The Problem with "Budget" Cards

Sovereign is a magic the Gathering card it was first printed in 1993 in Alpha the first print run of the first Magic the Gathering set and went on to be printed in the other three print runs ending in Spring of 1994. it is one of the most powerful Mana artifacts in the game and has been banned or restricted in most constructed formats for basically its entire existence it sat on the reserved list a list of cards that Wizards of the Coast has promised not to reprint from 1996 until 2002 at which point Wizards updated the reserved list to allow reprints of the first sets Commons and uncommons the card commanded fairly high prices all through the 2000s with it being reprinted in the limited run From the Vault relics but still keeping most of its value then it was reprinted in the first Commander set in 2011 as one of two cards included in all five of the set's pre-constructed decks the other card was command Tower effectively a downsideless Mana confluence the reasoning for this choice on Wizard's part was simple soul ring was considered by some to be a must include in then small Commander format since on account of it being banned in Legacy its low double digits price was pretty affordable for its power level so the preconducts should also include soul ring I could say a lot about this logic most prominently that Soul Ring's relative affordability was a product of it not being played in large formats printing sets specifically for EDH was a great way to inflate the size of the format a process which without a reprint would have caused a demand Spike with a fixed Supply and increased the price likely relegating soul ring to higher power level EDH decks it's a problem that solves itself one could argue also the pre-con commandered X weren't exactly well constructed so the idea that they need to keep up with the decks of long time Commander players is pretty laughable but something you might notice is that there's a small difference between me and Wizards of the Coast I don't make money off of how many units of the commander pre-cons gets sold and they do so I guess I'm a little biased that way but okay I think it would have been fine or even advisable to let Soul Rings price soar as the format size grows let it be a toy for the power Gamers alongside Mana Crypt moxin and the like I understand why some people might disagree but that's my opinion there are also people who have argued that it should be banned such as a writer known as chisholicious two months after the commander says release in 2011. and well unless somebody goes around burning every single copy of soul ring on Earth released after 2010 a band would really be the only solution but it's not going to happen Commander's ban list is hot take alert kind of a stupid mess that very clearly underscores the difficulty of moderating such a large format played in so many different ways and with such a why potential pool of cards on top of this soul ring has been printed in over a dozen commander sets Wizards have done their utmost to place the card within the pantheon of EDH soaring is here to stay but what does that mean for the game what does the existence of wildly powerful guards at a cheap price do do a format like Commander one of the most compelling issues with these cheap powerful cards is that they warp the way players look at other cards depending on the goals of a deck and how it's constructed it might be looking for varying quantities of Mana rocks counter spells draw spells and so on you could build a framework for the deck without looking at cards for example going okay this deck wants eight ramp spells 10 draw spells and 12 removal spells I shouldn't look through cards to find these quantities of cards but come on let's be honest this is not how most people build decks people see their options for ramp drawn removal and they just start adding cards the specific cards being considered then have an impact on how many of that sort of card end up in the final deck as a counter scenario one can imagine a universe in which players removal options solely consist of naturalize murder lava coil and banishing Light to be played in whatever quantities the player wants in this universe a player is forced to spend more time thinking about questions like how much am I worried about enchants and artifacts how many creature removal spells do I need to deal with opposing pressure and wind cons the question isn't what specific removal spells a player needs but rather how much of these sort of stock options back in the real world things end up working out a bit different than this this is especially pronounced if a player is using a website like edhrek or some other metric that orders cards by popularity or quality if you're looking for counter spells in Skyfall ordered by edhrec rank as I have been spotted doing from time to time you first see counterspell a card that'll set you back a dollar great I love it then you see a couple of other options that are similar with a downside as well as a couple that cost a lot of money by the time you get down to your standard Staples your kitchen table Kings your modern machinations of your it's looking a lot less tempting you have your Mana Leak type cars that fall off fast and Power in later turns you have your more specialized options and then you have your counter spells that commit the cardinal sin of costing three Mana it's easy to imagine a player seeing the rapid price increases and power decreases that happen when you scroll downward from counterspell going well okay I guess I'll run counterspell and a couple of these other ones and then I'll have the good counter spells within my budget now it should be mentioned that counterspell is an incredibly powerful card most other counter options that players can run are worse than it yes but I'd guess that most blue decks want lowercase C counter spells enough that they'd benefit from running cards that are kind of a lot worse than counterspell a joke in my play group is to respond to the question of oh what does that card do with something like oh yeah it's like a worse soul ring or oh yeah it's basically a worse version of lightning bolt the joke here is that these statements tell you almost nothing about the actual power of a card it's like somebody asking how old a person is and you saying oh yeah they're younger than Henry Kissinger helpful thank you as a point of contrast we can consider other types of cards somebody might choose to run ones whose power is less obvious it's pretty easy to go oh Wizards retort that's strictly worse than counterspell but what about if I want say a card that generates value when I play creature spells all right scryfall let's go green cards that have whenever cast and creature in their text and let's rank them based on Eda track and there well okay so there's Beast Whisperer and there's the great Henge and there's Silverback Elder and there's primeval Bounty and there's glimpse of Nature and there's wild pair and there's Matthew admirers and there's Benjamin so which ones are the bad ones which one should I add and where should I stop adding them these cards are pulled from all across the 57 ordered cards that pop up with my search inputs some are more flexible or more bursty or lower to the ground but analyzing them is a much trickier value proposition than looking at counter spells it's possible I did the math on my deck ahead of time and went okay I need two or three of these cards preferably at least one in the four to five Mana range and at least one in the six to seven minute range but if I didn't gee there are sure a lot of good looking cards here I could run worse counter spell or worse soul ring or I could run more of these and counter spells aren't the only thing to get neglected if I'm looking for creature removal source to plowshares and path to Exile are both under two bucks and absurdly Powerful with other white creature removal being much worse or much more expensive if I'm looking for artifact removal red has a braid and Vandal blast with other options once again being worse or more expensive if I'm looking for general purpose draw for blue there are a few low budget options Mystic Remora is fabulous especially with its price halved by a dominaria remastered reprint and mole Drifter treasure cruise and archmage Emeritus all have decent spots in several different archetypes but beyond that things get weaker more Specialized or more expensive if somebody isn't setting out a framework for their deck it's easy to imagine underdoing it on the more generalist stuff and overdoing it on the more synergistic stuff and a deck running too much synergistic stuff and not enough General stuff is at risk of getting itself into a bimodal pickle a state where it either falls on its face after getting a key piece removed or it goes on to a Mach 10 March toward victory a basic issue with having cards like soul ring widely available is that card quality in a given deck gets a lot less consistent at lower budgets if you're building a deck with a budget in the high hundreds or more you might include counter spell alongside Mana drain and a couple other pricey counters along with whichever cheaper ones best fit your deck and play situations if you needed some green ramp you might also include Nature's lore along with three visits a clone from Portal 3 Kingdoms a set that was almost exclusively sold in East Asian markets until a series of reprints recently the only way to get this card was to pay upwards of fifty dollars for the portal 3 Kingdoms version and honestly Portal 3 Kingdoms could be a video topic all on its own but I'm not going to dwell on it further today all this is just to say that shelling out money leads to debt consistency there are certainly powerful cards that are cheap due to wide reprints or another reason such as soul ring counterspell and source to flash shares but there's an even sneakier type of budget card the ones that cost zero dollars a quick anecdote I recently built the Maria scholar of antiquity deck it's an equipment's deck you throw a bunch of equipments on Maria and then tap them to generate mana and value I kind of built it as a meme but it's a genuinely delightful mid-power level aggro deck anyway after ordering the forty dollars worth of mostly random bulk I needed for the list I sat staring at the sort of the animist and sort of Forge and Frontier I had in my collection they cost no money to add and would be so good in the deck I put them in the deck for a few games but they had such a warping effect that I decided to take them out my Dex mana and value engines were pretty solid for an agro deck but decidedly reasonable in scope while explorers scope and rogue's gloves both feel very appropriate within the list when I played sword of Forge and Frontier it felt like a totally different deck and I know the fact that that's within the realm of possibility naturally shifts the way my opponents will think about my deck ultimately it wasn't meant to be a particularly high powered deck nor could it hope of Performing like a high-powered deck on the current budget so I cut the swords the point being made here is that you should add cards to a deck under consideration of how they'll impact the games you play with the deck even if you own the cards and they're free to add my quasi-meem equipments deck has a handful of specific weaknesses and adding power guards to the deck doesn't help it manage those weaknesses with any consistency it just makes people want to play better decks against it an even better example is Graveyard decks graveyard synergies are wide-ranging fun and potentially quite powerful but they exist within a game that has a lot of really heavy duty graveyard hate there are the options like Tor Mod script and rest in peace which straightforwardly demolish graveyard strategies and even cards like Nile spellbomb and bajookabog which do so without even spending a card and with the latter dodging counter spells on top of all that all this to say decks heavily based around graveyards need to make a decision accept the need to be resilient against this stuff usually by winning quickly or being loaded with counters for the hate or play at a power level where these hate cards are less common this puts a lot of mid-power graveyard decks in an awkward spot adding stronger synergies will lead to crushing unprepared decks even more than before but will still end up with getting wholesale Dunked On by hate cards unless the efficiency of the deck is vastly improved to guarantee quicker or more abrupt wins there's not necessarily a right or wrong answer here but my Mantra is that if you don't want to play higher power level don't play higher power level another example of this is cheap infinite combos namely div mazat and curiosity I've known people who went well this deck is running red and blue and I've got the card sitting right here why not add them if you're purely looking to increase the power level of your deck this is fine logic but adding an infinite combo to your deck changes the whole dynamic of games once people know it's there as a frequent enjoyer of aggro I often find myself asking the question how will each of my opponents be trying to win this game if the answer goes from I don't know Drake's or something to an infinite combo that requires very little setup I'm probably going to be hitting that player with my creatures and they're definitely going to deserve it as another anecdote about building decks for the types of games you want to play my brother recently got his first commander deck a decently built DOTA deck in a night with several EDH games everybody pulled out one of the more powerful lists every time he played the jota deck resulting in games where he was doing a lot but also eating a lot of removal spells and needing to deal with a bunch of powerful nonsense from other people the games were close but the only game he actually won that night was in a lower power level game where he borrowed my Maria deck at the end of the night he proclaimed that he needed to build a lower power level deck to bring this scattered assortment of points back down to earth a little let's think about soul ring once again a player running a budget deck might run the ever-powerful soul ring alongside hadron archive lockets or other slower Mana ramp now let's consider this effect for draw they're running a single consecrated Sphinx that they happen to have in their collection alongside cards like treasure Cruise blue Sun Zenith and body of knowledge add in a few other examples like this and it's not hard to construct an outline for their deck or 10 of the time they chain very powerful cards and explode the entire table but most of the rest of the time their deck performs on a much lower caliber some might ask well what's the problem with this and well the answer to that is complicated because EDH is a complicated format with a variety of different players and power levels in a format where table politics and the threat perceptions of individual players play a key role in this environment individual Power Cards might not necessarily pose a problem you know in my play groups soul ring is looked at with a minor eye roll uh nice draw bro if the soul ring player gets out of hand you hit them a bit and hopefully things calm down commanders theoretically a self-balancing format but the more inconsistently powerful a deck becomes the trickier it becomes for other people to conceptualize the power level of that deck at a certain point the self-balancing will simply be hitting your deck with their creatures or picking a more powerful deck to begin with to play against you because they don't want to contend with the puzzle box that you're presenting them with this video was a little Meandering so let's try and recap some of the key points here soul ring is an absurdly powerful card and I kind of hate putting it in my lower powered decks but it's not going to get banned Norwood banding it particularly constitute some kind of fundamental good for the format in my opinion counterspell is also a very strong card and absolutely should not be held as a power level Baseline for counter spells even if the card is called well counterspell if you're looking for Mana rocks counter spells or really any other sort of supporting effect you should ideally think about how many of these sorts of effects your deck needs before going looking or at least be careful while looking at cards a deck built with the tools it needs even at a slightly lower power level will perform well with much more consistency than the deck that only picks the strongest three to four cards for categories of cards where the deck is really looking for more like eight or ten an additional point I could flesh out more at a later date is that sometimes the strongest option isn't even the best for the deck if I want to drop my four Mana commander on curve as often as possible it might be correct to run lower power one or two drop Mana ramp rather than cultivate kodama's reach or Harrow similarly some decks might be much less worried about running three or four Mana counter spells if they're cheaper or better suited to the deck than the options that cost less Mana additionally players should add cards to their deck under consideration of how those cards will fit into the sort of game they want to play I could add torment of hail fire to my Turbo battle cruiser glissa deck and that would probably make it stronger but my opponents are going to view the deck wildly differently if they know I have an I win button playing a truly absurd number of lands is the goal of the deck and the fun part of the deck and I don't want people to feel like they'll get flattened instantly if they let me get to 20 lands even if you own a card and it's sitting right there in front of you waiting to get added in a casual EDH group it might still be correct to leave it out for the sake of keeping the deck at a consistent power level as mentioned earlier if you're running your graveyard Center deck you could juice up the power level of your graveyard strategies but if you're not prepared to deal with heavy duty hate cards you're going to be running a mess of a deck that smashes fun casual decks but gets demolished at the first sight of a relic of progenitus and to bring things back to earlier points if you're running just the most powerful of a certain effect like ramp removal or Draw you're going to have a handful of games where you get those and pop off super hard and other games where your deck is a clunky mass of high cost Synergy cards that fails to accomplish much of anything but the bottom line is if you have a time machine and several million dollars for bribes we should go back in time together and prevent Wizards of the Coast from printing soul ring in Commander 2011.

Channel: Salubrious Snail

Views: 202,187

Keywords: edh, commander, mtg

Id: 7xjyY5byGys

Length: 22min 6sec (1326 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 27 2023