sambeastie

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Asking them to bring precons sounds good. UT at least two of the people in that group don't even own any precons. For them, the deckbuilding is the fun part, so they'd just as well not play than run someone else's deck.

I think trying to proxy something more powerful is the last chance here, and if I still don't "get" commander after that, I'll probably just throw the towel in and do something else when they break out the commander decks.

Another friend (not in this pod) pointed out that it's for cards you love, a commander youre dying to build around, etc, so if you have to ask where the fun is, it's not the format for you, and I guess I get that.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

I've been thinking about your comment and I started to wonder if maybe the politics is what's actually keeping me from enjoying the format. I've tried some of that but I get swung at anyway, often because I'm the least dangerous/easiest to attack at any given moment (no blockers, no reach, etc). Even as much as I point to the Muldrotha and say "hey I've played that deck and none of you have targeted that player, it could get wild" it never seems to work. If I'm bad at the political game, maybe the rest of the game just kind of crumbles around me? I hear these stories of people "not looking like a threat" but when i try to do the same I think it looks more like I'm a soft target.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

I will definitely proxy those and test out this version of the deck next time we play. And if it feels better, I'll get the real ones.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

Hm...we may be onto something, then...

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago (3 children)

We tried that early on, where I'd get stuck, show my hand and they'd go "oh..." I think part of it is that my luck might just be really bad, and the first precon I picked up on my own is apparently really quite terrible, so that didn't help either. On board wipes, it's not that I have much of an issue with them, it's just that so far they seem to only come right before I'm able to do something, and it's incredibly frustrating to have never had an opportunity to actually affect the game. Although by the sound of it, maybe that's actually normal? The very mean part of me wants to put together 99 cards worth of board wipes, targeted removal, land destruction, stun counters, you name it and take an "If I can't play, nobody can" approach. But that'd be very very un-fun for everyone else, so I shan't.

Just for completeness' sake and to hopefully give context to what the rest of the group is playing, I tried to remember what card caused the Pantlaza situation, and it appears to have been Expropriate. Stuff on that order is what I'd consider normal for the power level here. Lots of things that can destroy one's chance of playing in a single turn.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

I'll take a look, but I do wonder if maybe Prosper just isn't resonating with me and I should just look elsewhere.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (5 children)

There's some incredulity that there's nothing I can do or have no answers in hand, and then encouragement to stay in because there somehow might be a comeback when I've missed 4 land drops and none of my mana rocks have come out. Or similar. I think there's a certain amount of feelsbad that commander is not catching with me, or how often in collateral damage in such a way that I don't actuality get to play even though I'm technically in the game. Probably a little over half the games so far have resulted in that.

Just this weekend I played the Pantlaza deck and it got removed early, I played it again and started building up a board, then the next turn it and the rest of my creatures got sent back to my hand, then I had to discard half of them for hand limit, and one I finally got it back out again, someone could either take it or get an extra turn. That deck basically ceases to function without its commander, so I waited another hour and a half being completely unable to affect the game state at all. In hindsight, I should've scooped to deny that player the resources. After 3 consecutive turns, they didn't even win!

But yeah it's not about winning, it's about sitting there bored out of my skull not being able to affect the game. At this moment I would rather play any other format because commander has been unbelievably boring in every one of the dozen plus games I've tried.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (4 children)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago (12 children)

Any tips on that then? I really don't want to spend more than $15-20 tops (although I realize this is impossible hecause of shipping, so I guess as little as possible will have to do) and it has to function without the commander (which seems to defeat the purpose of the format but whatever) because no matter who I've played, it just gets removed to the point where the tax makes it unplayable (Kess, Muldrotha, Pantlaza, Prosper, Hakbal...several more).

Also maybe you can answer, what happens when you are technically not dead (>0 life) but can't take any useful actions? Friends seem upset when I say I'm ready to scoop, but I'm also not interested in sitting there for another hour not being able to play. I guess they want my life total to stay for damage triggers maybe? Or they think someone can come back from an empty hand and a recent board wipe?

 

Still another rekative newcomer question, sorry!

I've finally started finding my footing in draft a little bit, and I've found some cool unofficial formats that I've enjoyed deck building for, but this is something that's stuck in my craw a little bit for a while and I'm curious what my options are.

My friends all play EDH, so if I want a casual game I have to play that. They have a number of decks I've been able to borrow, and I did buy a precon I saw at a toy show (Prosper, Tome Bound -- Planar Portal), but so far, I've just not really found the fun, and I'm wondering what I'm missing.

The main problem is that during each of these games, I wind up mostly sitting there waiting to play the game. Not just hecause of long turn times (although when someone has a lot of triggers, that is a factor), but also due to my commander getting instantly removed, or having little in hand to play, or someone having only flyers and my not having any kind of protection or removal in hand...ever. Maybe my luck is phenomenally bad, but I mostly sit there with a near empty board after a couple board wipes or targeted removal or just...well I assume my precon must just be kind of bad because i wind up with a bunch of treasure tokens and nothing to spend them on. In short, for almost any game, my turns have been draw > land > pass, with an occasional play > removed/countered > pass. I've thought about trying to buy a different precon or maybe finding a budget deck list on edhrec and buying that, but I'm hesitant to spend more money on a format I haven't really enjoyed or even gotten to actually play in so far.

So I guess I'm looking for advice. Have I just been playing the wrong decks? Is it because I'm bad at the game (Only about 2 years in, so this seems plausible)? Is it something else? What do I have to do to enjoy it?

What I've been enjoying is Primordial. I got the group to try it but I can tell it's not going to replace or even really augment EDH as their social format. But I dont want to be completely locked out of the social angle with my friends, so I'm determined to find a way to have fun with commander and get into it with them.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

Yeah I probably should've asked for advice, but I knew while assembling the deck that all my picks were garbage. Plus I was intimidated by being the only one there who didn't already know someone else, so the anxiety took over and I didn't do a whole lot of talking. The first opponent might have helped me out a little, he seemed pretty nice. The last two were a little scary tbh haha.

And yeah this group had 24 I think. Funny thing is that this is the small shop nearby me. It just happens to have high ceilings so every sound on the floor is amplified.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago

Ah that sounds nice. Makes me wish anyone played Jumpstart. Cracking a couple of those in a similar way to your Pauper decks would've probably kept my energy up after a terrible round!

 

Hey all!

Went to my second draft ever last night (first was 12 or 13 years ago) and had studied up on Aetherdrift since I'd asked about the event and was told it's pretty much always just drafting whatever the latest set was.

When I got there, though, it turned out the regulars wanted to do a chaos draft, so I ended up trying to make a deck out of everything currently standard legal. Needless to say, this went incredibly poorly for a relative newcomer like me and I ended up going 0-3 (as expected, I assumed I'd lose since drafting is hard, even for experienced players).

After the first match, though, it was pretty clear that this was going nowhere, and the space was a bit louder than anticipated and I could feel myself getting exhausted pretty early. While I finished out the evening playing all 3 matches to completion, I was wondering what the ettiquite around dropping early actually is. Is it OK to bow out if it's clear that my picks were trash and there's no chance? Or if not, can I just let my opponents for matches 2 and 3 know that it'll be pretty one sided and preemptively concede so they don't have to waste any time on rolling me? Or is it expected to just take the lumps and play through the whole thing?

It would be different if I thought I could put up a fight even if I lost every game, but I was having trouble getting any amount of damage through, or impacting board state at all. So the whole thing just felt like I was wasting my opponent's time.

So yeah, just hoping for an ettiquite lesson. Not rules (I know I can technically drop any time for any reason if I let the TO know), but the social angle.

 

Not counting the Steam Deck, since KDE isn't actually turned on while you're running games.

Normally I'm a Gnome guy, but I'm building a tiny low power portable computer and wanting to keep resource utilization low, so I'm investigating other options.

 

Hi all,

As the title, I'm looking for an adventure module that hits on similar notes to a Soulsborne game. The kind of crumbling dying world aeshetic, mixed with misty forests and long (possibly perpetual) nights and vague hints at factions or individuals from a time before. You know. Soulsy stuff. King's Field counts too, even though those games are quite different, since the worlds they portray have similar aeshetics.

I've found Vermis I, which I'm very excited to (hopefully soon) get a copy of so that I can finally actually read it, but as you might imagine, this is kind of a difficult thing to formulate search terms for. There are a lot of people who try to capture these games' mechanics, but seemingly not so many that I could find trying to capture their worldbuilding.

System compatibility doesn't matter, since I plan to just mine it for ideas

 

I've never actually run any of the old modules like Keep on the Borderlands or anything like that. I'm much more used to homebrewing a setting entirely or at most grabbing a few elements from a published adventure (I took a bunch from Willow, for example). I think this is why most of my favorite systems tend to be more in the NSR camp; I just never end up needing compatibility with older material.

Is running retro adventures in their entirety the most common practice for OSR tables? Or is the homebrew approach how most people are doing it?

 

I posted that I've been working on my own system (as probably a lot of OSR fans have), but this post isn't really about that so much. As I've been working, there's a nagging voice in my head that keeps asking "does the world really need another system?"

And that got me thinking, with the massive breadth of options from hardcore retroclones to modernized reinterpretations, does the world need another system? Is there a more useful or needed thing I could be spending my writing time on?

So I guess my question to the group is whether you're tired of seeing new systems. If you are, what would you rather see? Dungeon anthologies? Old school modules? Micro-settings? Something else?

Personally, I like new systems that either add something fresh, or just rearrange a bunch of existing systems into something that takes aspects of all of them (more what mine is), but I could also do to see more collections of small hexcrawls, zines full of one-page dungeons to drop into a game, or even things like Vermis I, just fun lore books or micro fictions that I can draw inspiration from.

So how about you?

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