@@psymar If you have 7 big splashy 7 mana finishers in your 99, you’ll need to look at about 15 cards to find them. Say you want to draw 20 to be safe. 7 of those come from your starting hand, 7 come from draws on the turns leading up to turn 7, and that means you’ll only need to draw about 6 cards over 7 turns (or probably more since this is casual) to have a good shot at finding one. You shouldn’t need rhystic study for that.
For those maybe unfamiliar with CEDH, and as such not familiar with how well Mald is summing up the question, in CEDH most of the decks run cards that have CMC 3 or less. As such they don’t necessarily need a lot of mana, they need a lot of cards. Think of it this way, if they only need 3 mana to play the entirety of their hand and win the game, why would they need to make 10 mana a turn? On the flip side most of your casual commander decks are probably running decks where the average CMC is 3 so even if they see a ton of their cards the likelihood of them playing them all is fairly low unless they have the mana to back it up
I think an important distinction between mana in cEDH and casual is what kind of mana generation each kind of deck wants. In cEDH you don't care about making 20 mana on turn 4 or whatever. Big mana doesn't do much for you, but *fast* mana does, and being able to make lots of mana on turn one is far, far more important in cEDH than in casual. Godo, Bandit Warlord is the most extreme example of this - the deck is literally built around counting to 10 mana and resolving your one card combo from the command zone. (6 mana for Godo, 4 for equipping Helm of the Host.)
I would like everyone to take a look at the banned card Griselbrand, a card which might not look insane but is so insane we banned it from our custom format in which we basically legalized nearly the entire ban list for our extreme cedh table. Griselbrand 4BBBB 7/7 Legendary Creature - Demon Flying, lifelink Pay 7 life: draw 7 cards. It's an 8 cost Demon, which gives instant access to about 30% of your deck, and it's in black so that's a near 100% chance of finding wincon. It is banned because it will draw an incredible amount of cards, and it will draw the wincon and it will draw the mana required to play the wincon.
The foundational reason is that CEDH has lots of Swords to Plowshares and Flusterstorms. Everyone is building guns, but Wizards also printed premade guns that shoot other guns, and to win you need more guns than the other guy
Except half those cards are used to generate mana to pay for the other half. CEDH would be completely different without fast mana. Its not about generating a lot of mana. Its about generating enough before your opponents do.
My Urabrask Deck is unironically teaching me so much of the importance of Card Draw in MTG. Man doesnt need to worry about mana nearly as much since Urabrask is a Scourge to Dollar Stores everywhere, but he still needs the right cards to cook someone off the face of the Earth
May i introduce you to Zada, Hedron Grinder? can draw soo many cards (almost to a point of almost decking yourself) in a single turn and pump up a board of 1/1 goblins into 100/100+ and swing for lethal on your opponents! super fun, super budget friendly. all around one of my favorite decks to play
I play with a small group, and one of our members is much closer to competitive than the rest of us, and so they often bring heavy card draw decks. One in particular was a blue deck that by the end of the game was functionally unassailable, had ridiculous amounts of mana, and could get all the cards they wanted. Me and the other person at the table were going to lose. Then I drew Emrakul, The Promised End. Never has someone losing due to lack of cards in their deck been so entertaining.
This is also why I, a casual player, am having so much fun with my Kruphix deck where the wincon is making everyone draw their whole deck. My opponents are trying to assemble guns and my goal is to bury them in gun parts before they can shoot me, and frequently they shoot each other while leaving me alone because " *that guy has a gun* and that other one is just giving me more parts for my gun sooo...."
Absolutely! I have a 9-cost card that is a 6/6 with 6 keywords. It's a dead card in my hand 4/5 games, and it doesn't even help my win condition. But i want it in the deck because that one time that the stars align to have that card hit the field will feel amazing and become a relatively mediocre story to tell as the blue player counters it. Also, its shiny and you have to play shiny cards!
One of these days I'll get Enduring Angel to trigger. Sadly, it's in a Liesa deck focused on myself losing life, and my opponents seem to have a panic attack any time she hits the battlefield. Played it today and had an empty board for a majority of the game, because apparently nobody wanted to let me play the game
I mean I'm already primed to worry about card advantage, but that's because I come from Yu-Gi-Oh. Card draw is so powerful in that game that anything which draws you 2 or more cards might as well cost you an arm and a leg.
Fucking hell, in yugioh any 2 card on the other side of the table might as well be the alchemist circle that summon the forbidden one to obliterate your ass.
You have the option to play a mana rock or draw two cards. If you play the mana rock, you have one more mana next turn, you draw one card on your upkeep. If you draw the two cards, you will draw a third card on your upkeep. Chances are at least ONE of the three cards you just drew is a land, and you have two more cards than you did before. It is *generally* better to take the cards even in casual play. Big exception is if that one extra mana helps you play your commander sooner or protect it after it enters.
Fun thought experiment. My feeling has always been, “Getting mana is easy, getting cards is hard.” There’s a million and one ways to get mana. They just kinda do nothing on their own. I’ll give you a hundred Sol Rings, in exchange for your library. Cast ‘em all. Cards are what turn mana into something. And if all your mana becomes more mana, you’re just spinning wheels. But I like having both.
yeah and this is one reason mana flood is worse than mana screw: when screwed you're down to luck to draw the land and pretty stuck until then, but you will *eventually* get the 1-3 lands you really need (the odds are like 1 in 3 each draw) at which point the problem pretty much ends since you can play all the nonland cards you've been stuck with and draw from now on. When flooded the disadvantage means you have to pretty much play whatever nonlands you draw to stay in the game; i.e. even if you consistently draw nonland cards the problem recurs each turn unless you find a nice mana sink or chain together lucky card draw - neither of which might even be in your deck. Fast aggro decks tend to run only cheap creatures/removal/burn and if they run out of cards they're especially toasted. Better to have a ton of cards you can't play than a ton of mana you can't spend. Only one will become more useful as the game goes on.
I love this video, because every card game comes down to asking which of these is the bigger problem, and your answer determines the kind of player you are and the game you play. Very insightful.
That’s a really good way to explain it. I’ve seen casual tables where one player draws 20 cards but still takes two or three turns to actually win because they still need the mana to resolve the pieces they’ve drawn. I’ve also seen high power/competitive games where someone has infinite mana and everyone at the table shrugs because that player doesn’t have anything to do with all that mana. The different levels of play benefit more from specific resources.
I think what's interesting about commander is that this is not necessarily the case in 60 cards. Simian spirit guide and mox are banned over this and its that its not nearly as hard to put together 2 or 3 cards when it makes up over 10% of your deck as opposed to 2-3% (discounting tutors for both versions of the math)
Depends on the format and the archetype for 60 cards. I think the older the format the better card draw over mana is, but in general I think card draw wins you more games than mana even fast mana. Using Spirit Guides, Moxes, Ancient Tomb etc to turbo out a threat on turn 1 is great, if you opponent can't answer it. In formats where a lot of the best answers are less than 2 mana being able to dig for them is likely better. I would say the cutoff is probably modern where you don't have a ton of free/semi free permission spells, but in Pauper (less so after the Daze and Gush bans), Vintage, and Legacy card draw is better than mana advantage.
@@OtherSideLLChard disagree, vintage is defined by fast mana. There are a zillion ways to lock you out or kill you, comparatively few ways to generate enough mana for vault/key on turn 0.
@@OtherSideLLC If you look purely at "in general" sure, because drawing cards is good for everyone but fast mana needs to be built around. But the most powerful broken decks are the ones that do build around it, and they make your card advantage worthless.
Tymna/Kraum, which has been the most consistent top deck in cEDH for some time now, perfectly represents this argument. Its a pile of good cards in sans-G, all of the best wincons they can use, and two commanders that have "draw cards" stapled in them.
I mean this is true but it also has all the fast mana in the game so I wouldn't say that the deck is a good argument toward fast mana being casual and draw being cedh
@@eionhd2715 i can see where you're coming from, but there is also another deck that helps with the argument here. Rog/Silas is considered by many the fastest deck in cEDH, and is usually a deck that looks to win on turn 1-2, and Rograkh helps them enable fast mana that most decks can't use effectively like mox amber and jeska's will, and still they are not even close to the representation and topping ability that Tymna/Kraum has. it perfectly shows that having all the fast mana to be able to win the game isn't as good as drawing you cards because you can't generate cards from fast mana, but card draw can help you get to the fast mana AND your win conditions.
It says a lot that extremely powerful and hyper-competitive non-Commander singleton formats like Canadian Highlander (which have a points system to restrict cards instead of banning them) give us a very good repeatedly-tested way to judge this question. Case in point: Both Sol Ring and Treasure Cruise are pointed cards. The best cards in the world without fast mana are not efficient *enough*, and the most mana ever made is useless without an *outlet*, so both fast mana and heavy draw / search become tandem issues at high level.
To be fair, even talking about competitive magic big mana is arguably just as if not more broken then big card draw. Look at decks like 12-Post, or for that matter cards like the Moxen and Black Lotus. Mana is important, and even when you're playing the most efficient options available the difference between the best 3 drop and the best 6 drop is _stark._ IMO, the main reason that big mana is typically weaker than big draw is because all the best big mana engines get banned.
12post is like mediocre to ok-i-guess in legacy. There's just better more efficient things to be doing that don't lose on the spot from the start of the game to a deck like lands
I've reacently looked baack through the cards that I have because I stumbled upon this channel. I just made a Myojin of Life's Web commander deck, we'll see how it goes if I ever decide to find a group to play with again.
You can have all the mana ever, but if you have jack all for cards in hand or abilities that need it it's not going to matter one single bit. Had over 60 mana of each colour but the only reason I won that stupid board state is that I had drawn like 30 cards and had a burn effect when I played spells.
Fast mana is way more relevant in CEDH than card draw. As an example, the primer Naajeela CEDH deck runs 7 cards that generate card advantage. Compare that to the 16 fast mana cards (that's not including normal ramp cards) and there's a massive bias
You pair the murder machine efficiency cards with the fast mana so that you can murder everyone first, it’s two great tastes that go great together. Four player formats are also kinda opposite two player formats-Vintage is defined by fast mana into lockouts and kills and the gate is definitely the fast mana.
Part of that is the deck building restriction, highlander and 99 cards means you NEED draw power to churn for your good shit that builds that three part flamethrower because even with alternatives, every piece is singleton, whereas Vintage, you can get the cards you want pretty dang easily you play four of em and four of all your favorites tutors and whatever, you just need the fuel for that stupid flamethrower instead
@@syrelian Most of the truly broken shit in Vintage is restricted to one copy, but there are so many ridiculous cards in the history of magic that you can find them pretty consistently, yeah.
Had a three man pod of commander. One was on Optimus, another was on Selensya Role Enchantments, and I was on a Kwain hard draw deck. Game lasted about two hours with each player having some leg of the game being the common dominator. Dropped my Eon Frolicker to give the Selensya player an extra turn to just beat out the Optimus player (Optimus was on some serious game ender shit at this point with Meld Urza). When it came back to me (after Optimus was killed, I cast Clone Legion to copy the Selensya's board, which had a creature who had Constellation to double a creature's power. Got Eon Frolicker to well over one thousand power to swing in the air, but the Selensya player had an instant to revive a Birds of Paradise to chump block the swole otter. Then he promptly killed me with a Rogue's Passaged creature.
As a legacy player, and someone who just enjoys Mald's content on the side--fast mana is absolutely the problem lmao. city of traitors + ancient tomb + lotus petal prop up so many decks it's not even funny.
I recognize that Fast Mana is the problem at my table. This is why I run things like opposition agent and vandalblast, because if my table doesn’t get to search for lands or keep their mana rocks, I get free rein of the table.
As someone who just recently won a game through a Consume Spirit with X for 31, I can confirm. All I needed was two cards to solve my mana issues, Black Market and Caged Sun. But what really let me GET that mana was Razaketh just letting me grope my deck and pull out the cards. If I had to top-deck those cards, I'd have lost to an unmodified precon. That very same precon was "Draw a card, cast a card, that's my turn". Meanwhile I'm leafing through my deck like its a damned Victoria Secrets catalogue, saccing creatures left right and center to pull my wincon out. Card draw is KING because he who has cards in hand, has answers and can do things. Sure, you might have 20 mana, but if you only spend 5 of it each turn casting the spell you top-decked, you're dead in the water.
Laughing as I sit high atop my throne of a chad pauper player. Weeping as I wallow in the filth of a modern player The duality of man. The life of someone who doesn’t play a lot of edh
The way i like to put it is that no matter how much mana you have, it's useless if you have no cards to cast anything with, and vice versa. Ironically this is kinda why blue and green players are so often at odds with eachother, as they both have similar, yet completely opposite resource issues, green needs you to manage your card economy while blue needs you to manage your mana economy. And yes, this is why simic is an ungodly abomination. We green players love/hate it just as much as the blue players do, fitting then that the abomination of the colour combos is the one that made such standout cards as Sharctocrab
Imma be real, if you are playing simic, or even a colour combo that includes simic (wubrg counts), you literally just want to be the only person to ever have a turn. I can say this because that is EXACTLY what my mutate deck does
As someone who plays a group hug deck for casual but also has a cEDH deck, I agree with your findings. When I give the table too much mana in casual, their shit keep 7 can turn into a god hand. If I give the table cards, it feels less risky. A mistimed heartbeat of spring is way more likely to lose me the game than a font of mythos
Very well said, this is why I made my Jund group hug deck, because most of the group hug cards in those colors are mana ramp. I feel like there should be a format where fast mana (including dorks) is banned or heavily restricted tho, see what kind of meta forms from it.
I guess I’m in the middle, because when I saw the question my immediate reaction was to pause the video and think on it for 5 minutes. I eventually decided on mana. I agree with the overall logic of card draw being more problematic at the a cedh level, though I would say there are exceptions. The exceptions are the cedh decks like Godo where the win condition is basically just “play your commander”. These decks care more about mana than cards because the win condition is to simply power out their commander + one other redundant and/or tutorable combo piece to win, ergo mana is the limiting factor for them. That said all the control/midrange decks that run Thoracle/Consult or similar packages are limited by cards as opposed to mana.
My first thought was "Well cards are the problem... but I need more mana" xD Coming from someone who follows a lot of Magic TH-cam and has played a few card games competitively, but also only actually plays a Boros precon when it comes to magic xD
So as a casual player listening to this, is Green's primary loops kinda not viable in CEDH? I mostly play flashy and pointless things that take a long time that deal more damage to Morale than to Life, but I notice a lot of the loop for Green is getting the mana together. As a black/white and then either looking to go Esper or Mardu, I can respect a green deck because they actually pay their taxes here, I am much more likely to combo chain together paying dirt for gold than them. They are definitely all about making that green, if you know what I am saying but I am the one pulling bank heists on the First Graveyard International Bank when I either sneak in with a Doomed Necromancer Scapegoat or lay Breach the Multiverse Charges and steal everything I can from everyone. Either way is fine I have a Sun Titan Lawyer to bail that Necromancer out. Green on the other hand, for being nature hippies, are surprisingly capitalistic, consuming everything in their leafy path to rack up all forms of mana generation to play beatsticks. Granted, they have a form of card draw in their sorceries when they are pushing lands out onto the battlefield from their library.
My group runs varying power levels and game types. But as the resident Golgari and Selesnya player, there’s the never ending arms race between my ramp and everyone else’s removal. So yes. It’s obviously card draw
I've found that fast mana in casual commander isn't usually an issue if decks at the table are roughly in parity with power. Unless you can use said fast mana to combo off (requires card advantage) or establish an unbreakably oppressive boardstate (also requires card advantage), there's enough interaction at a table to deal with a breakout early threat, and if you can't cinch a game quickly, being the fastest at a table usually just means you're the first to die. A buddy of mine tracked stats for hundreds of casual commander games and in the long term, card advantage is the single largest factor for a win, being first in the turn order is second.
I thought about it this way: On the one hand, you need mana to cast almost anything, so naturally having more mana would mean you could play more stuff, more stuff equals more win. On the other hand, you need draw power to be able to manifest everything I just mentioned, and the stronger your draw power, the more likely it is that you're going to get way, WAY out of control. Plus, you can't play more lands to get more mana if you don't draw them/have a fetch mechanic. So yeah, draw power is ultimately what's going to win you the game, whether it's casual or professional TCG.
Xerox player here, matchups become infinitely more thoughtful the moment you aren't running some advantage be it exile top of deck or Tocasia's Welcome. Especially as the game goes on, with a low Mana curve, you're gassed early.
Coming off from nearly 15 years of Yu-Gi-Oh and playing Magic in the most casual of manners, I instinctively said card/hand advantage. You do not understand as a casual player how drawing an extra card, going +1 or God forbid +2 on a card's value, can skew things wildly in that player's favor. Being able to get that kind of value off of two or three card effects, when your goal in competitive is to ALWAYS DISRUPT YOUR OPPONENT NO MATTER WHOSE TURN IT IS OR WHAT PHASE YOU'RE IN, is vital. You run the most efficient means to always have an answer for your opponent's BS, you always make sure you have one more card than your opponent, one more resource open than your opponent, or you scoop. Fast mana doesn't matter if you're running one or two card overlapping effects to fuck up your opponent's plans. If you're not doing it to them, they're doing it to you. I wouldn't even say it's the equivalent of building a cheap gun, it's having multiple shivs in your pockets and a knife that made the shiv if you and your opponent's shivs are bouncing off each other when you attack each other. Competitive is brutal efficiency and advantage, so it's almost always the guy who has more cards dictating who's going to win.
CEDH vs Casual deck, I have an urza, lord high artificer deck, if it draws 10 cards, it will vomit all of them over the table, and probably assemble some kind of infinite combo in the process. I have a spirits deck, if it draws 15 cards, it will most likely be good card selection as Ill discard to hand size and have more solid options over the next turns. Fast mana makes both do better things though. Sure, a sol ring in spirits is great, and basically accelerates by 2 turns, however a sol ring in urza does basically the same as it primes for a turn 2 urza.
Funny enough my casual Immodane, the pyrohammer commander deck teaches me the importance of card draw as most of the cards i play are from impulse draws where i will never see them again after that very turn.
I value card draw higher and as more powerful, even in casual. It makes sure you are getting your land drops in and dont get stranded on your ramp later on, which would get obsolete otherwise, plus it keeps you in the game. You can do more and can redeploy after a blow out much easier.
Anything over 3 CMC necessitates being able to carry my deck long enough to either win itself or survive long enough for another victory con to emerge. And I'm a braindead tribal player that cannot think on the combo level, my level of strategy is "I am going to beat you with this stick that I will try to make bigger" and the process of how I make the stick bigger is unknown even to me. I usually just end up hoping for a Lord top deck or to bring my Commander in and Tutor one up. I know I'm going to be able to find something, it just can't cost 5+ because I will likely find multiple excuses to not play it unless it brings a ton of punch. My wife continues to have me request Meren of Clan Nel Toth, please sir ❤
I said card advantage but probably for the wrong reasons. More cards means more guns and option. More options means more to do after the innevitable 5 board wipes.
I was teaching my little brother how to play using some precons. Mine happened to have grimoire of the dead in it. He asked, why wouldn’t everyone put that in their deck, it’s such a good card? This is why.
And its actually valuable to know that because good game mastery should mean you become more efficient at building inefficiently when you play at a lower power level. The D&D 3.5 approach. Which is not at all unexpected since MTG was inspiration for D&D 3.5 decisions.
@@dameonpigeon2736 tldr; They copied MTG's concept of chaff into character builds for D&D 3.5 to reward system mastery and created both a system with huge creativity and depth and an unfairly large demand on players that hobbled its potential. ---- Back when WoTC first got D&D from TSR (that originally owned it for 1e and 2e but went out of business) they took inspiration from Magic's success when approaching concepts like character choice. "Ivory Tower game design" I believe was how Monte Cook described it. But the fundamental concept was that certain system choices would be purposefully sub-optimal (draft chaff, as it were), and others would combo together very creatively, in an attempt to mimic the concept of building a powerful deck. They folded that concept into a character-building. Now if that sounds like a terrible kneecap to new players and brutally misunderstanding group play at an RPG table, you'd be right, but it did enable a glut of creative options (of varying effect, from the flavorful to the mechanically optimal) that allows you to make pretty much anything in D&D 3.5, with a rule for any and all of it. (although not necessarily a good rule, like banding bad at times.) Because commander has a certain expectation of table cohesion that's more similar to D&D than traditional magic you can see a similar way the systems demand mastery when creating decks/characters for the table. You have to know the heights of power, to some extent, to know how to kneecap yourself enough to play at a lower power level, otherwise you'll stumble face-first into table infuriating build problems with broken combos and such. The reactionary demand for balance that came from that decision lead to 4e being far more forcibly balanced (although it gained MTG's love of keywords, iirc, and I'll say no more on it because that's a longer diversion) I could go on from there for my opinions on their "design by mob opinion" 5e, or their proposed next edition that sounds very much like live-service D&D, but that diverts too much.
Casual war story turn 1 forest and lanowar elves turn 2 a mountain and a jeskas will for 7 then slapped down an etali and hasted him I agree with you 100% that fast mana in casual is lethal
Furthermore, anyone who does not understand cedh lethal oracle of Thessa and demonic consultation is 3 mana and wins you the game instantly if uninterrupted
I agree completely with this but with the caveat that it depends. See even in casual. Folks still need both. Maybe have crappier ways to get there. But it's still the same principle. Meanwhile the cedh players are forking over hella bread to do the refined version of your casual deck. But the principal still remains!!! If your card advantage blows up....what does it matter if you have extra mana? Flip side, what happens when all your mana is blown up? Sure your board state may be setup...but without the mana to protect it. You're now a glass cannon
Card advantage absolutely matters.. Until you have your killer combo in hand. Sometimes the spikey thing to do is mulligan and keep a bucket of ramp/mana and the thing your dumping into. See also: Tron.
My Gix deck does regular fair and balanced mono-Black things. Y'know, getting crazy levels of both mana and card draw. I had somehow gotten a Liliana of the Dark Realms to go off and ran out of cards way too fast as I never hit one of my draw engines after I activated Gix. Card draw is 100% the most important thing in this game and WotC makes it far too easy to refresh your hand constantly. You can have a billion mana available to you but if you don't have the utilities in hand all you can do is pass.
Well, I wouldn't say that at the most competitive points that it is usually about draw card advantage. Rather, a competitive deck needs stuff and the quicker and cheaper they get it, the better. This often doesn't involve drawing lots of cards so much as getting specific cards. So I'd say that fast mana is more dangerous in combination with card selection which them either wins or creates game winning card advantage in some form which may involve drawing or may not. Fast mana gets more dangerous as the deck gets stronger because of what that's going to cast and I guarantee you it isn't going to be something too convoluted. At the competitive level, they aren't trying to just have a ton of cards. They want to disable the opponent as fast as possible. It is just that disabling can come in the form of actual control, denying them something they need to play the game, or putting their life total to 0. Card selection > fast mana > drawing more cards.
Here's the thing: in my opinion Commander should be played to have fun and that includes a whole bunch of janky-ass cards that do f*cked up shit like "Custody Battle", "Possibility Storm" or "Eye of the Storm" (and yes: I am fully aware of the fact that my definition of "fun" sounds like the MTG-version of a drunk toddler who found daddy's 9mm in the unlocked kitchen-pantry but well, I like a bit of confusion at the table)
Maybe, but I still think it's cards every single time. Cards are mana advantage too, even precons have swords to plowshares and counterspell, which answer pretty much any big dragon, eldrazi or fish for just one or two mana. A player can burn their hand full of rituals, Grimm monolith, mana crypt, etc to slam an Etali just to have it never get it's etb because it was answered by a single card and two mana. The the red players is stuck with 3 cards while the blue player still has 6
As someone who also plays LoR where mana advantage doesnt mean as much outside of a few cases, whoever has more playable cards in hand almost always wins. I had an entire deck based around dropping a ton of cheap units every turn
Interesting Question: What if my problem isn't mana or card draw? What if my beef is removal and countering because every time my ridiculous jank gun is almost done someone pulls a piece off, throws it in a metal crusher and tells me to go by new parts as they finish building their gun and shooting me while I'm still browsing on Amazon?
I value both equally, I understand that without cards in my hand I do nothing in spite of the infinite mama combo I shot out turn 2, as well as the lack of mana to cast all 20 of the cards I’ve drawn so far. There for I believe yes card draw is more consistently dangerous, I’m still never gonna pair a deck with monstrous draw without putting the adequate mana ramp to do something with it.
I'm a casual player. Always have been. Yeah I prefer to have fun. But my go to is Nekusar. I love letting people draw cards. Drawing cards is fun. But it should come with a price...
We've known it all along but been too afraid to say it, cards are the problem! If no one has cards, magic will become the perfect game. Zero thoughts and heads empty, the way Richard Garfield intended.
This only made me realize how lax everything was when I started playing edh. Now every deck at the table is likely to be a well-oiled machine. Its almost scary how much the format has changed, and myself with it. Sometimes I do miss battlecruiser Magic though.
@@Interrobang212 Yeah, that's a lot of the problem I find with really "casual" commander. A lot of players try to cram "fun" stuff in their decks but a good chunk of them run out of gas extremely easily so they just sit around spinning wheels after they get interacted with. I run a lot of card advantage in my decks for that reason (and I'm not talking about stuff like Rhystic Study but tonnes of stuff like Welcoming Vampire or Coastal Piracy). I can at least play Magic, even if the deck I've built has loads of suboptimal cards, if I can somewhat quickly rummage through the 80 cards left in my library for some shit to cast. There's nothing worse in EDH than players that take too long to get their house of cards built up or are forced to sit there playing lands or mana rocks because they're forced to top deck after a board wipe. I want everyone to be playing the game and its no fun when someone brings a deck that does nothing the minute someone breathes on it.
I don't know about mana but for magic in general I'd say it's mana. For combo and lockdown decks doing something 1 turn earlier is the difference between losing and winning. And it doesnt even have to be permanent mana, a single lotus petal or spirit guide will make or break you. Being a single card ahead never gets that powerful.
Cards get efficient enough that good turn 1 plays in competitive don’t need a lot to get going. The logical conclusion of taking this to an extreme is you’d rather be one mana short with infinite cards in hand than have infinite mana with no way to guarantee seeing the cards the next turn. In the first scenario, you are guaranteed to win next turn. In the second scenario, you are likely losing. In Legacy - the fair version of Vintage - Delver is THE deck to beat, and it’s because it has a bunch of efficient creatures, removal, and permission that allows it to quickly work down your life total. Control also thrives in Legacy against combo with Force (of Will/Negation) and the ability to often shut combo down post-board with just a couple cards. Combo is very good, as well, but it’s cheating on mana more often than it’s generating a ton (with the exception of Tendrils, but even that relies on efficient card draw). The big combo decks like Sneak/Show and Reanimator may use a Petal or something to get a turn ahead, but really the big play is slamming a Griselbrand or Emrakul (which are both not coincidentally sources of direct or indirect card advantage) to shut the door on your opponent. Like even the combo decks that use fast mana do so to get an edge against other combo decks. They can still win playing a “fair” curve and doing what the cards say on the tin. Can’t say the same for decks that rely purely on fast mana. Tendrils is in and out of the top tier of the format based purely on the meta environment’s ability to disrupt its fast mana, and even then the deck is resilient because it has good hand disruption that becomes better when used by a knowledgeable pilot.
I'm sorry, but idk what you're talking about. What's flashy about using one of my favorite blue cards, Baral's Expertise, to cast a decimate for free so that I can be the only one with non land permanents out turn 4?
To be honest once you get 7 or 8 mana most decks have more then enough mana to do whatever they need to and maybe a little extra. So, in the long run card advantage is stronger.
@@Dragostorm21 So, the point I was trying to make is that most decks can function with 8 mana pretty easily outside of hyper specific cases, not that they don't benefit from having more mana than that.
@@Dragostorm21 I recognize there are specific decks which value mana more than card advantage often because mana creates card advantages or gives you something really worth it in the long run.
@@NobodyDungeons it was a joke pointing out that the reason why people need mana is to play cards and the reason people want cards is to spend mana (sorta, you get want I mean), thus if you think one is stronger then that just means the other is a given. Obviously on the long term each land gives so much mana you need much more cards to keep the balance, but without accounting for cost this question doesn't have a clear answer. A deck where all cards are x costed probably doesn't mind the card advantage but would also be fine so long as they offset the drawn lands. Likewise, a deck without mana costs would not care for lands and would only be limited by card advantage. In a 8-9 turn game with a cmc below 3 I agree that card advantage is more important, but if the cmc is higher (like 4.5) the extra cards start to be less about advantage and more about quality. After all, in a 10 turn game you only get access to like 120 mana total (and like 20 of it will go to ramp/early game nonsense). Tldr:it was a joke, but I do genuinely think that in commander card advantage being more important is probably true, especially at a higher level where cmc's are lower and thus the cards actually are used. On a casual level tho, mana is probably better since getting 10 extra mana over the course of the game for a higher cmc deck straight up means 1 or 2 high impact additional cards (or card draw and the mana to use it).
TL;DR What good is fast mana if you don't DRAW INTO IT!? 😛 Also - I've always wondered how much mana one can actually generate on turn one with the right sequence of existing cards. I'm talking hands from Fantasyland, colors don't matter, and we're playing Vintage with all the money in the world. 💰
In my playgroup, fast mana will get you killed. Signets and other things that produce less than they cost are ok. But from the time you drop things that produce more than you invested, you become a target.
My opinion on the subject is thus, you get 1 land and 1 card per turn as a given, but you have 3 opponents, so you're naturally losing advantage every single turn. It should be your goal to break the parity of resources, to get at least as much as the rest of the table. You need a goal, why am I generating these resources and what can i do with them. My the locust God deck cares about card draw more than anything, but there's still almost 20 sources of mana advantage within the deck because when you draw half your deck you need to do something with it there and then or you're not getting another turn.
If you have all the best cards, you want more of them. If you have all the funniest cards, you want to cast them sooner. Easy.
Best way to describe the argument.
The thing is, you still need to draw them to cast them.
@@psymar If you have 7 big splashy 7 mana finishers in your 99, you’ll need to look at about 15 cards to find them. Say you want to draw 20 to be safe. 7 of those come from your starting hand, 7 come from draws on the turns leading up to turn 7, and that means you’ll only need to draw about 6 cards over 7 turns (or probably more since this is casual) to have a good shot at finding one. You shouldn’t need rhystic study for that.
For those maybe unfamiliar with CEDH, and as such not familiar with how well Mald is summing up the question, in CEDH most of the decks run cards that have CMC 3 or less. As such they don’t necessarily need a lot of mana, they need a lot of cards. Think of it this way, if they only need 3 mana to play the entirety of their hand and win the game, why would they need to make 10 mana a turn? On the flip side most of your casual commander decks are probably running decks where the average CMC is 3 so even if they see a ton of their cards the likelihood of them playing them all is fairly low unless they have the mana to back it up
I think an important distinction between mana in cEDH and casual is what kind of mana generation each kind of deck wants. In cEDH you don't care about making 20 mana on turn 4 or whatever. Big mana doesn't do much for you, but *fast* mana does, and being able to make lots of mana on turn one is far, far more important in cEDH than in casual.
Godo, Bandit Warlord is the most extreme example of this - the deck is literally built around counting to 10 mana and resolving your one card combo from the command zone. (6 mana for Godo, 4 for equipping Helm of the Host.)
@3012mathias basically "Why would I care about having more mana next turn? You'll be dead by then."
I would like everyone to take a look at the banned card Griselbrand, a card which might not look insane but is so insane we banned it from our custom format in which we basically legalized nearly the entire ban list for our extreme cedh table.
Griselbrand 4BBBB 7/7
Legendary Creature - Demon
Flying, lifelink
Pay 7 life: draw 7 cards.
It's an 8 cost Demon, which gives instant access to about 30% of your deck, and it's in black so that's a near 100% chance of finding wincon.
It is banned because it will draw an incredible amount of cards, and it will draw the wincon and it will draw the mana required to play the wincon.
The foundational reason is that CEDH has lots of Swords to Plowshares and Flusterstorms. Everyone is building guns, but Wizards also printed premade guns that shoot other guns, and to win you need more guns than the other guy
Except half those cards are used to generate mana to pay for the other half. CEDH would be completely different without fast mana. Its not about generating a lot of mana. Its about generating enough before your opponents do.
I don’t play a ton of MTG, but I really like the “gun, death ray, WWE” analogy.
My Urabrask Deck is unironically teaching me so much of the importance of Card Draw in MTG. Man doesnt need to worry about mana nearly as much since Urabrask is a Scourge to Dollar Stores everywhere, but he still needs the right cards to cook someone off the face of the Earth
May i introduce you to Zada, Hedron Grinder? can draw soo many cards (almost to a point of almost decking yourself) in a single turn and pump up a board of 1/1 goblins into 100/100+ and swing for lethal on your opponents! super fun, super budget friendly. all around one of my favorite decks to play
Yeah Mono-red is really good at teaching you about card advantage.
As a fellow Urby player, I agree. Though I feel that's a bit of column A & B. You supplement the card draw, while Uranrask supplies the mana.
I play with a small group, and one of our members is much closer to competitive than the rest of us, and so they often bring heavy card draw decks. One in particular was a blue deck that by the end of the game was functionally unassailable, had ridiculous amounts of mana, and could get all the cards they wanted. Me and the other person at the table were going to lose. Then I drew Emrakul, The Promised End. Never has someone losing due to lack of cards in their deck been so entertaining.
You simply had to do it to em
You are my hero
Full disclosure, if I were that guy and you did that to me, I wouldn't even be mad. I would feel obligated to shake your hand.
@@malachai1381 luckily for me, he felt the same way
This is also why I, a casual player, am having so much fun with my Kruphix deck where the wincon is making everyone draw their whole deck. My opponents are trying to assemble guns and my goal is to bury them in gun parts before they can shoot me, and frequently they shoot each other while leaving me alone because " *that guy has a gun* and that other one is just giving me more parts for my gun sooo...."
Absolutely! I have a 9-cost card that is a 6/6 with 6 keywords. It's a dead card in my hand 4/5 games, and it doesn't even help my win condition. But i want it in the deck because that one time that the stars align to have that card hit the field will feel amazing and become a relatively mediocre story to tell as the blue player counters it. Also, its shiny and you have to play shiny cards!
Out of curiosity, what card?
@@sandybarton1797sounds like Zatalpa
@@almond5284it's pretty hilarious with Necropolis Regent, and a perfect example of Mald's point
One of these days I'll get Enduring Angel to trigger. Sadly, it's in a Liesa deck focused on myself losing life, and my opponents seem to have a panic attack any time she hits the battlefield. Played it today and had an empty board for a majority of the game, because apparently nobody wanted to let me play the game
@@rocketiermaster7498deserved
I mean I'm already primed to worry about card advantage, but that's because I come from Yu-Gi-Oh. Card draw is so powerful in that game that anything which draws you 2 or more cards might as well cost you an arm and a leg.
A left arm to be specific
Fucking hell, in yugioh any 2 card on the other side of the table might as well be the alchemist circle that summon the forbidden one to obliterate your ass.
I'm in the reverse route, going from uw control to YuGiOh is like walking vs the flash in terms of the speed of gameplay.
But what does pot of greed do?
@@Thelegoterrapinsitting it’s bottom on the banlist forever.
You have the option to play a mana rock or draw two cards.
If you play the mana rock, you have one more mana next turn, you draw one card on your upkeep.
If you draw the two cards, you will draw a third card on your upkeep. Chances are at least ONE of the three cards you just drew is a land, and you have two more cards than you did before.
It is *generally* better to take the cards even in casual play. Big exception is if that one extra mana helps you play your commander sooner or protect it after it enters.
Fun thought experiment. My feeling has always been, “Getting mana is easy, getting cards is hard.” There’s a million and one ways to get mana. They just kinda do nothing on their own. I’ll give you a hundred Sol Rings, in exchange for your library. Cast ‘em all.
Cards are what turn mana into something. And if all your mana becomes more mana, you’re just spinning wheels.
But I like having both.
yeah and this is one reason mana flood is worse than mana screw: when screwed you're down to luck to draw the land and pretty stuck until then, but you will *eventually* get the 1-3 lands you really need (the odds are like 1 in 3 each draw) at which point the problem pretty much ends since you can play all the nonland cards you've been stuck with and draw from now on. When flooded the disadvantage means you have to pretty much play whatever nonlands you draw to stay in the game; i.e. even if you consistently draw nonland cards the problem recurs each turn unless you find a nice mana sink or chain together lucky card draw - neither of which might even be in your deck. Fast aggro decks tend to run only cheap creatures/removal/burn and if they run out of cards they're especially toasted.
Better to have a ton of cards you can't play than a ton of mana you can't spend. Only one will become more useful as the game goes on.
I love this video, because every card game comes down to asking which of these is the bigger problem, and your answer determines the kind of player you are and the game you play. Very insightful.
“They’re trying WWE shit” sums up my Yidris, Maelstrom Wielder deck so well😂
That’s a really good way to explain it. I’ve seen casual tables where one player draws 20 cards but still takes two or three turns to actually win because they still need the mana to resolve the pieces they’ve drawn. I’ve also seen high power/competitive games where someone has infinite mana and everyone at the table shrugs because that player doesn’t have anything to do with all that mana. The different levels of play benefit more from specific resources.
I think what's interesting about commander is that this is not necessarily the case in 60 cards. Simian spirit guide and mox are banned over this and its that its not nearly as hard to put together 2 or 3 cards when it makes up over 10% of your deck as opposed to 2-3% (discounting tutors for both versions of the math)
Depends on the format and the archetype for 60 cards. I think the older the format the better card draw over mana is, but in general I think card draw wins you more games than mana even fast mana. Using Spirit Guides, Moxes, Ancient Tomb etc to turbo out a threat on turn 1 is great, if you opponent can't answer it. In formats where a lot of the best answers are less than 2 mana being able to dig for them is likely better. I would say the cutoff is probably modern where you don't have a ton of free/semi free permission spells, but in Pauper (less so after the Daze and Gush bans), Vintage, and Legacy card draw is better than mana advantage.
@@OtherSideLLChard disagree, vintage is defined by fast mana. There are a zillion ways to lock you out or kill you, comparatively few ways to generate enough mana for vault/key on turn 0.
@@pontiffmaximus that's fair, should have left it at legacy and pauper. I don't play enough vintage to speak on it
@@OtherSideLLC If you look purely at "in general" sure, because drawing cards is good for everyone but fast mana needs to be built around. But the most powerful broken decks are the ones that do build around it, and they make your card advantage worthless.
cedh also runs spirit guides and moxes tho.
I love the Door to Nothingness joke. My friend has it and uses it to almost exclusively make himself lose
Tymna/Kraum, which has been the most consistent top deck in cEDH for some time now, perfectly represents this argument. Its a pile of good cards in sans-G, all of the best wincons they can use, and two commanders that have "draw cards" stapled in them.
I mean this is true but it also has all the fast mana in the game so I wouldn't say that the deck is a good argument toward fast mana being casual and draw being cedh
@@eionhd2715 i can see where you're coming from, but there is also another deck that helps with the argument here. Rog/Silas is considered by many the fastest deck in cEDH, and is usually a deck that looks to win on turn 1-2, and Rograkh helps them enable fast mana that most decks can't use effectively like mox amber and jeska's will, and still they are not even close to the representation and topping ability that Tymna/Kraum has. it perfectly shows that having all the fast mana to be able to win the game isn't as good as drawing you cards because you can't generate cards from fast mana, but card draw can help you get to the fast mana AND your win conditions.
This is why I love my Henzie deck. He’s a medallion that gets better the longer the game goes, and he lets you draw more cards.
As a player of werewolf tribal. "WWE shit" is the best description for my bogus ass deck.
It says a lot that extremely powerful and hyper-competitive non-Commander singleton formats like Canadian Highlander (which have a points system to restrict cards instead of banning them) give us a very good repeatedly-tested way to judge this question. Case in point: Both Sol Ring and Treasure Cruise are pointed cards. The best cards in the world without fast mana are not efficient *enough*, and the most mana ever made is useless without an *outlet*, so both fast mana and heavy draw / search become tandem issues at high level.
Will admit, will always be fun to drop a scute swarm on the table and wait for everyone to realize what that actually means.
To be fair, even talking about competitive magic big mana is arguably just as if not more broken then big card draw. Look at decks like 12-Post, or for that matter cards like the Moxen and Black Lotus. Mana is important, and even when you're playing the most efficient options available the difference between the best 3 drop and the best 6 drop is _stark._ IMO, the main reason that big mana is typically weaker than big draw is because all the best big mana engines get banned.
12post is like mediocre to ok-i-guess in legacy. There's just better more efficient things to be doing that don't lose on the spot from the start of the game to a deck like lands
I've reacently looked baack through the cards that I have because I stumbled upon this channel. I just made a Myojin of Life's Web commander deck, we'll see how it goes if I ever decide to find a group to play with again.
Rystic Study > Smothering Tithe.
Doesn't matter how much treasure you have if your hands empty
You can have all the mana ever, but if you have jack all for cards in hand or abilities that need it it's not going to matter one single bit. Had over 60 mana of each colour but the only reason I won that stupid board state is that I had drawn like 30 cards and had a burn effect when I played spells.
Same thing the other way around. What good would it have done you to draw 30 cards if you can only cast one or two a turn?
Fast mana is way more relevant in CEDH than card draw. As an example, the primer Naajeela CEDH deck runs 7 cards that generate card advantage. Compare that to the 16 fast mana cards (that's not including normal ramp cards) and there's a massive bias
Card advantage > all. What cards you own is irrelevant but it can only make you better.
I agree on all accounts but would add that more cards are even more problematic at high levels when so many are free or have alt casting costs
The answer is obvious, it always has been. Fast mana is mana, but cards could be anything, they could even be fast mana! Therefore cards are better.
You pair the murder machine efficiency cards with the fast mana so that you can murder everyone first, it’s two great tastes that go great together. Four player formats are also kinda opposite two player formats-Vintage is defined by fast mana into lockouts and kills and the gate is definitely the fast mana.
Part of that is the deck building restriction, highlander and 99 cards means you NEED draw power to churn for your good shit that builds that three part flamethrower because even with alternatives, every piece is singleton, whereas Vintage, you can get the cards you want pretty dang easily you play four of em and four of all your favorites tutors and whatever, you just need the fuel for that stupid flamethrower instead
@@syrelian Most of the truly broken shit in Vintage is restricted to one copy, but there are so many ridiculous cards in the history of magic that you can find them pretty consistently, yeah.
Once more i beseech the Lord of Commander Roasts to review my favorite commander Eight-and-a-Half-Tails.
Had a three man pod of commander. One was on Optimus, another was on Selensya Role Enchantments, and I was on a Kwain hard draw deck. Game lasted about two hours with each player having some leg of the game being the common dominator. Dropped my Eon Frolicker to give the Selensya player an extra turn to just beat out the Optimus player (Optimus was on some serious game ender shit at this point with Meld Urza). When it came back to me (after Optimus was killed, I cast Clone Legion to copy the Selensya's board, which had a creature who had Constellation to double a creature's power. Got Eon Frolicker to well over one thousand power to swing in the air, but the Selensya player had an instant to revive a Birds of Paradise to chump block the swole otter. Then he promptly killed me with a Rogue's Passaged creature.
As a legacy player, and someone who just enjoys Mald's content on the side--fast mana is absolutely the problem lmao. city of traitors + ancient tomb + lotus petal prop up so many decks it's not even funny.
I recognize that Fast Mana is the problem at my table. This is why I run things like opposition agent and vandalblast, because if my table doesn’t get to search for lands or keep their mana rocks, I get free rein of the table.
As someone who just recently won a game through a Consume Spirit with X for 31, I can confirm. All I needed was two cards to solve my mana issues, Black Market and Caged Sun. But what really let me GET that mana was Razaketh just letting me grope my deck and pull out the cards. If I had to top-deck those cards, I'd have lost to an unmodified precon. That very same precon was "Draw a card, cast a card, that's my turn". Meanwhile I'm leafing through my deck like its a damned Victoria Secrets catalogue, saccing creatures left right and center to pull my wincon out.
Card draw is KING because he who has cards in hand, has answers and can do things. Sure, you might have 20 mana, but if you only spend 5 of it each turn casting the spell you top-decked, you're dead in the water.
Laughing as I sit high atop my throne of a chad pauper player.
Weeping as I wallow in the filth of a modern player
The duality of man.
The life of someone who doesn’t play a lot of edh
The way i like to put it is that no matter how much mana you have, it's useless if you have no cards to cast anything with, and vice versa.
Ironically this is kinda why blue and green players are so often at odds with eachother, as they both have similar, yet completely opposite resource issues, green needs you to manage your card economy while blue needs you to manage your mana economy.
And yes, this is why simic is an ungodly abomination. We green players love/hate it just as much as the blue players do, fitting then that the abomination of the colour combos is the one that made such standout cards as Sharctocrab
Imma be real, if you are playing simic, or even a colour combo that includes simic (wubrg counts), you literally just want to be the only person to ever have a turn.
I can say this because that is EXACTLY what my mutate deck does
As someone who plays a group hug deck for casual but also has a cEDH deck, I agree with your findings. When I give the table too much mana in casual, their shit keep 7 can turn into a god hand. If I give the table cards, it feels less risky. A mistimed heartbeat of spring is way more likely to lose me the game than a font of mythos
Very well said, this is why I made my Jund group hug deck, because most of the group hug cards in those colors are mana ramp. I feel like there should be a format where fast mana (including dorks) is banned or heavily restricted tho, see what kind of meta forms from it.
As a Selvala, Heart of the Wilds player yeah I love mana. uncounterable hugs of Last March of the Ents for you all
I guess I’m in the middle, because when I saw the question my immediate reaction was to pause the video and think on it for 5 minutes. I eventually decided on mana. I agree with the overall logic of card draw being more problematic at the a cedh level, though I would say there are exceptions. The exceptions are the cedh decks like Godo where the win condition is basically just “play your commander”. These decks care more about mana than cards because the win condition is to simply power out their commander + one other redundant and/or tutorable combo piece to win, ergo mana is the limiting factor for them. That said all the control/midrange decks that run Thoracle/Consult or similar packages are limited by cards as opposed to mana.
My first thought was "Well cards are the problem... but I need more mana" xD
Coming from someone who follows a lot of Magic TH-cam and has played a few card games competitively, but also only actually plays a Boros precon when it comes to magic xD
So as a casual player listening to this, is Green's primary loops kinda not viable in CEDH? I mostly play flashy and pointless things that take a long time that deal more damage to Morale than to Life, but I notice a lot of the loop for Green is getting the mana together. As a black/white and then either looking to go Esper or Mardu, I can respect a green deck because they actually pay their taxes here, I am much more likely to combo chain together paying dirt for gold than them. They are definitely all about making that green, if you know what I am saying but I am the one pulling bank heists on the First Graveyard International Bank when I either sneak in with a Doomed Necromancer Scapegoat or lay Breach the Multiverse Charges and steal everything I can from everyone. Either way is fine I have a Sun Titan Lawyer to bail that Necromancer out.
Green on the other hand, for being nature hippies, are surprisingly capitalistic, consuming everything in their leafy path to rack up all forms of mana generation to play beatsticks. Granted, they have a form of card draw in their sorceries when they are pushing lands out onto the battlefield from their library.
I mean I feel the answer here is simply that card advantage ensures the fast mana is in your hand
My group runs varying power levels and game types. But as the resident Golgari and Selesnya player, there’s the never ending arms race between my ramp and everyone else’s removal. So yes. It’s obviously card draw
I haven't touched Magic cards (irl or virtual) in YEARS, and you're telling me I have a competitive mindset, Mald? Damn.
This was incredible
I've found that fast mana in casual commander isn't usually an issue if decks at the table are roughly in parity with power. Unless you can use said fast mana to combo off (requires card advantage) or establish an unbreakably oppressive boardstate (also requires card advantage), there's enough interaction at a table to deal with a breakout early threat, and if you can't cinch a game quickly, being the fastest at a table usually just means you're the first to die. A buddy of mine tracked stats for hundreds of casual commander games and in the long term, card advantage is the single largest factor for a win, being first in the turn order is second.
I thought about it this way:
On the one hand, you need mana to cast almost anything, so naturally having more mana would mean you could play more stuff, more stuff equals more win.
On the other hand, you need draw power to be able to manifest everything I just mentioned, and the stronger your draw power, the more likely it is that you're going to get way, WAY out of control. Plus, you can't play more lands to get more mana if you don't draw them/have a fetch mechanic. So yeah, draw power is ultimately what's going to win you the game, whether it's casual or professional TCG.
Xan definitely agree I run a Animar deck just to avoid the taxes and the only ever stopping me is when i run out of cards
Xerox player here, matchups become infinitely more thoughtful the moment you aren't running some advantage be it exile top of deck or Tocasia's Welcome. Especially as the game goes on, with a low Mana curve, you're gassed early.
At the competitive level the important part is basically ALL THE FAST MANA.
Cards. Lots of Cards.
Coming off from nearly 15 years of Yu-Gi-Oh and playing Magic in the most casual of manners, I instinctively said card/hand advantage.
You do not understand as a casual player how drawing an extra card, going +1 or God forbid +2 on a card's value, can skew things wildly in that player's favor. Being able to get that kind of value off of two or three card effects, when your goal in competitive is to ALWAYS DISRUPT YOUR OPPONENT NO MATTER WHOSE TURN IT IS OR WHAT PHASE YOU'RE IN, is vital.
You run the most efficient means to always have an answer for your opponent's BS, you always make sure you have one more card than your opponent, one more resource open than your opponent, or you scoop. Fast mana doesn't matter if you're running one or two card overlapping effects to fuck up your opponent's plans. If you're not doing it to them, they're doing it to you.
I wouldn't even say it's the equivalent of building a cheap gun, it's having multiple shivs in your pockets and a knife that made the shiv if you and your opponent's shivs are bouncing off each other when you attack each other. Competitive is brutal efficiency and advantage, so it's almost always the guy who has more cards dictating who's going to win.
CEDH vs Casual deck,
I have an urza, lord high artificer deck, if it draws 10 cards, it will vomit all of them over the table, and probably assemble some kind of infinite combo in the process.
I have a spirits deck, if it draws 15 cards, it will most likely be good card selection as Ill discard to hand size and have more solid options over the next turns.
Fast mana makes both do better things though. Sure, a sol ring in spirits is great, and basically accelerates by 2 turns, however a sol ring in urza does basically the same as it primes for a turn 2 urza.
Funny enough my casual Immodane, the pyrohammer commander deck teaches me the importance of card draw as most of the cards i play are from impulse draws where i will never see them again after that very turn.
Skirge Familier makes it so your card draw IS mana!
Seriously, MVP in my Vilis deck.
As a man who has played a fuckton of different card games both casually and competitively 100% giving people cards
Great video, excellent analogies and informative monologue of casual vs cedh, HOWEVER, still no muzzio review I need it pls
I value card draw higher and as more powerful, even in casual. It makes sure you are getting your land drops in and dont get stranded on your ramp later on, which would get obsolete otherwise, plus it keeps you in the game. You can do more and can redeploy after a blow out much easier.
I’m a tournament cedh player and u r dead on about this. Mana crypt is really good but I think the best card in cedh is rhystic study.
Now, the best card is The One Ring.
We all know the real enemy: Tutors
Having a bunch of cool cards in hand and no mana sucks. Having 20 mana worth of lands/mana rocks/mana dorks and no (worthwhile) action sucks.
Anything over 3 CMC necessitates being able to carry my deck long enough to either win itself or survive long enough for another victory con to emerge. And I'm a braindead tribal player that cannot think on the combo level, my level of strategy is "I am going to beat you with this stick that I will try to make bigger" and the process of how I make the stick bigger is unknown even to me. I usually just end up hoping for a Lord top deck or to bring my Commander in and Tutor one up. I know I'm going to be able to find something, it just can't cost 5+ because I will likely find multiple excuses to not play it unless it brings a ton of punch.
My wife continues to have me request Meren of Clan Nel Toth, please sir ❤
Cue Nancy Sinatra. My baby shot me down
Wonder what he'd think on Toxrill, The Corrosive
I said card advantage but probably for the wrong reasons.
More cards means more guns and option. More options means more to do after the innevitable 5 board wipes.
I was teaching my little brother how to play using some precons. Mine happened to have grimoire of the dead in it. He asked, why wouldn’t everyone put that in their deck, it’s such a good card? This is why.
Ancestral Recall > Dark Ritual
Or, said in a different way: card draw gets you something good to hand, but you need something good in hand already to use fast mana.
And its actually valuable to know that because good game mastery should mean you become more efficient at building inefficiently when you play at a lower power level. The D&D 3.5 approach. Which is not at all unexpected since MTG was inspiration for D&D 3.5 decisions.
Not familiar with dnd, but how did magic influence it?
@@dameonpigeon2736
tldr; They copied MTG's concept of chaff into character builds for D&D 3.5 to reward system mastery and created both a system with huge creativity and depth and an unfairly large demand on players that hobbled its potential.
----
Back when WoTC first got D&D from TSR (that originally owned it for 1e and 2e but went out of business) they took inspiration from Magic's success when approaching concepts like character choice. "Ivory Tower game design" I believe was how Monte Cook described it. But the fundamental concept was that certain system choices would be purposefully sub-optimal (draft chaff, as it were), and others would combo together very creatively, in an attempt to mimic the concept of building a powerful deck. They folded that concept into a character-building. Now if that sounds like a terrible kneecap to new players and brutally misunderstanding group play at an RPG table, you'd be right, but it did enable a glut of creative options (of varying effect, from the flavorful to the mechanically optimal) that allows you to make pretty much anything in D&D 3.5, with a rule for any and all of it. (although not necessarily a good rule, like banding bad at times.)
Because commander has a certain expectation of table cohesion that's more similar to D&D than traditional magic you can see a similar way the systems demand mastery when creating decks/characters for the table. You have to know the heights of power, to some extent, to know how to kneecap yourself enough to play at a lower power level, otherwise you'll stumble face-first into table infuriating build problems with broken combos and such.
The reactionary demand for balance that came from that decision lead to 4e being far more forcibly balanced (although it gained MTG's love of keywords, iirc, and I'll say no more on it because that's a longer diversion)
I could go on from there for my opinions on their "design by mob opinion" 5e, or their proposed next edition that sounds very much like live-service D&D, but that diverts too much.
Simic: "Por que no los dos?"
Casual war story turn 1 forest and lanowar elves turn 2 a mountain and a jeskas will for 7 then slapped down an etali and hasted him I agree with you 100% that fast mana in casual is lethal
Furthermore, anyone who does not understand cedh lethal oracle of Thessa and demonic consultation is 3 mana and wins you the game instantly if uninterrupted
Which is better, Dark Ritual or Ancestral Recall? I rest my case.
i was gunna say both
i've seen Fast mana Brick, because their hnad was all fuel no engine
Okay but can mana or cards get it?
I agree completely with this but with the caveat that it depends. See even in casual. Folks still need both. Maybe have crappier ways to get there. But it's still the same principle. Meanwhile the cedh players are forking over hella bread to do the refined version of your casual deck. But the principal still remains!!!
If your card advantage blows up....what does it matter if you have extra mana?
Flip side, what happens when all your mana is blown up? Sure your board state may be setup...but without the mana to protect it. You're now a glass cannon
Card advantage absolutely matters.. Until you have your killer combo in hand. Sometimes the spikey thing to do is mulligan and keep a bucket of ramp/mana and the thing your dumping into.
See also: Tron.
My Gix deck does regular fair and balanced mono-Black things.
Y'know, getting crazy levels of both mana and card draw.
I had somehow gotten a Liliana of the Dark Realms to go off and ran out of cards way too fast as I never hit one of my draw engines after I activated Gix.
Card draw is 100% the most important thing in this game and WotC makes it far too easy to refresh your hand constantly. You can have a billion mana available to you but if you don't have the utilities in hand all you can do is pass.
what does it say about me when i say both AND love combo locks?
I will never not call door my overused gloryhole anymore
Well, I wouldn't say that at the most competitive points that it is usually about draw card advantage. Rather, a competitive deck needs stuff and the quicker and cheaper they get it, the better. This often doesn't involve drawing lots of cards so much as getting specific cards. So I'd say that fast mana is more dangerous in combination with card selection which them either wins or creates game winning card advantage in some form which may involve drawing or may not. Fast mana gets more dangerous as the deck gets stronger because of what that's going to cast and I guarantee you it isn't going to be something too convoluted. At the competitive level, they aren't trying to just have a ton of cards. They want to disable the opponent as fast as possible. It is just that disabling can come in the form of actual control, denying them something they need to play the game, or putting their life total to 0. Card selection > fast mana > drawing more cards.
How do you feel about Kadena?
Here's the thing: in my opinion Commander should be played to have fun and that includes a whole bunch of janky-ass cards that do f*cked up shit like "Custody Battle", "Possibility Storm" or "Eye of the Storm" (and yes: I am fully aware of the fact that my definition of "fun" sounds like the MTG-version of a drunk toddler who found daddy's 9mm in the unlocked kitchen-pantry but well, I like a bit of confusion at the table)
Maybe, but I still think it's cards every single time. Cards are mana advantage too, even precons have swords to plowshares and counterspell, which answer pretty much any big dragon, eldrazi or fish for just one or two mana. A player can burn their hand full of rituals, Grimm monolith, mana crypt, etc to slam an Etali just to have it never get it's etb because it was answered by a single card and two mana. The the red players is stuck with 3 cards while the blue player still has 6
This is fair... looks at my Malignus bomb I built yesterday.
As someone who also plays LoR where mana advantage doesnt mean as much outside of a few cases, whoever has more playable cards in hand almost always wins. I had an entire deck based around dropping a ton of cheap units every turn
Interesting Question:
What if my problem isn't mana or card draw? What if my beef is removal and countering because every time my ridiculous jank gun is almost done someone pulls a piece off, throws it in a metal crusher and tells me to go by new parts as they finish building their gun and shooting me while I'm still browsing on Amazon?
What do you think of flesh and blood
Ramp tribal is in shambles
I value both equally, I understand that without cards in my hand I do nothing in spite of the infinite mama combo I shot out turn 2, as well as the lack of mana to cast all 20 of the cards I’ve drawn so far. There for I believe yes card draw is more consistently dangerous, I’m still never gonna pair a deck with monstrous draw without putting the adequate mana ramp to do something with it.
I'm a casual player. Always have been. Yeah I prefer to have fun. But my go to is Nekusar. I love letting people draw cards. Drawing cards is fun. But it should come with a price...
We've known it all along but been too afraid to say it, cards are the problem! If no one has cards, magic will become the perfect game. Zero thoughts and heads empty, the way Richard Garfield intended.
This only made me realize how lax everything was when I started playing edh. Now every deck at the table is likely to be a well-oiled machine. Its almost scary how much the format has changed, and myself with it. Sometimes I do miss battlecruiser Magic though.
Battlecruiser magic was a time of innocence. The plays were fun, but boy howdy do I not miss 6 hour games
@@Interrobang212 Yeah, that's a lot of the problem I find with really "casual" commander. A lot of players try to cram "fun" stuff in their decks but a good chunk of them run out of gas extremely easily so they just sit around spinning wheels after they get interacted with. I run a lot of card advantage in my decks for that reason (and I'm not talking about stuff like Rhystic Study but tonnes of stuff like Welcoming Vampire or Coastal Piracy). I can at least play Magic, even if the deck I've built has loads of suboptimal cards, if I can somewhat quickly rummage through the 80 cards left in my library for some shit to cast.
There's nothing worse in EDH than players that take too long to get their house of cards built up or are forced to sit there playing lands or mana rocks because they're forced to top deck after a board wipe. I want everyone to be playing the game and its no fun when someone brings a deck that does nothing the minute someone breathes on it.
I don't know about mana but for magic in general I'd say it's mana. For combo and lockdown decks doing something 1 turn earlier is the difference between losing and winning. And it doesnt even have to be permanent mana, a single lotus petal or spirit guide will make or break you. Being a single card ahead never gets that powerful.
Cards get efficient enough that good turn 1 plays in competitive don’t need a lot to get going. The logical conclusion of taking this to an extreme is you’d rather be one mana short with infinite cards in hand than have infinite mana with no way to guarantee seeing the cards the next turn. In the first scenario, you are guaranteed to win next turn. In the second scenario, you are likely losing.
In Legacy - the fair version of Vintage - Delver is THE deck to beat, and it’s because it has a bunch of efficient creatures, removal, and permission that allows it to quickly work down your life total. Control also thrives in Legacy against combo with Force (of Will/Negation) and the ability to often shut combo down post-board with just a couple cards. Combo is very good, as well, but it’s cheating on mana more often than it’s generating a ton (with the exception of Tendrils, but even that relies on efficient card draw). The big combo decks like Sneak/Show and Reanimator may use a Petal or something to get a turn ahead, but really the big play is slamming a Griselbrand or Emrakul (which are both not coincidentally sources of direct or indirect card advantage) to shut the door on your opponent.
Like even the combo decks that use fast mana do so to get an edge against other combo decks. They can still win playing a “fair” curve and doing what the cards say on the tin. Can’t say the same for decks that rely purely on fast mana. Tendrils is in and out of the top tier of the format based purely on the meta environment’s ability to disrupt its fast mana, and even then the deck is resilient because it has good hand disruption that becomes better when used by a knowledgeable pilot.
I'm sorry, but idk what you're talking about. What's flashy about using one of my favorite blue cards, Baral's Expertise, to cast a decimate for free so that I can be the only one with non land permanents out turn 4?
To be honest once you get 7 or 8 mana most decks have more then enough mana to do whatever they need to and maybe a little extra. So, in the long run card advantage is stronger.
But if you have all those cards the mana becomes the bottleneck again. Which one is it then?
@@Dragostorm21 So, the point I was trying to make is that most decks can function with 8 mana pretty easily outside of hyper specific cases, not that they don't benefit from having more mana than that.
@@Dragostorm21 I recognize there are specific decks which value mana more than card advantage often because mana creates card advantages or gives you something really worth it in the long run.
@@NobodyDungeons it was a joke pointing out that the reason why people need mana is to play cards and the reason people want cards is to spend mana (sorta, you get want I mean), thus if you think one is stronger then that just means the other is a given.
Obviously on the long term each land gives so much mana you need much more cards to keep the balance, but without accounting for cost this question doesn't have a clear answer. A deck where all cards are x costed probably doesn't mind the card advantage but would also be fine so long as they offset the drawn lands. Likewise, a deck without mana costs would not care for lands and would only be limited by card advantage.
In a 8-9 turn game with a cmc below 3 I agree that card advantage is more important, but if the cmc is higher (like 4.5) the extra cards start to be less about advantage and more about quality. After all, in a 10 turn game you only get access to like 120 mana total (and like 20 of it will go to ramp/early game nonsense).
Tldr:it was a joke, but I do genuinely think that in commander card advantage being more important is probably true, especially at a higher level where cmc's are lower and thus the cards actually are used. On a casual level tho, mana is probably better since getting 10 extra mana over the course of the game for a higher cmc deck straight up means 1 or 2 high impact additional cards (or card draw and the mana to use it).
I want a card with land fall that says whenever you play a land card you can search your library for a land and add it to your hand.
TL;DR What good is fast mana if you don't DRAW INTO IT!? 😛
Also - I've always wondered how much mana one can actually generate on turn one with the right sequence of existing cards. I'm talking hands from Fantasyland, colors don't matter, and we're playing Vintage with all the money in the world. 💰
Well i do play simic landlord so i dont know what the problem is
In my playgroup, fast mana will get you killed. Signets and other things that produce less than they cost are ok. But from the time you drop things that produce more than you invested, you become a target.
More options is better than more bullets
My opinion on the subject is thus, you get 1 land and 1 card per turn as a given, but you have 3 opponents, so you're naturally losing advantage every single turn. It should be your goal to break the parity of resources, to get at least as much as the rest of the table. You need a goal, why am I generating these resources and what can i do with them. My the locust God deck cares about card draw more than anything, but there's still almost 20 sources of mana advantage within the deck because when you draw half your deck you need to do something with it there and then or you're not getting another turn.