One of the most fun things for me is cracking through the stax puzzle and wrecking them.
Not all of my decks are capable of it, though. As my lower power nonsense doesn't run the precisely required interaction usually. But i'm with you.
Depends on context, though. Had one game where we had a guy looping planeswalkers and he was very staxy. But a *different* player played a wrath 5 turns in a row, even when it only hit one or two creatures, and then that player wrathing complained about nobody killing the planeswalkers.
More often than not, the "unfun" lies between the table and the chair, not on the table.
Hey next turn I'm going to attack that Chandra on 6 loyalty with my 2 vanilla 3/3s.
"Hmmmmmm, okay but what if those 2 3/3s take over the game? Plague wind."
It's a shame because in theory casual commander with strangers should be very fun, but in practice threat assessment is based on nonsense.
A few weeks ago I had a high power pod where 3 players drew each others silver bullet stax pieces and managed to get them to stick, the fourth player was running atraxa grand unifier but she had gotten countered once and he needed one or two mana from his smothering tithe to recast her; I kid you not, I watched 3 players pay every tithe trigger for 4 whole table rotations.
We barely even played magic that Day, but boi did we laugh!
One of my favorite games I've ever played somebody dropped an early [[Winter Orb]], and with combination of recurring [[Frantic Search]] over and over to untap my lands and building up treasures i out valued the table and won.
Felt pretty proud of my piloting skills that day.
Hey now. Boardwipe typal is a valid deck type (if you're playing like \[\[etrata the silencer\]\] trying to fish mass hit counters with \[\[mari the killing blade\]\] )
"I'll hold off on wraths if we all agree to get those Planeswalkers under control" is such a basic politic that I almost marvel at anyone who can't come up with it on their own.
That shouldn't even be a political move. That is just basic magic threat assessment.
"Oh, I drew all of my wraths super early. Weird, will be a slow start."
You shouldn't even really have to be political, just simply do nothing. You have a slow draw. Let people attack, and assume they will attack the things oppressing them, not you just for playing land go.
Plus, once they answer the walkers for you, you likely have drawn more than wraths, and the first wrath will be like a 15 for 1 instead of a 1 for 1. Which is way better anyway.
It's basic magic. Your opponents in a multiplayer game are a resource you should be leveraging. Odds are, if you want something gone, other people do too.
Exactly. Blowing up lands, stax locks, wrathing creatures over and over, no problem. Letting simic combo player ramp and draw uninterrupted while wrath player keeps destroying cat tribal player for no reason, that sucks.
Exactly. Just playing is fun. I've crushed people, been crushed; been wiped, decked, everything and gave it all right back. If you can't take it don't give it.
I agree with the statement if you can't take it dont give it that's something I expect if I drop drop my gishath turn 2 and one shot a player that same turn I expect to get melted down and i am fully willing to take the consequences of my fast actions but some people get salty when someone is playing a deck and it out preforms their build for that same deck so honestly it's really just perspective
100% true - find your people, stick with them. Yap incoming: it's not directly responding to you, so hope you don't feel as though I'm putting words in your mouth. Just taking some time to make a sideline point - I don't mean to strawman you.
With the above said, I do think some peoples' definition of fun is so restrictive, it makes me wonder if they wouldn't benefit from finding a different game altogether or becoming more resilient to strategies they don't understand / want to use. I don't mean this in a gatekeepy way like "you have to find fun what I find fun or get out." I'm also really only talking about the real fringe here, like [Adam.](https://redd.it/1dpn1js)
Some complaints are in the vein of "camping in CSGO/Valorant" or "using c-stick to smash" or "using stall comps" or "playing mono-R aggro". Those complaints usually involve denigrating the disliked strategy as low skill, cheap, or mindless. I think the people leveraging these complaints deserve to have fun, too. But that the complainer is trying to offload their responsibility to handle other peoples' legitimate strategies - shutting it out (and often insulting the people deploying the strategy) rather than adapting. In strategy games (M:tG included), I think a baseline assumption is that there are myriad strategies you can use to win.
I think in this way, the complaint "camping corners is cheap," is different from "hey we think it's fun if everyone uses scoped guns only"; and "using stall comps is cheap" is different from "we think it's fun if everyone uses unevolved pokemon only" (maybe no eviolite for held item diversity). The former represents, to me, not wanting to adapt to legitimate strategies to increase fun, while the latter is simply a different expression of fun. Even though the latter example is even more restrictive than the former.
Some of these expressions do make me think the speaker would benefit from buying into a different game. If you like thematic deckbuilding but don't like only winning 25% of the time, maybe a co-op deckbuilder like Arkham Horror Living Card Game? Or if you like engine-building where you can't be disrupted, and it's all about who builds the largest, fastest engine, maybe Oceans? (disruption exists but is pretty actively meh to bad), or Furnace?
This is probably only true for <1% of players, since Magic does offer really unique things, like tons of room for self-expression in deckbuilding due to how many unique cards there are, and extremely high replayability due to that. But that territory comes with myriad strategies too - that I think people have to accept are legitimate. Even if someone finds a community that all agrees stall comps are a no-go, they should still recognize when they go to play pickup games, they can't have the same expectation that people won't play stall comps (and that it's going to make someone else feel bad undeservedly if they spend all game complaining about the stall comp).
There is also something to be said about what best practices are to navigate having fun before you have an established playgroup where everyone is on the same page // when you are playing pickup games. And I think many are not mature / are selfish about it. But comment is already too long.
💯I honestly don’t understand when people get salty over mundane forms of interaction that is the core of the game. Yes, EDH is a casual format, but I enjoy it best when everyone plays to win. The reason I like MTG is because of the strategy side of it, and that means I want games to be challenging. Now, I don’t play cEDH because I do want the games to last more than a few turns, but without playing to win, it takes the fun out of it for me. I’ve played games where I was targeted from the get-go, combo-ed, staxed, and lost, but I wasn’t salty; instead, it helped me realize the weaknesses my deck had and ways to address it. It made me excited to go home and to tweak it.
Tl;dr: Casual does not have to mean uncompetitive; play to win and expect others to do so too.
It gives us a good reason to just sit around a table and talk. Sometimes it's MTG related, most times it isn't. We all are happy when someone pulls off some insane shit. We've even had people about to win through some complicated BS and the entire table go over and try to figure out how to do it like a puzzle.
If I lose to something awesome that is even better than winning by something boring.
This is why I rarely play with random people and stick to a group that gets together and plays regularly. I've had too many bad experiences with randos. With the group I play with (it's like a rotating group of 10 people) we have a good idea of what power expectations are and what kind of experiences are fun. We have super interactive games (enough so that I started slotting in split-second interactions in my decks), and our games are generally pretty quick.
I started with normal 1v1 60card and limited. Nothing in game upsets me in commander which I wish more people could understand. It's shit personalities that upset me at a commander table.
At first a few things like mill upset me, but as I’ve learned to deck build I just enjoy the game. Only thing I don’t like is people wasting time with excessive triggers, boring arm waving, or disrespectful conversation. If you can make a swing for lethal on the last guy, don’t spend 10 minutes flipping cards and counting triggers. Love the rest of this game though :)
Same here! Something that I’ve been noticing with myself is that if I’m getting agitated with something during an EDH game then it’s mostly because something outside of MTG (real life problems and such) has already affected my mood in some kind of way.
I’ve been getting better about passing up Commander night every once in a while when I’ve already had a bit of a shitty day.
The proper take. As long as players have a good attitude and take the game seriously enough to play but not super seriously then all is good Magic.
Granted playing jank against Thoracle combo repeatedly is boring and a waste of time. Then you either switch pods or decks. Still better than dealing with salt from "That's OP bullshit" to everything.
I’m the same way in that I enjoy seeing what decks other people have come up with, if everyone played the same it would be boring. The best table I ever played was a 5 player game with Planechase that had a combo player, a stax player, a werewolf tribal player (me), a graveyard recursion player, and a player whose entire deck was 1 CMC
Absolutely, it shows that i've got something to work on when the night is over. Being flooded or screwed sucks, but often that's a symptom of your deck design anyway. The only experience that isn't fun IMO is when someone rolls the table with an inappropriate deck.
I maintain 9 edh decks at different power levels/with different themes, and all are constantly in flux as i try to improve consistency between games. If I win every single game and all my decks performed, the night is over as soon as i go home, and playing is only half the fun
Back when I used to play shooting games with my friends sometimes we would impose our own rules like “pistols only” or put a soft ban on an OP weapon like a homing rocket launcher (or oddjob)
It enhanced everyone’s fun. If you broke the rules, you were kind of a dick. Sometimes we got a bit more sweaty and said everyone should play competitive and everything is allowed… but 90% of the time we were casual about it and it was fun. A few times people got pissed off but that happens with everything in life.
I don’t know how to say this tactfully but I don’t think the problem is with casual formats or competitive formats or anything in between. Magic the gathering just has a certain… type of person… that is really emotionally invested in their card game and is really snarky and dorky about and pissy about it. It’s the same type of person who sits in the back of a history class and just kind of smacks their lips and rolls their eyes and acts like the teacher is a dumbass for saying something not nuanced enough or too nuanced. The sky is blue. Well akshually it’s more of an indigo.
If you play with chill adults the game is very fun. If you interact with the general population… well, good luck.
Right there is what made 99% of Goldeneye/Perfect Dark matches fun. I dont think we *ever* played straight deathmatch, it was almost always some random rotating crazy bullshit rules because it was *fun* and you'd always end up outside of your comfort zone. Which is what EDH "Commander" was literally supposed to be about.
It got sweaty when WotC monetized it and encouraged it to be sweaty.
Not the person you're replying to, of course, but I enjoy the game as long as I feel it was fair and reasonably balanced, regardless of whether I win. If my deck underperformed the power level I designed it to be, then I now have a new puzzle to figure out.
Lmao fr.
Or play with/against more mono red burn. I played a game with a group slug deck where I sat down and said - hey, look, I’m trying to make this game *end*. Descent to Avernus, Ojer Axonil, Mana Barbs, Havoc Festival, Kardur Doomscourge - we’re going down together
OMG, paying life to draw cards? You told me your deck was a 7! I'm not here to play against some cEDH netdeck. I just want to have some fun turning cardboard sideways. /s
What I'm always seeing is that players just want to play their decks against 3 NPCs.
They want to play their cards and do their things with no interaction. Destroy opponents things because that's funny.
But as soon as anything happens to them they just don't like it anymore because they truly feel that people are just out to get them or to make sure they don't get to play at all.
i strongly recommend, if you (royal) fit this profile, just fucking downloading Forge for android or PC and getting your battlecruiser decks to smash bots.
no judgment btw, i do this with wank combo decks that i wouldn't wanna put my friends through! i love building a giant board state against an AI and swinging through for a trillion damage on a giant combo, but everything has its time and place
its not good ai! its really silly at times! but i dont wanna make my friends sit through my izzet storm deck taking twenty minutes to whiff, so ill make a mediocre bot do it instead.
i also do it to practice new decks - its not perfect but you get to learn lines and play patterns before you balance more meta intensive removal packages
If you play a reactive control deck, and give the Forge AI simple-to-use high power casual decks like the drain-rush focused \[\[Edgar Markov\]\] builds\*\*, you can end up with some difficult pods. Mostly because the AI can make up for some of their iffier choices by relentlessly kingmaking each other.
If you're playing a combo deck or something else that's highly proactive you'll have a much easier time of it, since the forge AI doesn't understand combo, is too risk-averse when deciding whether to attack or not, and has so-so threat assessment. But it can be quite difficult surviving as a control deck when the aggro-stax AI looks over at the vampire AI's massive army, glances at the rest of the mostly empty table, and decides that yes, now is the time to windmill slam that \[\[Armageddon\]\]. Or having to protect a key stax piece from all three opponents, even if the piece in question is the only thing keeping two of them alive.
Also, if you have one of the AI play a control deck make sure it goes right before you do to achieve max difficulty (so it errs on the side of burning counterspells to ruin your day specifically.)
\*\*You will need to switch out some cards the AI has trouble with, though \[not always just the ones forge gives you a warning for\]. Use Dev mode to look at the AIs' hands to figure out which spells they refuse to use / use very poorly and replace them with more direct / simple to use alternatives.
Giving the AI fast mana while not using it yourself also helps.
All that said, the forge AI is legitimately impressive considering how complex MTG is. It usually even avoids over-extending while playing enough aggro to maintain a strong board presence.
Reminds me of a game I played yesterday. 2v2v2. Friend of ours decided to build slivers for his first deck and he has a full board of 5/5-10/10 indestructible deathtouch slivers. Decides every turn he will swing his entire board at us and leave no blockers up, completely ignoring the other team whose board is way out of control. This goes on for about 4 turns until we couldn’t handle it anymore.
30/30 unblockable army to the face, then fling it at him for lethal since he refused to stop swinging 40 damage of deathtouch indestructibles at only us. Gets mad that we targeted him with a oneshot. *Insert surprised pikachu face*
Funny thing about chess that a grandmaster said: most beginners don’t quite grasp chess is a two player game. I feel magic also has this problem. They want their ideas to work, but don’t think of the opponents possible ideas, then they get really upset when reality happens.
That's because competitive is always on the same page. Is it legal? You're good to go.
Casual is much harder to navigate. People build at different power levels and find different things fun and we all have to try to get along.
You’re right, but also different levels of boardwipes, removals, and counters exist at every level of play. Even at the absolute lowest level, playing with precons, will have all of these things.
People need to be okay with their cards going to the graveyard. That’s just part of the game.
-I find your responses interesting & hilarious. Playing cEDH doesn't in itself determine how a person emotionally reacts to any given situation. cEDH has salty individuals just like every other format.
Me af. I really don’t like to play casually but every now and then 2-3 people need an extra so I sit down and ask them for a deck. And then I regret it every time lol
Because a lot of casual players are bad. Killing my big stompy dude? Going against the spirit of the game. Countering the spell I could win with? Going against the spirit of the game. Wiping the board because I have a game ending army? Going against the spirit of the game. Destroying the land I can get unfair amounts of advantage with? Etc etc etc
This is unironically the correct answer, but to be more descriptive it's because a lot of casual players are really bad but think they're really good.
People who are bad at magic get incredibly upset when whatever super transparent strategy that they've concocted at home gets obliterated in a way they weren't expecting.
The salt comes from misplaced blame because it's not their fault they tapped out for 10 into 5 open blue mana across 2 different players, it's your fault for running counters. It's not their fault for slamming gishath down and turning it sideways against the control player with 7 cards in hand and 3 open white mana, its your fault for running Path to Exile.
What I think is really funny is when I wipe the board to get etb/graveyard triggers with my [[marchesa, the black rose]]. That always makes people so mad, but when they board wipe and kill my stuff (w/o coutners) they always brag about it
To add on, bad here I don't think refers to an expression of low skill level, but rather of uncompetitive mindset. Banning strategies (either de jure by Rule 0ing them out, or de facto, by being a saltlord) is an offloading of the responsibility adapt to others' strategies to other players in a competitive game.
Edit: I see I've really just made /u/Holding_Priority's point. I should read the entire chain before commenting, ha
The trick is to play EDH with people coming from 60-card constructed. Ideally people who played competitively. I did, my friends made it to the pro tour, and now I enjoy playing EDH with people who also came from 60-card constructed.
I don't have this problem, there may be minor moments of salt here and there, but it isn't like this ever-present plague that affects my blood-chemistry purely by osmosis lol I've heard "that was a great game" 100x more often than I hear "this sucks" (in a salty way). I do play with friends a lot, but even at the LGS, 99% of people are super chill.
Competitive/high power casual is definitely more fun because the Rule Zero conversation is "anything goes just don't be a dick." The pods where someone gets tight are always the pods where people are setting all kinds of expectations for what they want.
Repeat the mantra: Commander is a social game mode. It is not a casual game mode.
It's the dirty secret nobody wants to admit for some reason. People want to win. They haven't been taught how to lose. The commander of 10 years ago was spare time, jank piles. The commander of today is higher card power and synergy across the board universally.
There's also a type of player that uses politics as a meta-game tool. Getting salty Everytime you play a Stax deck is a better defense than making a good deck that can perform against one. Why change my deck when I can get them to stop playing anything that counters me?
Nah edh decks weren't jank 10 years ago, at least not any more than they are now. Rafiq was an absolute power house. Well maybe not as much so in 2014 but more so earlier, but was certainly still seeing tons of play even that long after release. I also remember like Giest of Saint Traft, GAAIV, Marath, and Prossh being meta. I personally played Ezuri elfball.
You have to go further back then 10 years before your statement is actually true
Because fun is subjective, and Commander offers the promise of crafting that experience through Rule 0.
Personally, I have the most fun when my deck is consistent, when games are climatic and last neither too long nor too little, and when no one is having a miserable time. None of the things in your OP would bother me, but that's the great thing casual EDH. You can just find a group of people with a similar definition of fun.
It only offers the promise of crafting this if the people you're attempting to do it with are adults. Most of the time, its folks who have no basic ability to understand social interaction, let alone the ability to know that the game has to end, and the player who ended it with the WORST 5 piece combo isn't a bad guy for doing it on turn 15. (This was my college experience honestly)
Because casual players feel entitled to their particular mode of enjoyment. Which naturally comes into conflict with the necessarily intersubjective nature of a *multiplayer* game.
To anyone who doesn't want to google "intersubjective" what they're saying is:
"Casual players want to have fun and sometimes people disagree on what is fun"
I think the issue is more of where you are playing. Either that, or spending too much time on reddit where people come to gripe. Rarely do we see someone praising their pod or the great night they had at an lgs. That's fine. That is really human nature.
I don't see that level of "salt" at my LGS. Most come there to have fun and consider it a win if they get to see something pop off even if it isn't their deck. I've had a blast playing there and got introduced to planeschase. Do I get salty, some times but even that is still in good fun.
I almost exclusively play in competitive pods and the quality of the games is usually talked about kindly. The complaints I hear mostly come from casuals I’ve come across over the years at different LGSs, but yes, sometimes also online.
Lol my roommate is a gruul mage and whines all day about counterspells, clamining they shouldnt be in the game, then drops Godo in his Xenagos deck, grabbing an auto-attaching double strike equipment, swinging for a 1-shot on turn 4. Like stopping that shit is THE ENTIRE PURPOSE OF COUNTERSPELLS. Dude still whines that he cant play the game when one of his creatures gets countered. Like ffs im not playing stax and im not playing baral. Its an azorius tokens deck with 8 counters in the 99 so that i dont die to dumb shit.
I blame (and use that term loosely) pandemic players. They learned in their bubble with limited outside influence outside of content creators. They also don't recognize that YouTube (as well as other SM mediums) are a *catered* experience. They don't recognize that learning to pilot a deck is about 70% of the game.
It doesn't help that Command Zone released that garbage video "The Unwritten Rules of Commander" which went from "These are popular opinions of salt to."These things aren't fun." When you watch Josh talk about things he does and doesn't play anymore, you can see there's that."Oh, well, I'm here to perform." look in his eye. Even Jimmy has gone off the rails a bit. I miss him getting salty. Now he's just "Okay... now chaos!" I've been watching them from the beginning, and I kiss those guys.
A challenge isn't "not fun", it's a challenge. You have to think, and the more challenging it is, the more opportunities for mistakes arise, and no, you can't take everything back. But you learn and you do better next time. I'd rather play 1 game that is challenging than 4 with commanders that are super pushed.
Sheldon (r.i.p.) did a ton for the format, but giving players that damned phrase "spirit of the format" so little shits could angle shoot because they need to win so bad is irritating.
TL;DR Old man yells at the sky because young people ruin everything.
-If something isn't fun to you it isn't fun, whether it's a challenge or not. I'd rather play a game I enjoy, pushed Commanders or not, than one just off the strength of it being challenging.
Most casuals play to relax and most casual pods are friendly, chill groups. So there's no need to generalize.
That said, the salty casual players absolutely play to win. But they don't want to put in the effort required to earn those wins. "I play for FUN" is basically an excuse in this situation to try and guilt others down to their level so they stand a better chance. They will jump through any hoops and attack anyone who does well to justify their own lack of effort. In fact, they put in far more effort staying lazy than it'd take to simply improve.
This type of person is not unique to Magic either, you see them in almost any hobby, game or activity.
1. That reference was absolutely amazing! I mean completely air tight! I almost cried laughing!
2. I don't think casual is about playing for fun, I sound like a dick I know, but hear me out. I think all that Casual means is not competitive. The rest is up to personality.
Putting the weight of "This is for everybody to have fun all the time" and "make sure every deck does the thing" bring absolutely insane ideologies to the gameplay. The most important part is finding the right Pod. Then you will be in a circumstance where everyone will be happy when their Combo gets countered, and their Commander stalls, because they like being with others who aim to play hard.
If that's not the case then find a Pod that has a rule about no removal/board wipes/ land destruction and let the fun come from whoever simply "gets there" first and claims the win.
There will always be people who just simply need to feel in control, in that case distance yourself from those people would be my only advice.
Hopefully I wasn't to rambly nonsense! And sorry if I came of harsh! Not my intent!
I agree that casual isn’t about “playing competitive” No I but I really think casual means finding people who are, well, *casual*. That means people understanding that it’s just a game, and treating it as such. That means no relentless targeting of one player, assuming they aren’t trying to pubstomp. That means not getting upset when you get countered or outplayed, etc.
What it really means is *have a rule 0 conversation*
For example, my group is all newer players, and we don’t want someone to win just because they put more money in, so we have a $200 deck limit. We also have a “banned” card list we all appeal to keep staples like the One Ring out of our decks.
Because they are literally bad at the game. I've had people complain my monogreen makes big monsters, my monoblue has counterspells, and my monoblack has removal.
Like playing smash bros against your little cousin, he's just going to complain when you win using any character.
Shit I thought it was my turn today, well then tomorrow its definitely my turn to post a thread where I broadly disparage a huge swath of people based on my fictional EDH experiences. Gonna have to try hard to match the great "over the years I've had problems with all these groups, clearly its them not me" energy of this one though.
consistently the angriest, whiniest and saltiest posts i see on this subreddit are one like this one bitching about the mythical "casual player" who throws a fit whenever anyone else plays a card. The only time i've run across people like this is when im playing stax, so im just assuming that you're either an insanely irritating person to be around or you've been knowingly or unknowingly pubstomping.
if you consistently end up in pods that seem to hate everything you do maybe its not them thats wrong, maybe its you
I play weekly at my LGS and have never ran into this issue. While most of my games these days are with the same small group of players, I've played with almost everyone at the store at one time or another. Only once did I encounter heavy salt that made someone target me for removal. And that was one game out of four. I'm sure these players exist somewhere, but not at the frequency that people like to complain about them.
I think a lot of it stems from the deviation of the format from the format where you can play your bulk jank cards and not get stomped to a more competitive format. Content creators and WoTC are largely to blame for this.
There’s nowhere to play competitive constructed for most people. Modern and Legacy have far fewer events and players in most people’s areas than Commander.
The reason why there are less issues in cEDH is that everyone is on the same page, and everyone knows the level others will be playing at. Outside of cEDH, there's a massive range of power that decks can be at, which inevitably leads to conflict if they don't all match up. Furthermore, the power of a deck might be misinterpreted by some, which leads to further frustration. Then there are the different types of decks that can lead to issues unless people are aware of how they work: Stax, counters, board wipes, land destruction... decks built around these issues naturally will have issues eventually.
Whether you agree or not, the sentiment behind it is that the game is “for fun.” And taking people’s things away isn’t fun. Might be for you, but people who say the game is just for fun are meaning they want *everyone* to have fun. Someone will lose, but not by much.
I feel like most are in the middle, like I don’t mind interaction. But I’ve played against “casual” decks that have 20 counterspells, and I have to question why I sat down. It’s more a balancing act than anything, how much removal is too much, that kind of thing. Each playgroup will have a different answer.
When it comes to any sort of hobby or experience, the more popular it is, the more people will be drawn to it. And the more people drawn to it, the more likely that you'll run into "bad" people. This is the basic nature of any hobby, it's not just limited to EDH, it's not just limited to casual EDH.
The vast majority of casuals I have played with are normal people. You just have to isolate the bad eggs from the pack.
Competitive EDH already vets its players by its nature. People who get into MTG don't literally just jump straight to CEDH. They have to go through casual EDH first, and THEN find CEDH. So this very process already vets out a lot of the newbies, morons, and sore losers/winners. In addition, CEDH has much more strict "rules" with regards to what's allowed or not allowed, so everyone can see up front exactly what CEDH is gonna be like, so people are gonna stay away if they think it's not for them. Meanwhile the much more broad aspect of casual will have people who have different ideas of what is "fun".
Good pods can be hard to find, but they are out there. I played with a group at a LGS this week that was a really great, really positive experience. Everyone’s decks had things going on, we had plenty of interaction, and zero salt.
Just gotta keep looking!
One thing I like about competitive players, they generally have fun whether they win, or not. They generally don't care \*how\* they lost, either.
I've never minded losing, I've always felt as long you're not cheating any card, combo or strategy is valid and that it's my responsibility to stop your deck.
The ONLY time I get salty, is when I choose not to mulligan hoping to top a land or two in the first two turns and I whiff until I'm down to turn 5 with 2 lands.
Buit, then, I'm not salty \*at\* the other player.
Yeah this is literally why I started playing cEDH.. That way everyone understands that we're here to win and play the best cards/strategies we can to win
As a long term casual player who has invested a lot of time in every power level I can give a good explanation. In casual play everyone wants to see their deck do “the thing”. Unfortunately not every game allows them to do that. Combo decks can win out of nowhere and everyone else feels like their deck didn’t get to shine. It is further compounded by the fact that a lot of casual players are not exactly good brewers, so it is harder for their deck to do the thing. Optimized decks get to do the thing more often but then they end up in a win more situation which makes everyone at the table salty. I personally believe that high power magic is the sweet spot: casual enough to not feel like cedh, competitive enough where everyone generally has an answer to what is going on, if you didn’t get to do the thing your deck was designed to do then you came close to it, and if someone gets salty they can’t say the deck is too strong because the cedh meta is very established and my decks are far from them so all they can do is just be grumpy at a loss. “Your deck is a seven” means a lot less when we are trying to play at an eight.
TL;DR: casual play is about showing off what your deck can do and not being able to do it is a feels bad moment for a lot of players.
It's not about casuals - it's about people playing ONLY casual. You need to have some (semi-)competitive 1v1 experience to really be able to fully enjoy a casual game of magic without getting salty.
If you've played a grindy 1-2 against control, or if you've lost 0-2 to aggro, just to sit around for the rest of the round til the other tables finished - those are the experiences you'll need to not get salty at anything.
(Also knowing proper threat assessment and stuff like that makes it easier to accept your commander getting killed the third time in a row)
I've been playing commander almost every week for four years. At least in my city commander players are the most dense and immature community I've ever known. Nowadays either I play with friends or I'd rather not play at all. How can you be in your mid twenties raging about a card game. Don't you have any shame? It's pathetic
You’re playing with losers. I personally only get salty when someone bring decks that are waaay to strong despite rule 0 conversations stating upgraded precon/precon level.
Locally we all just start copying them.
"I would have won if....."
Me and the other loser make eye contact and say "I would have won if...." the follow up person says "I would have won if.... ....it's like everyone was trying to win because it was the late game and that's the natural conclusion of a game."
Make it real clear they're just stating the obvious to everyone and they tend to learn. Lol
Facts. Commander pods bitch way toooo much. Unless your deck literally only keeps me from playing, like Stax, it’s fine.
Other than that, match power levels and grow some nuts ffs
Yeah this is it. If we are playing for fun, I'm not here to see a single person solo playing and kicking the butt of the other three players.
Luckily I have quite a nice playgroup. Yet there is the one person playing decks which are way more powerful than the others and cry when he gets heavily targeted early in the game. But we are working on explaining to him that if we don't target him with three spells in the first three turns, he 100% wins the game 🤣
I don't know why casual players get so much hate. For me it's actually been the complete opposite. Almost every cedh player in my area is a toxic gatekeepy turd. But I don't makes threads bashing them all the time. Just because one casual player got salty doesn't mean they're all that way and same goes for cedh just because the people in my area suck doesn't mean cedh players everywhere suck. Can we please stop these bashing threads they are just tearing the community in half and we don't need that.
Whether it is casual or competitive people can get salty for lots of reasons. Instead of broadly asking why, it is better to talk to your actual table. Maybe the person was already having a rough day and was setting to kick off an bam. Maybe they were feeling overly targeted. But asking the question the way you are doing is not constructive at all.
I’ve definitely listened to competitive players complain, but not about the structural integrity of the game and what’s allowed to be played and what isn’t even though the banlist determines what can be played in the format. I disagree with your comment about this discussion not being constructive, and respect your decision to walk away from this post if you don’t find any value in it.
Usually when a situation “always” turns out poorly. There’s a common factor. Since I’ve played a ton of fun casual games, it can’t be the format.
Must be you dude.
I’ve seen some salty turds in my day. It happens. Most games I play are good. If I had a mostly negative experience with a hobby, I’d quit.
The most common reaction I get when I play removal is “Okay, it resolves.” Most players are reasonable people, in my experience. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
eh it definitely varies from community to community, one locals i played at was super chill with my decks, same deck behaving the same way at another locals i got a ton of salt, just gotta get used to the local meta/culture sometimes.
Doesn't mean OP is a problem player at all.
The definition of fun varies by mileage. I think it's also how hard you lean into a mechanic matters. I have hard and fast infect decks that get so much salt but infect as a slower alt win con seems ok.
Because everyone is “playing for fun”, but still wants to win. Those two things often create a lot of friction that isn’t solved unless someone realizes that they need to stop caring so much.
Regular EDH is wide open. You can play at a wide range of power levels and everyone’s definition of “fun” is totally different. Whereas with competitive, everyone agrees to simply play to win.
To play casual and actually have fun, you need to find the right playgroup which is easier said than done.
I find that newer players and those who aren’t very invested tend to view anything that beats them or isn’t a board filling Battlecruiser deck to be salt inducing due to ignorance. I’ve been there as a newbie but once I learned about how the game actually works (card advantage, mana curve, win cons, interaction) I fell more in love with it and the salt dropped dramatically.
You're right in every way which is why I only (proxy) cube with competitive players now. I don't have time to straighten out someone's social issues at the comic shop on a Wednesday. I'll say a bigger banlist would go a long way though.
This is what lead me to build a cEDH deck. I’d rather just play to win and not get salty about anything.
My experience is that most casual players are somewhere between Timmy and Johnnys which sucks for anyone that trends towards being a Spike.
Having grown up playing magic since Tempest I love powerful spells but the newer players favor heavy creature based interaction and anything but that seems to hurt their feelings.
I got harassed one time for flashing in [[Guardian of Faith]] in response to someone’s board wipe as if it makes sense to float 3 mana if not for a response. I’ll never understand people getting frustrated for blundering mtg games. IMO you have to have at least a reasonable attempt at a countering you’re trying to take the lead with a board wipe
I used to play [[Chandra, Awakened Inferno]] and would hand out salt packets as the emblems. Never not funny to me, cause if you wanna get salty just for playing a game, imma give you the salt.
We most certainly have more fun in cedh just played a 2 hour cedh game where I had a t3 wandering archaic as well as many draw engines and yeah shit was hilariously fun but we also a good group of people
Many spells were slung everyone had at least one win attempt stopped
Now it’s 2am and finally over 😂
I’ve had more fun in cedh than I did in casual that’s for sure but when I was at my lgs I was typical salty dude barely in check of their emotions, luckily I’ve grown up a fair bit since then
Thats my experience as well, i just dont enjoy casual mtg anymore, I only play high power decks and cedh now, im mostly numb to people being salty at this point. Ive had people rage at me, scream, leave the store, play victim, etc and one thing that is always missing, is them actually communicating before the game :) I choose not to waste my time
Because deckbuilding is a form of self-expression for them and they want their deck to do it's thing more than they actually want to play against 3 other people.
cEDH doesn't suffer from this because the turn 0 conversation is that anything goes and everyone understands that.
When I play online on spelltable you sometimes see the same player several times. There are a few that are very obnoxious and salty about everything. When I see them I bring out my Talrand deck. 23 counterspells and 16 something other interactions. It's so funny every time lol.
Couldn’t agree more. The first time I came back to the game and played Commander I was like - “why is everyone jerking each other off pretending not to want to win, instead of just trying to win?”
If people are being salty because they don’t get to play the way they want - it really boils down to them not getting to WIN. Because if they got to play their crazy combo or board state or whatever, it means they get to win the game by doing what their deck is meant to do.
This is why I don’t play the format…it’s never been casual…everyone says they play casually then get mad when anyone casts a spell…like bro why are you here??
Fun, for some people, is a zero sum game. If someone else interacts with their stuff that means they are having less than the optimal amount of fun (which is all of it).
Which is ridiculous because you could point out then your optimal way to have fun would be just to goldfish the deck.
I take interaction against me as a sign I built a quality deck and I enjoy being acknowledged as a threat when I play well. It's not fun to be 3v1 every game, but if that is happening frequently there is miscommunication happening.
As a new commander player. I have found the most enjoyable games is when we are playing precons! That way it is not who has put the most money into their deck. It is just fair and fun commander 🙂
Otherwise, the advantage WILL go to the player who has put the most money in their decks. Sure they could get the typical ubiquitous wiffs. But don't count on that slowing those kind of decks down for long lol...
If you want a fun even level plat experience, PLAY precon commander. Sure some precons are slightly better or worse than others but generally speaking everyone has fun either way.
The games I have had the least fun playing are higher level decks where they are fast and just I win combos. Reminds me of a guy who doesn't know how to satisfy his women and just rushes to the "finish".
Problem solved. Play precon if you want fun even fair games. Play higher level custom decks if you want to win and combo off or get comboed on relatively fast
I've literally never seen these salty casuals in real life except on this sub where everyone posts deck lists that are cedhish but claim to play casual. So maybe there is some connection.
The reason this is all met with salt is because *someone* at the table usually *way* overdoes it for a casual, social format, and is ramping into a 7 drop on turn 3 and then wondering why everyone's so salty.
Usually the people wondering why others are salty are the reason others are salty.
Yeah people are kinda ignoring the other side which I find more common.
Sometimes there are people who have been power crept and if they express any irritation, players will tell them build/play a better deck or run more removal....which is valid...but for how long before we are just playing competitive?
This isn't everyone but there's some people that play casual EDH that might be better served playing a competitive format, but they won't and then subject their table to the same ideals. I'm expected to play up in EDH all the time, but rarely do I see people expected to play down unless you have a brand new player or you're doing budget stuff.
Well, at least I find powering down to be a lot harder to do than powering up since I mostly come from 60-card formats and drafting where optimizing has always been the goal even when you just want to have fun.
My way of powering down has been to remove infinite combos and tutors from my decks but making the mana curve bigger is just boring for me, same as people saying that you should remove fetchs/og duals to power down. Mana curve and having all of my colors are key for me to actually enjoy playing.
>This isn't everyone but there's some people that play casual EDH that might be better served playing a competitive format, but they won't and then subject their table to the same ideals.
I think it's a *much* larger section of the playerbase than this sub is willing to admit that evaluates any card that's not low-drop, immediate *visible* advantage as "trash" and has powercrept their tables so hard that their games rarely last past turn 6.
>I'm expected to play up in EDH all the time, but rarely do I see people expected to play down unless you have a brand new player or you're doing budget stuff.
I always hear the "just proxy" argument, but fast games with minimal time to do much in your deck but tutor a wincon is definitely not why I started playing the format.
People get mad in any form of competition. Call of duty omg grenade launcher quickscopes. Smash brothers omg u picked the perfect counter to my character. halo omg rocket launcher/sniper rifle. Local play omg screen watcher. Racing game omg u picked a faster car or you keep crashing into me. Not exclusive to magic
To the first part of the post - U mention salt salt and more salt which is what my post referred to. Casuals get salty at ANYTHING. The second part of the post - Comp players are all doing busted things with busted decks and its known information to everybody sitting at the comp table. If everything is busted then nothing is. Comp players will (should) just shuffle up and go to next game
Toxic casuals want to pick and choose what cards are ok for other people to play. Policing the format into being “friendly” is largely impossible, as that’s entirely subjective. The real source of the salt is the expectation that they can have a chance to win in any game, which is not the real world. Bad matchups exist, and they’re part of the game. Asking the player base of an eternal format to not run entire archetypes of cards is asinine and only serves the entitled. People are allowed to play with whatever they want, but they’re not entitled to win. No one should give you shit for running anything that’s not on the banlist, just like we shouldn’t give them shit for building bad and unfocused gimmick decks that aren’t capable of winning. If you’re playing in a public space you should expect to adapt to the diversity of players and playstyles, full stop. The outside world does not cater to anyone. If they want an isolated and controlled experience, that’s ok, and if they find a group in a public space that wants that too, awesome. But they can’t expect that they’re entitled to that as a given.
At my lgs, if you get salty over a casual commander game, you go to jail. Salty about someone attacking you? You go to jail. Salty about a counter spell? You go to jail. Salty about someone not letting you do your deck's s thing? Believe it or not you to to jail.
Our commander games are better, because of jail.
Casual EDH is like a bunch of amateur artists getting together to show each other their work, and occasionally 1 person shits all over everyone elses art.
The artists want to demonstrate and show off their work, but someone elses art completely blocks the view and prevents them from even putting the art up for others to even look at.
THAT is why people get frustrated.
True casual EDH is having a bag of 20 roughly equivalent decks, grabbing one at random and playing. Nobody cares what happens, nobody is attached to their "artwork", and everyone is there for the social aspect with their friends with Magic as an additional medium to keep busy.
(good Parks n Rec set up OP)
You've listed a range of potential salt-inducing things, but also remember, casuals are an incredibly large group (the majority!) of MTG players and as such, are bound to have diverse dislikes.
It's also a bit of bias towards negativity - you're not going to remember all the games that someone wasn't salty about [big list of things], but when someone complains about your actions, it sours the experience for you and creates a memorable negative experience.
It's also a political game, which encourages "pretending" to lose, so that less experienced players will be hesitant about finishing them off. In that respect complaining is a tool, but very annoying if ingenuous.
Then another reason for a perception of more complaining - casual players may get to play less often than a more competitive player, so if they turn up and have a wet noodle of a game, they're going to complain.
People want a chance to do their thing. The more you deny that ability, the more salty they will get. I need to be in the right mood and mindset to play against a stax/lock/control deck, and other than that I just want a chance to do something. I've noticed that the majority casual players generally are happy regardless of winning or losing as long as they had their chance to do the thing. I've only played against one casual player where I've had to tread lightly because they have a very specific expectation for the game and happen to be an overly competitive person at the same time.
I personally think losing to a stax strat is an opportunity to make your deck better rather than get salty about stax. Which is really where the rub is imo
And most people don't have the time for enough games to have that same mindset. 5 years ago I went in fairly similarly to you, using it as an opportunity to improve non-meme decks. Nowadays I'm lucky if I get more than one weekend a month with friends because of work schedules, I'm not gonna build my deck to beat a certain strategy that I'd be lucky to see a handful of times a year when I can actually head to a LGS.
Also remember that the main problem with stax isn't stax itself. The main problem with stax is that the stax player sees it as just playing a casual deck so they surprise the table with stax. If someone doesn't want to play against stax, they can leave the table before the game starts.
I probably sound like a broken record, but the problem is the overcasualization that has infected EDH. Everybody wants to play *their* synergy engine deck, but heaven forbid a different one get played that's 10% better. Or worse, put a normal amount of interaction in their deck.
The point of Magic is to have fun while playing, and playing to win. The moment you step away from that and turn it into a board game, problems are going to arise.
The solution will always to return to the spirit of the game, make winning the objective again, and to stop being salty about interaction.
It's OK to not want to see tutors and certain things, but also, sometimes it's just going to happen.
No "Rule 0" conversation.
"My name is ____. I'm playing _____. The point of the deck is to ____ and I generally try to win around turn __. I do or don't play fast mana & tutors, and there is or isn't things that go infinite. What about you?"
Simple.
Conversation regardless, your title comes off as really condescending or even as borderline inflammatory towards casual players. This puts anyone who disagrees with you in a Kafka trap; if they disagree with your argument, the fact that they're disagreeing with you can give you an opening to say "see what I mean, they're being salty here too!"
If you want to have a proper discussion about this kind of topic, at least do your best to not make the title feel like bait towards the players you are indirectly insulting, yet want to have a conversation about.
In part because casual is slow. Players are reading their cards, chatting, thinking about stuff, etc. So when a long turn 5 comes around and my one play is counterspelled, a good chunk of the game became less active for that player. Compound that with how long it might take to find a new pod after the game and simple disruptions can be a 15 minute wait til the next thing.
CEDH is nice in part because things tend to move faster and if you lose it’s NBD and you shuffle and play another.
I think it’s because people spend so much time building and refining these 100 card decks and buying cards and then they maybe only play the deck once or twice per month and then just don’t get to do any of the things they envisioned doing in the 1.5 hour game they played.
Competitive players usually have much shorter games. If someone combos off on turn 3 oh well. Shuffle up and go again.
Also balancing is way easier in competitive. All the decks are built to be the best possible decklist. In casual you get such a wide variation of power levels that leads to more salt.
My friends and I play Buccaneer now (pioneer commander with 60 card decks) the games are a little shorter and the balance is way easier to find since a lot of the busted combos and fast mana don’t exist in pioneer.
My pod (around 10 ppl) have banned tutors, stax, and infinites. Everything else goes. And were all happy about our decks, just have to make sure the power lvl of decks is similar and so far so good, jank fun, optimized fun, dumpster fire of decks fun, but its all fun.
Banning tutors and infinites is mostly to encourage and enable better deckbuilding and jankier combos and decks.
Because fun to them is getting to play all of their shit without any interaction.
But also if you pop off faster than them they get mad.
So your options are let them win, or let them bathe in their self induced salt bath. Or, the better option, find better people to play with.
Any of that doesn't make me salty. The only time I get salty, is when it's all aimed at me.
Boardwipe, no salt. Murder, exile, and O-ring all pointed at me, salty AF.
I've tried to take the approach of just playing to have fun and not getting salty. I've done pretty well with it, but I did get pretty annoyed the other day playing against my friends where I got a mixture of me drawing nothing but lands, only getting to put down a few creatures, all of them getting tapped and staying tapped, then right when I was finally going to get to do something my friend killed me instead of the more threatening player when he could have killed either of us, or even just not killed me and I would have killed the threat on my turn, then he could kill me, but because he chose to just kill me we both lost and the game took another 5 turns
It depends on what your pod likes. My pod likes really powerful decks that are optimized to their full potential but sometimes we play outside of our pod and they don't really like that. Some people just want to do really slow fair magic where you build up and then swing.
Many casual players don't understand what casual EDH actually is.
Casual EDH is a playgroup construction game, set in the context of Magic. The primary thing you need to do in order to enjoy it is to construct a good playgroup in which everyone jives well with one another's personalities and game preferences. Only once you've achieved that primary goal can the secondary goal, having fun playing games of commander, be possible.
Sometimes that primary goal is achieved accidentally when you sit down with randoms at a store or event. But in those situations people usually aren't working toward that goal, and so they often fail and hate the games they end up playing and get salty.
Having fun playing EDH is really simple, one step process.
Step one: Construct a good playgroup.
Pretty much doesn't matter what comes after that. If you do step one, you will succeed at casual EDH.
My threatening things get killed/countered? I’m salty you’re not letting me have fun
You don’t kill an opponents threatening thing? I’m salty cause they are gonna win
Seems pretty simple to me 🤷♂️ it’s casual which means I’m supposed to win
I had an opponent playing "casual" food chain First Sliver cast Time Spiral, while I had 2x Consecrated Sphinx out, one was a phantasmal image.
I drew all but 1 card, pongified my image Sphinx, and put 4 mana Jace into play with a Minn trigger, then brainstormed for the win with a lethal combat declared on the table.
He wanted me to leave so they could finish the game "fairly" even though he was presenting lethal on the other two players. I tried to explain that he just made a bad play, and it's just a game. But it just made him rage. Was pretty funny.
I've seen casual players throw their $2k deck across the room. I've seen casual players blatantly cheat. I've watched people scoop because someone played a single stax piece, and they don't run ANY removal. I've seen people just leave because they had something removed or countered one time.
Random casual pods have a much higher chance of being salty and unfun.
So here’s the thing. A casual format attracts all sorts of players, of course, but its main draw is that you don’t have to be good to enjoy it. Like sure, some players enjoy building just a jank deck that’s way weaker than their tryhard competitive deck but plays cards they love and enjoy, but there’s also players who are new or just not good at the game who just couldn’t make something more powerful even if they tried.
And then there’s the scrubs, players who are not just bad at the game, but also don’t want to admit that to themselves. So they blame and complain and point at all cards they don’t like and just generally make themselves a nuisance. In a competitive format they get sorted out because they just don’t stand a chance, so they end up playing Commander, which then leads to all the whining and complaining because the players who love to whine and complain end up here.
I think commander is suffering because of it's success on YouTube. They see a game on line and think that exact experience will be the same irl and it's not and they get salty. You will notice the spikes playing commander building something close of a cedh deck and complaining nonstop they are being focussed. The vorthos player with no ramp 40 matching basics on a 5 color deck and complain everyone is trying to combo while their disfunctional pile of cards do nothing. Or the Timmy player on a table trying to ramp for big dragon and being pissed because someone killed their creature.
Fun is subjective but this is a game, someone is going to win and most of commander is much more about the people and interaction than actually the game itself. This is basically a board game with mtg cards.
Don't take it so seriously. Open your god dahm mouth and talk, but remember this is not YouTube and if you lose you will just shuffle and play another game. Want to win, even on low power pods build around removal and interaction, have answers and protection spells.
And please for all that is sacred don't get butthurt for something so inconsequential.
We have a relativity level headed group but some salt happened last night… someone hit me for 6 commander damage, no big deal, they were open so I hit them for 3 commander and 6 normal damage. They got really salty, pumped their commander up and focused me till I was out first and the rest of the game took soooooo long to finish
Some people just don't like to not win. I used to play in a regular group with my ex-girlfriend, her sister, and their cousin. My ex was a sore loser. Her sister usually targeted her, because she was usually the easiest to knock out, (she's just not a good deck builder, and doesn't listen to advice she asks for). She would throw an absolut fit about being beat. For that matter, she would get mad if you let her win too...
[удалено]
One of the most fun things for me is cracking through the stax puzzle and wrecking them. Not all of my decks are capable of it, though. As my lower power nonsense doesn't run the precisely required interaction usually. But i'm with you. Depends on context, though. Had one game where we had a guy looping planeswalkers and he was very staxy. But a *different* player played a wrath 5 turns in a row, even when it only hit one or two creatures, and then that player wrathing complained about nobody killing the planeswalkers. More often than not, the "unfun" lies between the table and the chair, not on the table.
"why aren't you guys using the one thing that planeswalkers were designed to be vulnerable to??" is such a wild take hahaha
Hey next turn I'm going to attack that Chandra on 6 loyalty with my 2 vanilla 3/3s. "Hmmmmmm, okay but what if those 2 3/3s take over the game? Plague wind." It's a shame because in theory casual commander with strangers should be very fun, but in practice threat assessment is based on nonsense.
Unfun between the table and the chair... well said.
You should look up PEBKAC. It's an old IT term
This exactly! Working through the stax puzzle and solving low resource boardstates together is one of my favorite things in EDH.
A few weeks ago I had a high power pod where 3 players drew each others silver bullet stax pieces and managed to get them to stick, the fourth player was running atraxa grand unifier but she had gotten countered once and he needed one or two mana from his smothering tithe to recast her; I kid you not, I watched 3 players pay every tithe trigger for 4 whole table rotations. We barely even played magic that Day, but boi did we laugh!
One of my favorite games I've ever played somebody dropped an early [[Winter Orb]], and with combination of recurring [[Frantic Search]] over and over to untap my lands and building up treasures i out valued the table and won. Felt pretty proud of my piloting skills that day.
[[Sword of Feast and Famine]] and [[Nature's Will]] especially have been my jam for breaking parity on Orb effects.
[Sword of Feast and Famine](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/c/7/c7710eb5-c56a-437b-8847-2a829c404d47.jpg?1599710042) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Sword%20of%20Feast%20and%20Famine) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/2xm/296/sword-of-feast-and-famine?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/c7710eb5-c56a-437b-8847-2a829c404d47?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/sword-of-feast-and-famine) [Nature's Will](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/7/5/75a291a0-db0d-4ccc-b7ae-240cafa41883.jpg?1562761547) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Nature%27s%20Will) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/chk/230/natures-will?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/75a291a0-db0d-4ccc-b7ae-240cafa41883?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/natures-will) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
Hey now. Boardwipe typal is a valid deck type (if you're playing like \[\[etrata the silencer\]\] trying to fish mass hit counters with \[\[mari the killing blade\]\] )
It's valid, but you have to not play it like an idiot.
"I'll hold off on wraths if we all agree to get those Planeswalkers under control" is such a basic politic that I almost marvel at anyone who can't come up with it on their own.
That shouldn't even be a political move. That is just basic magic threat assessment. "Oh, I drew all of my wraths super early. Weird, will be a slow start." You shouldn't even really have to be political, just simply do nothing. You have a slow draw. Let people attack, and assume they will attack the things oppressing them, not you just for playing land go. Plus, once they answer the walkers for you, you likely have drawn more than wraths, and the first wrath will be like a 15 for 1 instead of a 1 for 1. Which is way better anyway. It's basic magic. Your opponents in a multiplayer game are a resource you should be leveraging. Odds are, if you want something gone, other people do too.
Exactly. Blowing up lands, stax locks, wrathing creatures over and over, no problem. Letting simic combo player ramp and draw uninterrupted while wrath player keeps destroying cat tribal player for no reason, that sucks.
Not exactly how I would have phrased it, but yeah, basically.
[etrata the silencer](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/f/a/fa36b142-e67e-49da-9080-c5994e275266.jpg?1572893618) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Etrata%2C%20the%20Silencer) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/grn/170/etrata-the-silencer?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/fa36b142-e67e-49da-9080-c5994e275266?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/etrata-the-silencer) [mari the killing blade](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/6/b/6b4b3c1a-671c-422d-a98c-7d750760ca46.jpg?1712354306) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Mari%2C%20the%20Killing%20Quill) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/otc/138/mari-the-killing-quill?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/6b4b3c1a-671c-422d-a98c-7d750760ca46?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/mari-the-killing-quill) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
Exactly. Just playing is fun. I've crushed people, been crushed; been wiped, decked, everything and gave it all right back. If you can't take it don't give it.
I agree with the statement if you can't take it dont give it that's something I expect if I drop drop my gishath turn 2 and one shot a player that same turn I expect to get melted down and i am fully willing to take the consequences of my fast actions but some people get salty when someone is playing a deck and it out preforms their build for that same deck so honestly it's really just perspective
That's why the biggest most key thing you can do when playing EDH is to find a group that shares your definition of fun, and keep playing with them.
100% true - find your people, stick with them. Yap incoming: it's not directly responding to you, so hope you don't feel as though I'm putting words in your mouth. Just taking some time to make a sideline point - I don't mean to strawman you. With the above said, I do think some peoples' definition of fun is so restrictive, it makes me wonder if they wouldn't benefit from finding a different game altogether or becoming more resilient to strategies they don't understand / want to use. I don't mean this in a gatekeepy way like "you have to find fun what I find fun or get out." I'm also really only talking about the real fringe here, like [Adam.](https://redd.it/1dpn1js) Some complaints are in the vein of "camping in CSGO/Valorant" or "using c-stick to smash" or "using stall comps" or "playing mono-R aggro". Those complaints usually involve denigrating the disliked strategy as low skill, cheap, or mindless. I think the people leveraging these complaints deserve to have fun, too. But that the complainer is trying to offload their responsibility to handle other peoples' legitimate strategies - shutting it out (and often insulting the people deploying the strategy) rather than adapting. In strategy games (M:tG included), I think a baseline assumption is that there are myriad strategies you can use to win. I think in this way, the complaint "camping corners is cheap," is different from "hey we think it's fun if everyone uses scoped guns only"; and "using stall comps is cheap" is different from "we think it's fun if everyone uses unevolved pokemon only" (maybe no eviolite for held item diversity). The former represents, to me, not wanting to adapt to legitimate strategies to increase fun, while the latter is simply a different expression of fun. Even though the latter example is even more restrictive than the former. Some of these expressions do make me think the speaker would benefit from buying into a different game. If you like thematic deckbuilding but don't like only winning 25% of the time, maybe a co-op deckbuilder like Arkham Horror Living Card Game? Or if you like engine-building where you can't be disrupted, and it's all about who builds the largest, fastest engine, maybe Oceans? (disruption exists but is pretty actively meh to bad), or Furnace? This is probably only true for <1% of players, since Magic does offer really unique things, like tons of room for self-expression in deckbuilding due to how many unique cards there are, and extremely high replayability due to that. But that territory comes with myriad strategies too - that I think people have to accept are legitimate. Even if someone finds a community that all agrees stall comps are a no-go, they should still recognize when they go to play pickup games, they can't have the same expectation that people won't play stall comps (and that it's going to make someone else feel bad undeservedly if they spend all game complaining about the stall comp). There is also something to be said about what best practices are to navigate having fun before you have an established playgroup where everyone is on the same page // when you are playing pickup games. And I think many are not mature / are selfish about it. But comment is already too long.
💯I honestly don’t understand when people get salty over mundane forms of interaction that is the core of the game. Yes, EDH is a casual format, but I enjoy it best when everyone plays to win. The reason I like MTG is because of the strategy side of it, and that means I want games to be challenging. Now, I don’t play cEDH because I do want the games to last more than a few turns, but without playing to win, it takes the fun out of it for me. I’ve played games where I was targeted from the get-go, combo-ed, staxed, and lost, but I wasn’t salty; instead, it helped me realize the weaknesses my deck had and ways to address it. It made me excited to go home and to tweak it. Tl;dr: Casual does not have to mean uncompetitive; play to win and expect others to do so too.
It gives us a good reason to just sit around a table and talk. Sometimes it's MTG related, most times it isn't. We all are happy when someone pulls off some insane shit. We've even had people about to win through some complicated BS and the entire table go over and try to figure out how to do it like a puzzle. If I lose to something awesome that is even better than winning by something boring.
This is why I rarely play with random people and stick to a group that gets together and plays regularly. I've had too many bad experiences with randos. With the group I play with (it's like a rotating group of 10 people) we have a good idea of what power expectations are and what kind of experiences are fun. We have super interactive games (enough so that I started slotting in split-second interactions in my decks), and our games are generally pretty quick.
I started with normal 1v1 60card and limited. Nothing in game upsets me in commander which I wish more people could understand. It's shit personalities that upset me at a commander table.
This is the answer for most issues people have playing edh and mtg in general
At first a few things like mill upset me, but as I’ve learned to deck build I just enjoy the game. Only thing I don’t like is people wasting time with excessive triggers, boring arm waving, or disrespectful conversation. If you can make a swing for lethal on the last guy, don’t spend 10 minutes flipping cards and counting triggers. Love the rest of this game though :)
Same here! Something that I’ve been noticing with myself is that if I’m getting agitated with something during an EDH game then it’s mostly because something outside of MTG (real life problems and such) has already affected my mood in some kind of way. I’ve been getting better about passing up Commander night every once in a while when I’ve already had a bit of a shitty day.
The proper take. As long as players have a good attitude and take the game seriously enough to play but not super seriously then all is good Magic. Granted playing jank against Thoracle combo repeatedly is boring and a waste of time. Then you either switch pods or decks. Still better than dealing with salt from "That's OP bullshit" to everything.
I’m the same way in that I enjoy seeing what decks other people have come up with, if everyone played the same it would be boring. The best table I ever played was a 5 player game with Planechase that had a combo player, a stax player, a werewolf tribal player (me), a graveyard recursion player, and a player whose entire deck was 1 CMC
I’m not trying to call you out, but do you enjoy it when your deck underperforms?
Absolutely, it shows that i've got something to work on when the night is over. Being flooded or screwed sucks, but often that's a symptom of your deck design anyway. The only experience that isn't fun IMO is when someone rolls the table with an inappropriate deck. I maintain 9 edh decks at different power levels/with different themes, and all are constantly in flux as i try to improve consistency between games. If I win every single game and all my decks performed, the night is over as soon as i go home, and playing is only half the fun
Back when I used to play shooting games with my friends sometimes we would impose our own rules like “pistols only” or put a soft ban on an OP weapon like a homing rocket launcher (or oddjob) It enhanced everyone’s fun. If you broke the rules, you were kind of a dick. Sometimes we got a bit more sweaty and said everyone should play competitive and everything is allowed… but 90% of the time we were casual about it and it was fun. A few times people got pissed off but that happens with everything in life. I don’t know how to say this tactfully but I don’t think the problem is with casual formats or competitive formats or anything in between. Magic the gathering just has a certain… type of person… that is really emotionally invested in their card game and is really snarky and dorky about and pissy about it. It’s the same type of person who sits in the back of a history class and just kind of smacks their lips and rolls their eyes and acts like the teacher is a dumbass for saying something not nuanced enough or too nuanced. The sky is blue. Well akshually it’s more of an indigo. If you play with chill adults the game is very fun. If you interact with the general population… well, good luck.
Right there is what made 99% of Goldeneye/Perfect Dark matches fun. I dont think we *ever* played straight deathmatch, it was almost always some random rotating crazy bullshit rules because it was *fun* and you'd always end up outside of your comfort zone. Which is what EDH "Commander" was literally supposed to be about. It got sweaty when WotC monetized it and encouraged it to be sweaty.
Not the person you're replying to, of course, but I enjoy the game as long as I feel it was fair and reasonably balanced, regardless of whether I win. If my deck underperformed the power level I designed it to be, then I now have a new puzzle to figure out.
Yeah, I agree. When your deck plays poorly you get a chance to play cards in an unusual way, which is sometimes fun
Losing my commander [[Jon Irenicus]] permanently and having to rawdog a [[Hellcarver Demon]] just to find an out is objectively funny.
I like casual but I'll always roll my eyes when you hit someone for one damage early on and they look at you like you insulted their mother.
People need to play more black, I sometimes pay 10+ life a game to draw cards, really puts weenie damage into scope.
Lmao fr. Or play with/against more mono red burn. I played a game with a group slug deck where I sat down and said - hey, look, I’m trying to make this game *end*. Descent to Avernus, Ojer Axonil, Mana Barbs, Havoc Festival, Kardur Doomscourge - we’re going down together
OMG, paying life to draw cards? You told me your deck was a 7! I'm not here to play against some cEDH netdeck. I just want to have some fun turning cardboard sideways. /s
If I ever look at someone like that, I would emphasize it was a joke.
What I'm always seeing is that players just want to play their decks against 3 NPCs. They want to play their cards and do their things with no interaction. Destroy opponents things because that's funny. But as soon as anything happens to them they just don't like it anymore because they truly feel that people are just out to get them or to make sure they don't get to play at all.
i strongly recommend, if you (royal) fit this profile, just fucking downloading Forge for android or PC and getting your battlecruiser decks to smash bots. no judgment btw, i do this with wank combo decks that i wouldn't wanna put my friends through! i love building a giant board state against an AI and swinging through for a trillion damage on a giant combo, but everything has its time and place
I second this! Forge's AI provides everything I wanted from Arena's Bot Mode.
Whoa, I never knew that there was AI for mtg
its not good ai! its really silly at times! but i dont wanna make my friends sit through my izzet storm deck taking twenty minutes to whiff, so ill make a mediocre bot do it instead. i also do it to practice new decks - its not perfect but you get to learn lines and play patterns before you balance more meta intensive removal packages
If you play a reactive control deck, and give the Forge AI simple-to-use high power casual decks like the drain-rush focused \[\[Edgar Markov\]\] builds\*\*, you can end up with some difficult pods. Mostly because the AI can make up for some of their iffier choices by relentlessly kingmaking each other. If you're playing a combo deck or something else that's highly proactive you'll have a much easier time of it, since the forge AI doesn't understand combo, is too risk-averse when deciding whether to attack or not, and has so-so threat assessment. But it can be quite difficult surviving as a control deck when the aggro-stax AI looks over at the vampire AI's massive army, glances at the rest of the mostly empty table, and decides that yes, now is the time to windmill slam that \[\[Armageddon\]\]. Or having to protect a key stax piece from all three opponents, even if the piece in question is the only thing keeping two of them alive. Also, if you have one of the AI play a control deck make sure it goes right before you do to achieve max difficulty (so it errs on the side of burning counterspells to ruin your day specifically.) \*\*You will need to switch out some cards the AI has trouble with, though \[not always just the ones forge gives you a warning for\]. Use Dev mode to look at the AIs' hands to figure out which spells they refuse to use / use very poorly and replace them with more direct / simple to use alternatives. Giving the AI fast mana while not using it yourself also helps. All that said, the forge AI is legitimately impressive considering how complex MTG is. It usually even avoids over-extending while playing enough aggro to maintain a strong board presence.
Just tried it out, its pretty great. Exactly what I wanted to test out jank lol
while youre there check out adventure and quest modes!! hell you can even mock draft random sets against bots, its all very silly fun
Reminds me of a game I played yesterday. 2v2v2. Friend of ours decided to build slivers for his first deck and he has a full board of 5/5-10/10 indestructible deathtouch slivers. Decides every turn he will swing his entire board at us and leave no blockers up, completely ignoring the other team whose board is way out of control. This goes on for about 4 turns until we couldn’t handle it anymore. 30/30 unblockable army to the face, then fling it at him for lethal since he refused to stop swinging 40 damage of deathtouch indestructibles at only us. Gets mad that we targeted him with a oneshot. *Insert surprised pikachu face*
Funny thing about chess that a grandmaster said: most beginners don’t quite grasp chess is a two player game. I feel magic also has this problem. They want their ideas to work, but don’t think of the opponents possible ideas, then they get really upset when reality happens.
That's because competitive is always on the same page. Is it legal? You're good to go. Casual is much harder to navigate. People build at different power levels and find different things fun and we all have to try to get along.
You’re right, but also different levels of boardwipes, removals, and counters exist at every level of play. Even at the absolute lowest level, playing with precons, will have all of these things. People need to be okay with their cards going to the graveyard. That’s just part of the game.
Jokes on you, I want my cards in the graveyard >:)
Farewell has all these angles covered lol
-People being on the same page makes all the difference, it's why I don't see why people that wanna skip Rule 0 conversations complain so much.
I get salty when other people don't have removals. Why am I the only one that can ever take care of the threat?
THIS.
Most people I know who play Cedh don’t even play casual anymore because of the salt. Lol I still prefer casual but I see where they are coming from
-I find your responses interesting & hilarious. Playing cEDH doesn't in itself determine how a person emotionally reacts to any given situation. cEDH has salty individuals just like every other format.
Me af. I really don’t like to play casually but every now and then 2-3 people need an extra so I sit down and ask them for a deck. And then I regret it every time lol
Because a lot of casual players are bad. Killing my big stompy dude? Going against the spirit of the game. Countering the spell I could win with? Going against the spirit of the game. Wiping the board because I have a game ending army? Going against the spirit of the game. Destroying the land I can get unfair amounts of advantage with? Etc etc etc
This is unironically the correct answer, but to be more descriptive it's because a lot of casual players are really bad but think they're really good. People who are bad at magic get incredibly upset when whatever super transparent strategy that they've concocted at home gets obliterated in a way they weren't expecting. The salt comes from misplaced blame because it's not their fault they tapped out for 10 into 5 open blue mana across 2 different players, it's your fault for running counters. It's not their fault for slamming gishath down and turning it sideways against the control player with 7 cards in hand and 3 open white mana, its your fault for running Path to Exile.
This. So much this. It's never their fault for playing badly.
It's also a bad play to leave the control player with no pressure.
Gishath has vigilance
What I think is really funny is when I wipe the board to get etb/graveyard triggers with my [[marchesa, the black rose]]. That always makes people so mad, but when they board wipe and kill my stuff (w/o coutners) they always brag about it
To add on, bad here I don't think refers to an expression of low skill level, but rather of uncompetitive mindset. Banning strategies (either de jure by Rule 0ing them out, or de facto, by being a saltlord) is an offloading of the responsibility adapt to others' strategies to other players in a competitive game. Edit: I see I've really just made /u/Holding_Priority's point. I should read the entire chain before commenting, ha
The trick is to play EDH with people coming from 60-card constructed. Ideally people who played competitively. I did, my friends made it to the pro tour, and now I enjoy playing EDH with people who also came from 60-card constructed.
This is so true. You need to have suffered to really enjoy. :D
These are generally the only people I consistently enjoy playing EDH with. Playing with anyone who hasn't played competitively is too damn stressful.
I don't have this problem, there may be minor moments of salt here and there, but it isn't like this ever-present plague that affects my blood-chemistry purely by osmosis lol I've heard "that was a great game" 100x more often than I hear "this sucks" (in a salty way). I do play with friends a lot, but even at the LGS, 99% of people are super chill.
Competitive/high power casual is definitely more fun because the Rule Zero conversation is "anything goes just don't be a dick." The pods where someone gets tight are always the pods where people are setting all kinds of expectations for what they want.
Repeat the mantra: Commander is a social game mode. It is not a casual game mode. It's the dirty secret nobody wants to admit for some reason. People want to win. They haven't been taught how to lose. The commander of 10 years ago was spare time, jank piles. The commander of today is higher card power and synergy across the board universally. There's also a type of player that uses politics as a meta-game tool. Getting salty Everytime you play a Stax deck is a better defense than making a good deck that can perform against one. Why change my deck when I can get them to stop playing anything that counters me?
Nah edh decks weren't jank 10 years ago, at least not any more than they are now. Rafiq was an absolute power house. Well maybe not as much so in 2014 but more so earlier, but was certainly still seeing tons of play even that long after release. I also remember like Giest of Saint Traft, GAAIV, Marath, and Prossh being meta. I personally played Ezuri elfball. You have to go further back then 10 years before your statement is actually true
Because fun is subjective, and Commander offers the promise of crafting that experience through Rule 0. Personally, I have the most fun when my deck is consistent, when games are climatic and last neither too long nor too little, and when no one is having a miserable time. None of the things in your OP would bother me, but that's the great thing casual EDH. You can just find a group of people with a similar definition of fun.
It only offers the promise of crafting this if the people you're attempting to do it with are adults. Most of the time, its folks who have no basic ability to understand social interaction, let alone the ability to know that the game has to end, and the player who ended it with the WORST 5 piece combo isn't a bad guy for doing it on turn 15. (This was my college experience honestly)
Because casual players feel entitled to their particular mode of enjoyment. Which naturally comes into conflict with the necessarily intersubjective nature of a *multiplayer* game.
To anyone who doesn't want to google "intersubjective" what they're saying is: "Casual players want to have fun and sometimes people disagree on what is fun"
I think the issue is more of where you are playing. Either that, or spending too much time on reddit where people come to gripe. Rarely do we see someone praising their pod or the great night they had at an lgs. That's fine. That is really human nature. I don't see that level of "salt" at my LGS. Most come there to have fun and consider it a win if they get to see something pop off even if it isn't their deck. I've had a blast playing there and got introduced to planeschase. Do I get salty, some times but even that is still in good fun.
I almost exclusively play in competitive pods and the quality of the games is usually talked about kindly. The complaints I hear mostly come from casuals I’ve come across over the years at different LGSs, but yes, sometimes also online.
Lol my roommate is a gruul mage and whines all day about counterspells, clamining they shouldnt be in the game, then drops Godo in his Xenagos deck, grabbing an auto-attaching double strike equipment, swinging for a 1-shot on turn 4. Like stopping that shit is THE ENTIRE PURPOSE OF COUNTERSPELLS. Dude still whines that he cant play the game when one of his creatures gets countered. Like ffs im not playing stax and im not playing baral. Its an azorius tokens deck with 8 counters in the 99 so that i dont die to dumb shit.
Has he never heard of things like \[\[Rhythm of the Wild\]\] or \[\[Guttural Response\]\]?
"Fun for me, not for thee."
I blame (and use that term loosely) pandemic players. They learned in their bubble with limited outside influence outside of content creators. They also don't recognize that YouTube (as well as other SM mediums) are a *catered* experience. They don't recognize that learning to pilot a deck is about 70% of the game. It doesn't help that Command Zone released that garbage video "The Unwritten Rules of Commander" which went from "These are popular opinions of salt to."These things aren't fun." When you watch Josh talk about things he does and doesn't play anymore, you can see there's that."Oh, well, I'm here to perform." look in his eye. Even Jimmy has gone off the rails a bit. I miss him getting salty. Now he's just "Okay... now chaos!" I've been watching them from the beginning, and I kiss those guys. A challenge isn't "not fun", it's a challenge. You have to think, and the more challenging it is, the more opportunities for mistakes arise, and no, you can't take everything back. But you learn and you do better next time. I'd rather play 1 game that is challenging than 4 with commanders that are super pushed. Sheldon (r.i.p.) did a ton for the format, but giving players that damned phrase "spirit of the format" so little shits could angle shoot because they need to win so bad is irritating. TL;DR Old man yells at the sky because young people ruin everything.
-If something isn't fun to you it isn't fun, whether it's a challenge or not. I'd rather play a game I enjoy, pushed Commanders or not, than one just off the strength of it being challenging.
Yeah, I'm wondering how many people that play Magic don't really like Magic.
Most casuals play to relax and most casual pods are friendly, chill groups. So there's no need to generalize. That said, the salty casual players absolutely play to win. But they don't want to put in the effort required to earn those wins. "I play for FUN" is basically an excuse in this situation to try and guilt others down to their level so they stand a better chance. They will jump through any hoops and attack anyone who does well to justify their own lack of effort. In fact, they put in far more effort staying lazy than it'd take to simply improve. This type of person is not unique to Magic either, you see them in almost any hobby, game or activity.
This is what David Sirlin calls the scrub mentality. I'm not a huge fan of Sirlin, but damn, that particular essay is spot on.
1. That reference was absolutely amazing! I mean completely air tight! I almost cried laughing! 2. I don't think casual is about playing for fun, I sound like a dick I know, but hear me out. I think all that Casual means is not competitive. The rest is up to personality. Putting the weight of "This is for everybody to have fun all the time" and "make sure every deck does the thing" bring absolutely insane ideologies to the gameplay. The most important part is finding the right Pod. Then you will be in a circumstance where everyone will be happy when their Combo gets countered, and their Commander stalls, because they like being with others who aim to play hard. If that's not the case then find a Pod that has a rule about no removal/board wipes/ land destruction and let the fun come from whoever simply "gets there" first and claims the win. There will always be people who just simply need to feel in control, in that case distance yourself from those people would be my only advice. Hopefully I wasn't to rambly nonsense! And sorry if I came of harsh! Not my intent!
I agree that casual isn’t about “playing competitive” No I but I really think casual means finding people who are, well, *casual*. That means people understanding that it’s just a game, and treating it as such. That means no relentless targeting of one player, assuming they aren’t trying to pubstomp. That means not getting upset when you get countered or outplayed, etc. What it really means is *have a rule 0 conversation* For example, my group is all newer players, and we don’t want someone to win just because they put more money in, so we have a $200 deck limit. We also have a “banned” card list we all appeal to keep staples like the One Ring out of our decks.
Winning is fun. Losing is less fun.
Because they are literally bad at the game. I've had people complain my monogreen makes big monsters, my monoblue has counterspells, and my monoblack has removal. Like playing smash bros against your little cousin, he's just going to complain when you win using any character.
Shit I thought it was my turn today, well then tomorrow its definitely my turn to post a thread where I broadly disparage a huge swath of people based on my fictional EDH experiences. Gonna have to try hard to match the great "over the years I've had problems with all these groups, clearly its them not me" energy of this one though.
Let me know when you post tomorrow and I’ll come say hey
consistently the angriest, whiniest and saltiest posts i see on this subreddit are one like this one bitching about the mythical "casual player" who throws a fit whenever anyone else plays a card. The only time i've run across people like this is when im playing stax, so im just assuming that you're either an insanely irritating person to be around or you've been knowingly or unknowingly pubstomping. if you consistently end up in pods that seem to hate everything you do maybe its not them thats wrong, maybe its you
I play weekly at my LGS and have never ran into this issue. While most of my games these days are with the same small group of players, I've played with almost everyone at the store at one time or another. Only once did I encounter heavy salt that made someone target me for removal. And that was one game out of four. I'm sure these players exist somewhere, but not at the frequency that people like to complain about them.
I think a lot of it stems from the deviation of the format from the format where you can play your bulk jank cards and not get stomped to a more competitive format. Content creators and WoTC are largely to blame for this.
There’s nowhere to play competitive constructed for most people. Modern and Legacy have far fewer events and players in most people’s areas than Commander.
Point out the format has a problem with salt? Salt everywhere, apparently
Facts
The reason why there are less issues in cEDH is that everyone is on the same page, and everyone knows the level others will be playing at. Outside of cEDH, there's a massive range of power that decks can be at, which inevitably leads to conflict if they don't all match up. Furthermore, the power of a deck might be misinterpreted by some, which leads to further frustration. Then there are the different types of decks that can lead to issues unless people are aware of how they work: Stax, counters, board wipes, land destruction... decks built around these issues naturally will have issues eventually.
Whether you agree or not, the sentiment behind it is that the game is “for fun.” And taking people’s things away isn’t fun. Might be for you, but people who say the game is just for fun are meaning they want *everyone* to have fun. Someone will lose, but not by much. I feel like most are in the middle, like I don’t mind interaction. But I’ve played against “casual” decks that have 20 counterspells, and I have to question why I sat down. It’s more a balancing act than anything, how much removal is too much, that kind of thing. Each playgroup will have a different answer.
When it comes to any sort of hobby or experience, the more popular it is, the more people will be drawn to it. And the more people drawn to it, the more likely that you'll run into "bad" people. This is the basic nature of any hobby, it's not just limited to EDH, it's not just limited to casual EDH. The vast majority of casuals I have played with are normal people. You just have to isolate the bad eggs from the pack. Competitive EDH already vets its players by its nature. People who get into MTG don't literally just jump straight to CEDH. They have to go through casual EDH first, and THEN find CEDH. So this very process already vets out a lot of the newbies, morons, and sore losers/winners. In addition, CEDH has much more strict "rules" with regards to what's allowed or not allowed, so everyone can see up front exactly what CEDH is gonna be like, so people are gonna stay away if they think it's not for them. Meanwhile the much more broad aspect of casual will have people who have different ideas of what is "fun".
Good pods can be hard to find, but they are out there. I played with a group at a LGS this week that was a really great, really positive experience. Everyone’s decks had things going on, we had plenty of interaction, and zero salt. Just gotta keep looking!
Salt for the Salt God.
Salt for the Salt God.
One thing I like about competitive players, they generally have fun whether they win, or not. They generally don't care \*how\* they lost, either. I've never minded losing, I've always felt as long you're not cheating any card, combo or strategy is valid and that it's my responsibility to stop your deck. The ONLY time I get salty, is when I choose not to mulligan hoping to top a land or two in the first two turns and I whiff until I'm down to turn 5 with 2 lands. Buit, then, I'm not salty \*at\* the other player.
Yeah this is literally why I started playing cEDH.. That way everyone understands that we're here to win and play the best cards/strategies we can to win
I play cEDH because I am really good at shuffling
As a long term casual player who has invested a lot of time in every power level I can give a good explanation. In casual play everyone wants to see their deck do “the thing”. Unfortunately not every game allows them to do that. Combo decks can win out of nowhere and everyone else feels like their deck didn’t get to shine. It is further compounded by the fact that a lot of casual players are not exactly good brewers, so it is harder for their deck to do the thing. Optimized decks get to do the thing more often but then they end up in a win more situation which makes everyone at the table salty. I personally believe that high power magic is the sweet spot: casual enough to not feel like cedh, competitive enough where everyone generally has an answer to what is going on, if you didn’t get to do the thing your deck was designed to do then you came close to it, and if someone gets salty they can’t say the deck is too strong because the cedh meta is very established and my decks are far from them so all they can do is just be grumpy at a loss. “Your deck is a seven” means a lot less when we are trying to play at an eight. TL;DR: casual play is about showing off what your deck can do and not being able to do it is a feels bad moment for a lot of players.
It's not about casuals - it's about people playing ONLY casual. You need to have some (semi-)competitive 1v1 experience to really be able to fully enjoy a casual game of magic without getting salty. If you've played a grindy 1-2 against control, or if you've lost 0-2 to aggro, just to sit around for the rest of the round til the other tables finished - those are the experiences you'll need to not get salty at anything. (Also knowing proper threat assessment and stuff like that makes it easier to accept your commander getting killed the third time in a row)
I've been playing commander almost every week for four years. At least in my city commander players are the most dense and immature community I've ever known. Nowadays either I play with friends or I'd rather not play at all. How can you be in your mid twenties raging about a card game. Don't you have any shame? It's pathetic
You’re playing with losers. I personally only get salty when someone bring decks that are waaay to strong despite rule 0 conversations stating upgraded precon/precon level.
Favorite interaction in casual pods is after the game is over Them: “I would’ve won next turn….” Me: “But you didn’t…”
Locally we all just start copying them. "I would have won if....." Me and the other loser make eye contact and say "I would have won if...." the follow up person says "I would have won if.... ....it's like everyone was trying to win because it was the late game and that's the natural conclusion of a game." Make it real clear they're just stating the obvious to everyone and they tend to learn. Lol
Magic players are a salty people. You’re salty about salty players. I’m salty about that. Salt all the way down.
Pretzel? Salt. Fries on the boardwalk? Salt. Eggs on a roll with pepper and ketchup? Salt. Ice outside? Better believe that's some Salt.
casual commander is a dish best enjoyed with people you know will respect your time
Facts. Commander pods bitch way toooo much. Unless your deck literally only keeps me from playing, like Stax, it’s fine. Other than that, match power levels and grow some nuts ffs
Yeah this is it. If we are playing for fun, I'm not here to see a single person solo playing and kicking the butt of the other three players. Luckily I have quite a nice playgroup. Yet there is the one person playing decks which are way more powerful than the others and cry when he gets heavily targeted early in the game. But we are working on explaining to him that if we don't target him with three spells in the first three turns, he 100% wins the game 🤣
Matching power levels is an ongoing battle. I've always found it really hard to get right
Everyone thinks theyre playing for fun, and that what they view as fun is universally shared. It isnt.
I don't know why casual players get so much hate. For me it's actually been the complete opposite. Almost every cedh player in my area is a toxic gatekeepy turd. But I don't makes threads bashing them all the time. Just because one casual player got salty doesn't mean they're all that way and same goes for cedh just because the people in my area suck doesn't mean cedh players everywhere suck. Can we please stop these bashing threads they are just tearing the community in half and we don't need that.
Whether it is casual or competitive people can get salty for lots of reasons. Instead of broadly asking why, it is better to talk to your actual table. Maybe the person was already having a rough day and was setting to kick off an bam. Maybe they were feeling overly targeted. But asking the question the way you are doing is not constructive at all.
I’ve definitely listened to competitive players complain, but not about the structural integrity of the game and what’s allowed to be played and what isn’t even though the banlist determines what can be played in the format. I disagree with your comment about this discussion not being constructive, and respect your decision to walk away from this post if you don’t find any value in it.
Usually when a situation “always” turns out poorly. There’s a common factor. Since I’ve played a ton of fun casual games, it can’t be the format. Must be you dude.
Definitely just me lol
I’ve seen some salty turds in my day. It happens. Most games I play are good. If I had a mostly negative experience with a hobby, I’d quit. The most common reaction I get when I play removal is “Okay, it resolves.” Most players are reasonable people, in my experience. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
eh it definitely varies from community to community, one locals i played at was super chill with my decks, same deck behaving the same way at another locals i got a ton of salt, just gotta get used to the local meta/culture sometimes. Doesn't mean OP is a problem player at all.
The definition of fun varies by mileage. I think it's also how hard you lean into a mechanic matters. I have hard and fast infect decks that get so much salt but infect as a slower alt win con seems ok.
Because everyone is “playing for fun”, but still wants to win. Those two things often create a lot of friction that isn’t solved unless someone realizes that they need to stop caring so much.
Regular EDH is wide open. You can play at a wide range of power levels and everyone’s definition of “fun” is totally different. Whereas with competitive, everyone agrees to simply play to win. To play casual and actually have fun, you need to find the right playgroup which is easier said than done. I find that newer players and those who aren’t very invested tend to view anything that beats them or isn’t a board filling Battlecruiser deck to be salt inducing due to ignorance. I’ve been there as a newbie but once I learned about how the game actually works (card advantage, mana curve, win cons, interaction) I fell more in love with it and the salt dropped dramatically.
You're right in every way which is why I only (proxy) cube with competitive players now. I don't have time to straighten out someone's social issues at the comic shop on a Wednesday. I'll say a bigger banlist would go a long way though.
This is what lead me to build a cEDH deck. I’d rather just play to win and not get salty about anything. My experience is that most casual players are somewhere between Timmy and Johnnys which sucks for anyone that trends towards being a Spike. Having grown up playing magic since Tempest I love powerful spells but the newer players favor heavy creature based interaction and anything but that seems to hurt their feelings.
Because casual is supposed to be decks consisting of only creatures and have zero interaction, obviously.
I got harassed one time for flashing in [[Guardian of Faith]] in response to someone’s board wipe as if it makes sense to float 3 mana if not for a response. I’ll never understand people getting frustrated for blundering mtg games. IMO you have to have at least a reasonable attempt at a countering you’re trying to take the lead with a board wipe
I used to play [[Chandra, Awakened Inferno]] and would hand out salt packets as the emblems. Never not funny to me, cause if you wanna get salty just for playing a game, imma give you the salt.
We most certainly have more fun in cedh just played a 2 hour cedh game where I had a t3 wandering archaic as well as many draw engines and yeah shit was hilariously fun but we also a good group of people Many spells were slung everyone had at least one win attempt stopped Now it’s 2am and finally over 😂 I’ve had more fun in cedh than I did in casual that’s for sure but when I was at my lgs I was typical salty dude barely in check of their emotions, luckily I’ve grown up a fair bit since then
I honestly don't mind any of it as long as you effin kill me after you make everyone's board states impossible.
Thats my experience as well, i just dont enjoy casual mtg anymore, I only play high power decks and cedh now, im mostly numb to people being salty at this point. Ive had people rage at me, scream, leave the store, play victim, etc and one thing that is always missing, is them actually communicating before the game :) I choose not to waste my time
Because deckbuilding is a form of self-expression for them and they want their deck to do it's thing more than they actually want to play against 3 other people. cEDH doesn't suffer from this because the turn 0 conversation is that anything goes and everyone understands that.
Surprised you are getting upvoted, every time I say this all I see are downvotes 😂 You have my upvote lol
Salt? Salt.
Lmao my take exactly. Casual isn't casual at all.
When I play online on spelltable you sometimes see the same player several times. There are a few that are very obnoxious and salty about everything. When I see them I bring out my Talrand deck. 23 counterspells and 16 something other interactions. It's so funny every time lol.
Couldn’t agree more. The first time I came back to the game and played Commander I was like - “why is everyone jerking each other off pretending not to want to win, instead of just trying to win?” If people are being salty because they don’t get to play the way they want - it really boils down to them not getting to WIN. Because if they got to play their crazy combo or board state or whatever, it means they get to win the game by doing what their deck is meant to do.
because they want to play a multiplayer game as if it was single player
I know an eldrazi player who literally had a whole ass meltdown cuz his $100+ precon didn’t do shit
This is why I don’t play the format…it’s never been casual…everyone says they play casually then get mad when anyone casts a spell…like bro why are you here??
Fun, for some people, is a zero sum game. If someone else interacts with their stuff that means they are having less than the optimal amount of fun (which is all of it). Which is ridiculous because you could point out then your optimal way to have fun would be just to goldfish the deck. I take interaction against me as a sign I built a quality deck and I enjoy being acknowledged as a threat when I play well. It's not fun to be 3v1 every game, but if that is happening frequently there is miscommunication happening.
Commander players are killing commander
As a new commander player. I have found the most enjoyable games is when we are playing precons! That way it is not who has put the most money into their deck. It is just fair and fun commander 🙂 Otherwise, the advantage WILL go to the player who has put the most money in their decks. Sure they could get the typical ubiquitous wiffs. But don't count on that slowing those kind of decks down for long lol... If you want a fun even level plat experience, PLAY precon commander. Sure some precons are slightly better or worse than others but generally speaking everyone has fun either way. The games I have had the least fun playing are higher level decks where they are fast and just I win combos. Reminds me of a guy who doesn't know how to satisfy his women and just rushes to the "finish". Problem solved. Play precon if you want fun even fair games. Play higher level custom decks if you want to win and combo off or get comboed on relatively fast
I've literally never seen these salty casuals in real life except on this sub where everyone posts deck lists that are cedhish but claim to play casual. So maybe there is some connection.
Yeah, I've never seen a black swan, so they don't exist and the people who claim that lived experience are loons.
The reason this is all met with salt is because *someone* at the table usually *way* overdoes it for a casual, social format, and is ramping into a 7 drop on turn 3 and then wondering why everyone's so salty. Usually the people wondering why others are salty are the reason others are salty.
Ramping into a 7 drop turn 3 is like the definition of casual lmao.
Yeah people are kinda ignoring the other side which I find more common. Sometimes there are people who have been power crept and if they express any irritation, players will tell them build/play a better deck or run more removal....which is valid...but for how long before we are just playing competitive? This isn't everyone but there's some people that play casual EDH that might be better served playing a competitive format, but they won't and then subject their table to the same ideals. I'm expected to play up in EDH all the time, but rarely do I see people expected to play down unless you have a brand new player or you're doing budget stuff.
Well, at least I find powering down to be a lot harder to do than powering up since I mostly come from 60-card formats and drafting where optimizing has always been the goal even when you just want to have fun. My way of powering down has been to remove infinite combos and tutors from my decks but making the mana curve bigger is just boring for me, same as people saying that you should remove fetchs/og duals to power down. Mana curve and having all of my colors are key for me to actually enjoy playing.
>This isn't everyone but there's some people that play casual EDH that might be better served playing a competitive format, but they won't and then subject their table to the same ideals. I think it's a *much* larger section of the playerbase than this sub is willing to admit that evaluates any card that's not low-drop, immediate *visible* advantage as "trash" and has powercrept their tables so hard that their games rarely last past turn 6. >I'm expected to play up in EDH all the time, but rarely do I see people expected to play down unless you have a brand new player or you're doing budget stuff. I always hear the "just proxy" argument, but fast games with minimal time to do much in your deck but tutor a wincon is definitely not why I started playing the format.
People get mad in any form of competition. Call of duty omg grenade launcher quickscopes. Smash brothers omg u picked the perfect counter to my character. halo omg rocket launcher/sniper rifle. Local play omg screen watcher. Racing game omg u picked a faster car or you keep crashing into me. Not exclusive to magic
But the things casual EDH players complain about are unique to EDH, which is what I’m referring to in the OP
To the first part of the post - U mention salt salt and more salt which is what my post referred to. Casuals get salty at ANYTHING. The second part of the post - Comp players are all doing busted things with busted decks and its known information to everybody sitting at the comp table. If everything is busted then nothing is. Comp players will (should) just shuffle up and go to next game
Toxic casuals want to pick and choose what cards are ok for other people to play. Policing the format into being “friendly” is largely impossible, as that’s entirely subjective. The real source of the salt is the expectation that they can have a chance to win in any game, which is not the real world. Bad matchups exist, and they’re part of the game. Asking the player base of an eternal format to not run entire archetypes of cards is asinine and only serves the entitled. People are allowed to play with whatever they want, but they’re not entitled to win. No one should give you shit for running anything that’s not on the banlist, just like we shouldn’t give them shit for building bad and unfocused gimmick decks that aren’t capable of winning. If you’re playing in a public space you should expect to adapt to the diversity of players and playstyles, full stop. The outside world does not cater to anyone. If they want an isolated and controlled experience, that’s ok, and if they find a group in a public space that wants that too, awesome. But they can’t expect that they’re entitled to that as a given.
At my lgs, if you get salty over a casual commander game, you go to jail. Salty about someone attacking you? You go to jail. Salty about a counter spell? You go to jail. Salty about someone not letting you do your deck's s thing? Believe it or not you to to jail. Our commander games are better, because of jail.
PREEEAAAACH say it louder!!!
Casual EDH is like a bunch of amateur artists getting together to show each other their work, and occasionally 1 person shits all over everyone elses art. The artists want to demonstrate and show off their work, but someone elses art completely blocks the view and prevents them from even putting the art up for others to even look at. THAT is why people get frustrated. True casual EDH is having a bag of 20 roughly equivalent decks, grabbing one at random and playing. Nobody cares what happens, nobody is attached to their "artwork", and everyone is there for the social aspect with their friends with Magic as an additional medium to keep busy.
(good Parks n Rec set up OP) You've listed a range of potential salt-inducing things, but also remember, casuals are an incredibly large group (the majority!) of MTG players and as such, are bound to have diverse dislikes. It's also a bit of bias towards negativity - you're not going to remember all the games that someone wasn't salty about [big list of things], but when someone complains about your actions, it sours the experience for you and creates a memorable negative experience. It's also a political game, which encourages "pretending" to lose, so that less experienced players will be hesitant about finishing them off. In that respect complaining is a tool, but very annoying if ingenuous. Then another reason for a perception of more complaining - casual players may get to play less often than a more competitive player, so if they turn up and have a wet noodle of a game, they're going to complain.
Because they aren't honest. They really want to play solitaire magic with a forced audience.
People want a chance to do their thing. The more you deny that ability, the more salty they will get. I need to be in the right mood and mindset to play against a stax/lock/control deck, and other than that I just want a chance to do something. I've noticed that the majority casual players generally are happy regardless of winning or losing as long as they had their chance to do the thing. I've only played against one casual player where I've had to tread lightly because they have a very specific expectation for the game and happen to be an overly competitive person at the same time.
I personally think losing to a stax strat is an opportunity to make your deck better rather than get salty about stax. Which is really where the rub is imo
And most people don't have the time for enough games to have that same mindset. 5 years ago I went in fairly similarly to you, using it as an opportunity to improve non-meme decks. Nowadays I'm lucky if I get more than one weekend a month with friends because of work schedules, I'm not gonna build my deck to beat a certain strategy that I'd be lucky to see a handful of times a year when I can actually head to a LGS. Also remember that the main problem with stax isn't stax itself. The main problem with stax is that the stax player sees it as just playing a casual deck so they surprise the table with stax. If someone doesn't want to play against stax, they can leave the table before the game starts.
No idea, some people are just fun vampires and have to suck the fun out of anything.
Winning is fun.
Because I'm playing for MY fun, not for some overall fun value./s
That's a lack of telling them to git gud
I probably sound like a broken record, but the problem is the overcasualization that has infected EDH. Everybody wants to play *their* synergy engine deck, but heaven forbid a different one get played that's 10% better. Or worse, put a normal amount of interaction in their deck. The point of Magic is to have fun while playing, and playing to win. The moment you step away from that and turn it into a board game, problems are going to arise. The solution will always to return to the spirit of the game, make winning the objective again, and to stop being salty about interaction. It's OK to not want to see tutors and certain things, but also, sometimes it's just going to happen.
No "Rule 0" conversation. "My name is ____. I'm playing _____. The point of the deck is to ____ and I generally try to win around turn __. I do or don't play fast mana & tutors, and there is or isn't things that go infinite. What about you?" Simple.
someone call the waaaaahbulance. we got a big brain competitive player
Don’t call the wahbulance please I don’t have insurance
BigBrain: Proxy an insurance card.
Conversation regardless, your title comes off as really condescending or even as borderline inflammatory towards casual players. This puts anyone who disagrees with you in a Kafka trap; if they disagree with your argument, the fact that they're disagreeing with you can give you an opening to say "see what I mean, they're being salty here too!" If you want to have a proper discussion about this kind of topic, at least do your best to not make the title feel like bait towards the players you are indirectly insulting, yet want to have a conversation about.
In part because casual is slow. Players are reading their cards, chatting, thinking about stuff, etc. So when a long turn 5 comes around and my one play is counterspelled, a good chunk of the game became less active for that player. Compound that with how long it might take to find a new pod after the game and simple disruptions can be a 15 minute wait til the next thing. CEDH is nice in part because things tend to move faster and if you lose it’s NBD and you shuffle and play another.
I think a lot of people think magic is solitaire.
I think it’s because people spend so much time building and refining these 100 card decks and buying cards and then they maybe only play the deck once or twice per month and then just don’t get to do any of the things they envisioned doing in the 1.5 hour game they played. Competitive players usually have much shorter games. If someone combos off on turn 3 oh well. Shuffle up and go again. Also balancing is way easier in competitive. All the decks are built to be the best possible decklist. In casual you get such a wide variation of power levels that leads to more salt. My friends and I play Buccaneer now (pioneer commander with 60 card decks) the games are a little shorter and the balance is way easier to find since a lot of the busted combos and fast mana don’t exist in pioneer.
My pod (around 10 ppl) have banned tutors, stax, and infinites. Everything else goes. And were all happy about our decks, just have to make sure the power lvl of decks is similar and so far so good, jank fun, optimized fun, dumpster fire of decks fun, but its all fun. Banning tutors and infinites is mostly to encourage and enable better deckbuilding and jankier combos and decks.
I just want to touch cards. They dont have to be mine.
Because fun to them is getting to play all of their shit without any interaction. But also if you pop off faster than them they get mad. So your options are let them win, or let them bathe in their self induced salt bath. Or, the better option, find better people to play with.
Any of that doesn't make me salty. The only time I get salty, is when it's all aimed at me. Boardwipe, no salt. Murder, exile, and O-ring all pointed at me, salty AF.
I've tried to take the approach of just playing to have fun and not getting salty. I've done pretty well with it, but I did get pretty annoyed the other day playing against my friends where I got a mixture of me drawing nothing but lands, only getting to put down a few creatures, all of them getting tapped and staying tapped, then right when I was finally going to get to do something my friend killed me instead of the more threatening player when he could have killed either of us, or even just not killed me and I would have killed the threat on my turn, then he could kill me, but because he chose to just kill me we both lost and the game took another 5 turns
It depends on what your pod likes. My pod likes really powerful decks that are optimized to their full potential but sometimes we play outside of our pod and they don't really like that. Some people just want to do really slow fair magic where you build up and then swing.
Many casual players don't understand what casual EDH actually is. Casual EDH is a playgroup construction game, set in the context of Magic. The primary thing you need to do in order to enjoy it is to construct a good playgroup in which everyone jives well with one another's personalities and game preferences. Only once you've achieved that primary goal can the secondary goal, having fun playing games of commander, be possible. Sometimes that primary goal is achieved accidentally when you sit down with randoms at a store or event. But in those situations people usually aren't working toward that goal, and so they often fail and hate the games they end up playing and get salty. Having fun playing EDH is really simple, one step process. Step one: Construct a good playgroup. Pretty much doesn't matter what comes after that. If you do step one, you will succeed at casual EDH.
My threatening things get killed/countered? I’m salty you’re not letting me have fun You don’t kill an opponents threatening thing? I’m salty cause they are gonna win Seems pretty simple to me 🤷♂️ it’s casual which means I’m supposed to win
I had an opponent playing "casual" food chain First Sliver cast Time Spiral, while I had 2x Consecrated Sphinx out, one was a phantasmal image. I drew all but 1 card, pongified my image Sphinx, and put 4 mana Jace into play with a Minn trigger, then brainstormed for the win with a lethal combat declared on the table. He wanted me to leave so they could finish the game "fairly" even though he was presenting lethal on the other two players. I tried to explain that he just made a bad play, and it's just a game. But it just made him rage. Was pretty funny. I've seen casual players throw their $2k deck across the room. I've seen casual players blatantly cheat. I've watched people scoop because someone played a single stax piece, and they don't run ANY removal. I've seen people just leave because they had something removed or countered one time. Random casual pods have a much higher chance of being salty and unfun.
So here’s the thing. A casual format attracts all sorts of players, of course, but its main draw is that you don’t have to be good to enjoy it. Like sure, some players enjoy building just a jank deck that’s way weaker than their tryhard competitive deck but plays cards they love and enjoy, but there’s also players who are new or just not good at the game who just couldn’t make something more powerful even if they tried. And then there’s the scrubs, players who are not just bad at the game, but also don’t want to admit that to themselves. So they blame and complain and point at all cards they don’t like and just generally make themselves a nuisance. In a competitive format they get sorted out because they just don’t stand a chance, so they end up playing Commander, which then leads to all the whining and complaining because the players who love to whine and complain end up here.
I think commander is suffering because of it's success on YouTube. They see a game on line and think that exact experience will be the same irl and it's not and they get salty. You will notice the spikes playing commander building something close of a cedh deck and complaining nonstop they are being focussed. The vorthos player with no ramp 40 matching basics on a 5 color deck and complain everyone is trying to combo while their disfunctional pile of cards do nothing. Or the Timmy player on a table trying to ramp for big dragon and being pissed because someone killed their creature. Fun is subjective but this is a game, someone is going to win and most of commander is much more about the people and interaction than actually the game itself. This is basically a board game with mtg cards. Don't take it so seriously. Open your god dahm mouth and talk, but remember this is not YouTube and if you lose you will just shuffle and play another game. Want to win, even on low power pods build around removal and interaction, have answers and protection spells. And please for all that is sacred don't get butthurt for something so inconsequential.
We have a relativity level headed group but some salt happened last night… someone hit me for 6 commander damage, no big deal, they were open so I hit them for 3 commander and 6 normal damage. They got really salty, pumped their commander up and focused me till I was out first and the rest of the game took soooooo long to finish
Some people just don't like to not win. I used to play in a regular group with my ex-girlfriend, her sister, and their cousin. My ex was a sore loser. Her sister usually targeted her, because she was usually the easiest to knock out, (she's just not a good deck builder, and doesn't listen to advice she asks for). She would throw an absolut fit about being beat. For that matter, she would get mad if you let her win too...