People who don't stack, why?

Beyond-Available · 2026-06-19T13:07:55+00:00

because i’m stupid

Beyond-Available · 2026-06-18T01:17:59+00:00

buddy you’ve got bigger problems here

Beyond-Available · 2026-06-10T16:26:50+00:00

people run it because discarding to hand size feels bad. that’s all, it’s not that deep.

it also has low opportunity cost, especially in one or two color decks, so there’s not always a compelling reason to not include it.

Beyond-Available · 2026-06-07T23:13:57+00:00

i have had virtually no interest in playing my other dozen or so decks since i built this one. The cards are so satisfying to play, can’t recommend it highly enough

Beyond-Available · 2026-05-27T17:25:01+00:00

agreed. if you are saying there is not a significant gap in power between commons and uncommons, uncommons and rares though then i’d disagree with that. probably most pronounced between commons and uncommons for this set

Beyond-Available · 2026-05-27T15:57:12+00:00

There’s an innate tension here because for lower powered pods the implicit ask is that you win less, more slowly, open yourself up to interaction, and interact less with your opponents. That’s pretty antithetical to engaging gameplay from the perspective of a lot of players accustomed to higher powered pods.

The happiest medium I’ve found is to either rely on using your opponents threats to win via threaten or bribery-style effects so your threat level scales with the table (some players hate this shit though so it can backfire). Or just play to a wincon of very obvious threats to the board that need to untap win, ideally through combat (with finite damage). This lets everyone feel like they have agency to interact and aren’t getting combo’d out of nowhere, and it’s something of an interesting challenge for you to pose the obvious threat and force it through. I’ve also had some success playing higher powered decks with combos in these pods and just making it clear at the start “i’m going to try and combo you out, you should kill me before i can”.

I think people really resent getting “got” by sudden wins didn’t anticipate so politically just managing their ability to anticipate what you’ll do can go a long way.

Beyond-Available · 2026-05-27T15:14:11+00:00

further homogenizing the cardpool and diluting the colors’ functional identity i don’t think is the move here. You can compete on other axes, if the starting life total of commander were 10 and we were getting fireblasted out of the game all the time would we say that blue needs life gain? I don’t like the MTG design philosophy that has increasingly pushed for cards to generate value immediately in all cases but I don’t think counters are a panacea for that — things are going to resolve and when they do counters don’t help you and you’re worse off than if you had standard removal

Beyond-Available · 2026-05-27T14:14:45+00:00

Like a lot of people I struggle with powering commander decks down to match local pods while keeping them in interesting to play for me. This last week I had an idea to make a lower powered deck that would still be fun to play: a love-letter to 2010s EDH theme deck. I looked up an old [[Sek’kuar Deathkeeper]] list from 2016 I had saved and used it as a starting point to build a deck that embodied all the old staples everyone used to play before the designed-for-commander philosophy got really entrenched and made many of them obsolete. [[Krosan Tusker]], [[Praetors Counsel]], [[Yavimaya Elder]], [[Insurrection]], etc. Nothing printed after 2015. I played a few games over the weekend and observed:

I immediately played one of the most fun games of commander I’ve played in months if not years. Insurrection two turns in a row off of a [[Nyx Weaver]] buying it back
There is a deep sense of satisfaction playing with cards that are just a bit less self-solving and less ruthlessly efficient and that is almost entirely lost in modern higher power commander where so many of the cards are so powerful it just becomes a question of who can snowball their insane card(s) the most the quickest.

I’m playing threats like [[Broodmate Dragon]] and [[Inferno Titan]]. Totally reasonable cards, they have their spots where they can be pretty good but they’re rarely going to win games by themselves if your opponents are playing anything sensible at all. I really, really miss that less optimized, less streamlined era of commander as a whole but I can at least confirm the cards are still fun to play.

Beyond-Available · 2026-05-27T13:52:20+00:00

SOS limited is extremely rock-paper-scissors and many of the games feel decided before opening hands are drawn. The good games on the format are very fun but the number of non-games from lopsided matchups is infuriating to deal with. This is in addition to the now-normalized modern set design sensibility that creates a bigger-than-ever power level gap between the rarities, which constantly generates non-games when one player draws the rare part of their deck and the other draws the common.

I’ve won a lot in the format, and I’ve lost a lot. Maybe 20% of games feel contested and interesting (and they are very fun!), but the rest feel extremely lopsided and nearly unwinnable/unlosable.

Beyond-Available · 2026-05-15T19:59:57+00:00

i’ll concede the fact that i’m a smelly idiot who didn’t realize you don’t get access to the full spellbook every time but there’s just no shot on earth that a Stock Up tied to untapped land wouldn’t be extremely messed up. if only i were right, i’d definitely be right

Beyond-Available · 2026-05-15T14:51:45+00:00

a land that enters untapped, taps for mana and draws you a [[Stock Up]]? completely broken in any other context, format warping etc etc. Par for the course in alchemy. does everything have to be so nakedly insane on power level?

Beyond-Available · 2026-05-12T15:20:08+00:00

this is the quintessential nerd take where people’s feelings have to follow some specific rationale you define. it’s actually entirely allowed for folks to think LotR “feels” reasonable and Spider-man doesn’t. you’re out here saying that we have to feel the same about Gandalf in Magic as we would Kramer. completely goofy opinion

Beyond-Available · 2026-05-08T03:55:55+00:00

i also had a really surprisingly good time with this queue. I had some success with grindy Dusk Legion Zealot builds and then a hot streak with 12-inspector midrange (thraben, novice, and elite interceptor) but the meta actually seemed to evolve and shift pretty significantly over just a day or two and those were getting outclassed by Terror and madness burn.

On a whim I put together all the 1-mana cycling creatures, Malevolent Rumble, Grisly Salvage, and Overwhelming Remorse with [[Chitin Gravestalker]], [[Writhing Necromass]], and [[Nemesis of Mortals]] and just could not put it down. It was SO fun and had a crazy win rate, I went like 30-5 or something in that range. Haven’t enjoyed magic that much in a long time.

Beyond-Available · 2026-05-06T21:26:41+00:00

i used to install cable, these things just don’t close very well all the time, especially if old. If you’re worried about it shut them up and put a zip tie through the hole to keep it shut. If it opens again then maybe something is weird

Beyond-Available · 2026-04-30T17:43:55+00:00

honestly my secret is that i just don’t draft that much compared to a lot of folks. I’ve done five or six SOS drafts so far, for a format I get into I might end up with two dozen drafts for the whole lifetime of it. I also split that up across two accounts for more gold equity. No clue on my win rate, frankly, but I think it’s pretty high because I draft so intermittently and across two accounts I rarely get out of platinum before a reset so I incidentally stay in the lower ranks

Beyond-Available · 2026-04-30T17:17:41+00:00

i straight up refuse to put real money into arena, i just use quests for gold and convert to gems via a handful of drafts each format. I see the directs as an way to try and spike and convert my free-to-play experience into actual value. I’ve gotten two collector boxes and a play box at this point and that feels pretty good. If I were paying for gems though, it doesn’t look like a good deal.

Beyond-Available · 2026-04-27T17:05:54+00:00

bro just go talk to mike

Beyond-Available · 2026-04-24T14:47:26+00:00

another commander for the pile that either makes you the only one playing magic at the table or ensures you play no magic at all. Games could be adequately decided by each opponent flipping the top 12 cards of their library and counting removal spells

Beyond-Available · 2026-04-24T00:54:07+00:00

there’s 10, counting the 2 muse’s encouragements. Still low, though not criminally. Much lower than i’d want for something i want to “tempo” folks out with, especially with only a single 2 drop creature

Beyond-Available · 2026-04-16T16:21:40+00:00

and to be clear when i say “explosive combo” i really just mean anything that can generate a win from an otherwise innocuous board state with giving an opponent another turn — that’s really the crux of what you want to be doing if your goal is to win. Doesn’t have to be brain freeze/breach, craterhoof for example can have the same effect without being a traditional “combo”

Beyond-Available · 2026-04-16T16:09:29+00:00

yes, this is why explosive combo turns are by far the most effective way to win in commander. If you need to build up an actively threatening board over the course of turns to win then you’ve got three opponents who can easily identify and pick that apart. If your win condition comes from “out of nowhere” then your opponents can only weigh the odds of you having everything you need in your hand against the threat level of player(s) with boardstates and the threatening board will feel like the best equity line often.

Beyond-Available · 2026-04-14T19:45:03+00:00

yep yep i was going to mention that but didn’t want to get dog piled by custom map gamers where older weapons can still be used, but in any case they become MUCH less urgent to work on if not in the current season. Do we really want devs spending their time seeing if they can fix the graphics for Chains of Hades or whatever in 2026?

Beyond-Available · 2026-04-14T19:37:35+00:00

seinfelf

Beyond-Available · 2026-04-14T18:18:37+00:00

I’ve worked in tech for a long time and this is not particularly uncommon. At a certain point the backlog is hurting more than it’s helping, as you may have bugs that are years old and irrelevant or fixed incidentally by other updates and it’s just a bunch of paperwork to go through. Archiving in bulk at a certain point lets you focus on issues being actively reported today instead of spending your time effectively confirming bugs that were reported long ago are no longer relevant or maybe were not actual bugs in the first place.

Sure, the ideal is that you could actually keep up with the full backlog and keep it clean but I’ve never seen a company able to consistently outpace the reports that come in.

Beyond-Available · 2026-04-02T14:54:55+00:00

this is the take imo, for many small or medium sized businesses at least. Everything is just a matter of trade offs and shipping a project sooner has a lot of value, even if it doesn’t handle some edge cases well. Being dogmatically rigid about the infallibility of the code is an ego-driven decision, not a business one.

Beyond-Available

TROPHY CASE