I got burned out at the beginning and I'm just coming back now. Yeah I'm playing my old decks in my new group and they work fine. But yeah it's incredibly overwhelming.
I’ve played against a Voja a few times. It’s literally: Turn 1: play mana dork elf Turn 2: play mana dork elf Turn 3: play Voja Turn 4: play another elf or wolf, swing for 7-8 commander damage at someone. Turn 5: play another elf or wolf (or both), swing for lethal to the first player. Turn 6: Repeat with more elves and wolves and each attack against each player as Voja is probably now larger than 20/20 and just getting bigger. In our mid-level group, the only time we beat Voja was by never letting the beast be cast in the first place.
There's a lot of one mana spells that remove it, spending 4 mana sucks but it's not the end of the world. It's more then it should be but I'm not sure why people act like ward 3 means it has hexproof@@DemonBlanka
just fyi, phasing out doesn't cause the permanent to leave or enter the battlefield! It's just straight up treated as though it doesn't exist until it magically reappears during your upkeep
Crying in Ovika spellslinger and goblin avalanche 😢 Jokes aside, Ovika Enigma Goliath is sorta its own playstyle (albeit not too original)- Aggro Storm and Burn. Storming off to make a massive army of hasty Phyrexian Goblins that you can smash face with and other cards that can burn down opponents. It's a debatably balanced Locust God (ovika does have ward 3 mana and 3 life for a Flying 6/6 for 5UR)
The walking dead secret lair sold well because they created a pseudo reserved list around the cards by saying these versions would not be reprinted. Nobody gave two hoots about Glen or Darryl.
@@williamdrum9899 Look for the Universes Within cards. Secret Lair versions are basically alt-arts! The commander decks are still gonna be outside property cards
Ward THREE is such a disgusting amount. You mention here being 'the guy that plays four or five sweepers': note that people are moving up towards six-to-eight due to Ward, not to four. Three-to-five is pretty normal for a hundred-card deck :p
@@aldotrioksidilike Octavia the more crazy they keep getting with ward like Sarumans ward of a legendary enchant or artifact, the more the Rick and Morty meme comes to mind against wizards for coming up with ward in the first place... "That's still just Hexproof with extra steps..."
I have fought against Voja multiple times and I have to say.... It is a very unfun commander to fight against it and everyone on the table (aside from the Voja user of course), agrees that is problematic (when it comes to fun). There is no effort playing Voja - since the deck cares about Elves, the deck will DEFINITELY have elves that are mana dorks, thus, cheating Voja early. One time, the Voja player used "crossroads " and then voila - turn 3 Voja up and attacking and pumping everything. For me the most annoying part about Voja is "ward 3"....It could be worse...it could be hexproof instead but still....That card is so unfun and it needs little to no effort to be good.
Part of me is thinking that the answer to a Voja deck is trying to control the elf population; kind of like any other time Elves is a dominant type. Without its host of dorks, the big bad wolf isn't growing into absurdity and then it can't swing with impunity into faces to draw cards. White's still got wraths to sweep a board. Blue's probably going to have to put in counters for creatures and not let the big bad wolf resolve; it doesn't have Ward on the stack. Black might need to run some of those -X effects like Toxic Deluge, but even other versions like Malicious Eclipse just to cull the elf-ball. Red might want stuff like End the Festivities - although a Lithomantic Barrage would be an incredibly clean answer to Voja on the turn cycle it comes down. Green is just going to have to start fighting elves. A different, greedier part of me noticed that a lot of creatures with the text "Wolf" just spiked in price, and has now bought a whole bunch of Ranger Class.
@@The_Sharktocrab you completely missed the point of the video and the point that I made....I have mono green EDh deck...Heck, I pretty sure that I have a deck for each colour combination. Voja as commander is just unfun to fight against and it does things way easier compared to similar commanders. Sorry for insulting your no brainer commander.
@@51gunner while that is a solution , the problem is that every deck needs to be build up to an extent that is thematically fitting within itself and not adding cards just in one case an opponent has Voja. This is the reason that Ragavan was annoying in Modern (before Bowmasters showed up) cause every deck was forced to add specific cards in order to get rid off turn one ragavans.
As soon as the started printing Legendary creatures expressly for the Commander format, many of the potential commanders have had the same issue of being both the enabler and the payoff. The first Commander set from 2011 was one that did it right; powerful legendaries with "build-around-me" abilities that either enabled strategies or were a big payoff for strategies, but not both. Commander 2013 started to creep in a bad direction with cards like Oloro and Prossh, and each successive set afterwards had more and more commanders that were both payoff and enabler.
Basicallly, the issue can be boiled down to this: Johnny, Timmy and Spike have been combined together, and now singular cards are capable of fulfilling the needs of all three with little issue, which at this point if the power creep and railroading has gone this far, what's next?
The thing about Voja is that instead of playing a couple of elves, you just need to play a couple of Changelings and be able to do both of the things that Voja cares about.
Jumpstart is a great example of how they tunnelvisioned a good thing but they also messed it up. You're right, when commander was a format where cards weren't designed for it there was an element of finding homes for cards that were bad but good with the commander. That was super cool and, while that does still exist, it's definitely been erodede.
and with the power creep of the format, a lot of those bad but good in commander cards just can't keep up and are now also bad in commander. they have no home.
I still remember when building a commander deck meant looking at your legendary creatures and thinking how it would work in a different format. EDH went downhill when wotc started to print cards for it. I will die on that hill.
You are very right! Beginnings of EDH (Highlander for that matter) was the most enjoyable time in magic in my life. So many choices and so many new cards to build around or not! (I am guilty of playing Lady Orca deck). I stopped playing EDH more or less once wizards got involved in the format but the fond memories remain :)
Just starting the video, haven't finished yet but I have thought this same thing for a while now. A large part of the issue is the asymmetry in a lot of cases. One of the first and most fun commander decks I put a lot of effort into was Ruric Tharr - I liked the the deck was capable of literally killing its pilot as long as he was out. But he's a magnet for removal so the deck needs to be a clever balance of protection (hexproof/shroud and indestructible) for both the commander and the alternate win cons/threats (which are overwhelmingly strong creatures in gruul), ways to make your creatures more dangerous, ways to make Ruric Tharr not symmetrical (life link), and interaction on top of all that. Compare that to most modern Legendary creatures that usually explicitly name "You" as a beneficiary and "opponent(s)" as victims of whatever rule stipulation the commander you run places on the rules of the game. The game has moved in that direction for ages and we don't see ruric tharr or lord of the pit style creatures anymore. You can make decks around old creatures that do that sort of thing but its more niche design challenge than efficient these days.
Yeah, even stax pieces are like that nowadays. Even though old ones were more brutal (like Winter Orb or Stasis), they made you build your deck around them to break the symmetry. Now we get less powerful stuff, but the only victims are your opponents, like Drannith Magistrate. I feel like the card would be way less hated if it stopped you from casting spells that are not in your hand as well. And you'd definitely think about including it in your deck, especially if your commander cost more than two mana
I don't think Slogurk falls into the category of cookie cutter commander. He doesn't put lands in the graveyard for you and because of this Slogurk decks in standard have changed overtime depending on the support pieces.
Yeah, Slogurk doesn't play the game by itself any more than a Tatyova would. Fetch lands are a thing, sure, but it won't really become a threat if all you do is play some fetch lands. It needs self mill. Voja, on the other hand, only needs you to play elves (which you'd do anyway to ramp into it) and some changelings (they are both elves and wolves). As soon as it attacks you have one turn to wipe the board or lose. And wiping the board is pretty hard since it only needs a couple of creatures on board to get insane value from its attack trigger, so the deck has so much space for protection like Heroic Intervention
Caves, Deserts, Fetches, Strip Mine, etc. You could easily jam that deck with half lands that put themselves into the grave. You're not thinking wide enough.
This kind of design is why I play odd things. Like Spirit of the Night only 1 creature, Damia dommy mommy art only, Kenrith takes his kids to the races(vehicles and only Kenrith family members and like 9 racers), Garth the Zookeeper(all creatures are regular animals and all other non-land cards have art similar to enclosures), Jolreal mass land destruction through mass land animation, Ihsand's Shade shades only, Aphemia enchantress, or Maeve "all my wincons are Armageddon Clocks".
You sound like someone who wants to play a game because it's fun and not because you're trying to pretend like you have a bigger dick than everyone else. Why can't there be more people like you? 😊
The signpost for me was Neon Dynasty, when Shrines were niche and clunky even after M21. Then the Go-Shintai cycle just felt like it made the whole machine go brrrrr
red is really weird on Voja, she's been pure selesnya forever, and none of her abilities would be a pie break if she wasn't red. it's just there to make her better for commander
There are a lot of wolves/werewolves in red, so that was certainly part of it. Wolves are primarily green, but so is Naya; it's green + green's allied colors. The abilities work without red (or even white, as they're all primary or secondary in green), but the way I see it, the vigilance is white, the trample is red, and the ward is green. I'm not saying it isn't a training-wheels design (it obviously is), but I'm OK with the color identity and keyword abilities.
@@majordude83Voja's keywords don't really make sense. While vigilance is clearly white, trample is more of a green thing and ward is just a good keyword wotc put on it to make sure none of your opponents can remove it without functionally skipping their turn. They just put a bunch of good keywords on it so it's hard to block it, attack it back or remove. They really wanted to make sure it was hard to deal with
@@majordude83Yes, but Voja doesn't interact with Werewolves. Trample reads way more green than red. So the red was just included so that she could be a commander for those few red wolves? But Voja is not a new character, she's well established as a part of the Selesnya guild, the companion of Tolsimir. And it's incredibly strange that Voja cannot be in a deck commanded by any of the three versions of Tolsimir.
This reminds me of ghirred conclave exile. As he gives you a chunky token to populate on etb and will populate. No card draw. I guess now will have the clause "whenever you populate draw a card, this ability triggers only once each turn" to make it playable.
As a fellow Magic boomer, I agree with you. Too many legendary creatures are doing too much. I liked how in the past, you had to choose cards to synergize with your commander and deck theme or game plan to make your deck work. Now your commander does everything and also tells you what to run, making decks more same-y and repetitive. I also wish they would release fewer sets and make them high quality.
There's one "all in one" commander I really enjoy and that's Hazezon. His abilities care about one specific card type that basically never gets played and his tokens create interesting synergies due to their status as R/W/G dual typed tokens, desertwalk is also up there for a top 10 most useless keywords (that isn't actively detrimental) and makes you think about ways to force deserts onto your opponent's sides of the field. Deserts being nonbasic you wind up having to use much more premium ramp and they're just not great lands in general, there's a whole suite of challenges that arise when you're building land reanimator out of using specific, quite bad lands that you don't get out of similar decks.
Took me a minute to realize you're talking about the new version... I play OG Hazazeon and none of this applies to him, except the continued making of sand warrior tokens.
You can run old Hazezon in new Hazezon, using astral slide to cycle deserts to blink old Hazezon, putting his trigger multiple times on your end step. Then you play the cycled desert anyway with nuHazezon. new Hazezon's desert walk once killed my Hazezon deck because someone stole and buffed him. Hazezon is great ❤
I agree with all the points. I also just think that's the fundamental problem with elfball, they do not have backup plans, they go all in, their gameplay loop is solved right from the get go (get mana, play elves, buff board for lethal) so Voja just makes their all-in strategy more consistent, and thus too powerful, but how many games are just randomly determined by a board of 7 1/1 elves and you just HOPE they don't draw overwhelming stampede effects? Ezuri could also act as your lethal in the command zone threat, but at least it doesn't have ward, and importantly, red's haste, and white's protection spells
Having played a few games against voja, the experience was absolutely miserable. Any early ramp to play voja against a board that didn't ramp is just GG before turn 5. Simultaneously wins games if played early and cannot be answered if played early enough.
@@KrayZieTylerit's got ward 3, good luck killing it on turn 3/4. And if you're the one who spends a card and 4-5 mana (ie your whole turn) to kill it, good luck keeping up with the other two players. Sweep or lose. Commander is turning into sweep or lose. I much prefer Brawl. A lot of the problems with "do-it-all" commanders don't exist there because trading 1 for 1 is actually fine or using up a turn to cast removal isn't an auto game-loss.
@KrayZieTyler they're going to have a board leading into voja. And the only non blue counterspells that can hit a voja are Kozilek the Great Distortion. Mana tithe Lapse of Certainty and Tibalt's trickery if you want to destroy voja without paying the ward cost you need blue for lier Disciple of the Drowned or a void rend
@@KrayZieTyler counterspells are definitely the correct answer to something like Voja, but "it can be countered" can also be said about 99% of all cards; doesn't mean some of those cards aren't poorly designed. And do we really want a commander format to exist where everyone needs to pack 6+ sweepers? They make for such long and boring games. I already feel like everyone running 3-5 sweepers is bad for gameplay, but it's a necessary evil when so many threats are like Voja; sweep or lose against it.
Ive been complaining about newer designs, and i feel like there's just less room for decision making. My decks that feel the most interesting are old Atraxa, which is a combo deck that relies on the modular keyword ability, amd Feather, which is a stuffy doll burn/control deck. The thing that makes these commanders so interesting is that they are very open-ended and give me as a deck builder a lot of room to explore and make decisions. The newest commander I've built is Malcator, and while I wouldn't describe the deck is particularly unique, the commander is an engine piece that you really have to build around, and that was why I chose to build a deck around it.
I tried to build Malcator but I couldn't make a list that wasn't just better as Losheel. Yea, you get access to blue but I didn't feel the blue added enough substance to justify it over Losheel. Would love to see your list and see if you got around that "problem" I was having. I know TH-cam doesn't do links anymore, but I could probably search you up by username if you're on moxfield or wherever.
the problem is that whatever you do with atraxa deck still is mostly irrelevant because you have in command zone virtually untraversable obstacle that you drop on the board t4 or earlier and it will do its thing just by you passing the turn. there are very little other players can do to have profitable attacks with atraxa on board and repeatably wiping the board or using spot removal turn after turn to get rid of atraxa is not interesting gameplay. and unless people do that you will sit behind this pillow fort and win the game with combo. that's not what most players find interesting in commander format. feather have similar issues. it matters very little what specific cards you use because they all boil down to the same predictable gameplay loops you will be doing over and over again. adding stuffy dolls is nice but when the first one drops onto the table it will be obvious what you are doing and again the other cards in your deck will not matter because they all fall into the same category of effects and feather cares only about that not the specific effect. it's unfortunate that how efficient those cards are outshines all the effort you can put into building their decks. it's fun to have them in a game once in a while but they get old very very quickly.
Atraxa really isn't the best example to point to... yeah she requires SOME build around, but she's really only a step or two removed from current commander design.
Something I've noticed in precons from Kamigawa Neon dinasty onwards is that face commanders in those products are super hand holding, but most of the secondary commanders have cool desings that really want you to think outside the box to brew them
The face commander is usually aimed at new player, so they are very "on the rails" (because some genius at WotC though Commander is a great way to teach new players).
@@enricomassignani thing there is, they went years making face commanders that didn't hold your hand. the commander products from before they started releasing them with every set had a lot of commanders that gave you a direction to build without being the enabler, the engine, and the payoff, with only a few exceptions in the mix. It was really only around Ikoria when they stopped designing this way.
I think I generally agree with you. And I do think that decks are a bit more rewarding when you have to build around it a bit more. One of my favorite commanders decks I've built is Vaevictus Asmadi the Dire. It has an on attack trigger, but doesn't have haste. It doesn't have protection. It's trigger makes you sacrifice things but doesn't provide you sac fodder. If you have a non-permanent card on top of your deck? It stays there. It doesn't draw you the card so it makes you think about how many non-permanent cards you want to run. There is also a chance that using his ability can backfire on you. Sometimes you flip your opponent into a bigger threat than whatever it is you removed. But those moments to me just make memories. It synergizes with sacrifice synergies and feeds into graveyard plans. It ended up being a Jund control token-y deck. Its a really neat build and leads to situations where i really have to think about if it's worth running out my commander without haste or a means to protect it. But the deck still functions perfectly fine without my commander. Which is generally how I prefer my decks to run. IMO the commander should be a good part of your deck, but not the sole reason that it functions which I think is a trap a lot of modern commander decks fall into. I have a buddy in my normal play group that builds heavily around the commander sometimes to the detriment that if his commander gets removed then his deck doesn't really work.
For me, the "it does everything on its own" Commander was always Chulane. I built a Chulane deck that I felt wasn't even very good, and it was still just backbreaking and oppressive. That was sort of when I realized that Commanders are bad now, because they're too good and do everything for you.
Adding the "draw a card" clause really elevates commanders that do a thing to a best-in-class tier. The issue is for me is that at a certain point we're punishing ourselves by not playing the Chulanes and Korvolds of the world. My lands deck was a Prossh deck that animated lands to sacrifice; I had a sac outlet in the command zone but I still had to make some work for it to do anything. The deck always struggled with card draw and I realized that as neat as my niche deck was, Korvold was just a better commander for drawing me cards for "doing the thing", triggering "the thing," and eventually being a lethal threat on his own. And if I was trying to optimize a deck and didn't do those things, I risk being swept by those who are.
I was about 80% of the way done with my Voja deck before I realized how broken it is. I didn’t even have the best cards in there, just stuff I had laying around from taking apart other decks. I started goldfishing it and was regularly getting Voja out on turn 3 and it just snowballed from there and I realized how unfun it was going to be for my play group to face
I agree on your final point. Having the commander be able to do everything by itself means that games have less variance, which is one of the only unique aspects of the format. It makes games feel way too similar because players don't need to dig through their library as often to find a card that combos with their commander, because their commander usually does it inherently.
Syr Konrad was designed for limited, where niche A+B strategies can too often end up being blank pieces of cardboard. Nobody wants to draft Avacyn Restored again. Take that for a Boomer reference! I'm not sold on Slogurk being self-enabling though. Its abilities combine to create a payoff for putting lands in the graveyard, but it doesn't do that part itself.
Tatyova is the go to example of "Oops accidentally ruined the commander game" for me, doesn't matter how much text is on it, it comes down, draws a card and gains a life unless it's countered, and then does MORE when you've run out of instant speed interaction. It doesn't require you do anything you wouldn't already be doing in simic, it just rewards you with free cards for doing what every simic ramp deck is already doing as opposed to allowing you to do anything interesting in and of itself or BEING a ramp payoff. Like, you're sitting there telling me Voja is bad because it kills you on turn 6, meanwhile I have spent games playing against Tatyova (and other similar commanders) just asking "OK, are you done yet?" for 30 odd minutes in a row until finally they tell me, "OK, attack everyone at the table for 97"... you didn't need to make me wait for that.
So is your problem that it draws cards, or that you don't like simic? Because the wolf draws cards too (and can draw more than tatyova if you are focused on the wolf side instead of elf) but its also the wincon on its own. I get that control is boring but that isn't really because of tatyova, that's because of control itself. You can use a thousand other draw engines or uninteractive commanders and get the same result but there aren't a thousand other win condition commanders that do what voja does all in one card
I generally don't like any deck that says "draw a card whenever you breathe" because it inevitably leads to long solitaire turns that let me know you don't respect my time
@@KrayZieTyler No? Your local commander game generally isn't about just win at all costs. Usually it's about getting a few people together to sit around the table and have some fun. If you just want to win as fast as possible, go grind tournaments, but you will not be asked to return to my kitchen table games if you make the experience miserable for everyone else.
@@legendunbound5845 My issue is that control decks end their turn, Voja decks end their turn, Combo decks demonstrate a combo and end the game entirely, Tatyova decks tend to stop letting other people play the game at ALL. Not like control decks trying to keep the board empty until they can win, no no, they just... stop passing their turn at all at some point. So you either just scoop rather than waiting to see if they can pull out the victory after 30 minutes and drawing their whole deck, or you go play Smash Bros instead and the guy plays solitaire for a bit.
This is definitely something I've noticed as well that's been pissing me off for a while now. It's not even all that new, Winota, Questing Beast, Dauthi Voidwalker, Ragavan, Bloated Contaminator, there's so many cards lately that slice and dice and do it all on their own, no downsides. Idk if there's just one bad designer on the team getting away with all these terrible designs like Leyline of Guildpact, but they all give me the same vibe of just amateurish overpowered overdesigned lack of balance and experience.
LMAO leyline of the guildpact. If you had posted that exact card on r/custommagic years ago you would get 20,000 downvotes and a ton of comments calling you stupid for using hybrid mana like that
@williamdrum9899 like it really is the most r/custommagic card I've ever seen. Funny in concept, terrible in practice, which really tells you how little they are actually playtesting this shit these days
I think Slogurk is on the better side since it doesn't mill yourself or say "discard a land, get a treat" or something, but I do agree with the overall premise. One thing I think is important though is the aspect of designing for limited. It's not applicable to all cases, but a fair few are like "Sacrifice a goblin: Deal 2 damage to something" and in case you don't end up with any goblins or it's one of few goblins in the set, it'll also have "Whenever ~ attacks, make goblins equal to its power" or something. Both abilities could very well be on their own cards (and the latter one is practically one of the Krenkos already), but to make the limited experience smoother you get the enabler coupled with your payoff so the latter isn't a dead card on its own if you get unlucky in a draft or the set otherwise doesn't support it. Whether that's good design or not is another matter, but given how folks have been enjoying limited a heck of a lot in recent years, it seems to be working pretty good on that front at least.
Great video. It's what I have been complaining about for a while. My favorite example is Massacre Girl, Known Killer. I would love this card if she only did either thing. Being this 1 card combo makes me absolutely despise it. I think the first time I noticed this new design that I dislike was when I saw a friend play Codie, Vociferous Codex. Generally, really cool idea. Just why does it have to make it so easy for you? It lets you play all 5 colors, alright. You can drop it on t3 or even 2 with any ritual or whatever. You can then naturally curve into it's ability on the next turn. Which will not only ramp you. It also fixes your mana. I would like Codie so much more if it's ability cost no mana and gave you no mana. You could even give it an additional ability like "Codie is all colors" so you can play all colors in your deck. Or make the book cost 1WU and activate for WUBR and give you 4 mana in any combination. or something. Honestly green doesn't fit as well as it's the one color caring about permanents. I'll take that back. The first card was Ramos, Dragon Engine. A commander you can play with any mana, that gross whenever you cast almost anything. That also let's you cast more things. Boy do I hate this dragon. When I started playing commander we played stuff like Isperia, Supreme Judge, Volrath the Fallen, Zedruu the Greathearted, Obzedat, Ghost Council. And I had barely anything to complain about.
Massacre Girl, KK at least has the draw back of being a single color, but I agree, even the menace is pushing the other synergies; if your opponent double blocks her they get absolutely wrecked by an instant -x/-x spell (4 for 1 territory). I've been playing MG,KK in standard brawl and the first thing I did was look for all the menace creatures because it's just that strong with her. The deck built itself; menace creatures and instant speed -x/-x so kind of boring but boy is it strong. I've been dunking on every other mono-black commander and most decks tbh and my list isn't even optimized (don't want to spend the rare/mythic wildcards).
Let's take the analysis Codie ramps you for 1, fixes your mana, gives your next spell a very special Cascade You can say it's a one card combo but there is no pay off directly imbued within it, fun ways of building Codie usually has something to do with how to play permanents without casting them, that's not really hand holdy, you need to actually go look in the deep card pool to look for cards that can help achieve this goal. It certainly takes a lot more effort than just looking up generic elves and wolves and be mostly done with the deck. Ramos is quite usually a t5 do nothing like a lot of higher costed commanders, being prone to removals like that. It then grows whenever you cast spells, and you can use that to gain a lot of mana to cast some other spells. The pay off requires you to run a lot of multicolored spells, which usually requires a lot of mana fixing, while Ramos technically fixes you, but that's it's payoff, it doesn't just magically appear at first. Sure, it's a big flyer that can punch pretty hard, it's not a card that naturally comes with trample, and while you could try Voltron Ramos because it's a versatile card, it's in no way shape or form as hand holdy as some of the other cards in this video is. Ramos tells you that you should prefer colored spells, especially multi colored spells, how you execute that is completely up to you. You can make a boring Ramos deck, sure, but you don't have to. I feel like you want to see people jump through hoops to do their thing, and I think that's fun too, but it doesn't need to be directly on the commander itself. Codie and Ramos are way closer to Tatyova than Voja or Syr Konrad. Syr Konrad reads "Make Discards and black mana and win the game"! Ramos reads "Play multicolored spells." ooook but how and what exactly? Because the only combo Ramos has with itself is making it a Voltron, that can be chump blocked, slightly harder than usual because it's a flyer, but it will be stopped by a thopter. This isn't so different from Tatyova, where you gain life and draw more cards, which can be more lands to fuel her, you'd naturally incline to cards like Azusa to help drop more lands, but you need to use the resources she gives you to... get somewhere, do something actually game winning, having a bunch of lands and gained like 15 life is great but you haven't really won the game. This is the same with Ramos, they are value engines that helps facilitate the deck but they rarely win you the game on their own, you are still gonna have to go into the deep card pools and figure out just what do you want to do with the resources, Ramos makes all your multicolored spells better, but the actual wincon needs to come from the 99 cards you put in the deck, and the possibilities are endless, how is this hand holdy?
Atraxa is gross, but she isn't the engine, the enabler, and the payoff. She has you proliferate, but unless you include cards that need proliferation, she does nothing. Honestly nowadays it feels like rather than keyword soup and proliferating, she would also put counters on your creatures when she attacks or something like that, or draw you a card when a counter is put on her.
@anthonydelfino6171 I'm pretty sure they're referring to Grand Unifier, not Praetor's Voice. Grand Unifier is a card advantage piece and combo piece all in one.
Tymna requires you to commit to the board state in order to fire off the engine. There are plenty of other commanders that don't require you to do anything other than play them out in order to generate some sort of advantage. Tymna isn't one of those. I can attest to this because I play her.
@@anthonydelfino6171 it would be the only logical explanation. As you stated, Praetor's Voice only proliferates and requires a deck to be built around her. Grand Unifier is just a 4 color good stuff Food Chain deck. More often than not, you're not playing a "fair" deck with Grand Unifier in the command zone.
The commander decks that I run are Sephara (definitely need set-up for her), Karador (doesn't enable himself), Karametra (plant tribal), Omnath, Locus of the Roil (kinda works for itself), Yidaro (cycle tribal, funnest deck, but hardest deck of mine to play), and Oloro (sets himself up, but if I'm ever playing him, I'm in trouble). I agree with you that commander cards really should be either an enabler or a pay-off, but not both. A good example of this is Averna. She deals with cascade, but doesn't cascade herself, so you need other cards to back up your deck to make use of her ability
I wonder if commander having commanders in the command zone has limited what legendries have effects that revolve around going back to the hand or to the deck. Like Slogurk or that one Fblthp. I wonder what different abilities would revolve around those without a focus on commander. Maybe less legendries as a whole.
Voja is perfect for high power, to strong for casual, to weak for cEDH. A lot of people talk about just countering him or just wipe the board. The issue is that Voja is in very good colors for protection from both. A Voja deck needs a good amount of protection and haste enablers and you are golden. Making Voja uncounterable with Alosaurus Shepard, Rhythm of the Wild and Kutzil helps. Protection from boardwipes is key with things like, Galadriels dismissal, Flawless Manouver, clever Concealment, inspiring call, heroic Intervention, Akroma's Will and boros charm. Haste enablers are also great. Lands like Flamekin Village, Slayers' Stronghold, Hanweir Battlements aswell as cards like Rhythm of the Wild and Rising of the Day can help to connect early.
I would argue that there have always been broken commanders that do everything, Derevi for example. The difference now is that WotC are engaging in disaster economics and desperately milking players with fast power creep, to the detriment of long-term stability. I wonder if we see a "taking back EDH" movement now that Sheldon passed away. It was always supposed to be the "don't tell us how to play on our kitchen table" format but it got co-opted by marketing and accountants.
I would argue even Derevi needed a deck built around it to function. Obviously, cheap creatures are a must to get the triggers going, then you need some kind of draw engine since you're burning your hand on small creatures and some payoff spell to spend the mana you get from untapping on. And even after pulling all of that off, you are not going to kill the table fast by any means. The cookie-cutter design is more of a recent issue. A commander will ask you to do something while accomplishing it by itself and then generating card advantage because it did the thing 😂
At the start you literally just described WotC's approach with Kamigawa. As a new player, I always heard how WotC was unwilling to revisit Kamigawa because the original flopped, and I always asked myself "But... people loved Kamigawa? It's just the card designs that sucked? Just revisit the plane and don't make mechanics that suck." I honestly wish we got one more "classic Kamigawa" set before the Neon Dinasty reboot, since what I love the most about the plane is how they managed to translate Japanese mythology in a way that's both truthful to the source but also its own original take (as they would later do with Theros and Greek mythology); with the introduction of the cyberpunk element, of course, that element got pushed more in the background, especially aesthetic-wise.
I've realised that Duskana, printed right alongside Voja in the same colours, actually plays in really similar space it has a trigger to draw you cards for having creatures, and has a trigger to buff your creatures. But Duskana doesnt have sny of those keywords, doesn't do anything by itself, whereas Voja draws a card, and generally supports a much weaker strategy. But i found Duskana way more interesting and appealing to build, in part for giving me a reason to care about something I haven't specifically before. I've enjoyed finding cool and different 2/2s and token generators for Duskana.
11:25 imho, the uncommon legends like Tatyova are a leftover from when they wanted Brawl to be a thing (they needed a bunch of standard-legal legends but did not have enough rare slots for them in sets)
I completely agree that the modern card design where cards both having the engine and enabling the engine is a problem. It just leads to very homogenous decks that all kinda do the same, and also creates too many decks where the deck cannot function at all without the commander. Personal opinion but I think it is generally better and more fun for everyone when a deck is able to function without its commander being in play, even if it might function less well. Would rather have that than a deck that is either a sitting duck cuz the commander is in the command zone, or an absolute menace because the commander is out and doing its thing self-sustainably
I have two decks that I play with my friends that I find to be incredibly fun, and both are monocolor. The first is Inferno of the Star Mounts, mono red ramp, and I call the deck "Build-a-Bomb" because that's what the commander is, but there's a LOT of prep for it. The second commander I am having a blast with lately is Aeve Progenitor Ooze with lots of Slime Against Humanity in the deck.
I have made several decks with and played against the kill or lose commanders, a d they are quite boring decks They dont have fun if can the thing happen, but how many turns we want? With syr konrad I barely used his mill in the decks I use him in unless I got nothing else needed with spare mana
One of my favourite commanders is Kazuul. He has one line of text. That one line is enough to get me thinking about how to build a mono-red pillowfort deck and what subthemes I could throw in there. Not only does it make the deckbuilding process more interesting, it's also immensely satisfying when everything comes together to form a cohesive deck in the end. Whenever I read a more modern commander I already know at least 95 of the cards that go in their decks just from their abilities. Deckbuilding, an entire aspect of Magic that I love, is completely eliminated from the equation when playing with these cards. They suck.
If he were printed nowadays, he'd have trample, get +1/+1 counters somehow, draw a card when he entered, and the ogres would make treasure tokens when they attacked.
predictable is the best description of those. while slogurk is doing its thing mostly on its own at least it requires more moving pieces to do so efectively and the thing it is doing is not overly powerful on its own. same with konrad. there sure is the activated ability but it is not that threatening unless you add more moving pieces. voja on the other hand is an atrocious design. it is basically better craterhoof (those counters are permanent) and distant melody stapled together. in the command zone. with additional keywords because... fu i guess. it really does not matter what you put into your deck really if it will satisfy the condition of being an elf or an wolf and it will win you games. sure there will be some variance based on what you have in the deck but all that will be so insignificant compared to the effects it gives you that it won't matter to how the game went.
I've been thinking about this lately as well. I find a lot of new commanders are the engine and the payoff. Wish we had more Tasigurs and Volo, iterant scholars and some such more open ended commanders. I really like partner pairs and especially the choose a background commanders since those tend to give you more room to brew.
honestly the commanders I tend to be drawn to are the ones that do something mechanically interesting, like Jinnie Fay (I've built her around For Mirrodin and Living Weapon) or King of the Oathbreakers, or the ones that act as an enabler for the rest of the deck (Warped Eclipse as a cost reducer for a Forced Fruition deck, for example, or the new Aurelia in a deck built around giving everyone else a big board and goading them). one card combo commanders just... tend not to be that fun.
@@otterfire4712Looks like a decent build-around-- not something I'd build myself (I already have an izzet deck I really enjoy), but something that's got a clear strategy that needs more than just the commander to work.
old commanders: You decide how to play your deck new commanders: Wizards tells you how to play your deck and gives you a chocolate every time you do what they want
This just reminds me that I need to play against my friend's Voja deck with my Galadriel deck and see which of us can get to 200 total power on the board first. It'll be the ultimate pp measuring contest. 😂
Can we refocus on the 99 instead of commander? Voja is a nice wincon in the command zone, it also gives Elves access to Naya which lets their elf deck do more than just be a mono green ramp deck. The big issue with Voja is how hard it is to deal with (hint lots of boardwipes) and how few Naya commanders can compete with it. Slogurk is a life from the loam minus dredge, thats what you want in the command zone of your lands-matter deck. If you want to win at commander and not just build cool decks, your commander needs to do one of two things, either be the wincon, or be a value engine. You can have theme, meme and other commander decks if you want but most people don't have nearly as many decks as you seem to think they do. The fact that you don't need to search scryfall for niche cards is what a majority of commander players want.
A point you made briefly, with more boardwipes in the format instead of single target removal, it really does slow the game down. More often now I've had games where turn 3 commanders come out, also Voja because of Jeweled Lotus ofc, boardwipes, another Commander, boardwipe. Turn 6, the game finally starts after 4 spent boardwipes and people play without their commanders. I would also have the optimist thought that single removal can be used politically, while a boardwipe is always "we will be here longer, sorry".
I've been working on a pioneer wolf deck since WAR Tolsimir & ELD Garruk were in standard and i've added the Voja now and yeah it is a easy bomb/win con. I've had to expand by adding the 8 elves and red to the mana base but still its a tad crazy how pushed it is.
I'm not at all a hipster deck brewer, but when i built mono red Panharmonicon, using jaxis as my commander it feels pretty unique. I haven't been able to replicate that unique deck feeling since though.
I agree with most of your points! Most cards now just do too much. I feel like the game has grown to be more about building around a few cards instead of building around a strategy... Maybe thats just me being a long-time magic player though.
If you have a decent mana base Voja comes down turn 3. Dork turn 1, any ramp spell or mana rock turn 2, voja turn 3. You now get 1 turn cycle to get a cheap board wipe in like Toxic Deluge or Blasphemous act before you have a massive problem.
Yugioh ran into very much the same issue, you'd have cards that had effects which basically red - When you play this card summon a monster from your hand - If this card is used for a [insert here] summon, special summon this card from your grave - If this card is special summoned, special summon a monster from your grave So you'd just end up having a bunch of cards that would set up an entire combo by themselves and it was so boring. Hey new card reveal, oh it just does everything that the archetype originally would do, just on 1 card. If there was a fan favourite archetype that had a big boss monster you knew that it's new support cards would be "Summon Man, Boss Monster Summoner", "Searcher of Summon Man", "Searcher of Searcher of Summon Man" and "Boss Monster Omni-Negate" dropping any previous theme the deck had for boss monster turbo
As someone who just started playing Magic I feel having commanders that do 'everything' can help with learning the game as it makes deck building somewhat easier. That said I agree with the boredom part because having a commander that does it all doesn't really make it feel like I'm winning the game myself, I'm just playing the card that pretty much does that by itself so to say. This was fine, and very helpful, when I was just starting out and learning the mechanics of the game but it's already starting to become a bit of an issue for me now as I want to dive deeper into deck building and understanding the nuances of Magic. In an ideal world I think 'do all' commanders should be able to set themselves up for easier plays but have relatively lower payoffs when compared to commanders that are more limited by themselves but reward good synergy and deck building. This would be helpful for newer players but also create a point where it would push players to move out of the comfort zone to improve. I'm afraid that design space in such a case would be quite limited however so I'm not sure if it is feasible at all.
Something makes me fear they’re going to start power creeping the old commanders out in favour of new, stronger ones. How much longer before the Ur-Dragon or Edgar Markov get powercrept?
I had a Naya Werewolf/Angel tribal deck led by Samut I dubbed my "Dogwalker" deck. (I was a dogwalker/petsitter for a decade.) I've since took my deck apart & replaced with Tovolar as Commander. It runs better as far as Werewolf tribal goes, but lacks the personal flavour the deck used to emulate. I haven't thought about that deck until this video. *Thanks for the Content!*
Ooooh man I love the Gurk. Caught onto it right away when it dropped. It's a blast to play, wild that it's taken this long for the wider community to catch on to it.
Slogurk can feel incredibly awkward outside of the right deck Sure the gurk is incredible if built correctly but has the issue that it doesn't look obviously powerful because unlike voja you don't win the game by just playing creatures ya need lots of sac lands and self mill to turn the Loam on a stick into a huge win
@@jmanwild87 I actually think it's got quite a diverse range of options to it. Scapeshift stuff, hermit druid, mill, I built a deck around cycling with it and it did nicely. I liked that it wasn't immediately busted and took some thinking to operate. That said, the ooze gets enormous very quickly, so Voltron is fairly trivial.
@@toctheyounger I built one that uses slogurk primarily as a value engine with cycling lands and sac lands along with landfall engines and the grind game feels fantastic, it's really odd that slogurk was mentioned as a commander that more or less builds themself when I can think of dozens of better examples
I personally don't mind commander who can do the thing if they do it slowly, for example the wise moth man wants you to mill cards and also gives people rad counters to help do that and then buffs your board when nonland cards are milled, but it can only give everyone one rad counter at a time and has to attack to do that repeatedly. i like cards that are designed like the wise moth man because the card helps you do the thing and gives you a pay off, but the cards ability to do the thing is weak enough that you have to build a deck around doing the thing, then your commander rewards you for that by being a value engine for your deck and still being useful because it can "do the thing" even if you some other factor in the game is stopping you from going off with your commanders payoff. I thing Syr Konrad, the grymm is a pretty good example of this as he is able to "do thing thing" and get a payoff for it, but on his own is not super powerful and requires you to actually have to work to build a good deck that works with his payoff. but I do agree that Voja, Jaws of the conclave is a pretty low skill commander because while Voja can activate its own payoff by itself and not be super powerful like that, the payoff voja givers is for going wide with elves and wolves, so making a voja deck only requires you to just throw together the some ramp, removal, and defiantly some creature protection (for voja) and then just adding the best elves and wolves. it doesnt take nearly as much skill to thought to make a super strong voja deck as it does to make super sting moth man or Sry konrad deck. all in all this was a good video though and I do agree that commanders should require more effort to be able to go off and "do the thing"
The problem with Voja isn't at CEDH tables, it's at casual ones. And even then the issue isn't that it's too powerful or back breaking. I've played against Voja twice and both times the player did disgusting things but ultimately lost because they were too scary, and then got really salty about it. It's a salt inducing card on both sides of the table. On one hand Ward 3 is absurd on such a power house and on the otherhand I feel a lot of super casual players are going to build Voja badly and get punished hard because the commander is too scary. It's like bringing a gun to a knife fight, then getting mad your opponents aren't giving you the space to load your gun with bullets.
Korvold is a do everything for you kind of commander and in cEDH it is a deck that just says, "Hello have you heard of our lord and savior Dockside Extortionist?"
I think commanders that make it clear how to play them are not inherently a problem, it's necessary to offer a choice between generalist commanders where the deck is what matters and niche decks that count on doing The Thing best. A card like Hazezon demands Desert Landfall, largely needing the same cards as regular Landfall but still offering some challenge to respond to by needing you to play a large number of famously weak lands. Voja not only speaks for itself, it speaks directly over the player. It is a command zone Craterhoof for Elfball whose best merits are enabled by mana dorks in Elfball and which demands an answer while refusing to be answered. There's no true variance in deck design of balancing traits and properties, there's just the blatantly obvious optimal way to play it and then also worse-on-purpose decks.
Perhaps a hot take but I feel like there's a significant amount of edh players that just always want their deck to "do its thing" every game, regardless of the fact that three other players could prevent you from doing said thing. These players tend to gravitate towards all-in-one commanders because it's not about jumping through hoops and building interesting synergies from a gigantic pool of cards. It's about having fun when their deck does the thing, even if "the thing" almost ensures victory. I don't blame these players. Everyone has fun in different ways and I doubt many players wouldn't have fun swinging out with an army of elves and wolves. I just wish that wotc wouldn't funnel into that lazy design space so much, but given how the so many of the top commanders tend to be both engine and enabler, I sadly don't see them stopping anytime soon.
The easy and efficient commander design draws more new players. Building a strong commander deck otherwise requires a lot of skill that usually takes at least a year or two to master. People are eager to play on an even playing field with their friends.
I'd only disagree on including Korvold simply because in a vacuum his 1st ability feeding the 2nd is card neutral (lose 1 permanent, draw 1 card) and does require all the treasure/sacrifice absurdities to be broke, so his design "on paper" feels a bit more of an "oops"-strong. Voja is just pure upside from "Go".
Tbh I think the biggest example of how things have swung since Tatyova days (and to be clear, Tatyova and Muldrotha and such are still relatively pushed!!), is Aesi. Aesi is Tatyova, with one mana increase, and now you get even more of the stuff done for you since now you get the extra land drops you need in the command zone!!!
It's crazy how signature spell books and the commanders arsenals started off strong and then just disappeared when the later ones didn't have enough value to keep the hype, they would've still worked, WotC just needed to support them better and not just throw the baby out with the bathwater
Agreed. That said, playing against monolithic commanders that need to be out for the deck to perform has inherent risk, even more so if a card is so pushed everyone knows it's name. I'd warn newer players that you will likely enjoy (and win) more games by choosing an approach that moves the ball up the field a few yards at a time so you stay off the radar while the table gangs up on the Voja player. One thing I like about someone using a known problem commander is not having to feel bad about playing a 'wash away' for one mana when they try to cast it :) After not getting to play for a while, people get the hint.
This is why one of my favourite things to do on Arena is looking at Uncommon rarity and underused Legendary creatures to see what weird things i can do with them. Not the ones that were built to go hogwild
The same can be said to a lot of commanders nowadays: Tergrid, Sheoldred, K'rrik, Atraxa grand unifier, Aragorn the uniter etc. IMO ward is one of the most OP mechanics to be created. I know WotC is a business, to sell products you should have chase cards. With the over saturation of products for commander, it's not a wonder that the card quality will be power crept to a exaggerated point. Funny thing with Voja lorewise is that the Pet/Mount is more powerful than the rider (Ragavan/Kari Sev). That said, imo even is power level 7 up there's not much effort to win becoz your whole deck is meant to be OP to begin with.
The only saving grace of Voja for me is that it's currently bad in Standard which is great for me as a mainly Standard player. That's only because Elves are bad in the current meta though. If there's a set in the next three years that prints a bunch of good low to the ground Elves, then Voja is going to be absolutely ridiculous in Standard, which is even worse because it's a stupid pre-release box only card.
is it too much that the new voja reminds me of edgar markov, and that a pretty easy way to build voja is just 1&2 cmc elves and wolves and there is a very good deck on hand
Remember when "The Year of Commander" started in 2020.. and just never ended?
I got burned out at the beginning and I'm just coming back now. Yeah I'm playing my old decks in my new group and they work fine. But yeah it's incredibly overwhelming.
Truer words...
Too much, that’s for sure!
I'm fine with it.
Got my favorite monoblack aristocrats deck out of it.
Every year since I found an absolute banger to play or two
@@DAsradawhich mono black?
I’ve played against a Voja a few times. It’s literally:
Turn 1: play mana dork elf
Turn 2: play mana dork elf
Turn 3: play Voja
Turn 4: play another elf or wolf, swing for 7-8 commander damage at someone.
Turn 5: play another elf or wolf (or both), swing for lethal to the first player.
Turn 6: Repeat with more elves and wolves and each attack against each player as Voja is probably now larger than 20/20 and just getting bigger.
In our mid-level group, the only time we beat Voja was by never letting the beast be cast in the first place.
when the cheapest answer to remove voja is wrath you're not having a fun game.
It is a 7 out of 10 tops, I was disappointed given all the fussing I have seen people online do concerning this card.
There's a lot of one mana spells that remove it, spending 4 mana sucks but it's not the end of the world. It's more then it should be but I'm not sure why people act like ward 3 means it has hexproof@@DemonBlanka
"It's about a seven" sound like the right response for someone downplaying it's power. @@joelanderson5285
@@toolittletoolatetime walking yourself to let the opposing player who still has a massive board untap isn't a very good play.
I just threw together a bunch of "phase things out" and "exile and return in end step" cards with a pile of Elves and Wolves...
And that was Voja.
just fyi, phasing out doesn't cause the permanent to leave or enter the battlefield! It's just straight up treated as though it doesn't exist until it magically reappears during your upkeep
@AdamCameron-zf7ur Galadriel's Dismissal is key in the deck.
Either phase a board out to enable an alpha strike or save your board.
For how much people have been hating Farewell, they sure love to play commanders that justify me jamming Farewell in every deck.
Crying in Ovika spellslinger and goblin avalanche 😢
Jokes aside, Ovika Enigma Goliath is sorta its own playstyle (albeit not too original)- Aggro Storm and Burn.
Storming off to make a massive army of hasty Phyrexian Goblins that you can smash face with and other cards that can burn down opponents.
It's a debatably balanced Locust God (ovika does have ward 3 mana and 3 life for a Flying 6/6 for 5UR)
100%
Play boardwipes that break parity so you can win a turn or two later. Farewell sucks because it just makes the game twice as long...
@@markosvafeas Fatewell in my group adds about two turns to the game: one to recover and one to reapply pressure. I wouldn't call that twice as long.
@@markosvafeashow does farewell not put you ahead? You control what gets exiled
The walking dead secret lair sold well because they created a pseudo reserved list around the cards by saying these versions would not be reprinted. Nobody gave two hoots about Glen or Darryl.
Not to mention that Rick made Legacy Humans go brrr during that time
Rick was really the only real good card from it :/
How are they gonna reprint universes beyond stuff with all the licensing red tape
@@williamdrum9899 Look for the Universes Within cards. Secret Lair versions are basically alt-arts! The commander decks are still gonna be outside property cards
@@williamdrum9899 Universes within is the reprints for Universes Beyond. You'll find the Within cards on the List
I feel you could revive the Roasting Commanders videos.
I think you are right.
@@PleasantKenobi crossover with Maldhound like you do with Prof for dies to removal(more please?) 🤔
@@PleasantKenobiI mean Preston, the Vansher can pull a whole dungeon out of his ass now with all the fiend hunter creature there are.
Shame people for their choices, Shame them!!!
Hi! Can I ask you who your profile picture is?
Ward THREE is such a disgusting amount. You mention here being 'the guy that plays four or five sweepers': note that people are moving up towards six-to-eight due to Ward, not to four. Three-to-five is pretty normal for a hundred-card deck :p
Ah...makes me glad I run Elixir of Immortality in every deck I own
I've been thinking of building Octavia solely because it has the absurd Ward 8
@@aldotrioksidilike Octavia the more crazy they keep getting with ward like Sarumans ward of a legendary enchant or artifact, the more the Rick and Morty meme comes to mind against wizards for coming up with ward in the first place...
"That's still just Hexproof with extra steps..."
Anything over Ward 2 might as well be hexproof
I have fought against Voja multiple times and I have to say.... It is a very unfun commander to fight against it and everyone on the table (aside from the Voja user of course), agrees that is problematic (when it comes to fun). There is no effort playing Voja - since the deck cares about Elves, the deck will DEFINITELY have elves that are mana dorks, thus, cheating Voja early. One time, the Voja player used "crossroads " and then voila - turn 3 Voja up and attacking and pumping everything. For me the most annoying part about Voja is "ward 3"....It could be worse...it could be hexproof instead but still....That card is so unfun and it needs little to no effort to be good.
Part of me is thinking that the answer to a Voja deck is trying to control the elf population; kind of like any other time Elves is a dominant type. Without its host of dorks, the big bad wolf isn't growing into absurdity and then it can't swing with impunity into faces to draw cards.
White's still got wraths to sweep a board. Blue's probably going to have to put in counters for creatures and not let the big bad wolf resolve; it doesn't have Ward on the stack. Black might need to run some of those -X effects like Toxic Deluge, but even other versions like Malicious Eclipse just to cull the elf-ball. Red might want stuff like End the Festivities - although a Lithomantic Barrage would be an incredibly clean answer to Voja on the turn cycle it comes down. Green is just going to have to start fighting elves.
A different, greedier part of me noticed that a lot of creatures with the text "Wolf" just spiked in price, and has now bought a whole bunch of Ranger Class.
So you hate green, get over it
@@The_Sharktocrab you completely missed the point of the video and the point that I made....I have mono green EDh deck...Heck, I pretty sure that I have a deck for each colour combination. Voja as commander is just unfun to fight against and it does things way easier compared to similar commanders. Sorry for insulting your no brainer commander.
The way you deal with Voja is like any other elf ball deck. You wipe their board
@@51gunner while that is a solution , the problem is that every deck needs to be build up to an extent that is thematically fitting within itself and not adding cards just in one case an opponent has Voja. This is the reason that Ragavan was annoying in Modern (before Bowmasters showed up) cause every deck was forced to add specific cards in order to get rid off turn one ragavans.
As soon as the started printing Legendary creatures expressly for the Commander format, many of the potential commanders have had the same issue of being both the enabler and the payoff. The first Commander set from 2011 was one that did it right; powerful legendaries with "build-around-me" abilities that either enabled strategies or were a big payoff for strategies, but not both. Commander 2013 started to creep in a bad direction with cards like Oloro and Prossh, and each successive set afterwards had more and more commanders that were both payoff and enabler.
Couldn't agree more.
And the sad thing is, the only answer is more stax pieces like Ghostly Prison etc.
I was thinking can't be countered removal spells as well.
Basicallly, the issue can be boiled down to this:
Johnny, Timmy and Spike have been combined together, and now singular cards are capable of fulfilling the needs of all three with little issue, which at this point if the power creep and railroading has gone this far, what's next?
Good point
The thing about Voja is that instead of playing a couple of elves, you just need to play a couple of Changelings and be able to do both of the things that Voja cares about.
Jumpstart is a great example of how they tunnelvisioned a good thing but they also messed it up.
You're right, when commander was a format where cards weren't designed for it there was an element of finding homes for cards that were bad but good with the commander. That was super cool and, while that does still exist, it's definitely been erodede.
and with the power creep of the format, a lot of those bad but good in commander cards just can't keep up and are now also bad in commander. they have no home.
the existence of tivit and voja implies a potential future "cycle" of powerful tricolor four legged engines with ward 3
I still remember when building a commander deck meant looking at your legendary creatures and thinking how it would work in a different format. EDH went downhill when wotc started to print cards for it. I will die on that hill.
You are very right! Beginnings of EDH (Highlander for that matter) was the most enjoyable time in magic in my life. So many choices and so many new cards to build around or not! (I am guilty of playing Lady Orca deck). I stopped playing EDH more or less once wizards got involved in the format but the fond memories remain :)
Just starting the video, haven't finished yet but I have thought this same thing for a while now.
A large part of the issue is the asymmetry in a lot of cases. One of the first and most fun commander decks I put a lot of effort into was Ruric Tharr - I liked the the deck was capable of literally killing its pilot as long as he was out. But he's a magnet for removal so the deck needs to be a clever balance of protection (hexproof/shroud and indestructible) for both the commander and the alternate win cons/threats (which are overwhelmingly strong creatures in gruul), ways to make your creatures more dangerous, ways to make Ruric Tharr not symmetrical (life link), and interaction on top of all that.
Compare that to most modern Legendary creatures that usually explicitly name "You" as a beneficiary and "opponent(s)" as victims of whatever rule stipulation the commander you run places on the rules of the game. The game has moved in that direction for ages and we don't see ruric tharr or lord of the pit style creatures anymore. You can make decks around old creatures that do that sort of thing but its more niche design challenge than efficient these days.
That, or if old cards were asymmetrical they were usually slower.
Yeah, even stax pieces are like that nowadays. Even though old ones were more brutal (like Winter Orb or Stasis), they made you build your deck around them to break the symmetry.
Now we get less powerful stuff, but the only victims are your opponents, like Drannith Magistrate. I feel like the card would be way less hated if it stopped you from casting spells that are not in your hand as well. And you'd definitely think about including it in your deck, especially if your commander cost more than two mana
I don't think Slogurk falls into the category of cookie cutter commander. He doesn't put lands in the graveyard for you and because of this Slogurk decks in standard have changed overtime depending on the support pieces.
Was going to say: there is no way for that card alone to put lands into your graveyard; you need cards that can self mill, discard or sac lands.
Yeah, Slogurk doesn't play the game by itself any more than a Tatyova would. Fetch lands are a thing, sure, but it won't really become a threat if all you do is play some fetch lands. It needs self mill.
Voja, on the other hand, only needs you to play elves (which you'd do anyway to ramp into it) and some changelings (they are both elves and wolves). As soon as it attacks you have one turn to wipe the board or lose. And wiping the board is pretty hard since it only needs a couple of creatures on board to get insane value from its attack trigger, so the deck has so much space for protection like Heroic Intervention
Caves, Deserts, Fetches, Strip Mine, etc. You could easily jam that deck with half lands that put themselves into the grave. You're not thinking wide enough.
@@toolittletoolateIf you do this you're trading available resources for the turn for deck synergy.
@toolittletoolate At that point, aren't you building around the commander?
This kind of design is why I play odd things. Like Spirit of the Night only 1 creature, Damia dommy mommy art only, Kenrith takes his kids to the races(vehicles and only Kenrith family members and like 9 racers), Garth the Zookeeper(all creatures are regular animals and all other non-land cards have art similar to enclosures), Jolreal mass land destruction through mass land animation, Ihsand's Shade shades only, Aphemia enchantress, or Maeve "all my wincons are Armageddon Clocks".
Sorry I NEED to see this damia decklist
I second the need for the dommy mommy list
@StellarisVT I don't currently have it uploaded anywhere, but gimme a few days and I'll post it in a reply.
@@StellarisVT it looks like TH-cam may have deleted the link, lemme know if you can see it.
You sound like someone who wants to play a game because it's fun and not because you're trying to pretend like you have a bigger dick than everyone else. Why can't there be more people like you? 😊
Something of note is that Voja being 3 colours is a huge positive for deck building. I instantly felt it was insane on spoiler season,
If it supported a less common tribe like say skeletons it would have been cool but elves? its just silly
The signpost for me was Neon Dynasty, when Shrines were niche and clunky even after M21. Then the Go-Shintai cycle just felt like it made the whole machine go brrrrr
red is really weird on Voja, she's been pure selesnya forever, and none of her abilities would be a pie break if she wasn't red. it's just there to make her better for commander
There are a lot of wolves/werewolves in red, so that was certainly part of it. Wolves are primarily green, but so is Naya; it's green + green's allied colors.
The abilities work without red (or even white, as they're all primary or secondary in green), but the way I see it, the vigilance is white, the trample is red, and the ward is green.
I'm not saying it isn't a training-wheels design (it obviously is), but I'm OK with the color identity and keyword abilities.
@@majordude83 vigilance is white, trample is green, ward 3 is pushed bs
@@majordude83Voja's keywords don't really make sense. While vigilance is clearly white, trample is more of a green thing and ward is just a good keyword wotc put on it to make sure none of your opponents can remove it without functionally skipping their turn.
They just put a bunch of good keywords on it so it's hard to block it, attack it back or remove. They really wanted to make sure it was hard to deal with
@@majordude83Yes, but Voja doesn't interact with Werewolves.
Trample reads way more green than red.
So the red was just included so that she could be a commander for those few red wolves?
But Voja is not a new character, she's well established as a part of the Selesnya guild, the companion of Tolsimir. And it's incredibly strange that Voja cannot be in a deck commanded by any of the three versions of Tolsimir.
To make it better for commander they could have just not made it, would have been the best option
This reminds me of ghirred conclave exile. As he gives you a chunky token to populate on etb and will populate.
No card draw.
I guess now will have the clause "whenever you populate draw a card, this ability triggers only once each turn" to make it playable.
As a fellow Magic boomer, I agree with you. Too many legendary creatures are doing too much. I liked how in the past, you had to choose cards to synergize with your commander and deck theme or game plan to make your deck work. Now your commander does everything and also tells you what to run, making decks more same-y and repetitive. I also wish they would release fewer sets and make them high quality.
There's one "all in one" commander I really enjoy and that's Hazezon. His abilities care about one specific card type that basically never gets played and his tokens create interesting synergies due to their status as R/W/G dual typed tokens, desertwalk is also up there for a top 10 most useless keywords (that isn't actively detrimental) and makes you think about ways to force deserts onto your opponent's sides of the field. Deserts being nonbasic you wind up having to use much more premium ramp and they're just not great lands in general, there's a whole suite of challenges that arise when you're building land reanimator out of using specific, quite bad lands that you don't get out of similar decks.
Took me a minute to realize you're talking about the new version... I play OG Hazazeon and none of this applies to him, except the continued making of sand warrior tokens.
You can run old Hazezon in new Hazezon, using astral slide to cycle deserts to blink old Hazezon, putting his trigger multiple times on your end step. Then you play the cycled desert anyway with nuHazezon.
new Hazezon's desert walk once killed my Hazezon deck because someone stole and buffed him.
Hazezon is great ❤
@@anthonydelfino6171Unfortunately I am not rich enough to run original Hazezon
I agree with all the points. I also just think that's the fundamental problem with elfball, they do not have backup plans, they go all in, their gameplay loop is solved right from the get go (get mana, play elves, buff board for lethal) so Voja just makes their all-in strategy more consistent, and thus too powerful, but how many games are just randomly determined by a board of 7 1/1 elves and you just HOPE they don't draw overwhelming stampede effects? Ezuri could also act as your lethal in the command zone threat, but at least it doesn't have ward, and importantly, red's haste, and white's protection spells
Having played a few games against voja, the experience was absolutely miserable. Any early ramp to play voja against a board that didn't ramp is just GG before turn 5. Simultaneously wins games if played early and cannot be answered if played early enough.
@@KrayZieTylerit's got ward 3, good luck killing it on turn 3/4. And if you're the one who spends a card and 4-5 mana (ie your whole turn) to kill it, good luck keeping up with the other two players.
Sweep or lose. Commander is turning into sweep or lose.
I much prefer Brawl. A lot of the problems with "do-it-all" commanders don't exist there because trading 1 for 1 is actually fine or using up a turn to cast removal isn't an auto game-loss.
@@KrayZieTyler what happens if you're not playing blue? and board wiping every time the commander comes down feels silly
@KrayZieTyler they're going to have a board leading into voja. And the only non blue counterspells that can hit a voja are Kozilek the Great Distortion. Mana tithe Lapse of Certainty and Tibalt's trickery if you want to destroy voja without paying the ward cost you need blue for lier Disciple of the Drowned or a void rend
@@KrayZieTyler counterspells are definitely the correct answer to something like Voja, but "it can be countered" can also be said about 99% of all cards; doesn't mean some of those cards aren't poorly designed.
And do we really want a commander format to exist where everyone needs to pack 6+ sweepers? They make for such long and boring games. I already feel like everyone running 3-5 sweepers is bad for gameplay, but it's a necessary evil when so many threats are like Voja; sweep or lose against it.
@@jayjayhooksch1 not to mention if you're not playing blue you have like 3 commander playable counterspells that can answer voja on turn 5
Ive been complaining about newer designs, and i feel like there's just less room for decision making. My decks that feel the most interesting are old Atraxa, which is a combo deck that relies on the modular keyword ability, amd Feather, which is a stuffy doll burn/control deck. The thing that makes these commanders so interesting is that they are very open-ended and give me as a deck builder a lot of room to explore and make decisions. The newest commander I've built is Malcator, and while I wouldn't describe the deck is particularly unique, the commander is an engine piece that you really have to build around, and that was why I chose to build a deck around it.
Atraxa just does everything
I tried to build Malcator but I couldn't make a list that wasn't just better as Losheel. Yea, you get access to blue but I didn't feel the blue added enough substance to justify it over Losheel.
Would love to see your list and see if you got around that "problem" I was having. I know TH-cam doesn't do links anymore, but I could probably search you up by username if you're on moxfield or wherever.
the problem is that whatever you do with atraxa deck still is mostly irrelevant because you have in command zone virtually untraversable obstacle that you drop on the board t4 or earlier and it will do its thing just by you passing the turn. there are very little other players can do to have profitable attacks with atraxa on board and repeatably wiping the board or using spot removal turn after turn to get rid of atraxa is not interesting gameplay. and unless people do that you will sit behind this pillow fort and win the game with combo. that's not what most players find interesting in commander format. feather have similar issues. it matters very little what specific cards you use because they all boil down to the same predictable gameplay loops you will be doing over and over again. adding stuffy dolls is nice but when the first one drops onto the table it will be obvious what you are doing and again the other cards in your deck will not matter because they all fall into the same category of effects and feather cares only about that not the specific effect. it's unfortunate that how efficient those cards are outshines all the effort you can put into building their decks. it's fun to have them in a game once in a while but they get old very very quickly.
Atraxa really isn't the best example to point to... yeah she requires SOME build around, but she's really only a step or two removed from current commander design.
I made an energy deck with the old Atraxa.
It was awful but I find it funny i unintentionally predicted the return of energy- in commander no less lol
Something I've noticed in precons from Kamigawa Neon dinasty onwards is that face commanders in those products are super hand holding, but most of the secondary commanders have cool desings that really want you to think outside the box to brew them
I'd argue it goes back even further, possibly to at least Zendikar Rising, but also some of the Ikoria commander were pretty hand holdy too
The face commander is usually aimed at new player, so they are very "on the rails" (because some genius at WotC though Commander is a great way to teach new players).
@@enricomassignani thing there is, they went years making face commanders that didn't hold your hand. the commander products from before they started releasing them with every set had a lot of commanders that gave you a direction to build without being the enabler, the engine, and the payoff, with only a few exceptions in the mix.
It was really only around Ikoria when they stopped designing this way.
@@anthonydelfino6171 yeah, bcs that's when they decided Commander was a good way to teach new players
I think I generally agree with you. And I do think that decks are a bit more rewarding when you have to build around it a bit more.
One of my favorite commanders decks I've built is Vaevictus Asmadi the Dire. It has an on attack trigger, but doesn't have haste. It doesn't have protection. It's trigger makes you sacrifice things but doesn't provide you sac fodder.
If you have a non-permanent card on top of your deck? It stays there. It doesn't draw you the card so it makes you think about how many non-permanent cards you want to run. There is also a chance that using his ability can backfire on you. Sometimes you flip your opponent into a bigger threat than whatever it is you removed. But those moments to me just make memories.
It synergizes with sacrifice synergies and feeds into graveyard plans. It ended up being a Jund control token-y deck. Its a really neat build and leads to situations where i really have to think about if it's worth running out my commander without haste or a means to protect it. But the deck still functions perfectly fine without my commander. Which is generally how I prefer my decks to run.
IMO the commander should be a good part of your deck, but not the sole reason that it functions which I think is a trap a lot of modern commander decks fall into.
I have a buddy in my normal play group that builds heavily around the commander sometimes to the detriment that if his commander gets removed then his deck doesn't really work.
For me, the "it does everything on its own" Commander was always Chulane. I built a Chulane deck that I felt wasn't even very good, and it was still just backbreaking and oppressive. That was sort of when I realized that Commanders are bad now, because they're too good and do everything for you.
Not to be a hipster, but why is it that once Wotc starts designing for a format they start to fuck it up?
Adding the "draw a card" clause really elevates commanders that do a thing to a best-in-class tier. The issue is for me is that at a certain point we're punishing ourselves by not playing the Chulanes and Korvolds of the world. My lands deck was a Prossh deck that animated lands to sacrifice; I had a sac outlet in the command zone but I still had to make some work for it to do anything. The deck always struggled with card draw and I realized that as neat as my niche deck was, Korvold was just a better commander for drawing me cards for "doing the thing", triggering "the thing," and eventually being a lethal threat on his own. And if I was trying to optimize a deck and didn't do those things, I risk being swept by those who are.
I was about 80% of the way done with my Voja deck before I realized how broken it is. I didn’t even have the best cards in there, just stuff I had laying around from taking apart other decks. I started goldfishing it and was regularly getting Voja out on turn 3 and it just snowballed from there and I realized how unfun it was going to be for my play group to face
I agree on your final point. Having the commander be able to do everything by itself means that games have less variance, which is one of the only unique aspects of the format. It makes games feel way too similar because players don't need to dig through their library as often to find a card that combos with their commander, because their commander usually does it inherently.
Syr Konrad was designed for limited, where niche A+B strategies can too often end up being blank pieces of cardboard. Nobody wants to draft Avacyn Restored again. Take that for a Boomer reference!
I'm not sold on Slogurk being self-enabling though. Its abilities combine to create a payoff for putting lands in the graveyard, but it doesn't do that part itself.
Tatyova is the go to example of "Oops accidentally ruined the commander game" for me, doesn't matter how much text is on it, it comes down, draws a card and gains a life unless it's countered, and then does MORE when you've run out of instant speed interaction. It doesn't require you do anything you wouldn't already be doing in simic, it just rewards you with free cards for doing what every simic ramp deck is already doing as opposed to allowing you to do anything interesting in and of itself or BEING a ramp payoff. Like, you're sitting there telling me Voja is bad because it kills you on turn 6, meanwhile I have spent games playing against Tatyova (and other similar commanders) just asking "OK, are you done yet?" for 30 odd minutes in a row until finally they tell me, "OK, attack everyone at the table for 97"... you didn't need to make me wait for that.
@@KrayZieTyler cEDH is not exactly the same environment we're discussing here.
So is your problem that it draws cards, or that you don't like simic? Because the wolf draws cards too (and can draw more than tatyova if you are focused on the wolf side instead of elf) but its also the wincon on its own. I get that control is boring but that isn't really because of tatyova, that's because of control itself. You can use a thousand other draw engines or uninteractive commanders and get the same result but there aren't a thousand other win condition commanders that do what voja does all in one card
I generally don't like any deck that says "draw a card whenever you breathe" because it inevitably leads to long solitaire turns that let me know you don't respect my time
@@KrayZieTyler No? Your local commander game generally isn't about just win at all costs. Usually it's about getting a few people together to sit around the table and have some fun. If you just want to win as fast as possible, go grind tournaments, but you will not be asked to return to my kitchen table games if you make the experience miserable for everyone else.
@@legendunbound5845 My issue is that control decks end their turn, Voja decks end their turn, Combo decks demonstrate a combo and end the game entirely, Tatyova decks tend to stop letting other people play the game at ALL. Not like control decks trying to keep the board empty until they can win, no no, they just... stop passing their turn at all at some point. So you either just scoop rather than waiting to see if they can pull out the victory after 30 minutes and drawing their whole deck, or you go play Smash Bros instead and the guy plays solitaire for a bit.
This is definitely something I've noticed as well that's been pissing me off for a while now. It's not even all that new, Winota, Questing Beast, Dauthi Voidwalker, Ragavan, Bloated Contaminator, there's so many cards lately that slice and dice and do it all on their own, no downsides. Idk if there's just one bad designer on the team getting away with all these terrible designs like Leyline of Guildpact, but they all give me the same vibe of just amateurish overpowered overdesigned lack of balance and experience.
LMAO leyline of the guildpact. If you had posted that exact card on r/custommagic years ago you would get 20,000 downvotes and a ton of comments calling you stupid for using hybrid mana like that
@williamdrum9899 like it really is the most r/custommagic card I've ever seen. Funny in concept, terrible in practice, which really tells you how little they are actually playtesting this shit these days
I think Slogurk is on the better side since it doesn't mill yourself or say "discard a land, get a treat" or something, but I do agree with the overall premise. One thing I think is important though is the aspect of designing for limited. It's not applicable to all cases, but a fair few are like "Sacrifice a goblin: Deal 2 damage to something" and in case you don't end up with any goblins or it's one of few goblins in the set, it'll also have "Whenever ~ attacks, make goblins equal to its power" or something. Both abilities could very well be on their own cards (and the latter one is practically one of the Krenkos already), but to make the limited experience smoother you get the enabler coupled with your payoff so the latter isn't a dead card on its own if you get unlucky in a draft or the set otherwise doesn't support it. Whether that's good design or not is another matter, but given how folks have been enjoying limited a heck of a lot in recent years, it seems to be working pretty good on that front at least.
Please I just went through my cards to put together a voja deck like 20 minutes
Great video. It's what I have been complaining about for a while. My favorite example is Massacre Girl, Known Killer. I would love this card if she only did either thing. Being this 1 card combo makes me absolutely despise it.
I think the first time I noticed this new design that I dislike was when I saw a friend play Codie, Vociferous Codex. Generally, really cool idea. Just why does it have to make it so easy for you? It lets you play all 5 colors, alright. You can drop it on t3 or even 2 with any ritual or whatever. You can then naturally curve into it's ability on the next turn. Which will not only ramp you. It also fixes your mana. I would like Codie so much more if it's ability cost no mana and gave you no mana. You could even give it an additional ability like "Codie is all colors" so you can play all colors in your deck. Or make the book cost 1WU and activate for WUBR and give you 4 mana in any combination. or something. Honestly green doesn't fit as well as it's the one color caring about permanents.
I'll take that back. The first card was Ramos, Dragon Engine. A commander you can play with any mana, that gross whenever you cast almost anything. That also let's you cast more things. Boy do I hate this dragon.
When I started playing commander we played stuff like Isperia, Supreme Judge, Volrath the Fallen, Zedruu the Greathearted, Obzedat, Ghost Council. And I had barely anything to complain about.
Massacre Girl, KK at least has the draw back of being a single color, but I agree, even the menace is pushing the other synergies; if your opponent double blocks her they get absolutely wrecked by an instant -x/-x spell (4 for 1 territory).
I've been playing MG,KK in standard brawl and the first thing I did was look for all the menace creatures because it's just that strong with her. The deck built itself; menace creatures and instant speed -x/-x so kind of boring but boy is it strong. I've been dunking on every other mono-black commander and most decks tbh and my list isn't even optimized (don't want to spend the rare/mythic wildcards).
Let's take the analysis
Codie ramps you for 1, fixes your mana, gives your next spell a very special Cascade
You can say it's a one card combo but there is no pay off directly imbued within it, fun ways of building Codie usually has something to do with how to play permanents without casting them, that's not really hand holdy, you need to actually go look in the deep card pool to look for cards that can help achieve this goal. It certainly takes a lot more effort than just looking up generic elves and wolves and be mostly done with the deck.
Ramos is quite usually a t5 do nothing like a lot of higher costed commanders, being prone to removals like that.
It then grows whenever you cast spells, and you can use that to gain a lot of mana to cast some other spells.
The pay off requires you to run a lot of multicolored spells, which usually requires a lot of mana fixing, while Ramos technically fixes you, but that's it's payoff, it doesn't just magically appear at first.
Sure, it's a big flyer that can punch pretty hard, it's not a card that naturally comes with trample, and while you could try Voltron Ramos because it's a versatile card, it's in no way shape or form as hand holdy as some of the other cards in this video is.
Ramos tells you that you should prefer colored spells, especially multi colored spells, how you execute that is completely up to you. You can make a boring Ramos deck, sure, but you don't have to.
I feel like you want to see people jump through hoops to do their thing, and I think that's fun too, but it doesn't need to be directly on the commander itself.
Codie and Ramos are way closer to Tatyova than Voja or Syr Konrad. Syr Konrad reads "Make Discards and black mana and win the game"! Ramos reads "Play multicolored spells." ooook but how and what exactly? Because the only combo Ramos has with itself is making it a Voltron, that can be chump blocked, slightly harder than usual because it's a flyer, but it will be stopped by a thopter. This isn't so different from Tatyova, where you gain life and draw more cards, which can be more lands to fuel her, you'd naturally incline to cards like Azusa to help drop more lands, but you need to use the resources she gives you to... get somewhere, do something actually game winning, having a bunch of lands and gained like 15 life is great but you haven't really won the game. This is the same with Ramos, they are value engines that helps facilitate the deck but they rarely win you the game on their own, you are still gonna have to go into the deep card pools and figure out just what do you want to do with the resources, Ramos makes all your multicolored spells better, but the actual wincon needs to come from the 99 cards you put in the deck, and the possibilities are endless, how is this hand holdy?
Atraxa and Tymna who basically do everything: "First time?"
Atraxa is gross, but she isn't the engine, the enabler, and the payoff. She has you proliferate, but unless you include cards that need proliferation, she does nothing. Honestly nowadays it feels like rather than keyword soup and proliferating, she would also put counters on your creatures when she attacks or something like that, or draw you a card when a counter is put on her.
@anthonydelfino6171 I'm pretty sure they're referring to Grand Unifier, not Praetor's Voice. Grand Unifier is a card advantage piece and combo piece all in one.
Tymna requires you to commit to the board state in order to fire off the engine. There are plenty of other commanders that don't require you to do anything other than play them out in order to generate some sort of advantage. Tymna isn't one of those. I can attest to this because I play her.
@@khub5660 are they? Because that Atraxa post-dates the simic frog Vince was talking about.
@@anthonydelfino6171 it would be the only logical explanation. As you stated, Praetor's Voice only proliferates and requires a deck to be built around her. Grand Unifier is just a 4 color good stuff Food Chain deck. More often than not, you're not playing a "fair" deck with Grand Unifier in the command zone.
The commander decks that I run are Sephara (definitely need set-up for her), Karador (doesn't enable himself), Karametra (plant tribal), Omnath, Locus of the Roil (kinda works for itself), Yidaro (cycle tribal, funnest deck, but hardest deck of mine to play), and Oloro (sets himself up, but if I'm ever playing him, I'm in trouble). I agree with you that commander cards really should be either an enabler or a pay-off, but not both. A good example of this is Averna. She deals with cascade, but doesn't cascade herself, so you need other cards to back up your deck to make use of her ability
3:38 it does NOT enable you to put lands in the yard. The +1/+1 mode is a pay off for putting lands in the yard.
What's your opinion on Anikthea, hand of erebos? In terms of a build part, there are obvious synergies but not a direct method of attack
Slogurk reminds me of Gitrog with that trigger. Speaking of do you think you could update a deck tech of your gitrog edh if you still have it?
I wonder if commander having commanders in the command zone has limited what legendries have effects that revolve around going back to the hand or to the deck. Like Slogurk or that one Fblthp. I wonder what different abilities would revolve around those without a focus on commander. Maybe less legendries as a whole.
Which commander is hard mode (no vanilla jank)? I need a challenge
Voja is perfect for high power, to strong for casual, to weak for cEDH. A lot of people talk about just countering him or just wipe the board. The issue is that Voja is in very good colors for protection from both. A Voja deck needs a good amount of protection and haste enablers and you are golden. Making Voja uncounterable with Alosaurus Shepard, Rhythm of the Wild and Kutzil helps. Protection from boardwipes is key with things like, Galadriels dismissal, Flawless Manouver, clever Concealment, inspiring call, heroic Intervention, Akroma's Will and boros charm. Haste enablers are also great. Lands like Flamekin Village, Slayers' Stronghold, Hanweir Battlements aswell as cards like Rhythm of the Wild and Rising of the Day can help to connect early.
Unrelated question; are Universes Beyond the new kind of Reserve List?
Short answer: yes
I would argue that there have always been broken commanders that do everything, Derevi for example. The difference now is that WotC are engaging in disaster economics and desperately milking players with fast power creep, to the detriment of long-term stability. I wonder if we see a "taking back EDH" movement now that Sheldon passed away. It was always supposed to be the "don't tell us how to play on our kitchen table" format but it got co-opted by marketing and accountants.
I would argue even Derevi needed a deck built around it to function. Obviously, cheap creatures are a must to get the triggers going, then you need some kind of draw engine since you're burning your hand on small creatures and some payoff spell to spend the mana you get from untapping on. And even after pulling all of that off, you are not going to kill the table fast by any means.
The cookie-cutter design is more of a recent issue. A commander will ask you to do something while accomplishing it by itself and then generating card advantage because it did the thing 😂
At the start you literally just described WotC's approach with Kamigawa. As a new player, I always heard how WotC was unwilling to revisit Kamigawa because the original flopped, and I always asked myself "But... people loved Kamigawa? It's just the card designs that sucked? Just revisit the plane and don't make mechanics that suck."
I honestly wish we got one more "classic Kamigawa" set before the Neon Dinasty reboot, since what I love the most about the plane is how they managed to translate Japanese mythology in a way that's both truthful to the source but also its own original take (as they would later do with Theros and Greek mythology); with the introduction of the cyberpunk element, of course, that element got pushed more in the background, especially aesthetic-wise.
My problem with Voja is it's basically a craterhoof in the command zone, with card advantage as well slaped onto it.
I've realised that Duskana, printed right alongside Voja in the same colours, actually plays in really similar space it has a trigger to draw you cards for having creatures, and has a trigger to buff your creatures. But Duskana doesnt have sny of those keywords, doesn't do anything by itself, whereas Voja draws a card, and generally supports a much weaker strategy. But i found Duskana way more interesting and appealing to build, in part for giving me a reason to care about something I haven't specifically before. I've enjoyed finding cool and different 2/2s and token generators for Duskana.
11:25 imho, the uncommon legends like Tatyova are a leftover from when they wanted Brawl to be a thing (they needed a bunch of standard-legal legends but did not have enough rare slots for them in sets)
That might have been a factor then, we still get them now - and it's because of Commander.
I completely agree that the modern card design where cards both having the engine and enabling the engine is a problem. It just leads to very homogenous decks that all kinda do the same, and also creates too many decks where the deck cannot function at all without the commander. Personal opinion but I think it is generally better and more fun for everyone when a deck is able to function without its commander being in play, even if it might function less well. Would rather have that than a deck that is either a sitting duck cuz the commander is in the command zone, or an absolute menace because the commander is out and doing its thing self-sustainably
Maskwood Nexus is such a no brainer with jaws. Lucky I had an extra copy lying around cause it shot up very quickly.
I have two decks that I play with my friends that I find to be incredibly fun, and both are monocolor. The first is Inferno of the Star Mounts, mono red ramp, and I call the deck "Build-a-Bomb" because that's what the commander is, but there's a LOT of prep for it. The second commander I am having a blast with lately is Aeve Progenitor Ooze with lots of Slime Against Humanity in the deck.
Got to try out Canadian Highlander
Really refreshing to play a 100 card format that's not EDH
Voja with the Shalai and Halar card from MoM Commander precon in the 99 is disgusting
I have made several decks with and played against the kill or lose commanders, a d they are quite boring decks
They dont have fun if can the thing happen, but how many turns we want?
With syr konrad I barely used his mill in the decks I use him in unless I got nothing else needed with spare mana
This video makes me feel even better for recently building a Celestial Kirin deck and shamelessly winning through mass land destruction
One of my favourite commanders is Kazuul. He has one line of text. That one line is enough to get me thinking about how to build a mono-red pillowfort deck and what subthemes I could throw in there. Not only does it make the deckbuilding process more interesting, it's also immensely satisfying when everything comes together to form a cohesive deck in the end.
Whenever I read a more modern commander I already know at least 95 of the cards that go in their decks just from their abilities. Deckbuilding, an entire aspect of Magic that I love, is completely eliminated from the equation when playing with these cards. They suck.
If he were printed nowadays, he'd have trample, get +1/+1 counters somehow, draw a card when he entered, and the ogres would make treasure tokens when they attacked.
predictable is the best description of those. while slogurk is doing its thing mostly on its own at least it requires more moving pieces to do so efectively and the thing it is doing is not overly powerful on its own. same with konrad. there sure is the activated ability but it is not that threatening unless you add more moving pieces. voja on the other hand is an atrocious design. it is basically better craterhoof (those counters are permanent) and distant melody stapled together. in the command zone. with additional keywords because... fu i guess. it really does not matter what you put into your deck really if it will satisfy the condition of being an elf or an wolf and it will win you games. sure there will be some variance based on what you have in the deck but all that will be so insignificant compared to the effects it gives you that it won't matter to how the game went.
I've been thinking about this lately as well. I find a lot of new commanders are the engine and the payoff.
Wish we had more Tasigurs and Volo, iterant scholars and some such more open ended commanders. I really like partner pairs and especially the choose a background commanders since those tend to give you more room to brew.
honestly the commanders I tend to be drawn to are the ones that do something mechanically interesting, like Jinnie Fay (I've built her around For Mirrodin and Living Weapon) or King of the Oathbreakers, or the ones that act as an enabler for the rest of the deck (Warped Eclipse as a cost reducer for a Forced Fruition deck, for example, or the new Aurelia in a deck built around giving everyone else a big board and goading them). one card combo commanders just... tend not to be that fun.
Wonder how you think about Rielle the Everwise.
@@otterfire4712Looks like a decent build-around-- not something I'd build myself (I already have an izzet deck I really enjoy), but something that's got a clear strategy that needs more than just the commander to work.
old commanders: You decide how to play your deck
new commanders: Wizards tells you how to play your deck and gives you a chocolate every time you do what they want
Just played with my Voja deck for the first time yesterday. Stomped the table with it. That card gets out of hand very quick.
To be fair, this kind of already started back with Nekusar, who was an Underworld Dreams and a Howling Mine in one.
This just reminds me that I need to play against my friend's Voja deck with my Galadriel deck and see which of us can get to 200 total power on the board first. It'll be the ultimate pp measuring contest. 😂
I completely forgot about Slogurk. Looks like a fun addition for Mothman!
Can we refocus on the 99 instead of commander? Voja is a nice wincon in the command zone, it also gives Elves access to Naya which lets their elf deck do more than just be a mono green ramp deck. The big issue with Voja is how hard it is to deal with (hint lots of boardwipes) and how few Naya commanders can compete with it. Slogurk is a life from the loam minus dredge, thats what you want in the command zone of your lands-matter deck.
If you want to win at commander and not just build cool decks, your commander needs to do one of two things, either be the wincon, or be a value engine. You can have theme, meme and other commander decks if you want but most people don't have nearly as many decks as you seem to think they do. The fact that you don't need to search scryfall for niche cards is what a majority of commander players want.
A point you made briefly, with more boardwipes in the format instead of single target removal, it really does slow the game down. More often now I've had games where turn 3 commanders come out, also Voja because of Jeweled Lotus ofc, boardwipes, another Commander, boardwipe. Turn 6, the game finally starts after 4 spent boardwipes and people play without their commanders.
I would also have the optimist thought that single removal can be used politically, while a boardwipe is always "we will be here longer, sorry".
I've been working on a pioneer wolf deck since WAR Tolsimir & ELD Garruk were in standard and i've added the Voja now and yeah it is a easy bomb/win con.
I've had to expand by adding the 8 elves and red to the mana base but still its a tad crazy how pushed it is.
I'm not at all a hipster deck brewer, but when i built mono red Panharmonicon, using jaxis as my commander it feels pretty unique. I haven't been able to replicate that unique deck feeling since though.
I agree with most of your points! Most cards now just do too much. I feel like the game has grown to be more about building around a few cards instead of building around a strategy... Maybe thats just me being a long-time magic player though.
If you have a decent mana base Voja comes down turn 3. Dork turn 1, any ramp spell or mana rock turn 2, voja turn 3. You now get 1 turn cycle to get a cheap board wipe in like Toxic Deluge or Blasphemous act before you have a massive problem.
Yugioh ran into very much the same issue, you'd have cards that had effects which basically red
- When you play this card summon a monster from your hand
- If this card is used for a [insert here] summon, special summon this card from your grave
- If this card is special summoned, special summon a monster from your grave
So you'd just end up having a bunch of cards that would set up an entire combo by themselves and it was so boring. Hey new card reveal, oh it just does everything that the archetype originally would do, just on 1 card. If there was a fan favourite archetype that had a big boss monster you knew that it's new support cards would be "Summon Man, Boss Monster Summoner", "Searcher of Summon Man", "Searcher of Searcher of Summon Man" and "Boss Monster Omni-Negate" dropping any previous theme the deck had for boss monster turbo
As someone who just started playing Magic I feel having commanders that do 'everything' can help with learning the game as it makes deck building somewhat easier. That said I agree with the boredom part because having a commander that does it all doesn't really make it feel like I'm winning the game myself, I'm just playing the card that pretty much does that by itself so to say. This was fine, and very helpful, when I was just starting out and learning the mechanics of the game but it's already starting to become a bit of an issue for me now as I want to dive deeper into deck building and understanding the nuances of Magic.
In an ideal world I think 'do all' commanders should be able to set themselves up for easier plays but have relatively lower payoffs when compared to commanders that are more limited by themselves but reward good synergy and deck building. This would be helpful for newer players but also create a point where it would push players to move out of the comfort zone to improve. I'm afraid that design space in such a case would be quite limited however so I'm not sure if it is feasible at all.
A commander i hate is Hakball, he is the answer and the solution in one card.
Something makes me fear they’re going to start power creeping the old commanders out in favour of new, stronger ones. How much longer before the Ur-Dragon or Edgar Markov get powercrept?
Ward is like soft hexproof sure, but it's also soft haste. It impacts the board upon entry by throwing a monkey wrench in your opponent's efficiency.
I had a Naya Werewolf/Angel tribal deck led by Samut I dubbed my "Dogwalker" deck. (I was a dogwalker/petsitter for a decade.)
I've since took my deck apart & replaced with Tovolar as Commander. It runs better as far as Werewolf tribal goes, but lacks the personal flavour the deck used to emulate.
I haven't thought about that deck until this video.
*Thanks for the Content!*
Ooooh man I love the Gurk. Caught onto it right away when it dropped. It's a blast to play, wild that it's taken this long for the wider community to catch on to it.
Slogurk can feel incredibly awkward outside of the right deck Sure the gurk is incredible if built correctly but has the issue that it doesn't look obviously powerful because unlike voja you don't win the game by just playing creatures ya need lots of sac lands and self mill to turn the Loam on a stick into a huge win
@@jmanwild87 I actually think it's got quite a diverse range of options to it. Scapeshift stuff, hermit druid, mill, I built a deck around cycling with it and it did nicely. I liked that it wasn't immediately busted and took some thinking to operate. That said, the ooze gets enormous very quickly, so Voltron is fairly trivial.
@@toctheyounger I built one that uses slogurk primarily as a value engine with cycling lands and sac lands along with landfall engines and the grind game feels fantastic, it's really odd that slogurk was mentioned as a commander that more or less builds themself when I can think of dozens of better examples
@@jmanwild87 I mean it kind of does. There's some nuance though, it's not a cookie cutter deck by any stretch.
I personally don't mind commander who can do the thing if they do it slowly, for example the wise moth man wants you to mill cards and also gives people rad counters to help do that and then buffs your board when nonland cards are milled, but it can only give everyone one rad counter at a time and has to attack to do that repeatedly. i like cards that are designed like the wise moth man because the card helps you do the thing and gives you a pay off, but the cards ability to do the thing is weak enough that you have to build a deck around doing the thing, then your commander rewards you for that by being a value engine for your deck and still being useful because it can "do the thing" even if you some other factor in the game is stopping you from going off with your commanders payoff. I thing Syr Konrad, the grymm is a pretty good example of this as he is able to "do thing thing" and get a payoff for it, but on his own is not super powerful and requires you to actually have to work to build a good deck that works with his payoff. but I do agree that Voja, Jaws of the conclave is a pretty low skill commander because while Voja can activate its own payoff by itself and not be super powerful like that, the payoff voja givers is for going wide with elves and wolves, so making a voja deck only requires you to just throw together the some ramp, removal, and defiantly some creature protection (for voja) and then just adding the best elves and wolves. it doesnt take nearly as much skill to thought to make a super strong voja deck as it does to make super sting moth man or Sry konrad deck. all in all this was a good video though and I do agree that commanders should require more effort to be able to go off and "do the thing"
The problem with Voja isn't at CEDH tables, it's at casual ones. And even then the issue isn't that it's too powerful or back breaking. I've played against Voja twice and both times the player did disgusting things but ultimately lost because they were too scary, and then got really salty about it. It's a salt inducing card on both sides of the table. On one hand Ward 3 is absurd on such a power house and on the otherhand I feel a lot of super casual players are going to build Voja badly and get punished hard because the commander is too scary.
It's like bringing a gun to a knife fight, then getting mad your opponents aren't giving you the space to load your gun with bullets.
Sir, how could you skip Aseir when talking about no thinking commanders
Korvold is a do everything for you kind of commander and in cEDH it is a deck that just says, "Hello have you heard of our lord and savior Dockside Extortionist?"
I think commanders that make it clear how to play them are not inherently a problem, it's necessary to offer a choice between generalist commanders where the deck is what matters and niche decks that count on doing The Thing best. A card like Hazezon demands Desert Landfall, largely needing the same cards as regular Landfall but still offering some challenge to respond to by needing you to play a large number of famously weak lands.
Voja not only speaks for itself, it speaks directly over the player. It is a command zone Craterhoof for Elfball whose best merits are enabled by mana dorks in Elfball and which demands an answer while refusing to be answered. There's no true variance in deck design of balancing traits and properties, there's just the blatantly obvious optimal way to play it and then also worse-on-purpose decks.
Perhaps a hot take but I feel like there's a significant amount of edh players that just always want their deck to "do its thing" every game, regardless of the fact that three other players could prevent you from doing said thing. These players tend to gravitate towards all-in-one commanders because it's not about jumping through hoops and building interesting synergies from a gigantic pool of cards. It's about having fun when their deck does the thing, even if "the thing" almost ensures victory. I don't blame these players. Everyone has fun in different ways and I doubt many players wouldn't have fun swinging out with an army of elves and wolves. I just wish that wotc wouldn't funnel into that lazy design space so much, but given how the so many of the top commanders tend to be both engine and enabler, I sadly don't see them stopping anytime soon.
The easy and efficient commander design draws more new players. Building a strong commander deck otherwise requires a lot of skill that usually takes at least a year or two to master. People are eager to play on an even playing field with their friends.
Agreed. The power level of cards going up and producing cards with powerful effects that are easy to make work are a problem.
I'd only disagree on including Korvold simply because in a vacuum his 1st ability feeding the 2nd is card neutral (lose 1 permanent, draw 1 card) and does require all the treasure/sacrifice absurdities to be broke, so his design "on paper" feels a bit more of an "oops"-strong.
Voja is just pure upside from "Go".
Tbh I think the biggest example of how things have swung since Tatyova days (and to be clear, Tatyova and Muldrotha and such are still relatively pushed!!), is Aesi. Aesi is Tatyova, with one mana increase, and now you get even more of the stuff done for you since now you get the extra land drops you need in the command zone!!!
It’s like Mark Rosewater says: “Restriction breeds creativity.”
Funny thing is Aesi is basically Tatyova that enables itself.
It's crazy how signature spell books and the commanders arsenals started off strong and then just disappeared when the later ones didn't have enough value to keep the hype, they would've still worked, WotC just needed to support them better and not just throw the baby out with the bathwater
Agreed. That said, playing against monolithic commanders that need to be out for the deck to perform has inherent risk, even more so if a card is so pushed everyone knows it's name. I'd warn newer players that you will likely enjoy (and win) more games by choosing an approach that moves the ball up the field a few yards at a time so you stay off the radar while the table gangs up on the Voja player. One thing I like about someone using a known problem commander is not having to feel bad about playing a 'wash away' for one mana when they try to cast it :) After not getting to play for a while, people get the hint.
This is why one of my favourite things to do on Arena is looking at Uncommon rarity and underused Legendary creatures to see what weird things i can do with them. Not the ones that were built to go hogwild
The same can be said to a lot of commanders nowadays: Tergrid, Sheoldred, K'rrik, Atraxa grand unifier, Aragorn the uniter etc. IMO ward is one of the most OP mechanics to be created. I know WotC is a business, to sell products you should have chase cards. With the over saturation of products for commander, it's not a wonder that the card quality will be power crept to a exaggerated point. Funny thing with Voja lorewise is that the Pet/Mount is more powerful than the rider (Ragavan/Kari Sev). That said, imo even is power level 7 up there's not much effort to win becoz your whole deck is meant to be OP to begin with.
The only saving grace of Voja for me is that it's currently bad in Standard which is great for me as a mainly Standard player. That's only because Elves are bad in the current meta though. If there's a set in the next three years that prints a bunch of good low to the ground Elves, then Voja is going to be absolutely ridiculous in Standard, which is even worse because it's a stupid pre-release box only card.
is it too much that the new voja reminds me of edgar markov, and that a pretty easy way to build voja is just 1&2 cmc elves and wolves and there is a very good deck on hand
Indeed.