 'turn off' mill decks who have no means to instant-speed exile cards from graveyards and those decks are basically dead weight anyways. If someone runs a mill deck against me that can't remove my cards from GY at instant speed, I win regardless of whether I have a titan in my deck or not, because there's so many shuffle effects out there now, many with other reasons for running them.

New Ulamog is certainly a powerful card, that I will agree with. But commander is a multiplayer format. In a 2 player format, 2 vindicates and a darksteel colossus is great. Of course in a 2 player format, good luck getting to 10 mana to cast that :P. In multiplayer though, you've spent 1 of your cards to remove 2 of your opponents and you force one of them to use a good removal spell on it. You're down one card, your opponents are down 3 of high quality (presumably). That's good, but it's hardly impressive compared to the other shenanigans you can pull in commander. Ulamog is basically a 1-for-1 in a 4 player game. Nothing wrong with 1-for-1s, but you can do a lot better (especially for that much mana).

I run New Ulamog in my Eldrazi deck. He's good, but I don't expect to win any game I cast him in. He'll come down, get answered by an opponent, and we'll move one with me having gained a slight advantage. Or my opponents will be so worn down by other threats that they won't be able to answer Ulamog and I'll win, in which case literally any threat would have done the job, he just happened to be the last one.

I don't play multiplayer, and I don't think multiplayer players are the ones complaining about the problems with the game TBH. Commander gets cards printed specifically for it, and essentially a third wheel to limited and constructed.

I play Legacy Post. I hard cast Ullamogs all day long :P

[Ninjaman]

Guess I should have said 'Eldrazi titan design'.

Eldrazi titans warp whatever deck they're in by sheer virtue of doing more work than every other card in the deck.

Most decks can't even play eldrazi titans since they cost so much. In the decks that do play them of course a lot of them center around them, since they're the big win conditions your deck is centered around.

"Dude in our playgroup built Sheoldred Commander. A commander that is graveyard centric in a deck that was graveyard centric. He tossed in an eldrazi titan because why not, right? Guess which card kept winning him games? Even though it had counter synergy to the whole deck AND the commander?
If you guessed the eldrazi titan then you win the prize. "

How come none of you were able to deal with it? I think you did something wrong. A friend of mine has a mono green ramp (nissa as commander) stuffed with huge eldrazis, and it's a good deck, but not the best in the playgroup and by no means unbeatable.

Once, a long long time ago, power creep was resisted by the magic creative teams as a destructive force to tge game itself.
Now its been accepted as some sort of unavoidable consequence, part of the cost of doing the business of gaming.

I think you've let your nostalgia get the better of you.
The creatures now are better than they used to be, the spells are worse. That's not really power creep, that's a shift in balance.

They literally offloaded the blame for overpowered card design onto the playerbase claiming that we won't buy cards unless they print strictly-better-than versions of old cards.

Where have they done that?
Also, what is wrong with strictly better versions of existing cards? There are plenty of cards that are too weak
Strictly better Savannah Lion, Jackal Pup and Watch Wolf were printed in theros, all of the cards had previously been some of the best cards at what they did, and none of the strictly better reprints even made an impact outside of standard. That's because Magic used to be designed with spells being much more powerful than creatures, and that has shifted.

TLDR: Strictly-better-than combined with too-many-anilities is what I would describe 'Eldrazi titan design' to be.

I don't think any of the eldrazi titans are strictly better than probably any card in the game, except perhaps some dumb vanilla common that no one has ever played in constructed.
Also, how do they have too many abilities, the titans either have annihilator plus maybe one other keyword, and then a cast trigger, or an ability instead of annihilator. They do two things:
1 they're big beaters with some amount of protection, and some amount of evasion.
2 they each do one other thing (draw cards, shoot stuff, manipulate turns).
That's not actually that much.

I could ask you why your group hasn't had Eldrazi titans in search/sacrifice shells wreck face? But I won't because as you said, 'Dies to removal' arguements are silly.

I have, the guy with the mono green ramp deck has wrecked our faces with eldrazis, but not more often than we wreck his face with other stuff, usually less.
And his deck isn't good because it plays dumb eldrazis that just win when you play them. It's good because it keeps slamming them onto the battlefield and hope the opponent runs out.

The Eldrazi titans were an example. The earliest major example (aside from what? JMS and Blightsteel?) of just infuriatingly overpowered, over-abilitied cards.

Once again, how is Blightsteel over-abilitied?
It's a huge indestructible dude, that kills in one swing. That is super simple.

Actually many of the "overpowered" cards are pretty simple:
Tarmogoyf
Griselbrand
Elesh Norn
Birthing pod
Splinter twin
And so on..

Don't get me wrong, there are much simpler, more overpowered, undercosted, and newer cards.

Without examples you're not really making much on an argument.

There are a couple of Kaladesh block artifacts that, though they were fun for a while, our group will be mainboarding Tranquility and similar to deal with in the near future.

I hope not, since Tranquility only destroys enchantments, and is pretty awful at it at that.
There are cards, cheap ones too, that will sometimes require answers, that's some of what makes magic interactive.
It seems most of your issue is just with cards doing something good.

But those are a mana cost issue, a simpler miscalculation than dumping a bunch of superpowers on a single card and calling it a day.

Once again, they don't have a bunch of powers, most of them do one or two things.

[tgva8889]

Can we get a new thread before further discussion?

[Androgeus]

Can we get a new thread before further discussion?

I don't post often so I thought someone one else might do it, but I do seem to be in charge of admin.

New Thread Here