In my playgroup we all go heavy in removal/interaction, and we have a saying: "Confucius say: First man to pop off, eats early removal."

So: Goldfish Powerlevel matters, but in an FFA environment, resiliency & disruption is a more important axis of power

Mate your content is pretty much the best there is in terms of commander theory, love to see another post!

I agree with you to some extent. If every single person in the playgroup is running lots of interaction then your point is 100% accurate, however, if ONLY YOU are playing interaction while others just sit on their "try to win and do my deck things" then you're be going to have a bad time

Something I really like about these videos that I think some people seem to miss in the wide, wide spectrum of EDH content is that you never seem to approach theory videos with the idea of "this will make your deck win more," but rather, "this is how you can negate the bad feelings of modern EDH decks and contribute to a more fun environment." Very cool, big fan :)

I think a really underrated deck consideration not often talked about is 'multifacetedness'. Being able to dynamically pivot your strategy, envision alternative actionable wincons when one or more combo pieces aren't present -- is critical. If your entire deck is put on hold from accomplishing anything of note when Solemnity or Ashes of the Abhorrent comes into play -- it may be a sign you need other synergetic components. Obviously, the deck that sets out to do too many things at once accomplishes none of them, but if every single card feeds into one pipelined payoff, it's shooting yourself in the foot by sticking to your guns.

In my old playgroup, I was often the only player to run interaction and it typically made ME the focus of everyone rather than the other way around, because I was 'getting in their way'. I had toxic friends.

"Play more removal" is great unless you're having to overcompensate for the pubstomper. The rest of my pod is low power, below the new precons, so the needed density doesn't fit a game without the pubstompee

My favorite thing about interaction is that (in most cases) its power scales with the threat. A counterspell is strong but casting it in response to a rampant growth will probably annoy your opponent more than anything else. But if it's used to counter an extra turn spell, that may shift the whole outcome of the game. I always see casual players shying away from interaction because they think its mean or that it slows down a game, which is unfortunate bc interaction is the most fun part of the game imo. Especially in a multiplayer format.

Sal uploads at 12:30 AM while I have work in the morning? Splendid. Time to watch.

I usually feel that if I run the amount of interaction people recommend, I don't have enough space left in the deck to reliable do the thing my deck wants to do. I'd rather play aggro mirror than winconless control.

Edh players will do literally anything to not play a proper board game instead

Also leave up mana to play your interaction, ive lost so many games making the "fun" (greedy) play and then lost cause i dont have the mana to interact with the win

My pod doesn't run anywhere near enough removal. So in order to get them to run more, I've started playing A LOT more Voltron. I try to meta my friends a little bit when I see glaring weaknesses in our pod, but I always explain to them what they could have run or played differently that would have stopped me.

This tracks with my experience sculpting my first deck. It started as majority good stuff engine pieces. After watching some deckbuilding vids and reflecting, I soon realized the games where I felt like "this deck doesn't do anything" were brought on by a lack of interaction and protection. I added 10 or so protection pieces, included stax permanents and swapped in a smattering of removal/counter magic. Now my games feel much less volatile in terms of bad for me (I was shut down completely) and bad for my opponents (I went unanswered and stormed off). Great content as always Alex!

I don't play mtg, let alone edh, but these analyses help me make sense of why certain yugioh decks end up strong, esp in this day and age. The fewer cards an archetype needs to come online, the more generic tools it can run to interact with and counter the enemy. And if an archetype has multiple one-card starters, that just cranks its consistency since now it can play around handtraps and negation. So all in all, good video.

This probably explains why I, as the only interaction player in my local meta of Timmy battlecruiser decks (I run 10-13 targeted removal and 3-5 board wipes in every deck) often feel like im the only one at the table capable of stopping people. So games when I dont get interaction, the board gets stomped, because nobody can pick up the slack

This is the best content on commander that I enjoy! :D People really get mad when I am the only deck with interaction and get disappointed when I stop them from winning like wtfff.

Here's a topic I'd like to see your take on: At multiple accounts, I've had harsh complaints about the amount of removal and stax I ran thrown my way. I lowered them to 6 slots total, yet the complaints emerged everytime I used one at rare occasions. I realized, that the complaints weren't actually about the quantity of removal and stax I ran, but the timing of when I used them. Essentially, I removed escalating threats early, before they had a chance to pop-off. While this was always the best play, it felt frustrating to my opponents, that meticulously planned their bad combos and didn't get to show them off. By letting them escalate a little, then checking them at eye level, we created a more wholesome table experience.

When I started around 2013 or so, it seemed like having a variety of power levels was the whole point of the format. Now, it feels like everyone gets mad when your idea of what an arbitrary number rating means is different from theirs.

God, this stuff is so fascinating. Krep up the good work snail!

yo this guy taught me magic in 7th grade and I still play to this day. these videos are sweet af. HE IS THE GOAT!

I sometimes feel that some of my decks lacks to perform as I want to, your shared experience had made me more clear about what is happening in my decks and my playgroup. Thanks.

"Really going ham with their peices of cardboard"😂😂😂

All hail the snail. Love the content! I've learned so much from bingeing your videos. I'm building my first "real" deck from scratch this weekend and am really looking forward to putting this theory into practice!

Blowouts are a good thing. Blowouts teach you what you are fucking up in your deck building. The best games you can possibly play are the ones where you draw your perfect hand and get blown out anyways. Games you win tend to teach you nothing.

I really appreciate your channel. your videos put into words a lot of my feelings about the format in an easy to digest way. I'm also a firm believer that power level doesn't matter much as long as folks are building responsibly.

I'm so glad I found your channel. I love this kind of deck and meta analysis and reshaping some of the conventions around EDH with logic and sometimes scary math! I'm looking to make a rogues deck and am trying to site read your list to figure out the gameplan and how it wins games and am having trouble finding more than "ding people with evasive creatures and generate a lot of card advantage" ... I'm still learning the way of the Snail so I think I'm probably stuck in a more "Craterhoof is the wincon" mindset causing me to undervalue all the card draw and interaction. I would love to hear how this deck works to apply to my own deckbuilding!

I mean, snail is right. Power level is less important if everyone is running interaction, but that will almost never happen without a dedicated play group, which will mean that you can just coordinate power levels anyway. But, the video does a good job of pointing out that even at very similar power levels, the games are better when nobody is playing solitaire.

I definitely agree with this up to a certain point. My decks run more interaction than most casual commander decks for the reasons that you gave in the video. However, I recently had a miserable play experience where somebody lied about their power level at a local game store, having an actual cEDH deck. In theory, we were doing everything correctly. All three of us with casual decks banded together to take out the cEDH player, collectively having at least two removal spells per turn cycle, but the efficiency of the cEDH player's expensive cards was too much for our decks to keep up with. The end result was three players trying to remove the cEDH player's stuff without advancing their own game plan, but the cEDH player was able to counter most of the removal spells AND advance their own board state. It should have been an interesting "archenemy" kind of game, but instead it was just a painful grind watching helplessly as the cEDH player dug for their combo.

One issue i find with running more interaction is that the player who does in a pod that doesn't is that you can kinda end up as table police, never able to develop your own gameplan because everyone around you is playing bombs into bombs. You can run stax and a ton of boardwipes but that's usually not very fun for most people. And regarding table imbalance i think it works if the power level of decks is known in advance. In my experience the "low power" players will often use their interaction against each other not knowing that the "high power" player is up to destroying everyone. You could argue it's a failure of threat assesment but if you don't know what the other decks are able to achieve it's hard to do.

I would love a dive into/deck tech for some of the decks mentioned in the latter half of your video. It’s extremely interesting seeing your take on what makes a deck tick

I have a similarly built Sygg deck - A bit higher budget, but still staying within the confines of ample interaction and so on - and I absolutely love it. Your list even brought some previously unknown cards into my own list :) I'd love to see more of the decks from that battlebox!

really interesting definitely need to look at this more when deck building. I am often limited by budget so its cool to see that decks can overcome this just takes more tweaking.

This video is going to help my deck building alot! Thanks for making it!

I needed this. I'm a longtime player who understands the value of interaction. HOWEVER, I'm a Timmy at heart and I often build decks with best case scenarios in mind. Just yesterday, I re-built my Mina and Denn deck. Super explosive, splashy turns, etc. After I built the deck, I went back and counted my interaction cards: five--six, if you count Heroic Itenrvention. I love playing "Bumper Car EDH"--when everyone just jams fun cards and smashes into each other, but most of my best games (in terms of my performance in them and in terms of overall enjoyment by folks at the table) have been games with lots of interaction.

This was quite enlightening. I'm glad I decided to check it out when it showed up in my recommended feed. :)

Dude, you have a lot of great ideas that can move the format in an entire different direction. I love your videos, man. And yes, Magic is a great game bc of interaction. This is what makes the game so thrilling.

Sometimes I feel like people don't always think through how the fact that different people at the table want to do different things is what actually affects Commander's quality as a game. For instance, if you're playing a deck with lots of interaction in theory, but you always tap out to progress your board state, you're actually going to just lose to someone's infinite combo the exact same way as if you weren't playing interaction. For some people I think the feeling of having to be the control player and sit back "doing nothing" while everyone else gets to make plays can be really frustrating, because if only ONE player is doing that, then it's like you're doing all the work while everyone else gets to have the fun because if you don't do it everyone loses and if you do do it one of the players with a poorly made pop off deck will eventually just win because you've exhausted yourself trying to manage everything. At the end of the day the most important part of anyone having a good time is for everyone at the table to be doing their job as a group...

I'm glad I found your channel. most channels just say put this, strong card that, combo with this, price something that but rarely gives perspective how to build with the idea of getting back or preventing other's win in mind. Recently I've been building themed EDH decks and question the need or ego to call a deck power level 7. Your videos have given me an idea that in order for my deck to be at a certain power level, it should be matched with others who think they are power level 7 with only limitation from official EDH banned cards. Meaning that strategies for land destructions, powerful mana rocks, Stax, and prison like interaction are not off limits. Its like a license test for my deck if I enjoy or think I have a realistic winning chance for that level. I just need a limit to where I can say a deck complete with its themed restrictions and budget.

This is a really solid take and explains a lot about how some of my decks play out in my casual pods. I have been building decks for only a few months now and I'm running into an issue where it often feels like the decks I'm running end up kind of running away with the game and leave my opponents frustrated. With the exception of 1 deck which I only run with the permission of the table and automatically makes me archenemy, none of my decks are excessively powerful, probably a 6 on the scale, but I often end up overwhelming the other players. With your thoughts in mind, I thought back on a lot of recent games and realized that how my friends were playing their decks and how I'm playing mine are very different. My decks tend to have solid levels of interaction and decent resiliency. An example is my Treebeard Voltron deck. Sure if Treebeard gets removed despite his ward it sets me back a step, I have a lot of backup to keep me safe and going until I can get treebeard online again, and I have solid options for both single-target removal, or board wipes if my enemies get too far ahead. Meanwhile one of my most regular opponents plays a massive elfball deck with essentially no interaction and constantly just tries to overrun with elves, but I can regularly shut down the key pieces to their engine and they're left stalled out and unable to do anything while they watch my tree eventually just run them over. I'm going to share this video around with my playgroup and see if it helps.l

I super agree!! Nearly all the bad games and player interactions I’ve had in casual EDH have come from a lack of removal in other decks

Just wanna say I love your vids and you've been a great at helping me improve my mtg decks

I was JUST talking earlier today about that enabler-payoff problem, but you phrased it better than I did.

I love this breakdown. I think a huge problem i have in deck construction is i have so many cards i want to play with and its hard to have interaction over something that feels that it contributes to the deck game plan.

I misheard you briefly at 5:28, but now I want them to make a "Sword of All or Nothing"

Another banger! Been staring at my new Mothman deck trying to find space for more removal and card draw, and there are in fact way too many counter amplifiers. I’ve gotten better about that in other decks (my Maja landfall tokens deck took forever to balance but I finally love how it plays) but in a new one it kept feeling like more counters=better. But it turns out that if you don’t immediately grow Mothman into something that threatens to finish people with airborne commander damage, he doesn’t get shot as much. All my decks could probably use like 3 more pieces of interaction, especially in colors where the next 3 choices are all strong. Gonna do a little editing. Your point about resource conversion was also really good. I struggled to close a game with Prosper the other weekend because I couldn’t keep him in play, and while the whole deck is built to generate impulse draw, storm off and win with treasure-related triggers, I don’t have enough ways besides Prosper himself to jump start the treasure train. Protecting Prosper at instant speed with impulse draws is rough, so I should focus on repeatable treasure generation that still happens when he’s not in play.

babe wake up new snail video dropped

the way you talk about the game is very real and also underrepresented in content!

Excellent content once again. Most players struggle to get the balance right in their decks and it definitely takes a few playthroughs to see what does and doesn't work. Also, it feels like all I hear about are these solitaire racing metas (like everyone just goldfishes not expecting to be interacted with) and that just doesn't exist with my meta. No one wants to play against 15 board wipes, but I treat my EDH games like the "current leader" is the blackjack dealer. Sometimes, for the good of the table you take one for the team and burn your cards, otherwise the game is just over.

Dude your channel is awesome! Just stumbled upon it!!

This is a phenomenal video. Mister Snail just never misses. It's funny this topic got brought up the day after I played with some of my friends. We have this one guy in our group that plays Atraxa, the Grand Unifier. On previous meet-ups, he would just win by turn 6/7/8 with Peregrine Drake and Flicker spells. It took some convincing for him to even realize that his combo was far too fast for our table, despite the results it produced. Athough he removed it, his decks never run enough interaction, and games with him always revolve around him in some way. He abuses the fact that WE load up on interaction to justify his rather poor deck building. I wish I would have been able to express my issues as well as this video on that day, since talking things out is always the best thing to do.

thanks for the card ideas for my anowon deck i was looking for more consistency pieces and the rogue deck helped

Listen man, when a guy kills me on turn three with reanimate + tainted strike + something to get his creature at power ten, its fucking bullshit.

I own decks with both mentalities, i found out recently that if you're the only one at the table with heavy interaction two scenarios unfold: a) you get out of resorces because you have been dealing with 3 opponents by yourself, and then someone just pops off. b) your opponents use the few interaction they had on you because you're not "leaving them alone", then another player pops off while you get nothing on your board.

I think there's argument against this encouragement of "more interaction neutralizes power difference". Let's say, for example, most lower power decks run a lot more removal to make sure they can slow down a deck if they're pub-stomping. Now, let's pit 4 of those lower power decks with no "pubstomper" in sight, no deck that's clearly more powerful. What happens? What happens is everyone has an excess of cards that do nothing for them or nothing sticks around the board. This is the problem we so often experience with precon-only games with repeated board wipes and slowing a game down to an exhausting crawl. More interaction is smart, but the lower the average level of a pod is, the worse interaction gets as it now sits with no real individual problem to deal with, or even worst, it gets used and nothing gets to stick around the board, making for an exhaustingly stale game. Second argument against it, including example from a game I just played yesterday; A player said "upgraded precons" for the power range of the game. obviously the other 3 of us assumed around 6 usually what that insinuates, his was Daretti artifact pl 8 shenanigans. He had suggested upgraded precons just meant high power version of precons. A weird assumption, but communication errors happen, no anger, no ill-intent. We played it out because I personally actually had a lot of removal on hand. I single-handedly exile over 4 pieces that were gonna let him win. Another player kills a damage engine, another does similar. 6 pieces of removal all at 1 player by around turn 6-7. And you know what happened? He won with excess and ease the turn after the 6th piece of removal. You know why? because removal solves individual threats. but if their entire deck is objectively far more efficient and consistent with winning faster with replaceable pieces for consistency, a slower deck could not possibly hope to catch up for the win, sometimes even if it's a 3v1. ESPECIALLY if the rest of us have to already play catch up while *also* not spending any of our resources to build our board state while there's continues to run rampant and out of control. I do run a lot of interaction in my lower power decks, definitely more than average, especially in any of my decks that include white. But I do not believe doing this solves a power difference. 8 or higher is when people should start being comfortable running 2-card infinite combos. I don't care how much removal is in my deck, a 5-6 is simply not equipped to deal with the level of efficiency that comes with power like that. I THINK, you're right about the core thesis that all levels should be running a lot more removal, a lesson we can all and should follow through on. Removal IS a great neutralizer. But I do strongly disagree that it's a good enough neutralizer to tame massive "power level" differences beyond 1 point maybe. Eventually there's not enough removal to deal with true hard core efficiency & value difference.

I learn so much watching your vids

petition for you to drop the optimized deck lists in the description? i'd love to study them.

Hey Snail. I think you should make a dedicated video talking about the "cold war" effect in pods. The idea of all players feeling like they need to run more and more removal and protection. My pod has a tendency to run a lot of interaction to the point where maybe it's too much? Not sure if anyone else knows what I'm talking about. It's like an arms race but instead of things like fast mana and powerful cards, it focuses on cheap removal and a major emphasis of interaction.

Big problem with having lots of interaction in a power level differential game is if the others with scrub decks don't run it, and you blow your cards holding down one while the other to enjoy your removal on the arch enemy and then they stomp

Definitely don't agree with everything in this video but I accept that more low power and casual decklists should run more interaction. The last game I played with my newish friends ended in a feelsbad for two of the players because neither of them could stop my combo for the final two full turns of the game even with my no protection spells backing it up.

These are the kind of Commander Deck/Games that make the format fun! It was probably like this with original EDH.. and not when WotC started to make "poorly-designed cards" for what Players thought Commander was supposed to be like.

I just find it so hard to put this into practice- I want consistency but it's very difficult to sacrifice the things I want to be doing for the sake of stopping other people from doing their thing. I like my decks having an identity, and my ability to express that identity often decreases as my ability to impede other's decreases.

I really appreciate this channel, thank you for the video. I'm now understanding more why some people have such swingy games

I'd love to hear more about your playgroup testing and tuning the 10 decks you mention in this video

My latest deck is a Marath +1 counter deck with a budget of 40 euros. It's performed pretty well because the commander himself already allows for interaction and most of the cards are there to support him. I have a lot of recursion to get my combo pieces back. Using Marath to kill off my own creatures to prevent them from getting exiled was also pretty fun. It's fought and won in a group with a 250 euro Omnath, locus of creation landfall deck and 2 precons.

When building I have a strict 10+ interaction rule. If the card can function in another way (payoff, etc.) it doesn't count towards that number.

Outside of running the appropriate amount of lands, I find “just run more X” is a bit of a thought-terminating cliche that leads down the route of less variance in a format made to take advantage of it being inherently varied. The better mindset IMO is that power level isn’t a good metric, but consistency/speed is. An incredibly fast and consistent deck is going dictate the game and would require a more “powerful” pod to get the games it needs. The solution isn’t for everyone to make their decks more consistent, it’s to have a variety of decks for the occasion. Every deck being your full 42 lands, the complete rock, ramp, and removal package, generic card draw, etc. honestly leads to every deck being the same shell with like 30-40% actual variance, and every game is just drawing through to those same gameplan pieces which gets very stale. Have some solid consistent decks that can compete. Have some stupid value piles that spin their tyres every now and then. Play them in the appropriate games. Solving every power level discussion with “just make your deck like every other deck” sucks and misses the wood for the trees a bit. We don’t necessarily want over-competing in a casual format. “Maybe you’re trying too hard” is a question people that aren’t playing cEDH need to ask themselves sometimes, too.

i’d love to see the rest of the lists if you have them would be super cool to print these out as options for getting beginners into the format

You have to be on the same wavelength as a group for this to work. In my group, I'm usually the only one running more instant speed interaction, so I end up going down cards trying to stop one player from going off and I end up giving the game to another player who isn't interacting. This creates a lot of games where I'm king-making and that's not a fun place to be.

in cedh and 1v1, it's stax, removal, counterspells and hate. in 4p edh i stopped running 99% of removal and counterspells in favor of protection and i don't see it changing. i like to let people do whatever they want but i draw the line at how it affects me. i got a stack of fogs, flicker and phase spells so good fucking luck touching me or my shit. of course i wish i had removal all the time but when your entire battlefield survives 2-3 boardwipes you begin to prioritize what's important.

This applies well for the split between casual and non-combo "tuned," though it doesn't quite land against cEDH or tuned-combo. While it's true that even in these cases having appropriate removal and interaction is far preferable to the value-balls that people tend to build, the efficacy is more limited. cEDH decks are built on the assumption of other decks having interaction, and of that interaction being used intelligently, so are thus more resilient. Of course, you won't really see these decks banging up against casual, lower-powered ones anyways. But "tuned" combo still often enough wins from-hand while exploiting the format's social contract, requiring players to metagame the combo player and dogpile them early owing to out-of-game knowledge. This is fine within a pod, even if it leads to repetitive games - but you will often see tuned combo pubstomping casual, lower-powered decks. "Dude, my tivit deck is casual, it doesn't win on turn 3." Often enough the tools to properly deal with these decks are locked behind more expensive cards - like free or pitch spells - and so even within a pod you start to see the arms-race approach, as strategies that actually use most of the game's mechanics have to pivot themselves to not-as-often lose the game out of nowhere. It doesn't help that running a card like Ashiok, Dream-Render will often get whined at as "anti-fun."

I play cPDH so the $30 budget deck talk was exactly what I've been saying. The $70 combo decks in PDH that I've played against traditional EDH decks win with like a 80% win rate

My only problem with removal is that the number also varies depending on powerlevel. I don't want to play in games where players are camping out some one-card combo with their commander and every other card is disruption/removal, because that's just looping back to playing solitaire and hoping you get there faster; you can only go through your deck so quickly before you become Necropotence Thoracle. Plus, if every other spell in your Dimir deck is counterspells, card draw, bounces, and kill cards, and everyone else at the table is playing exactly as fast with the likes of discard, board wipes, sacrificing, exile, et cetera, that just becomes a slog of waiting for your opponent to finally be empty-handed, with no relevant cards on board, and tapped out before you attempt to do anything that wins the game, AKA Yugioh. It also causes things to immediately becomes an arms race. Every commander that needs protection is getting Lighting Greaves. Every deck that needs non-pip ramp includes Sol Ring. Staples and staples and staples, until ultimately you get maybe fifteen cards for your actual game plan. This is supposed to be the format where you play garbage cards you'd never put in your four-copy-playset formats, not Singleton Vintage with better first-printing Companion rules. If it was, then the Power Nine sans Timetwister wouldn't be banned.

Really well thought out video!! Gonna make my decks a bit less all or nothing and more interactive!!

Solutions to these problems: 1. Run lots of tutors (this creates a large amount of redundancy for all of your effects, including removal) 2. Run a lot of permission (15+ 0-1 cmc counters/removal etc.) 3. Add fast mana and card draw for more speed and consistency (moxes, jewelled lotus, dockside, rhystic, remora etc.) 4. If you're playing non-blue/black, load up on stax that shut down the other players to give yourself more time to develop. 5. Minimise the footprint of your win package (2-3x low cmc combo like oracle+demonic consultation or 1 card combos with your commander) Congratulations. Now you have a cEDH deck - but at least you'll always be prepared 😁

you are absolutely right it is now my life mission to cut a land for a single removal spell

Alternatively, everybody move to the goldfish / dragster race end of the spectrum , that’s also fun

The problem comes up if you play online on spelltable. While you can set your deck to do the same thing almost every time there is no way to adjust it for the playgroup since it changes.

I like the bit about thinking about a deck running at 25% and 75%. I do put more stock in what the 100% situation looks like though. Or more correctly, what ways can I run a mile when given an inch of favorable variance. For example, 2CC commanders coming in on turn 2 off sol ring or turn 3 off a rock were a huge deal for me when I started. Most of my friends played higher cost things in the command zone, so they couldn't get the same level of tempo off a lucky opening hand. (And to be honest, back in partial paris days, how lucky was it really?)

I agree with all of this except the Teferi's Ageless Insight/Alhammarret's Archive since the only time people play these cards is if the commander draws extra cards or the deck's entire thing is drawing extra cards...and drawing extra cards is a well-known strategy to a more powerful and consistent deck since options = power. Similar for the life gain.

Y'know... watching this video, I'm seeing a lot of my own deck building evolution happening. V1 of a deck is payoff city, V2 is "okay, I had too many payoffs, now let's do the other stuff better" with not enough payoffs; and V3 turns into "the balance is well struck." I've stopped evaluating cards based on their "when all is going great, this will be amazing" potential and I've honestly started looking at it as "When I have fallen so far behind that I am a speedbump, will this card be able to help bring me back from the brink." Payoffs, Amplifiers, and Resource conversion are cards I've started to use less and focused more on "what do I want to payoff" and running more of those. (To the end where my Preston the Vanisher deck no longer even runs Panharmonicon, for example.)

The main issue is the dude who brings a Voja elf ball to a precon pod because its 'the only deck they have' and they don't want to play anyone elses.

i feel like another issue with the interaction conundrum is if you're in a pod where you are playing a bunch of interaction and nobody else either drew into theirs or actually runs it at which point you either become table police and the other three players have a miserable game or you get overwhelmed and pummeled by the rest of the table because you're the one able to stop the nonsense but don't have enough to stop all 3 opponents by yourself without extensive setup. my decks often run 10+ pieces of interaction and 2-4 board wipes but without the right board state, because i don't tend to run outright denial pieces like say rule of law, i can't control a whole table. If my opponents aren't playing removal i still run into plenty games where someone runs away with the game because despite running removal i either drew the wrong one or got singleton diffed

Do you recall what sort of snags your college playgroups' Joira deck ran into that got her sent to the box?

Your content have changed my outlook on deckbuilding entirely

Lots of good advice here, and ways to dabble in both efficiency and big splashy cards. The later is the reason I play EDH at all

I think a better angle to take "power level" is the X/Y axis, X being experience playing a deck/strategy and Y being budget/optimization of the deck.

I kinda had the opposite problem with my play group. We would go too hard on the interaction and end up just staring at each others with a full hand doing nothing waiting for other people to waste ressources on each other while we optimize our hand for the opportunity to strike. At some point we were not even playing cards, but just bluffing and negociating alliances with each others. Pretending not to hit your win condition or to have more removal that you actually have. It was fun but the games took waaaaay too long.

This helped me decide how I want to run a faerie deck. I was torn between both alela's and i got more wins with the dimir one because of playing into the trickster nature of faeries, with at least 15 interaction cards. Kindred Dominance and Raise the Palisade are goated, same with Cyc Rift. While not a value engine, she grinds games to her favor

That's why I love "Lord of the Nazgûl", because it gives payoffs for casting instants and sorceries, which contain most interaction cards. I run it with lots of instant speed removal, counterspells and draw spells + all the legal copies of the Nazgûl card and there you go: interaction, combos with commander and some way to build up even when your commander isn't out.^^

The multiplayer aspect also tends to balance power level differences out Of course if we have an extreme example like a cedh deck against precons not so much But generally speaking, when a player is ahead is also the archenemy And well, a 3v1 is a huge strain on a deck resources, so the table is bound to catch up eventually

40% of the time, it works 100% of the time

I've been realizing more and more recently that all of my commander decks need significantly more interaction. Love your channel as well.

Hey snail! I’ve been working on a rogues list for a little now and am on a tight budget, I was wondering if you had a list or something close for inspiration? Thanks!

Do you still have lists for those decks you mentioned? I'm super interested in highly interactive, highly resilient decks.

Good video, but did you record this in like a giant glass jar?

Quadrant thinking is super valuable, early i am ahead early i am behind, late i am ahead, late i am behinf

if only there was a rule that said other players arent allowed to attack me if i spent my turn to deny ONE opponent, then i would play single target removal or counterspells. But guess what, only Grasp of Fate type of cards gets me closer to winning, normal removal only gets me and the other player closer to losing. That is why it is better to close yourself in a pillowfort with Solitary Confinement or Sphere of Safety. Just let the guy most ahead destroy the 2 remaining players while you assemble your combo.

Best Commander content out there 👐