What do you do to get yourself motivated to build something again?
I don't typically brew for Legacy, I'm content to just netdeck and make, ah, budget-sensitive substitutions :) When it comes to EDH though I enjoy thematic deckbuilding as opposed to Good-Stuff lists, and lately it seems like I've been doing this thing where I get stoked about a new legend, buy a couple of the cards around it in its colors, and then realize that (a) not sure about the theme of the deck, or (b) realize it's just turning into a pile of jank, and I let the cards languish in my binder.
It could just be all the shit I have going on in life - everything I'm doing vs. everything I wish I were doing vs. the stuff I keep putting off - but my willingness to sit down with my cards and even so much as improve old lists or build new ones has been waning a lot lately. Mad cycle, that, because I need to get out of my doldrum which typically means going and playing the Magic cards.
How fix, what do?
Originally Posted by Dissection
I usually build all my lists in an Excell spreadsheet before I pull or purchase any of the cards. It helps me stay disciplined about not splurging a ton of money on Magic stuff I won't end up using.
As for your decks:
Depending on where and with whom you play EDH, a jank deck night would be sweet. Tell everyone to bring a general they haven't played before and make some shitty deck around them (maybe put a cap on the number of staples they can run) and voila, you have a craptastic evening of fun. Pauper EDH (only commons main, any uncommon creature as the commander) is another good one.
If you're playing at a FLGS where corralling a bunch of nerds into your pet project will be difficult at best, you can always just set challenges for yourself. Play a different commander every week, only build the deck the night before, and set yourself a strict budget on new purchases. Building at the last minute tends to keep the "But what if I did it this way..." dissatisfaction blues at bay since you're less likely to start brooding on the possibilities. Alternately, buy one of the precons and evolve it over time, giving yourself a set weekly budget and a set number of cards you can change every week. A low number - say, five per week - plus the longer time frame is good at forcing you to think through your plans and consider specifics in a way that from-scratch list building often buries. Finally, you can pick a general and solicit theme suggestions from the local crowd, or open a partially completed - say, you've only filled 66% of the nonland slots - to the masses; that at least means that if you end up with a deck you don't like, you can blame someone else!
I've been in the same place lately with my deck building. I want something new to play, but all I end up with is a pile of 40 cards or so before I decide the deck is too powerful and/or too janky and end up moving on. It was during one of these sessions where I had an idea - I spend all this time and effort trying to build "fair" decks that are also fun while my opponents show up with some mixture of tuned lists and 99 card piles of crap. Instead of trying to fit in with that, why not build a deck that's only as good as the other decks at the table? The idea took hold for the first time in a long time, and the Dragonlord Silumgar list I posted a few days ago is the result.
If I may gush for a minute, the beauty of the thing is that it never plays the same game twice. There's no "oops, I win" combo to tutor for, so you're essentially trying to cobble together a win with whatever your opponents brought to the table. I've also been finding that there's a lot less salt when I do win a game, mostly because people can't really be mad at you for beating them with their own cards.
I'm not trying to say build my deck or whatever, but maybe just consider approaching the game from a different angle. If you're used to playing stompy, try a combo deck. Maybe you've never run a graveyard-centric strategy, or group hug. The longer I play this game, and especially this format, the more I want to win with "bad" cards, and by extension "bad" decks. Any moron can entwine a Tooth and Nail for the win, but can you get there off of an unblocked Sphinx Ambassador and Memory Plunder?
Maybe your answer is to borrow a deck from a friend for a week or two. See the decisions other people make, and hopefully get inspired that way?
At the moment I am collecting cards and scouring Gatherer to build a/
Chaos Group Hug deck. It's a similar idea as Davran's, but random. I have no intention to do Norin the Wary/Confusion in the Ranks-style abusable stuff. But I think resolving Illicit Auction and Goblin Game will make me happy every time I get to do it.
Not to derail this thread too far, but I'm very interested in where you end up with this. I've been trying to put together something like what you're describing with Basandra, Battle Seraph at the helm because I really like the idea of making people attack (some of our games tend to be very long because people just durdle), but I keep doing the whole "40 cards then quit" thing with it.At the moment I am collecting cards and scouring Gatherer to build a
I also wanted to say that I recently stuck Illicit Auction into my Diaochan deck and I've been absolutely loving it. You might also look into Mage's Contest, which is on my short list for things to pick up next time I order cards.
I had never actually seen Illicit Auction until you mentioned it in your Diaochan thread!
It'll get it's own thread eventually, but this might also act as inspiration for Tsumi.
I'm leaning more towards Iroas, God of Victory. His devotion requirement makes it harder to make enemies at the table early on. And if I ever get in a good position to steal a win, his static abilities help with that.
So far the group hug pieces are:
Tempt with Vengeance
Alliance of Arms
Oath of Lieges
Oath of Mages
and probably some Howling Mine style card draw.
I don't intend to have any generic sweepers. I'm looking for conditional effects that let me greatly influence the board state without resetting it:
Council's Judgment
Coercive Portal
March of Souls
Fell the Mighty
Balancing Act
Razia's Purification
Grenzo's Rebuttal
And of course Chaos cards:
Chaos Warp
Teferi's Puzzle Box
Possibility Storm
Confusion in the Ranks
Illicit Auction
Thieves' Auction
Goblin Game
Warp World
Scrambleverse
To bind it all together I'm going with a token theme.
Skullclamp
Goblin Bombardment
Purphoros, God of the Forge
Heliod, God of the Sun
Young Pyromancer
Monastery Mentor
Rise of the Hobgoblins
Assemble the Legion
I'm still very much thinking through what I want to include. I'm trying to avoid cards that combo to make feel-bad or boring games.
I think you might need to reconsider that card. It fits thematically with the whole chaos bit, but it also takes absolute eternity to resolve and has a high "feel bad" potential. Try Risky Move instead. Similar effect, less time to actually deal with, and more "chaosy" in general.
The biggest issue I foresee with Thieves' Auction is keeping the ownership of cards clear once the game is over. This will be awkward if 2 players use similar decks or have the same color sleeves.
It seems easy enough to resolve the effect on most board states, although I suppose a 4-sided dice would help. I'll know the fate of this card after playing it a few times. It's either fun or it isn't.
Have you resolved the card? What happened?
Also, I'm trying to avoid coin-flipping. I like chaos and randomization, but not chance.
I'm not sure if this is question is intended to be EDH-centric, but I've tried making my own multiplayer format. If you want to tweak the rules of magic to try to stop some of the boring things from happening, I think it's essential to be the sole owner of all decks being played with. That way you can just say, "Hey guys, I want to try this out, here's a deck," and for the most part you can just start playing. Asking everyone to make decks with certain restrictions or goals is a lot of effort.
Anyway, I'll just say what my goals were and what I did to try to solve them. These gave me ideas/rules to follow when building a set of multiplayer decks.
1. Multiplayer is boring because leaving your creatures up to block is better than attacking one of your multiple opponents and leaving yourself open to the multi-swing.
For this I changed the rules of the game. At the start of each of your turns, except turn 1, if you were not attacked by an opponent, you get a *card counter*. Anyone who successfully hits a player who has a *card counter* during an attack with a creature gets to draw a card. The player taking the damage from the attack removes a *card counter* (Down to 0 if they only had 1). If the player had multiple *card counters*, you get to draw 1 card for every creature you hit them with (not every damage you did, and not every creature you attacked with if they got blocked), up to the total number of *card counters* that player had. The defending player then removes that number of counters.
Deckbuilding change:
This rule changes magic completely, and more than I originally thought, but it's really fun. Tokens/weenie decks are actually much more powerful because they can effectively replace themselves. This also incentivizes attacking into players who have more creatures later on, as those players will have more *card counters* up for grabs. This makes life totals consistently go down throughout the course of a game, as everyone wants to draw more cards.
2. Multiplayer can get boring if you always are playing with the same cards/deck.
This is debatable, but I really didn't want to have to put more time into building/rebuilding decks every couple weeks to keep games from getting stale. I made another rule to try to mix things up. I made 5 mono-colored decks, and everyone picks one to start with (if you have less than 5 people, you just leave the others in the middle of the table). You can payat any time during your turn to trade decks with any other deck. They each have different sleeves, each colored deck has that sleeve color to make it easy. It doesn't matter if cards get mixed up or if you can see what color cards the opponent has in their hand, there's too much going on anyway.
The decks are themed so that this makes sense. Red has every chaos effect in the game, along with Jokulhaups type things. Switch to red if you need a miracle to save you. White has tokens and weenies, and probably draws more cards than any other deck due to the *card counter* from part 1. Blue is blue, green is ramp + big stuff, and black has a lot of kill effects and cool old black cards before power creep made everything suck.
Lastly, to begin the game, everyone picks 3 basic lands of their choice of colors and puts them in their hand. Then you draw 4 cards of whatever deck is yours to get up to 7 and start playing as usual. This is to make Mulligans obsolete, and allow everyone an easy switch into 1-2 other decks to fix their weaknesses.
3. Fun games are all about having fun cards to play with. I hate planeswalkers, for example, unless I'm playing in a tournament. Finding fun cards isn't too hard but I also used every unhinged/unglued card that looked fun. That makes my 60 card decks roughly 70% unglued/unhinged wacky cards. I also bought a bunch of those white proxy cards and had a few friends and myself make up other fun cards. Here are some I'm proud of.
"Blowmaggeddon" 3W Sorcery
Each player inhales. Then everyone blows on the table until they are out of their one breath. Any card not remaining on the table is destroyed.
"Meow" 1W Instant
Put a 1/1 cat creature token into play. Whenever another player says a word that rhymes with "Meow" you may cast Meow from your graveyard without paying its mana cost if you shout "MEOW!"
Not so funny meow is it?
"Nooooope" UUU Enchantment
Whenever an opponent casts a spell, pretend to counter it or you must sacrifice Nooooope.
Sacrifice Nooooope: Counter target spell.
You don't even have a card in your hand...
"Still got all deez" 0 Instant
Cast only at the end of a game.
Reveal your hand. For each card in it, each opponent starts the next game with a 0/1 Anger token that has "when this dies, lose 2 life."
Who needs friends when you're the best?
"Sir Charles" 3RB Legendary Creature 3/2
Haste, Trample, Flying
SLAM (Pay: Target flying creature loses flying for the rest of the game. Can only be used on one creature.)
I am not a role model.
"Heart of the Cards" 1RB Instant
Reveal the top card of your library, you may cast it until end of turn. It cannot be countered. All numbers on it aside from its casting cost are multiplied by 5.
Anyway, I'm not really trying to get other people to play this format, I'm just trying to throw the idea out there that you can make up a magic format however you want, and can usually get people to play if you have enough decks to hand out. Heck, you could build 2 decks from 1999 grand prix championships and just play those 2 for a while with a friend, I did that and it was fun. I've also never thought EDH was fun, so take that into consideration with my message.
Make magic fun. Because honestly I don't think wotc design team has been headed in that direction for the last 5+ years...
You don't need a die because there isn't anything random about the effect.It seems easy enough to resolve the effect on most board states, although I suppose a 4-sided dice would help. I'll know the fate of this card after playing it a few times. It's either fun or it isn't.
Each player just takes turns choosing the permanents they want.
I do think it's an interesting effect and have seen it used a handful of times but I do share some of the concern about end-of-game logistics. (If you're playing with 4 or less people and none of them seem shady then this is probably not an issue)
Knowledge Pool is probably my favourite type of card for this 'wacky, yet strategic' category
I haven't ever resolved one because it seems like a nightmare. I don't know how games go wherever you're playing, but around here on turn 8+ there's easily 20+ permanents in play. The whole "each player chooses" bit would cause plenty of the newer people we play with to go deep in the tank once all of the "good" stuff has been taken, too.
What do you mean?! Everyone loves attacking with random 4/4 dorks and hates stack interaction! Just ask the dev team... /s
Joking aside, the reason I like EDH more than any other format is because it is fun. It's nice to be able to come up with some wacky concept list and try to get there vs. the other 3 guys at the table. Searching through people's decks with Sphinx Ambassador triggers and outsmarting them with what I chose is the most fun I've had playing this game in years.
I think a lot of the problems people have with the format come from trying too hard to win. I've been there, built those decks, and lost to them plenty of times too. It gets really stale really fast. Try brewing up something crazy instead. Jam that Mindleech Mass into the red zone even if it is strictly worse that the Grave Titan you could be playing instead. Try and ultimate Tibalt because who could ever say they actually managed to pull it off and win? That's the stuff that's fun, not comboing off with Sharuum for the 100,000th time in the same way as every other try-hard with his first EDH deck.
If you want inspiration, take a look at all the janky mythic rares they print that never see competitive play and build around some of those. Friends getting too competitive? Slam a Possibility Storm on to the table and bring them back to your level. Like getting there with creatures? I hear Minotaur tribal is a thing now...plus how can you lose with a Didgeridoo in play?! Everyone knows Homelands had the most broken cards in it...right?
At the end of the day fun is in the eye of the beholder which makes this whole discussion kind of pointless.
I've joined games on cockatrice labelled 'casual/fun' and been kicked for casting Possibility Storm.
Well there's your problem...
I agree though, different people find "fun" in different ways. The point I'm trying to make is that it's easy to spend way too much effort building a stack of 99 good cards when what you should be doing is building a stack of 99 fun cards, some or all of which also happen to be good. If you're really lucky, your play group will think they're fun too.
Really? This is such a dumb comment. Here's a thread that says "guys, I'm in a deckbuilding slump, any ideas to get out of it?" and when people respond with how to make deckbuilding fun again you just say "fun is in the eye of the beholder which makes this whole discussion kind of pointless." The only pointless comment in here is this one. Man, I usually let stuff like this go on forums, but really?
Except that Kiwi wasn't responding to Tsumi's request for help. Kiwi was very specifically responding to the comment from Davran quoted in his post.
Davran said "If your group is too competitive, play Possibility Storm to make it fun."
Kiwi said "I did that once and got booted from the game. Fun to you is not fun to all."
Compared to:
Tsumi said "I want to brew EDH, but my motivation is gone. How fix?"
Phoenix replied "I made up my own format! Try that."
(Not to imply your response was dumb! Just that it didn't apply to Tsumi's question about EDH.)
Although I do agree with Phoenix that Kiwi's obvious statement is obvious and doesn't productively move the conversation along. But by that point the thread had already derailed into a discussion of 'fun' chaos/random cards instead of how to get out of an EDH deckbuilding slump...
Seeing as I am mostly responsible for the derail, I'm going to try to re-focus the thread.
If the need to brew or build hits me, I embrace it. I have never 'gotten myself motivated' to enjoy my hobby... If you are finding you have to get motivated to enjoy your hobby, maybe it is time for a break?
Commit to you crap-pile!! Anyone building an EDH deck starts out with a crap-pile the first time around. After weeks/months of playing with it and making substitutions, you will end up with something enjoyable (if that is your focus). You've got to see the idea through. But I suggest seeing it through on paper first to make sure the idea has enough support to fill 99 cards.
I highly recommend Davran's suggestion of borrowing a friend's deck for now.
Yeah
I was more trying to emphasize the fact that the OP is basically saying "Guys I don't know what is fun".
We can't really tell him what is fun, he has to figure that out for himself, because his idea of fun (also his opponent's idea of fun) is not something that we can objectively determine.
I can agree with the idea of either a) Taking a break or b) Not focusing on deckbuilding and just playing the games, I think borrowing other people's decks is a fine suggestion
Well this thread got crazy. lol
Guys, kidding, I think I'm just going to sell my Magic cards and play Hearthstone. Kidding again!! Fooled you - I hate selling Magic cards, I'm just going to buy Duel Decks and trick them out.
I did get some good ideas from many people -- I think the "fun is relative" conversation is a red herring, I wasn't really asking about that so much as just how to maybe get my head in a more different creative space. Like fun is... whatever, it's a residue of design AFAICT. I stopped having fun playing Sedris when I put in multiple 2-card infinite combos like Mike-Trike and DENchron, mostly because players would just concede and I didn't find that fun, I felt like a shithead. So I took them out and now I actually have different lines of play besides "get good 2-cards with all these killer UB tutors and Gamble", and that to me is good because now I'm not just goldfishing. I can handle the fun aspect myself, I just needed input on like, how to good yourselves out of just looking at your pile of cards and going "know what, fuck this, i'm gonna go drink some milk or something"
I can only share my experience, but after coming up to a decade I've been through that too. I usually stem my inspiration not so much in the new... but the old vintage. I'll usually stumble about some theme, lets say Spike Weaver, "Spikes" and Forgotten Ancient in my trade book, I'll then start to brainstorm around that like "...all right, maybe I could run in Kraj, I could throw in Graft and mix in Thrumming Bird and things the synergize with counters".
I usually try to find old vintagey commanders and try to find a way to make them work. One great example was a B/R Boris Devilboon (minor demons ftw! I even had some cute demon tokens for it) and I made that into a Stax-like deck with a bunch of Threaten and Backlash/Delerium and Sudden Impact cards to chip players out too, I found that a lot of fun. Also gave me a chance to run all 3 Gauntlets I own and Recruiter, I usually just look for an excuse to use cards lol.
Another deck I've made recently was mono Red, I ALWAYS wanted to run Eron the Relentless and I wanted to make a viable mono red deck with burn in it. I decided my theme was just gonna' be burn control with tons of annoying "Ball Lightning" hasteys like Thunderblust and Elemental Appeal... the deck just sits back and plays safe, then finds an oppening and just rekts them with some 28/1 haste trample elemental or General. Eron's there to just be really annoying to kill, he resists a lot of removal and many sweeps and is really obnoxious for them todeal with. Basically, he lives up to his name lol.
May your suffering equal your weakness--Ihsan's Shade
This is basically the gist of EDH from my point of view.
Just sucks there's always that one guy that thinks winning the game is the only way to have fun playing it, and every time he loses his advantage, he scoops it up like clockwork and wants to start another game. Maybe he'll get bored with Jenara as his commander, it's not like the game is different every time he does win. Counterspells and Voltron. In contrast, another guy has General Tazri (5 color Allies) and I'm currently building Ayli in a police/pressure style deck. I was using Shattergang, then Kaalia, then Alesha... I consider it a slump as I've lost most ambition to continue.
Edit: wow... Didn't notice the necro...
We've got some players like that every once in a while. One person's solution to winning too many times in a row with one deck is to switch to another which has an even faster and harder to disrupt combo in it. The other players will literally take out their phones or have some sort of side conversation while she's comboing out or tutoring for some combo piece, and she still can't take the hint that no one other than her is having any fun. Heaven forbid you actually do have disruption though. Then you're a garbage person who obviously slotted whatever staple card into your deck just to beat her. It gets pretty old.
I'm in a bit of a slump right now myself, but I think it's more to do with the boring legendary creatures coming out of WotC lately. They're either so incredibly obvious that the deck builds itself, or their so incredibly terrible that there's really no point to even trying. I'm hoping that the RGWU guys in C16 will live up to the list I cooked up for them...otherwise I really don't know what to be inspired by anymore.
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