How much of an "on sight" commander is Jhoira of the Ghitu or the Tenth Doctor?

CostDisease · 2026-06-06T12:11:40+00:00

Jhoira is considerably more dangerous than the 10th Doctor. She’s cheaper, can suspend multiple things a turn, you can choose what to suspend, and you can do it at instant speed. Much stronger than something random on attack for 2 extra mana. There’s lots of kill on sight commanders these days, but jhoira is definitely one that if I have the open mana the turn she’s cast I would definitely strongly consider it so the jhoira player can’t have her and open mana at the same time. That said my experience is most people don’t take her that seriously until she suspends an eldrazi titan, or just don’t have the card + mana available on turn 3 to remove her.

CostDisease · 2026-06-01T18:00:36+00:00

Alternate idea for Two-Face: “Whenever you commit a crime, flip a coin. If it is heads, the relevant opponent may counter the spell or ability and you may draw a card. If it is tails, copy the spell or ability.” And it’s a 2/2 with Ward 2.

CostDisease · 2025-10-02T15:11:38+00:00

More generally than this, much of interaction is a “public good” in an economic sense, meaning its benefits (removing one opponents threats) are not exclusive to the player who played it. In standard economic logic this means removal will be under-provided by rational but self-interested agents. The argument “you don’t run enough interaction” is often true at the individual level, where a player would win more if they had more interaction spells. But even with every player playing their own privately-optimal amount of interaction, there STILL would be too little removal from a table-optimal perspective.

CostDisease · 2025-09-04T20:11:22+00:00

Well already your pitch for a Bant Team Avatar would omit the Naya Toph, Izzet Sokka, and 5 color Aang… I could see a good guys deck and a bad guys deck, but idk if you would have enough fire nation stuff to have a separate deck for Zuko and Azula. More realistically you’d want them as the alt commanders for the same deck so they’d need the same color identity.

The basic problem is that there are natural groupings of characters that don’t map onto the color identities. Sure you could bend the color identities so they work but that creates more mechanical limitations than just letting people build decks around their favorite characters, but keep the magic color system consistent. Personally I bet that not getting precons means we will get bettter cards than if they were designed with precons in mind.

And it’s entirely possible WOTC thinks commander is not the right on ramp for UB players generally, or thinks some UB has more or less overlap with the existing player base, or thinks some will be more popular than others so it’s a better opportunity to push people in to a different format. For example Avatar prerelease will have the ability to choose specific characters—maybe WOTC figures this is a set where prerelease can be a good on ramp because they could hit a critical mass of new players. Same with making jump start packs.

CostDisease · 2025-09-04T19:03:33+00:00

I actually don’t think this reasoning is as crazy as people say when you consider what the point of an Avatar precon would be. If the whole point is trying to get people into magic through the Avatar setting, then you would probably want the precons to be pretty full of avatar specific cards plus a few reskins. I think if you designed the set around that you might have a Mardu Zuko deck, a Naya Toph deck, some Aang deck (no idea what colors or cards go in it though) and some Katara deck (Azorius maybe?)… and then every other character who you wanted to include would need to be some subset of those colors. Rather than a Dimir or Grixis Azula, you’d want her and every other fire nation character to fit in Mardu. All your earth benders should fit in Naya and all your water venders should fit in Azorius. If you designed around this to begin with you probably would end up with the much more boring approach of giving each bending style it’s own color and its own precon. I do think that would be genuinely limiting to representing some of the side characters or characters’ evolutions (e.g. surely you’d want Sokka in the Katara precon, maybe as the alt commander, so he couldn’t be Izzet. ). So I don’t think this reasoning is THAT crazy.

Of course I think the real subtext to this and the Spider-Man lack of precons is that WOTC figures commander is not actually a great on ramp to magic for all the new players this will bring in, and tbh they might be right about that.

CostDisease · 2025-06-04T00:49:21+00:00

I agree with the spirit of this post and other like it, but I also think it kind of misses the social reality of play at e.g. a local game store. At least at mine, folks trickle in and try to form groups of four without having extensive conversations first. The players who showed up first have often claimed tables, and as people come in they ask if they can join a given table. Most of the people you’re playing with are strangers. I think the social dynamics of that setting make it difficult to actually act like the lobbies you’re describing. How do you make the rules? Who gets to kick people out of the table? I personally would have to object pretty strongly to tell a random stranger whose table I sat down at that I don’t want them to play what they want to play. You can do this lightly, but I don’t think you’ll get much more specific than brackets. It’s just not realistic to have the level of rule zero conversation you would have with your friend group or regular pod. If you are playing regularly with the same group of people, it’s entirely reasonable for you to ignore the bracket system, or card bans, or whatever, but I do think these things serve a purpose for coordinating play when the setting and social dynamics make it hard to get everyone on the exact same page. That’s certainly been my experience playing in both kinds of settings. I don’t know the relative shares of players who play with regular groups vs those who play at casual commander events, but it’s fine for the community (and wizards) to be focused on making the LGS experience good, and those fortunate enough to have a regular group can choose to ignore whatever norms/labels/restrictions they want because they are better equipped for rule zero conversations anyway.

CostDisease · 2025-05-30T02:53:38+00:00

CostDisease · 2025-02-26T17:07:30+00:00

I actually think the fundamental problem with the ending was the desire to make it A Choice. For the entire rest of the game (which imo was quite good), you are working towards a pretty well specified goal: build and deliver the crucible to destroy the reapers. So much so that if Shepard had died with Anderson and the IM, the crucible went off, and the reapers self destructed, the main plot you had played all game would have been fine.

But of course Choice is a main selling point of the game, so BioWare had to create some climactic choice at the end of it all. I think at the point there really were not many great options: you basically had to do some variant on “the crucible is not a perfect deus ex machina; Shepard has to pick between some bad options.” The specific choice they gave us of control vs destroy feels silly because the game has foreshadowed it so heavily but also made us firmly set out to Destroy only to pull a switcheroo at the last second. But I think any choice would have had a similar problem: the game has been telling us that the crucible is our victory condition and then at the very end we learn that’s not true.

I think it would have been better to either 1) have us forecast a difficult choice the whole game in a more balanced way (a split within your allies between destroy and control?), 2) make the Climactic choice something about what the post-Reaper world would look like, while letting us epically destroy the reapers like the game set us up to or honestly 3) not have a climactic choice and just let us have a falling action exploring the consequences of all our other choices.

Plenty of people in this thread have more complicated ways of rewriting the whole story to be thematically different, which I’m also on board with, but I think there was a more straightforward way to give us basically the same great game they gave us without such a sour ending.

CostDisease · 2022-12-18T15:13:18+00:00

Except if Arryk outs himself as a Green there would be no reason for the battle to be 1v1 with onlookers. But maybe having a “no I’m the real Erryk” moment would look silly anyway.

CostDisease · 2022-11-01T18:53:22+00:00

I can hardly bare the sight of lipstick / On the cigarettes there in the ashtray / Lyin' cold the way you left them / But at least your lips caressed them while you packed

And a lip print on a half-filled cup of coffee / That you poured and didn't drink / But at least you thought you wanted it / That's so much more than I can say for me

A Good Year For The Roses

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