The Curse of Long Games | EDHRECast 285

[Music] hello and welcome to the EDH Rec cast where we're all about commander data and dad jokes I'm Joey Schultz and I'm joined as always by my fantastic co-hosts up first he has the G to build the new galta it's Matt Morgan everyone knows that pizza is a delicious dish but what people don't realize is that pizza is also pretty profound sometimes it can be a deep dish oh wow I now I'm just hungry mant now I just want pizza I mean I'm sorry Dana I I saw you just kind of tossed your hands up for this so uh I'm sorry I I was just thinking that there's a magicon in Chicago where you can get deep dish pizza in the not too distant future so there we go oh dang all right oh and by the by the way uh yeah that's our our next host hi Dana it's Dana welcome Dana uh how many goblins does it take to paint a house oh no do I want to know the answer it depends how hard you throw them oh no oh I you know what goblins are just such a fun quintessential thing in Magic and now I'm just thinking of like all of those amazing goblins being flung at things in the artwork Dana I love that I mean to them it's just the Goblin game so that one I'm less of a fan of it's actually like probably the real goblin bombardment yeah right yeah yeah and Goblin game is actually like my little brother's like one of his absolute favorite cards so trust that I don't like your brother anymore oh no you guys would get along like a house on fire trust me his sense of humor is very similar to to to yours and you would both have an amazing time uh antagonizing me in game for the laughs or stealing my Segways and things like that don't worry you I speaking of which it is about time for of stats so why don't we get to that real quick we haven't even said what the show topic is Matt Dana what are we talking about this week we're be talking about uh Decks that play a little bit slowly yeah uh what' you call this one Matt the curse of long games some Cur of long games yeah Decks that can sometimes produce a game that goes longer than maybe we all have the bandwidth for sometimes and not just what those decks are but what do we do about it when we find ourselves playing against or playing with a deck that can cause a game to go like you know way over an hour sometimes even two hours or things like that like let let let's dive into what that's going to be after we give a couple of quick shout outs first i' like to thank Chase also known as manicur for their help in editing the show you can find them on the interwebs at manac curves and if you like to support the show you can do so by liking this video subscribing on YouTube subscribeing your local podcast app too or you can go over to patreon.com rcast where if Patron teers of all sorts of levels whether you want to join our Discord Community see me steal the Segways a day early or you can get that Weekly Patron shout out which is always coveted so this week we are going to give a very very special shout out to Kean dark and hopefully it's not too dark over there uh shine some light on that last name of yours Ken but either way I'm glad you did see the light and came over to patreon.com rcast Matt I love how you really uh always key in to our patrons names to find silly jokes to say about them I do I I I don't want to leave the the the listeners out in the dark so I perfect I I'm done I'm done we can move on now but thank you Ken either way and I want to make sure that we don't accidentally give the impression that we only choose listeners with names that we can make dad jokes on no it's just that we just like have to make dad jokes about any name this one happens to lend really well ke and super appreciate it but like Matt will find dad jokes for even the Joe Smiths of the world too like Matt is dedicated to his craft so Matt uh how about you get us started off with this topic we're we're talking about those long games and I when it comes to Long games of Commander ones that start to strain your attention where's your brain at with this my guy well we kind of did a similar topic a while back episode 231 about dirly Commander decks commanders that can kind of like sit around and take a lot of game actions don't really do anything to forward a game plan so we wanted to make sure that we're kind of making the distinction between gly Commander Decks that kind of just spin wheels sometimes and the difference between that and long games as in you're doing a lot of things you're forwarding the game plan but sometimes it just takes a while to really turn that corner so we really want to take a look and look maybe look at certain strategies certain decks specifically that maybe take some time to get into a winning position or close the game out even if it's not really being a dirly type of deck and maybe talk a little bit about how to fix that ideally if you're finding yourself with one of those decks are in that position yeah exactly and this was inspired a little bit by Matt this this past weekend in Vegas playing with your brand new Tom Bombadil deck yeah it it did have a few problems mostly taking all the game actions and it I mean it's a saga deck and if you haven't seen a saga before it requires you to take a lot of game actions and therefore there's a lot of time spent making decisions making you know all sorts of different plays therefore just the more plays are going on the more time it takes to actually resolve all of them and it just yeah I tried really hard and I played it as fast as I could but sometimes you can only do so much considering the cards that are in the deck yeah so what's interesting with that deck too and what's I guess we can kind of break this down a little bit because that's a perfect example uh um so so you're playing a bunch of different sagas and there's a bunch of things with those sagas that consume game action play time you know if you are playing a creature-based deck you're going to you know play your creatures that you can play that turn and look at the ones that you have already had in play and determine like what what my best attack is do your attack if there's a few triggers do your triggers move to the end of the turn that's basically it in this case every individual Saga you have to read because they're all going to do a different because they're all going to do a thing every single turn when we move to the next step yep right so so something's going to occur just on the Saga alone you have to manipulate dice or or some kind of a counter on every new one that comes into play and then because of the way Tom Works once you hit the end of that Saga it doesn't just go away it brings another one into play and repeats that action of like okay I need to put something out I need to make sure not it does I need to take that action so it's not just like one single thing that makes it longer it's a bunch of different things just mechanically with how that deck works and it makes it very difficult to speed those things up unless you're like consciously making an attempt to do so yeah I I would say especially the fact that you are effectively cascading into another Saga like that reminds me of another I wouldn't call the strategy dirly necessarily but like Cascade decks are also they tend to do things very powerfully if you've played against the first sliver or a yidris deck before they're cascading into so many cards they will often take over a board but that still takes up Dana as you said quite a lot of game time to keep searching and searching and searching and searching and and you're just like flipping and flipping and flipping and flipping um and and they're fun they're powerful those decks do a whole lot of stuff but they still just take a long time for that all to actually occur and sometimes I don't know you just literally get physically exhausted not even mentally exhausted by some of those tasks uh and that's just a I don't know in the case of the sagas especially Matt in order for those to finally like push you towards an end game a lot of the sagas that are designed do feel like they are designed to give you incremental amounts of value and the the Kiora bests the Sea Gods out there which actually have like oh this thing can turn into a proper wind condition those are a little bit more rare uh and I have to imagine that it makes you a little bit like very grateful cards for cards Like narcy Fable singer for example which actually has like here's a proper wind condition to make sure that this isn't just powerful but also is just like this game can finally really start to close yeah that is the problem and and you kind of mentioned it for a little second there Joey that you know yes Saga is not just our one game action they're three separate game actions that you have to do every single turn whereas you have a regular kill spell that's going to just pop down it's going to do the thing and then it's going to go away versus is a saga where it's going to come in it's going to do the thing and the next turn you do another thing and a lot of cases they get progressively more and more complicated at the same time and so not just is you have to pick your target for the first chapter you have to do your thing you have to then redo that all over again and then spend probably a little bit more time each turn figuring out how do you want to resolve all those things because the the board just gets more and more complicated and then in the case of resolving Tom bombadil's triggered ability where whenever the Saga basically complete itself you then start flipping into another Saga so you just start the process all over again as part of another already complicated resolution so yeah some of these deck strategies they could compound upon themselves so that not only it it feels like you're doing something significantly more powerful than maybe you might be doing but that's just because you're taking so many different game actions now one thing I observed I'm not even sure if you were aware that you were doing this but I think I played against a deck two or three times um this weekend twice at least by the second or by by the last game we'll say m you number one I noticed you had your sagas up on the kind of inner corner of the playmat closest to the most amount of people for readability and you were very carefully already like when it came time to do your sagas you're like okay I'm doing you know chapter two doing this chapter two I'm doing this chapter chapter three I'm doing this chapter three I'm doing this you would already like by the time your turn rolled around pre-planned out Yep this is doing this this you didn't have to stop okay what's happening now and read the card like you already knew what those actions were mhm when you put a new saga you are prepared with with with the dice that you're using for chapter markers um in the deck by virtue of being what it is you know it was still timec consuming but I noticed over the course of the weekend playing it a couple times you were already finding ways to like scrape off the time in between pitches like in baseball you know you were you were squeezing those Gap gaps closer and closer together I think that's the kind of thing with this kind of deck that's probably your best course of action Beyond working on finding wind conditions is finding ways to minimize that time it takes for you to do the do the bookkeeping you need to do to the deck well and that just goes down to I mean we talk a lot on the show about get reps in with your deck be familiar with the deck know why you're putting cards in yeah and thinking a turn or two ahead is super important with any of the decks and in strategies that we're going to talk about today because the more that you practice with it the more you're familiar with the deck the more you're familiar with the cards that's going to help you cut down on that time so you're not fiddling around in okay I'm in the tank and I'm also going to be in the tank for this thing and that and making sure that you kind of do your due diligence on behalf of the opponents you the other three people at the table because they deserve to have a good experience just as much as you do playing the deck and Dana I have to imagine that it was easy for you to observe some of those habit changes because well correct me if I'm wrong but you've got you've got a deck that might fall into this type of category too of producing some long games I I want to say that you have a Super Friends deck don't you I do I have a a jeru with eyes open deck so not only is it a Super Friends deck it is a mono white Super Friends deck which is probably the most difficult way to close out a game if you are playing a deck filled with all Plaines Walkers um yeah it's very tricky um and then I actually ran into a Plains Walker deck this weekend um Angus McKenzie um so there's a fog ability baked into the commander which you know can slow things out as well um but yeah a planes Walker Angus deck that the the person playing it was super nice and super apologetic about the fact that the game W up taking us a long amount of time um yeah so so like as I was was was watching that player play that I was also thinking about between Matt's Game in my deck the various ways that that these things can really slow down and become difficult to fight through if you're not consciously aware of it and working to like like Matt was speed things up as much as you possibly can right and and at least the sagas are like they typically are on Rails like this is definitely the next ability with Plaines Walkers you have you have even more choices for what those are going to do and choices for how to defend them geru in particular prevents damage to your Plaines Walkers and the prevention of damage is also not going to speed a game along anytime soon now is it so I I think that that probably gets even more and yeah additional reps in with that one are are big but I I also wonder like a question that occurs to me is is that a deck that you bring to conventions for example or or because I don't think you play it even on our stream all that often necessarily either because you're aware of the fact that sometimes this produces a long game and at a place like a convention maybe you've got a place to be at a place like on our stream it's just like yeah we can't you know stream for five hours or anything like that um so it makes me wonder like where are the times that you find yourself most wanting to actually uh pull that went out to play yeah I I didn't bring it um to Vegas I I don't play it on stream I I usually play it if I'm playing at you know with friends I don't even us bring to my shop it's usually when we're playing at someone's house or something on a weekend and everyone's you know got food and drinking and and just goofing around because it's number one then if things get along it's much easier when your friends to be like let's just scoop the whole game up and play a new one whereas that's is a little more awkward when you're playing with strangers or playing at at a at a venue or something it's easy to punt if things get too a point where it's kind of a deadlock um that doesn't happen that much that deck anymore I I one of the things I've done being consciously aware of how slow it is is I've really heavily leaned into as many Plaines Walkers that make tokens as possible and tried to turn the deck kind of into a token deck um that just happens to use planes Walkers to generate them so I I do have kind of a you know it's designed to move towards a wind condition but like that just doesn't always happen sometimes you get weird situations where you're not able to punch through that damage and then it just becomes a relatively slow defensive dirly attack and that's can be not a lot of fun if you're playing with strangers who weren't ready for that and weren't prepared to sit down for a two-hour Game and Watch a large chunk of a beu move dice around on on various different a Janis and ELP and and in a lot of ways it's very very similar to how Matt's deck plays as well his his Tom deck there's it's the the exact same problem you're everything you do isn't just a thing that's that's going to then have a very straightforward action you're making choices you're manipulating dice you're reading cards M um and in the case of plains walkers it they're named so similarly you have to remember which which elth has the minus one versus the plus one that makes tokens that kind of thing so yeah mean it can get even a little more complicated in terms of recordkeeping well and luckily at least with Tom bombad like you said Joey I always know what the second ability and the third ability on a saga is going to be whereas plains walkers typically like you Dana you picked plains walkers that mostly do one thing but every now and then you do you have to kind of weigh a little bit what's the next ability but for the most part you know what you're going to do that was one thing I did notice about playing Tom a little bit more was I'm I I already know in my head I have the next ability on the stack already because I'm constantly analyzing the board seeing what the ne what the best Target's going to be what the best thing I should be doing next is or sometimes it doesn't matter because I don't need to worry about targets so kind of the the little tips you can kind of trick your brain into doing and thinking ahead and and knowing okay do I want to not do the plus one to make the tokens is there something happening that I want to minus my planes Walker on those are some little things you can do just to skip ahead and make sure you're always thinking that one step ahead that's going to speed up the game play enormously well and that is what sometimes can make it tricky for certain of those strategies out there where you your game plan can change because of for example how many cards they draw on a given turn and suddenly that might shift your strategy because this you've started to do a little bit of popping off but now you have to change your decisions at every time um I've kind of noticed this with a landfall deck before with Oracle of Mia and it's really cool with Oracle of Mia but when you're looping fetchlands for example playing fetchlands out of your graveyard well you want to see if you can get that little bit of value blood paying the land off the top of your deck but that means that you have to you know sacrifice Shuffle flip the top card of your deck it's not a land I'll get the same evolving Wilds back from my graveyard sacrifice Shuffle reset the top to look and sometimes I'm just like I'm just going to shortcut this if that's okay with you guys I will take the loss of the value there and I'll just get just get the evolving Wilds directly from my graveyard because I don't want to worry about Shuffle check Shuffle check and that can be inherent to a bunch of commanders out there with th those those weird abilities that just take up a whole lot of extra time I don't know I'm thinking of light Paws right now for example where almost every aura that you play is going to cause you to shuffle your your entire Library shuffling takes up a whole lot of time as well and that can just really start to eat away at you the player not just uh eat away at your opponents too well and let's not also not forget while we're talking about just different strategies that you have to play quickly otherwise it's going to take forever let's not forget dungeons that can take forever in a day because yeah not just you you you you're going through a whole journey you're going back and forth all over that dungeon card man there's there's a lot of different decisions because sometimes you're not thinking about okay well the next decision but also well I want to make sure I'm getting to that other decision that I want which is clear across the board that can take so much time too and I mean shout out to you dungeon players if you're able to play them quickly but I can't play him but also I've never really tried so well so so this is an interesting one in my family meta we have a reala Rael deck which is an initiative deck and honestly that deck some some of the games can go long but at least that's a deck that does have that same Monarch situation where players are fighting for the initiative and that does Drive combat forward a little bit particularly that deck is actually so good when you blink RSA and a bunch of other initiative creatures that like getting through the dungeon can actually happen pretty darn fast and a lot of those abilities in particular are very very powerful compared to some of the other previous dungeons we had before the initiative like lost minds of fand Delver and all of those where the value is really really teeny tiny um and so like having something that players are actually battling for can really help and I think things like monarch are also famous for this too they actually drive combat as a form of Engagement rather than making you want to not do any combat at all and that can really get some extra chip damage in that can lead to a game ending a little bit more quickly but even that still has an irony to it right like I think we've all seen a queen marchesa sort of iido deck where she gets the monarchy and then it's a lot of defensive and removal spells to keep the monarchy to prevent other people from taking it from you so even those strategies which do encourage combat between players can also still accidentally once you're start starting to optimize a deck still accidentally produce a longer game State because they want you to be a little bit more controlling with the board and that too can accidentally cause a game to go a little bit longer than maybe you initially thought that it would well the other thing that props up with initiative decks as well is other players at the table if they haven't played initiative having no idea what that dungeon does or at least from like okay I think one room is a scry one room is something else but but I can't tell on that really weird dark plain card style card that's upside down in fourpoint font so so you're adding this extra weird thing where you're like can I read it so I can see what you're going to do next time you do this thing look at it again but you're not going to remember the three choices and the three choices and the four choices and the two choices so you're going have to look at it again and like that I I've seen plenty of time getting soaked up by people who are just like trying to be a good opponent and be aware and make strategic choices and because of how those those dungeon cards are designed um that is is a bit of a Time soak as well um and you know we one of the things we've been talking about is like fixes whether it's it's Matt paying attention to where his sagas are or you know me trying to bake a wind condition into geru I I legit think if you want to make the experience as pleasant as possible for your your initiative deck you should bring four copies of that to make sure everyone has to have in front of them so they can like just look at theirs even if they haven't got the initiative to see where you are on it I think that would make that experience much better and shave some time off if you did that I like that Dana yeah there are also sometimes strategies where we don't realize when we build them how timec consuming they will actually end up being um for instance crar and sakashima became a very famous competitive uh Commander pairing and the amount of coins that you have to flip for all of that stuff that is also just a thing that's going to take forever I've dabbled with storm decks before because I got a zafi precon and it was a storm precon just and like it could do some really powerful stuff but like when I started tuning it up like like I was joking about this with uh Rules Committee Member Jim leage uh over this past weekend like resolving six Ponder cop off of a Thousand-Year storm where you have to look at the top three and then Shuffle and draw and like you just you just kind of don't want to even do that like that's that's just sort of a whole lot and like that alone kind of turned me off of the strategy I'm doing a lot of very powerful stuff and it might even win me the game but it was still just very much a monopolizing the game time that made me self-conscious about it and I didn't know that kind of thing going in I did a video recently about gion an adventure deck and a lot of Adventures it turns out have removal effects on them which gion will copy but that means you're almost accidentally playing a control deck so you just sat down I wanted to play Adventures but it turns out that you're actually playing so much more removal in your deck than you expected and that is a thing that you have to key in on and just like okay no I have to be very very conscious of the wind conditions that I put into this thing because the shape of the deck is something completely different than what I anticipated when I first sat down to make it and now that I'm seeing the test runs like this is this is different than I thought it would be and that's when you have to like really start paying as close attention to what the deck truly needs and focus less just on the value and like what is the victory going to be how do I change this so that there's real proper forward momentum well that's a big reason I took my molda deck apart it was just something that it took forever I was doing very very powerful things but over the course of the game finding what in my graveyard I want to recur that turn do I want to take something on the battlefield find a way to get it in the graveyard do I want to do XYZ else as well there was a lot going on that just decision paralysis 1,000% a real thing even when you have a bunch of reps under your belt with the deck and so yeah it's it's not just ah well this decision I don't know how to make it it's oh no I know the decision that I want to make but I it still takes a process of going through all of those motions to getting there and I Joey I know you have a deck that I mean it's full of decisions your elth deck uh yeah how yeah there's so much going on with that thing yeah elth that that's really one where like what that deck is up to anytime you would scry instead you draw that many cards and so it's fun to play like ugan in it and stuff like that where I'll scry six and that means I draw six and then you also draw more cards on top of that that that deck is absolutely powerful but the commander is six mana and drawing all of those cards like what's blue famous for counter spells just like cyclonic rifty kind of stuff to control the board and like I I started to get very self-conscious when playing that deck because I'm I'm doing some powerful stuff but it's taking me a long time to actually find something that closes up there's only one copy of psychosis crawler that's out there there's only so many rewards for drawing those cards and even if I do pack the deck with as many of those rewards as possible I still it still can take some time to find them so I wound up in a strategy where I'm just kind of like oh I'm controlling and I'm preventing people from messing with me but I'm not actually winning yet and that means that this game is going on nine turns 10 turns 11 turns 12 turns and that's especially awkward because like I don't know if You' played a lot of games you probably all noticed that like the first six turns probably last as much time as the the next two turns like turn seven and eight can be a full half hour so if you're tacking on a turn nine a turn 10 a turn 11 that's a couple more half hours that can happen just from the number of game actions so that's a deck that I've really just stopped playing because of how much time it takes yeah like that kind of deck there's just so many decisions baked into like everything you do and really all you can do sometimes is just stop and like decide to segue into challenge the stat God oh wow no I like that decision that's that's such a good yeah just bite the bullet and do it were you two colluding but like was that were you two coordinating that we don't we don't need to collude at this point it just comes naturally it's K it's Kismet is is there no I'm convinced that y'all have like a secret chat without me where you're just like hey set me up for this cuz that was I didn't do it you set him up I was over here quiet you got me talking about my Sphinx boy and that got me excited to talk about the Sphinx boy yeah yeah y'all just mastered how to distract me I I guess we can't talk about things Joey likes anymore which is fine with me that means more celesia for me so what do you say Dana I think we should play more celesia and we're going to challenge that soon as we come back all right all start us off this week and I've got our listener submitted challenge the stats and this one comes to us from listener Brian savitz who had a recommendation for my Baba lasaga deck Baba lasaga is a commander I honestly never shut up about but she's got a very potent ability to draw cards and drain your opponents for a bunch of life but in keeping with the theme of this episode that is actually a deck where I have noticed that I'm doing a whole lot of powerful things but I'm not always turning the corner and winning the game because three life at a time can be a little bit slow when you know your opponents are off crater hoofing for 50 or 100 damage and stuff like that and so I was looking for other types of win conditions and Brian gave me a recommendation for a card that I had never ever considered but which turns out after testing it this weekend it won me the two games where I got to see it and the card is starcream power hungry which I never would have considered for this deck but boy did it put in work I'll actually start with the back half of starcream here because it introduces the Monarch you can convert it or something from your hand when you play it to make it a two3 vehicle with flying Menace and haste when it hits an opponent they become the Monarch if there isn't already a monarch and then of course from there you can steal the monarchy back once you're the Monarch it flips over to the front side and the front side of starcream says whenever you draw a card if you're the Monarch an opponent loses two life and that's really good when your commander draws three cards every activation this only shows up in 15 of the 3700 is Baba Saga Decks that are out there right now Brian thank you so much for this recommendation this card was a dream it's even two types artifact and Creature if I need to sacrifice it for Baba activations this really helped me close out games and prevent any long games from happening I am absolutely in love this is a really cool one I'm sure a whole bunch of Monarch players are already familiar with this one because what a potent ability but if you are also playing Baba this one really impressed me thank you so much Brian for this terrific recommendation well I'll step up next then so this isn't directly from a listener but I did see it in playing a game with one of our patrons so Levi Stevenson thank you so much for this inspiration because uh this card just keeps getting better I think it's a very old card Dana I bet you know exactly what this one is so crown of the ages this is a card right up your alley uh it's two Mana for an artifact it says you can pay four mana and you can move Target Aura from one creature to another and the new Target must be legal so with all of these new roll enchantments that are coming out you might want to move those around say maybe you're playing an area of the Charmed Apple deck it's all about having different auras on creatures that aren't yours but also it just says any Aura so crown of the ages just being able to instant speed move things around the versatility of this card is so so good only in 405 decks total and I just think there's juicy targets coming out all over the place uh every new set has powerful auras powerful enchantments that are going to just enchant Target creatures uh especially if you're playing this area of the Charmed Apple type of deck um which currently there's 3,300 decks for area of the Charmed Apple only 30 of them are playing crown of the ages so it's just a very unplayed card right now absolutely a gem Levi thank you for showing this to me um but also not thank you because this card is scary so um it's a great way and it's also just a very very good deterrent it's going to keep people from putting different enchantments on their creatures because well you can just steal it because you can take it from somebody else's and put on your creatures too there's so much play to this card I love it there's a lot of enchantments out there now just just stick it in your decks folks your Alpha Authority your ethereal armor yeah our ethereal armor comrade our elrazi conscription I scripted that spell for myself oh wild what a what neat card so last but not least this week I would like to challenge the card sarda summons probably in zabas the glimmer wasp decks but basically in any deck that's running modar and there's a couple different modar variants I've seen out there um sarda summons is currently only in about 18% of zabas decks it's an enchantment for white white creatures you control with plus one counters on them have base power and toughness 44 half flying and our angel in addition to their other types the angels part is not terribly relevant the base power and toughness 44 uh and flying is very very relevant and let me tell you why first of all of the 23 modular creatures you can run in a z zabas deck three have flying and one has trample so you're giving nine out of 10 creatures that you have access to evasion so they can swing in and actually deal damage people something that isn't always very easy more importantly though and this is something I kind of missed the first time every modular creature is a z00 um that's not technically true one of them is a 01 but the the problem with with things that that give the creatures a base power and toughness is it doesn't really help if they're a large creature or you know even a 3 three that feels pretty underwhelming basically this gives all of your creatures plus four plus4 and evasion it's an enchantment you can drop and have a pretty good chance of killing one if not multiple people and then it sticks around still buffing your creatures and still giving you Evasion for the next turn um modular decks sometimes struggle a little bit to find a way to turn that corner uh it's creature-based attack deck and that tends to want to have access to Green to be able to use some of those overrun style effects you don't have ACC access to that in boros well this kind of gives you a way to do that so sarda summons if you're playing a modular deck particularly if you're playing a boros modular deck should see way more play it is a killer finisher wow yeah I I really like that card just sort of in general but I especially like that application there um I get the sense that that card is just going to come out of nowhere and just totally smack me for a whole bunch of damage in some future twitch game that we play maybe just just I have this like spidey sense about it I can't I can't really put put my finger on why yeah I I have I have built another modular deck so you might be seeing that in the FR near future for sure that's excellent well uh let's keep going with this topic then uh going back to talking about the the Decks that can take all a real real long time and I guess ultimately the question for us to kind of like get around to in the back half of this episode is like cool what do we do about it like we talked about like oh goldfishing getting to know your deck playing multiple reps with it can be something to help you speed along some of those things Dana you observed like different placements can also be effective for strategies to make sure that you understand your own cards better and that other people understand your cards as well I I ultimately though with with some of these strategies I've really just found myself in point of just like not only do I not bring them to conventions I just kind of almost never play them at all like that elth deck or or I built a Tasha the witch Queen deck as well and the number of things that have to go right for Tasha to eventually start making you three threes you have to like mill your opponents and then start exiling their cards and then start stealing and casting their cards and then you get some three threes and like all of that requires like so many turns of setup that it just felt like every time I would play with this it's going to be a really long game and eventually that just kind of killed my joy for it and I didn't find a solution for those so help me guys help me what do you do about some of these things I mean I I'm not in a place to be giving anybody any help cuz I'm also in kind of the same situation with a couple decks I don't remember the last time I played my AC Tyrant of gy straits deck it's just been a long time since I played it because that car that deck even when I'm playing as quickly as physically possible it takes so many game actions just landfall decks like you said earlier Joey the just the nature of them do something that's integrally part of the game by playing lands and you get benefits from that whether it's drawing cards or doing other things and so when you have multiple landfall creatures in play doing something that you would normally do every single turn just complicates the board state so much so that's also another deck I just I I'm trying to figure out how to fix that without making sure just I just completely change the entire deck and so I'm also in a situation where I have Decks that I just I can't bring myself to play anymore and and they're just taking up space so so we discussed a little bit of this in the first half of the show and just to briefly review that um you know I mentioned the the the time between pitches and baseball one of the things major baseball did this year was like try to find ways to speed up games and so they shaved off space in between actions as a way to do that that's definitely something you can do we talked about Matt moving his stuff around and like being on top of what your next action is going to be as much as possible first of all if if your deck is is taking a long time to get things done look at that like what can you do to find ways to shave seconds off in between those actions as much as humanly possible um you know we talked about finding wind conditions you know that one feels pretty obvious but it it isn't sometimes like sometimes people don't think to do that they don't they don't think about that like maybe this deck could close things out faster if I just find ways to to actually take advantage of all the things I'm doing so like those you know are the two very first things if you have a deck that's taking a long time is to ask yourself how can I clean up my play to speed things up and how can I find ways to end these actual games faster with all the things I'm doing yeah however there's maybe some well and there's maybe some situations though where you can't do those things like the reality is sometimes you will find yourself in a situation where no matter what you do with your deck you can't squeeze time out in between pitches you can't f find more win conditions than the ones you already have maybe you just have to resign yourself to the fact that I'm only going to play this deck in certain places where I know it's not going to be a problem um but I think the first step is like sitting down and taking a long look at that and determining if your deck is one of those ones that that is in that position yeah I mean so as an example I mentioned gion earlier which I did in upping the average video for to make the deck you know we got a whole bunch of new adventures how can we tweak this deck to give it a a little more punch now that we have a bunch of new adventures for this Commander that cared about adventures and came out at a time that we didn't have a whole lot of them and the thing that I had to fix most about that deck was that it had like one win condition card in their total and that's definitely a habit that you like might not even notice that you're falling into because of all of the value that you are generating so I think that's a very common thing is to be like oh wait there actually aren't a ton of like dedicated this card wins the game in here well so the other thing I would say that that comes up sometimes or or you should try to keep an eye on to with your deck is maybe your deck doesn't have to be doing the thing that you think it has to be doing now obviously your elth deck Joey has to scry like that's what it has to do but to to go back to my jeru deck for example early on I ran quite a few board wipes in that deck because almost all board wipes don't touch Plaines Walkers so a situation where very frequently I could like cast a wrath of God or something and it would it would remove way more stuff and everyone other every other board than it would on my own that was a very good strategy in terms of making the deck effective wasn't a very good strategy in terms of making those games go quickly because you know particularly since the best way to win a game I had found in that deck was to play tokens so I was cleaning out my own tokens and making it challenging for me to get to a critical mass as well even though the deck won perhaps more than it does right now that slowed things up so I like I I just because that was effective doesn't necessarily mean it made for good gameplay and as I pulled back the number of board wipes in that deck and I think it at one point it was at seven and and I think I'm down to one maybe two I can't recall off top of my head um It sped things up like the deck did just because it could do that as Ian Malcolm says doesn't mean it should I did a very similar thing with my Tom Bombadil deck Dana uh so we mentioned all the things that I noticed about the deck I also Al in my first playthrough I noticed that I don't need any extra board wipes in that deck because there are several sagas in there that one of the chapters is indeed a board wipe and so I didn't need any extras I it ended up I was I had six or seven board wipes in there and I just didn't realize it because they were all on Saga I was I thought oh I only have end hostilities I don't I I yeah so maybe I don't need anything else but it turns out I didn't even need that because turns out that there's the phasing of zal fear for example that blows up all creatures and so there's a lot of different sagas that I I realized oh yep that's going to take out a whole bunch of other pieces which freed up a space for cards that I could play significantly quicker or at least let the table play significantly quicker I wasn't blowing up as many creatures because I didn't need those extras because I had so many already but also I was able to recur them and so there was a lot of different reasons that I didn't need to have extra removal because the deck already had so much involved just with the sagas I was playing to begin with and when we were talking about finding wind conditions for your deck too don't be afraid to think outside the box a little bit you know if you're playing Green and you have a creature deck it's pretty obvious there's a bunch of different overrun sell effects you can put in your deck like okay that's that that's obvious and if you're not doing that and struggling to win games in green well then you should probably do that um but it's a little more difficult say in Joey's eleg deck for example but like look at Matt Saga deck you're playing with a bunch of enchantments in that deck Maybe you will find yourself in a position where like something like Starfield of Nicks would actually let you turn your creatures into beaters and you're going to have way more enchantments and somebody else is to swing in it maybe that won't work in that deck but like it's the kind of thing that you can take a look at that maybe you wouldn't ever consider running anywhere else well and especially that's a fun example Dana and I'm going to use fun as as my word there because optimized I don't think is the right word Once you turn those enchantments into creatures you risk them getting removed absolutely uh you know a settle the wreckage or something like that could totally blow you out but even if that happens I still think that's kind of a fun state of gameplay like does this actually work it's a potential wind condition that actually like yeah there's a flaw in it there are problems with it but it's still like if it works that's going to be kind of awesome and even if you get blown out I mean that could also be kind of a fun memory to create with it as well Absol sometimes losing in a way that generates a good story is better than winning 45 minutes later in a game kind of a SWOG yes yeah very much and and I think also like party to this is that there are a lot of commanders out there where the the game state that they produce is just kind of always going to be um a a very controlling type I suppose like a tox real deck for example or Hinata can reduce the cost of all of your spells by so much that it's like you're paying one Mana to kill off a whole bunch of creatures on the board there are only so many ways to build that or like a Negan deck is going to to be all sacrifice and that that's going to cause a lot of like oh your opponents aren't doing a whole lot of stuff um we we've probably all even seen like a brago deck where like you're blinking a whole bunch of stuff some of those things might be removal effects that you're blinking I I had a Marin deck where I was just looping removal creatures all over the place and those were producing a board state that was very effective but wasn't even necessarily fun and eventually I took that Mar in a deck apart and I changed it into something else because what I wanted were those fun moments for for sure because the problem arises when you have controlled the board you stopped other people from doing stuff and you're doing things that are optimal you're doing things that are powerful and those are fun to do but whatever the rift is between the moment that you've got control of the board and however many turns it takes for you to actually close out that game it just can't you can't take a huge amount of time on that you got to find a quick win condition between those two moments otherwise it's really going to strain your own attention even and that's where I think things can get really really thorny because is as you try to increase the potency of your wi conditions maybe for example a brago deck would add a combo and that's yet another thing that can rub players the wrong way sometimes so even then when you are dedicated to finding other win conditions it can still get thorny so I like your suggestion there of a one that I just think is like oh that's just fun I think that it produces interesting stories but when finding wind conditions it can sometimes also accidentally oops you into a power level maybe that you didn't even intend to be and that's where it gets it just sort of compounds upon itself and sort of from there too and another big factor in this is in a lot of decks people still play tutors I know the three of us have kind of actively been taking them out of our own decks but in for a lot of folks I mean tutors are still some of the most commonly played cards in the format and so for folks that do still play tutors be careful what you tutor for if folks know that you're tutoring for wind conditions instead of tools or or utility pieces whatever that you know we typically will still tutor for now and then that will go a long way too and maintaining the Goodwill and so yes you may not be closing the game near as quickly but you're also creating a maybe a little bit better play experience because you're you're playing maybe to to react a little bit better instead of being proactive I guess if that makes any sense there no yeah I think proactive is a really good word for this uh because especially once we start like tuning and optimizing a deck like we want to do the things we want to do the things powerfully and we know from experience that we can't just let our opponents run rampant we need to have some removal to keep all of the other players in check cuz if they're allowed to do their thing they might just win the game but getting those balances right can be so so difficult and trying to be very proactive with your own deck rather than just reactive to what other players are doing is certainly going to be helpful but it it it it still can cause you to accidentally fall into those moments of just like ah I've accidentally caused the game to go like three extra rounds and that's a whole lot of extra time I don't know about you guys but there have been moments where I'm just like I think like I just want to sandbag a couple of these spells that are in my hand because the way that this game would end if I don't cast these is actually just going to be like way more fun that way like I think that would be a better ending to this game of whatever big cool blowout is happening than me playing this one settled wreckage whatever type of effect and and making it go a little bit longer just to see if I could come back I'm like n it's already a turn nine and what they did was really cool and I I'm kind of satisfied with that being the ending yeah for that's absolutely something to consider like you I talk about like you don't have to play some of the things that might be making your deck so yeah you don't have to play theum three in your deck like you can just choose to not do that absolutely sometimes yeah you you really took the words out of my mouth Dana maybe instead of playing those cards that you have to sandbag in some games maybe take those out and put in cards instead that you never have to sandbag play cards that are going to be more proactive uh that maybe you're you're always going to be constantly moving forward so you're doing a little less in the deck now and then that prevents other players from winning and instead you're just worrying about your own game plan instead that way you never have to worry about oh I I kind of want to make a suboptimal play because it's going to make for a better experience just play cards that always add to the experience then uh and that just goes into the debt construction rules and again knowing your deck knowing why you put Cards into your deck having that intentionality that we love to preach about on the show all the time that to me seems like such a better option instead of cards that they're going to sit in your hand because well sometimes maybe 50% of the time this is isn't going to benefit the game experience the kind of last point I want to make here is maybe make a sales pitch um there's a lot of reasons you want to speed up games to make for a better experience being the primary one for everyone involved but but I will note this um the the deck I mentioned this weekend the Angus McKenzie deck um the player in question was able to get the a Johnny ult off that that made so all damage is reduced to one damage Delta plains walkers and to the player is reduced to one regardless of how big that h hit is um that was one of the things that made it particularly hard to carve through that deck the player was super nice he was aware he was creating a slow game State we had a good time still but we all tried to kill him yeah and successfully did the entire table teamed up and he was the person that got knocked out um the reality is when you are the person creating a SL game State very often you're going to put a bullseye on your head so like Beyond just making things fun for people when you try to speed things up there's strategic reasons to do that it might well make your life a little bit easier and make it so the whole table isn't simultaneously gunning to take you down I really like that Dana or or and and it can be fun to root against an Archen enemy too absolutely and and so there are also ways for you to lean into that experience this is something that Crim at the Asian Avenger if y'all are familiar with him when you play Commander with him he's the heel to borrow a term from wrestling he creates he's he's just absolutely will pop off and become the Archen enemy everyone has to work together to deal with what he is doing CU if you don't work together he will win that game and in some contexts that can be a very frustrating experience where someone is playing something that you all have to deal with or else but Crim is such a fun personality to play games against because yeah it's frustrating but he he leans into that experience and makes it joyous for everyone else as well you know the one of my bigger pet peeves I think we did an episode about Commander pet peeves one of my bigger pet peeves is if someone is doing something super obviously powerful to the entire table that everyone does have to deal with but they kind of like try to deflect or or or like be like oh did I do that like they they try to pretend that they're not the threat that they truly are um and I much prefer someone who can take what might have been an unfortunate game state in some contexts and really find the joy that can still be accessed from those moments by leaning into just like no I am the arch enemy me I'm being Rowdy bodyy right now and you do have to deal with me and I hope that you can let's see if we can all craft that experience together as opposed to you know just don't be weak sauce right so I think that those are other tips that you can find from that as well if you do produce one of those game States leaning into that experience and being the heel can be fun for people to root against that can still be an experience that you craft and I would kind of just say in a general sense it never hurts to spend a couple minutes just pondering the play experience for all of your decks even ones that aren't particularly slow in in how long it takes to close out to win um you know think about whether it's a good experience for everybody else even if it's it's a fast deck that's I think a useful experiment to conduct you know once a year or so is just kind of do a performance review of how they're doing and how that not just for how they perform really and how well they win but like how enjoyable are they to play against and what things can you maybe tweak a little bit to make that a better time for everyone yeah honestly Dana that that that's got to be the most important thing right like you and I are both tracking all of our games that we've played this year which is a lot of interesting data points about like oh which of our decks are winning the most how long have those games gone like I'm tracking game length and stuff like that but the actual most important data point that none of those numbers are really going to show me are just like the most fun times and that's truly the the thing that we ought to actually focus on because the reason we talk about this the curse of long games is because those are the ones that do kind of weigh a little bit heavier on us that we don't always have as much fun with the point of this is again to come back around to how do we craft something that is enjoyable for other players you know it's not that that all long games are going to always be miserable or anything like that it's more about has something happened that took a little bit of fun away and what can we do about that but yeah this was interesting listeners we would love to hear your thoughts about long games Decks that can produce that strategies maybe do you play these do you avoid do you have any tips to share with your fellow listeners if so leave them in the comments we' really like to hear from you but for now fellas I think we've got to call this episode to a close so if our listeners want to get in touch with us where is it that they can find you Matt so you can find me on the social medias at Maus 55 on any platform really uh you can find us also Wednesday evenings over at twitch.tv/ edhrecast when we stream we have guests on we're always playing Commander it's always fun so make sure you tune in for that as well and Dana you can find me on the interwebs at Dana roach I'm writing articles for EDH and Commander Herold and you can find all of us together at patreon /cast and I'm Joey Schultz you can find me online probably on Instagram or something like that Joseph M Schultz and you can find the cast at edhrecast online as well plus if you want to get in contact with us maybe submit a challenge the stats you can email us at edhrecast gmail.com our thanks go out once again to chase for assisting me with the post-production of the show you can find them online at manac curves listeners will be back at you next week with more data and insights but until then remember EDH Rec your deck before you wreck your [Music] deck

Channel: EDHRECast

Views: 37,173

Keywords: magic the gathering, commander, edh, edhrec, mtg

Id: _YoffG7-Zdg

Length: 51min 11sec (3071 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 13 2023