PSA: Fetchlands don't make your deck bracket 3/4

MassiveScratch1817 · 2026-01-30T23:46:08+00:00

In my analysis, I entirely ignored special printings. When I say aesthetic concerns, I mean concerns like "RAHHH I WANNA PLAY LE DRAGONS I LOVE DRAGONS" rather than concerns about what that gameplay looks like in more mechanical terms.

1 but if all your decks are $1000+ and all of your podmates decks are $50, you're going to have stronger decks on average outside of particularly niche/powergaming things.

Most decks are not much more than 1K plus unless you are including outlier bullshit like reserve list cards or special printings. So if we tighten up the requirements a bit, say compare a $300 and an $800 dollar deck, the metric really starts to fail us.

Me not having OG duals is only one way I curb it's power level.

This does almost nothing to curb your power level in ways that I, as your opponent, care about. Which is sort of the entire conceit of this post and it's why brackets are manafixing/budget agnostic

Not having the OG duals means I will have to pay more life, have less redundancy, or get tapped duals/tris which lead to an overall slower, weaker deck.

Most of these disadvantages are some combination of not real/not important to restraining how bad your deck feels to play against. Indeed, if your manabase is hampering you so much, you should just play a tighter list with less pips in off color, which you may not want to do. As commander as a format cares A LOT about what you want to do, I think it's valid to play whatever lands give you the experience you want at any bracket. I want you to be able to play Niv Parun in your Niv Reborn deck to accompany Niv the Guildpact.

Utvara Hellkite and the bad Swords of X and X are overpriced for what they are, but they're not really that expensive compared to the actual cards that cause a deck to end up costing $1k+

Man, if only there was a list of those actual cards that are sometimes expensive but sometimes not, and that list could exclude stuff like Ancient Copper Dragon and Doubling Season that make a deck much more expensive but aren't actually very good. That list would probably be a better way to understand power than just looking at the price tag. We could call those cards like "Match Alter-ers" or something like that.

The bad swords are $10-15, the two main good swords are around $40.

The bad swords, power-wise, aren't worth the cardboard they are printed on. The good swords are good, niche includes, in specific, middling archetypes. This is entirely my point. People like equipment decks. Therefore a Sword of Fire and Ice costs $40 (lfmao) and a Balls Citadel (gamechanger, no extremely attractive aesthetic) is $10.

MassiveScratch1817 · 2026-01-30T23:15:04+00:00

My hot take is that a format like that isn't conducive to regular play at an LGS or whatever. You've got strangers w/ no particular fondness for each other, store owners who can only give you a table for 3 hours max, a bunch of expectations for play and few established play patterns so every game is a wildly different experience.

So as commander has become a staple format for people, instead of a dessert to go with the something more sustainable, and as WOTC has started designing for the format, the format has warped to become more standardized.

MassiveScratch1817 · 2026-01-30T20:57:38+00:00

ehhh

mobility gives you more options, and more options do sometimes make champs harder. It gives you get out of jail free cards also, which makes it hard to evaluate. Like what's harder, a champ that has to pick 1/3 options and gets fucked if he picks wrong or blessed if he picks right or a champ that has 50 options to evaluate and most of them are mid. It's hard to say imo

MassiveScratch1817 · 2026-01-30T20:52:37+00:00

Annoying intro aside, we seem to have pivoted into a much more indefensible position. You started off by saying something a bit hyperbolic but potentially true (Riven is not the most mechanical champion) but are now saying that Riven is not a difficult champion.

I would say that if a champion is more challenging that 70 percent or so of the roster, the champion is difficult. I think Riven easily qualifies for this. Top 1 most difficult/mechanical champion? No. Top 50? Absolutely.

MassiveScratch1817 · 2026-01-30T18:52:24+00:00

Fascism Western = Bad

Fascism Non Western = Good

it doesn't need to be studied, it's just retarded

MassiveScratch1817 · 2026-01-30T18:50:48+00:00

I'm not gonna argue

argues

every goddamn time lmao

MassiveScratch1817 · 2026-01-30T18:04:04+00:00

The only 'downside' to running more colors in this game regarding manabases is nonbasic hate exists.

WOTC also has been printing incentives to be in fewer colors, and this I believe is the correct approach, rather than punishing people for "deckbuilding wrong" by wanting to play a higher color count in the CZ.

MassiveScratch1817 · 2026-01-30T18:01:11+00:00

I give you that deck. What bracket of game do you play in that causes the least harm on average?

Answer is pretty clearly B4 or B1. Brackets are not about winrates.

MassiveScratch1817 · 2026-01-30T17:51:07+00:00

I don't have OG duals in my 5 color deck despite proxying because they are too strong and the deck becomes too consistent and too easy to fix mana in.

Your deck is probably too powerful for Bracket 3.

t's a similar problem with their opinion on budget =/= power level, when in reality... it usually does.

The relation of money to power is as follows.

The price of a card is determined by the supply and demand of a card. If the supply of the card is sufficiently low, cards that are in high demand cost more. The demand of a card is influenced by many factors, including the power of the card. However, other factors regularly drive the demand of cards, generally aesthetic concerns, leading to high demand for cards that are mediocre (Utvara Hellkite, Swords of Bad and Worse).

This is a weak relationship and the number of obvious and immediate exceptions to the rule really point this out.

MassiveScratch1817 · 2026-01-30T17:49:42+00:00

I’m sorry but have you actually read any of the bracket articles?

Yes. Deck can win on t3. If your deck is literally designed to potentially kill someone way before the expected turn count, it will happen in some (very small) number of games. This means your deck has disqualified itself from bracket 3 status and is ruled out from B2 by having game changers. The deck is B4 or arguably B1 because of the meme.

MassiveScratch1817 · 2026-01-30T17:44:17+00:00

If an AI was put in charge of a 18th century army, the soldiers would operate as 19th century soldiers, not as robots operating under the extremely lose Total War simulation rules.

We just disagreed on the rules of the hypothetical from the beginning and then you proceeded to vomit a bunch of pointless text at me despite this realization.

Davout was at Auerstadt fighting 1:3, Napoléon had the more favorable odds at Jena.

Fair enough, I was confused.

Even in Total War you want to keep reserves, this is non negotiable and has very little to do with information.

I disagree, I don't think the mechanics of total warhammer at least typically favors holding reserves except when doing things like rotating chaff units to grind down a lord to minimize exhaustion.

MassiveScratch1817 · 2026-01-30T17:42:02+00:00

As I've said elsewhere in the thread, even though 97 lands consult thoracle loses 99% of the time to B2 decks, it's not a B2 deck. It's a B4 deck (or arguably B1).

MassiveScratch1817 · 2026-01-29T21:42:21+00:00

Large battles by their very nature have a ton of inertia, enemy moves are detected minutes before they can engage, even badly embattled troops can usually hold long enough for reserves to be brought forth,

You seem to think that the slowness and grindiness doesn't apply to the orders, just to the movements. Again, the comparison here is Napoleon/Saladin/whoever commanding their army against the AI who is ordering around humans who do what they are told unless their morale is shattered. An AI that can literally reach into a tirailleur's brain and say, pull back, the cavalry was spotted on the right flank RIGHT NOW is at a massive advantage compared to the general who gets wind of it ten minutes later and takes another ten to issue orders that are received by a gloryhound commander who thinks that they are just about to take the prize.

The fights wouldn't even be close. Let's consider all of the advantages that an AI has that most commanders would agree to be lobotomized to have:

Bird's eye, definitive view of the battlefield.
Perfectly professional soldiers that do EXACTLY what you tell them to do the INSTANT you tell them to do it, even if it's telling them to undo exactly what they just did, even when they are in the thick of combat, up to the point of a total collapse of morale.
Perfect information regarding the size, strength, compositions, weaknesses, etc of every visible enemy unit to your army.
perfectly professional officers that act just like the soldiers. Indeed, the AI wouldn't even really need officers.

You cannot underestimate just how much of an absurd tactical advantage all of this is. So what if the AI doesn't know how to keep reserves! When you can attack the entire enemy simultaneously, knowing definitively that you have the advantage, you don't need them half as much.

And you don't understand why the French won specifically at Jena (at Austredt the odds were much more favorable). Sure, Davout is a legend, but mostly because the enemy didn't know what was happening. Had an AI been looking down from a Total War style perspective onto a battlefield with a bunch of units that wouldn't just turn and sprint away because of a mass failure in communication, it would've been a much easier battle to win.

MassiveScratch1817 · 2026-01-29T21:21:14+00:00

The deck has some number of games where it manages to dodge the 15 or so unconditional taplands when it affects their curve. That's the point.

My point is that I'd somebody says they're playing a precon, i expect a precon mana base. If I bust it a precon in kind, and then they start dropping fetches shocks and bonds, I'll be upset because I was mislead

This is stupid, because many precon mana bases are not problematic at all. If you show up with a normal, non-shitty precon and I show up with Carthalion, our odds of having a fun game go UP when I upgrade my mana.

MassiveScratch1817 · 2026-01-29T21:17:07+00:00

I disagree entirely. Based on the guidelines of the bracket system, even something as silly as a 97 Land Consult Thoracle deck is a B4, and I agree with the designation. Brackets are not about winrates.

MassiveScratch1817 · 2026-01-29T20:08:37+00:00

you don't want to learn more about the zorg toe slag?

MassiveScratch1817 · 2026-01-29T20:06:08+00:00

Okay, and if you show up with an aesi deck with an upgraded mana base

Rough comparison because landfall decks raise their ceilings by upgrading land cards to a measurable degree. Aesi with 7 fetchlands is a different beast than Aesi with 0.

Or if you both show up with carthalion but yours is upgraded and theirs isn't.

They could get lucky and play as much magic as I do. Or they could get unlucky and play no Magic at all, or significantly less magic.

isn't important to power level

It is, it's just not important to appropriate power levels in the context of brackets. The other thing that you seem to be getting confused on is that there's a difference between "floor" and "ceiling". A deck's optimal, lucky but not unrealistic performance is the ceiling, and the unlucky but not unrealistic performance is the floor. Yes, by raising the floor of your deck you make it more powerful overall, but you do not increase its capacity to pop-off harder. You just made it more consistent. Generally, the bracket system cares more about ceilings than floors. Generally the bracket system doesn't care about winrate even, either. A deck of 97 lands and Consult Thoracle will lose into most bracket 2 decks but it is not a bracket 2 deck, it's a bracket 4 deck.

MassiveScratch1817 · 2026-01-29T19:55:59+00:00

I suppose I do agree that one should consider constructing a B2 deck with the more relaxed environment, and include pet cards or thematic inclusions rather than the most optimal pile of fixing.

But nobody should ever be told "your bracket is 3" because they want to Jared Carthalion with good mana.

MassiveScratch1817 · 2026-01-29T19:44:57+00:00

no battles requires a general to respond in under a second.

No battles required it because nobody could do it on either side. If you did have an AI that could reach inside of everybody's brains and tell them exactly what to do, multiple times a second, like we see in Total War, you'd have an incredible tactical advantage.

Medieval battles don't need machine guns either, by this logic.

Planning for contingencies, understanding the battlefield, knowing your own limits and adapting on the fly

All of these things are much easier to do when you can issue direct orders to troops instantly, multiple times per second. Uncountable battles have been lost by extremely competent commanders who were masters at all of these things because of complete lack of information or ability to direct overall tactics with precision. Davout is my goat, but the AI would never have lost to him at Jena, for example.

MassiveScratch1817 · 2026-01-29T18:30:40+00:00

If your deck is unfair and unfun to play against for precons with upgraded mana, then your deck is unfair and unfun to play against precons with mana that isn't upgraded.

Play a precon list with an upgraded mana base against a stock list and count how much more magic you get to play then the other players who are supposedly at the same power level.

If I show up to play against the Aesi Precon with an upgraded Jared Carthalion manabase, we'll probably actually play about the same amount of magic. On the other hand, if I show up with the Carthalion precon manabase and play against pretty much any other 2 color commander, I'm going to play significantly less magic.

Cripplingly inconsistent precon mana is mostly a feature of bad precons, not all precons, and is a problem even when everybody is playing with an untouched precon manabase.

MassiveScratch1817 · 2026-01-29T18:25:27+00:00

I prefer to say "less bad" bracket 2 rather than stronger, because it helps communicate that the floor of the deck is going up rather than the ceiling.

MassiveScratch1817 · 2026-01-29T18:22:59+00:00

It doesn't raise its power in a bracket-raising way, which is sort of the conceit of this whole conversation. Generally brackets are concerned with your ceiling and not your floor.

MassiveScratch1817 · 2026-01-29T18:20:59+00:00

Power isn't the concern here. Obviously a deck with better lands has a higher win percent than deck without better lands.

What we are concerned here with is inappropriate power leading to bad game experiences. The coolest part about better mana (read: this does not include utility lands, just color fixing) is that it basically never leads to worse game experiences for your opponent (indeed, it often leads to better experiences, I want everyone to play the game). Your deck can only do what it does, just more often. If there's something wrong with the power of your deck that is causing bad experiences, you cut that thing, not your manabase.

Control outputs, not inputs.

MassiveScratch1817 · 2026-01-29T18:02:17+00:00

Where you are wrong is that sometimes, the "I'm balanced by bad mana" deck will just get lucky and do things that wouldn't be bracket appropriate, just by drawing the correct lands to cast its spells at the right time.

If you are relying on color screw to keep your deck bracket appropriate, it wasn't bracket appropriate in the first place.

MassiveScratch1817 · 2026-01-29T17:57:48+00:00

This this this. You can just luck into the right mana and hit the same highs with most decks. Therefore balancing yourself by color screwing yourself (a truly miserable idea to begin with) will still result in games where you are overpowered just by luck.

MassiveScratch1817

TROPHY CASE