I like to think each one of them is on a sine wave of good and bad takes, but they're all slightly off-phase from each other which is what makes this podcast great to watch
@@zackkelley2940 They’re not saying it’s not a board wipe because it has a targeted mode, they’re saying it’s not a board wipe because it bounces things, which isn’t a permanent solution. They had the same take on Unsummon. I agree that single-target bounce spells aren’t good enough to be considered removal, because the opponent can replay that one thing on their next turn and then they’re back to normal. But mass bounce spells are definitely board wipes, because they reset the board, and opponents won’t be able to get everything you bounced back down in one turn. And maybe they’ll even have to discard some of it to hand size. It buys time, which is what board wipes are supposed to do.
I get that it's goldfish and all, but every time I hear someone call Richard the fish father, I can't help but think the cod father would sound amazing
It’s more that’s it’s one sided removal too as most blue decks aren’t board heavy and your opponents also loses lose all there tokens which in commander is often a lot.
The strongest part of ramp is that it has a guaranteed/reliable payoff in the command zone. Ramp's weakness in 60 card formats is not having the payoff at the right time. Having a 3 cmc commander makes playing 6-7 1 cmc mana dorks a much more powerful inclusion in the deck. Or having a 4 cmc commander out on turn 3 because of 2 cmc mana rocks. Having that guaranteed playoff takes so much risk away when committing to mana ramp (in any form)
Thank you! Adding the letter ranks made things either very cluttered or very small, but adding just the symbols felt like the sweet spot :) EDIT: Only now did I realize I should've put the category titles at the top of the screen and not have them disappear, oops :(
I loved that part. Also, he got Seth to say artifact removal was less important and then got him to say green is very good because it has artifact removal.
This episode is basically an excuse for us to talk about the strengths and weaknesses of each color. Our rankings are meant to be generalized and based on our experienced power level (mid-power). Obviously there's far more factors, most notably the actual commander choice; if someone ranks Blue lower than Green that doesn't mean they think a Blue deck led by Urza is weaker than a Green deck led by Autumn Willow. CEDH is its own beast and the weight of each category would be totally different -- countermagic would be more important for example -- and not reflected in our rankings.
@@anthonymcclellan6256 I didn't check steal cards assuming there were too expensive mana wise for my deck, ty for the tip off. thats amazing. theres a white one that destroys an enchantment and then every other enchantment with that name for if you're the one player st the group without the money for them or haven't proxied them, also a 2 drop.
@@matthewdevey8878 is that the one where you can exile stuff when you draw? if so I just have a hard time seeing that being allowed to stick around if you can even resolve it. I considered adding it to my value engine deck but it seemed like it would pull ALL of the aggro. edit: idk why I chose to Google after and confirm I was talking about a different card.
Blue being the worst makes sense for lower powered combat based metas where combo is frowned upon, but at tables where people jam the best staples of each color blue may be the best. I only play against randoms in LGSs and am always way more worried about the mono blue deck than the mono green deck. There is a wide range of power levels between the average Commander Clash deck and CEDH, which I don’t play, and saying blue is the worst color broadly in EDH is bizarre.
What color is the best in a vacuum like this vs what color you're scared of at the table is a completely different question, though. Most of what they were looking at in this video was interaction, which outside of counterspells blue has a hard time with and counterspells are generally inefficient in multiplayer formats. Green has arguably the best noncreature removal and can shore up the creature removal with fights which are often quite cheap. The reason you're often scared of the mono blue deck has to do with the way they win rather than the strength of the deck. Mono green decks will pump out creatures and smack you with them and at any time you can wrath or murder a key creature and the deck will usually fall flat on it's face. Blue will pull some uninteractable combo and unless you have a counterspell ready you just lose. Wincons weren't really talked about at all this video, just generic cards like interaction so they don't factor into the ratings. Also most people I see running mono-blue decks are running decks that are much higher power than most of the rest of the table; borderline cedh with tons of fast mana and undercosted/free counterspells.
@@robertweavill2072 there were also issues with how they defined categories. For example; while blue ramp does rely heavily on artifacts, it is also the color that can take the best advantage of those artifacts. I’m sure we’ve all seen blue decks copy and/or untap their Thran dynamos and sol rings loads of times, which is a uniquely blue form of ramp that went totally unappreciated. Board wipes is another spot where as a mono blue player it’s much easier to keep the board clear of lethal threats with cards like cyclonic rift, evacuation, scourge of fleets, etc. while setting up a kill than if I’m the red or green player. Yes it’s largely a tempo play as they can recast their cards, but honestly a hard wrath can be making life easier for the reanimator deck to recover faster too, so there are comparable trade offs. A lot of the arguments made against blue in this video seemed to almost purposefully look past how blue decks actually operate in the wild. It is laughable to think red should be ranked higher than blue in single target removal just because chaos warp exists when blue has a huge catalogue of single target answers to pretty much anything from bouncing (too many to list) to destroying (pongify and rapid hybridization ) to transforming (imprisoned in the moon and frogify) to freezing (Frost Titan like effects) to exiling (Raven form and resculpt). If we’re exclusively talking metas where attacking with creatures is the only real path to victory, then sure blue is lacking in this category, but I’ve personally been killed much more by blue sun’s zenith x=100000 than by a craterhoof in random lgs games. It’s not just randomly vomiting out a combo that wins blue games, it wins because of it’s all around strength in the format.
@@robertweavill2072 yup, I also play with random rotating tables at my lgs and the blue and green decks are always afraid of the other in my experience. Creature players are worried about getting countered or combod and control/combo players are worried about dying before they can set up
@@frosty980 even in metas where attacking is the only path to victory, blue can be absolutely terrifying. Blue has the most flyers, and the most straight up unblockable creatures. Sure, they are usually low to the ground, but they also usually have payoffs for actually hitting. I've killed more people with Tetsuko than I have with Feather.
(Replying to the original comment) But the point is, blue decks have to go for a combo finish because they don't have other options that are as strong as the other colours. So if you're looking at what the colours have to offer in a vacuum, blue does very poorly on many metrics. That's what the commander clash crew identified here. What WotC could do is give blue more means to push towards a win then decks would exist that aren't combo and have a proper chance of fitting into low-mid power games.
Blue’s transformation removal is severely underrated. Frogifying a commander is great. Killing a commander with spot removal is card disadvantage. You lose a card in hand and they can still recast the commander. But if you frogify the commander, then they spend a removal on the enchantment, that was one-one interaction.
What blue removal is enchantment based? Pongify, kills and leaves an extra body behind. Turn to frog, only causes the creature to become a 1/1 and, lose abilities until the next turn.
@@thomasjacobs4919 there is an card called “Frogify” from throne of Eldraine. Turn to Frog is from magic origins and yeah I think that is a really bad card
Only problem with those effects is that they are sorcery speed. They do not protect you from combos and some commanders gain so much advantage even if they have them for one turn like the korvolds and chulanes that if you don't counter them or instant speed remove them it will be a minor inconvenience to them at worst.
Honestly, Tomer is schooling them all on Blue's removal ranking. I commented on the last podcast that if I'm building a Dimir or U/B/x deck, I'm putting in Blue's spot removal over black's. It's just more efficient, and can kill artifacts. Seriously underrated.
Agreed, though black has creatures with removal etbs it can make use of. But instant/sorcery wise, Black has one S (Deadly Rolick) and a bunch of B/Cs, while U has like 4 As and a B. And you only want so much spot removal.
@@NoNo-qt4ov I think most people are playing spot removal in Commander wrong. If they're using it to kill a Bird or something, than yeah, it's bad. But you can't do those 1-for-1's in Commander. You have to save it for game-ending threats.
@@brningpyre definitely agree. I have a Mizzix deck and it was vital that I save my Spot removal and Counterspells towards the end. Most people I see use them pretty quickly and on things that are technically strong but not worth wasting a spot removal at
@@MasterDoctorBenji Debatable. I personally run a good bit of removal depending on the deck I play. But I definitely agree there is such thing as too much targeted removal
@@NoNo-qt4ov when you run more removal and keep playing with the same playgroup, eventually they stop running removal and rely on you. Richard would rather run 6 birds and dousing dagger and lose than be the "police". After all he is playing with Seth, and he is never paying the 1.
I feel like blues interaction is a bit undervalued here, and black is a bit overvalued in that sense. Pongify is strictly better removal cost wise than most of blacks removal, raven form hits artifacts and creatures, bounce spells hit almost anything and can end up timewalking someone, etc... still think blue is lacking a bit in regards to diverse playstyles and options for "fair decks", but I dont think its nearly as bad as people seem to make it out to be either.
I am definitely most scared of mono blue player at the table, because they're either Storm, an artifact combo deck, or a Laboratory Maniac/Thassa's Oracle combo deck lol I'm beginning to realize just how influenced the CC Crew are by how infrequently they play two-card or even three-card combos as a primary win condition. I think that, more than anything, is the driver of ideas like "mono blue is weak" and "spot removal is overrated." When you don't have to worry about your opponents comboing off at all, it definitely skews the metagame and what cards are worth playing or not worth playing
Plus bounce synergizes with countermagic to be a permanent solution. Often you don't need to permanently remove something anyways. If you bounce something extremely threatening they're forced to recast it on their next turn. You can often effectively take away an entire turn since recasting most big threats is expensive, *and* it keeps a target on their back distracting the rest of the table. Also many threats are assembled. If you bounce a creature that has accrued a threatening number of +1/+1 counters, auras, or non-repeatable until end of effects, it often does not return as anything similar.
@@timbombadil4046 If you’re bouncing a creature, you’re usually taking _two_ turns away from them, because they’ll have to recast it next turn, and then wait another whole turn to be able to attack with it.
Richard arguing that Red has better spot removal than Black is wild, LOL. I feel like their group in general really underplays Indestructible creatures. Every other table I've played at ALWAYS has at least one ind. creature or other permanent on the table.
There's just also a ton of cards that are good exile based removal for black, like deadly rollick and baleful mastery and sacrifice effects also are very effective.
The other guys are massively underrating bouncing creatures. Tempo is as important as card advantage, especially in a multiplayer game like this. Having even one big blocker bounced back to your hand often means becoming vulnerable to 3 rounds of attacks before you can recast it.
@@andyspendlove1019 blue has the best reactionary removal. Its just not permanent. But pongifying chulane after its cast breaks the loops and sets them behind. Dispersing smothering tithe before the opponent draws removes 4 or more (7 on average)mana and invalidates turns. Unsummoning an urdragon removes eminence even if it was brought out by hellkite courser. Blue is above average. At everything.
Blue is the single best color at dealing with literally all threats. It has the game's best board wipe, the largest number of spot removal spells, the hardest removal to avoid, and the most aggressively costed removal. These guys created the categories to manufacture a ranking that seems legit if you don't actually pay attention. They separated all of the categories into "blue" and then "this card type, except when it's blue those don't count".
The more i listen to this podcast the more i belive this guys don't play enough islands and manarocks. Bouncing may not be a permanent solution but the fact that you get very cheap ones, instant speed ones and creatures attached ones. Makes blue amazing at keeping the board clean. The only real problem blue has in casual is closing out games, cause u want to stay away from combos so you are left with few, subpar, options. Also you are severely underrating mono black powerlevel.
Exactly. Blue had amazing interaction, but has limited win cons outside of comboing out. Blue is probably the best secondary color. It protects your stuff, slows down opponents, and has great cantrips for digging.
Weird to me Richard and Seth don't consider Cyclonic Rift as mass removal. Is literally removes everything on the board. Especially if you do it before someone's end step and then they have to discard to hand size. Its insane
@@joshuasnyder4101 They definitely have the chance to replay. But I mean as long as you do it on someone's end step and your turn is next, I assume you're going to hit them from anywhere to half their health or all of it since they have nothing. Plus I mean unless their deck is all ETBs they're going to have to spend another turn replaying everything which I think gives you plenty of time to win. Plus again, if you do it at the main threats end step they will most likely half to discard a lot of their stuff
@@joshuasnyder4101 but you're forcing them to spend mana on that thing again. Bounce is a tempo hit, and in alot of cases it is removal. Snap is one of the best removal cards that people aren't playing enough
to be fair choas warp can lead toward your opponent doesn't get anything valuble if the top card of there library is a land or a non permament spell. Meanwhile Tibalt will always hit a spell for your opponent to be able to cast.
Crim: Edict effects are not "spot" removal--they don't deal with specific threats, all else being equal. Tomer's right on Blue, it has multiple, efficient, instant speed creature removal. I'd say it's above Red--which just has chaos warp+good artifact removal--and maybe even Black. Seth is too hung up on permanently removing. Yes exile>destroy>bounce, but Rift still resets everyone else's tempo, and gets rid of tokens and counters as a bonus. Everyone has to rebuild using their mana and hand. Sounds like a boardwipe to me. Richard: ...3-4 removal spells?
But Crim's examples are Edicts that deal with the *strongest* Threat. Make an example in particular always hit the exact card you want it to, at the very least.
great pod! way late obvs, but for unique/strengths of each color i like: White - lifegain, auras/equips, enchantment focus, stax, protection, go wide, flying, blink, small creatures Blue - copying stuff, storm, flying, extra turns, artifact focus, blink, stax, mill Black - sacrifice, graveyard focus, discard Red - storm, copying stuff, artifact focus, burn, go wide, combat focus/extra combats, land destruction, stax, discard Green - +1/+1 counters, enchantment focus, go wide, protection, graveyard focus
This has been a super interesting exploration of each color by itself, though I'd be curious how your answers would have shaped out if you'd ranked each color pair and wedge as well. I'll bet you'd find that a lot of color combinations that include blue end up on higher on that list.
Well, unless your opponents have a reliquary tower or similar effect granting no maximum hand size, a cyclonic rift will be getting rid of most of the permanents bounced with it, since they won't have the mana to replay everything on their next turn and will have to discard down to 7 cards in hand.
@@P3rs3cutr0ll Niche in the sense that it has narrower targets than generic counterspells that hit everything. This is why a card like Essence Scatter, also niche, does not generally see play. Also, I'd argue that the "best counterspell" for the format would hit more targets i.e. Counterspell/FoW/Counterspell. Not bad for non-blue though. It'd likely see more play if people knew about it.
I’d really like to see a ranking of the best two colour pairings. I think it would be a really interesting podcast that has a lot of connections to this one.
I kind of think they are undervaluing a lot of the things blue can do, especially artifact synergies essentially giving it ramp and recursion rivaling green.
I think blues color identity is unique in that it lets blue "bend the core rules of magic". So it interacts on the stack, it messes with extra upkeeps, extra turns, it mills cards, it has alterante winconditions based on number of cards in hand (artemsis, omniscience in some sense) or in library (jace, thassa's oracle, labman). It also has cool alternate wincons related to its mastery over artefacts (mechanical production, phyrexian vs mirrodin enchantment thingy). I think expanding this, and possibly the sphinxes as blues core multiplayer identity could be a good way of 'pushing' blue for commander, without breaking it in other formats and maybe even without making i obnoxious. I think adding more counterspells is not the way to buff blue for casual, and giving it ramp would indeed make it very unfun in casual, and break the pie which is not good imo. Give me more cards that give me weird extra phases (extra untap steps, extra end steps, extra end of combat step, whatever, bend those rules, skip steps of opponent turns, phase things in/out; interact with exile if you really want, more knowledge is power themed alternate wincons, for example if you have more cards in hand then all your opponents combined, you win)
I personally consider bounce as removal, that being said, this view only stems from the amount of graveyard recursion that every color has now. Eerie Ultimatum works when you do get board-wiped, but not if you get bounced.
Lightning Bolt is so underrated in commander. The format has gotten smaller and faster these days. Archon of Emeria, Hushbringer, Drannith Magistrate... so many problematic creatures can be delt with with a bolt.
In my opinion, counter magic is spot removal, and because of this blue is an S in spot removal. I know y’all had a separate category for counter magic, but I wouldn’t separate that from spot removal.
Yeah, have come to see it as temporally rather than categorically limited removal. Shatter can only destroy artifacts, counterspell can only remove a threat while it's on the stack.
Isn’t it kinda bad removal because it requires you to respond first? Like opponent A casts a blightsteel and I have a path to exile in hand. You counter it, and I still have my path in hand. In a way, when you use them for removal instead of saving the game, you’re priority bullying yourself in a way, since you are responding at the first possible second instead of the last possible. That’s why i personally don’t like counterspells as removal, I like them for saving my board/the game
For board wipes it's WBU(R/G tied) White is amazing. Black is good but only hits creatures. Blue has full board bounce (can redeploy but that's a whole turn wasted to end up less than where they were) Red and Green have good removal but it's limited in the number of cards that are worth playing to wipe.
I consider bounce removal. With how easy it is to get anything back from the yard I dont see it as a whole lot worse than destroying creatures. Don't get me wrong, it is worse but destroying a creature is not even close to permanent.
37:48 Cyc Rift is absolutely a board wipe. Your opponents are often discarding some of the things that got bounced, so all the stuff that they discard was permanently removed. And none of them are attacking you next turn.
Blue isn't a low tier for spot removal any more, it's got lots of exile vs creatures, cheap destroy vs creatures, and can even deal with artifacts reasonably well, all this ignoring it's access to bounce, so I feel like I'd order things thusly: W is S tier again for removal due to how many good options they have to deal with essentially any card type now, Sultai is at A Tier, with each having shortfalls in it's package, Red is probably C tier as it can remove creatures, planeswalkers, artifacts and even players with it's spells/effects, but most of them require a lot of resources to work effectively. Remember, Red can generate a ton of mana and use that to burn pretty big stuff, it's issue is that it can't readily exile creatures, so Red is hardly a slouch in this area, but it's not really above what you'd call 'average'. Black technically can remove artifacts, enchantments, creatures (it's 2nd best at this, White is just better except Deadly Rollick), planeswalkers and sometimes a player, which is honestly pretty good if you've got a high enough budget to afford the good removal. It's also worth noting that Blue's best 'spot removal' is actually just Counterspell, so it's not like Blue can't deal with almost every card for UU, a big part of why Blue is not a bad colour, but apparently we're putting that elsewhere. Green has tons of naturalize effects, lots of fight effects for creatures and planeswalkers, and it has some damage based wipes vs flyers (and rarely vs other targets technically)/targeted removal for flyers, as well as having various 'destroy literally any permanent' stuff, Desert Twister is probably playable in budget mono-green, and Beast Within is a top tier card. I would say creatures and planeswalkers are the weakest area of Green's removal, but it's naturalize stuff is actually better than what you get in White generally, Green also has cheap wipes for Artifacts and Enchantments. Huh, now Tomer brings up card theft as removal, I'm actually liking that point and I've listed it thusly, stealing stuff is making it 'not a problem anymore' usually, and often turns it into an asset for you. Blue also has some pretty big 'spot removal' effects, Mental Manipulation and Curse of the Swine can be a late game spell to swing a game, either can just devastate a board, especially in a Simic deck. Counter magic is clearly just 'Blue Removal', but okay, I'd tier is U at S, Boros at C, and Golgari at D. In other formats, you've got weird counters that can matter, but you don't run Meren in cEDH because of her sick interaction package IMHO, you'd run a Jeskai deck for that. Stack fiddling is biggest in U, but it's also present in Boros in some cases, part of why Jeskai spells decks are pretty solid inherently at very high levels, they can just interact with everything and control the board. I guess Green has stuff like Avoid Fate? Does that matter? Black has essentially nothing. I think I might agree with Richard that White has slightly better stack interaction, look at all those W Silence effects, along with various 'bad' mono-white counters like Memory Lapse, along with Rebuff the Wicked, it's not like W can't do stuff. You could even use Teferi's Protection as a sort of counter, more or less dodging an annoying (or worse) effect, and there is also Angel's Grace. Red has less, but it does have some. Maybe I'd say W is C+ and R is C-? I guess R does have stuff like Fork, and Pyroblast? Green is good at wiping flyers, artifacts and enchantments. Ezuri's Predation is hilarious, but I use Monstrous Onslaught to good effect in OG Multani, where I can play it and deal +20 damage as I see fit, which should result in a dead player due to them having no blockers left. If you remember that Green can easily Naturalize wipe, Green is probably a bit better than you're rating it. Anyways, W is S for wipes, R is A, Golgari is B, U is C. None of the colours are helpless here, but R is arguably the least narrow colour after W, which can just wipe anything period. U is the hardest to work with, but it's mass bounce isn't bad, and it also has big spot removal like Curse and Manipulation, but Green's numerous naturalize wipes along with it's bad solutions to creatures/planeswalkers are solidly better, but not generally more relevant in a Commander game than Black's access to several very good Wrath effects. Black does suffer a ton from versatility issues, but it can also force mass sacrifice potentially, which can win the game while dealing with some problem permanents, I think Black might be worse than Green if your meta actually cares about naturalize. Red is actively good at wiping artifacts, and it's not bad at clearing the board of most creatures, and it can also blow up lands, especially non-basics, but it also has Flashfire, Boil/Boiling Seas and Omen of Fire if you really hate Azorius. Red has damage wipes galore, both big, small and versatile, so Red can be very good at controlling a board with wipes. For uniqueness, I feel like it should be Grixis on top, Grixis gets access to all of the cards that are just ridiculous that aren't Shahrazad, they've since taken away some of the uniqueness of these colours, but White is not known for crazy/chaotic effects (it does have them I know, like mass removal that trickles permanents back into play), but chaotic effects are a viable strategy to actually win games in Grixis, you don't even need wincons, you can just steal theirs. Anyways, I'll rate as follows: R is probably A, Dimir is B, W is C and G is D. White has some unique stuff, but it's biggest features are just removing things (either one at a time or a bunch at a time) and hitting people with creatures, I guess Silence is pretty unique? Protection stuff in general I guess, but I think you should break Protection off into it's own area. Green is low on the uniqueness totem, with very few cards doing especially interesting things, often the Green card in a creature cycle's perk is being big and having Trample (more true historically I guess), with other colours getting actual abilities that are interesting, like First Strike or Flying or non-keyword stuff even, Green is super-boring but super-powerful. I don't think any of the colours are really S tier at this point, too much colour pie bleed has occurred, perhaps as I see more of the new sets (which seem pretty interesting, and offer more unique cards arguably) I'll bump one of them up. 'Can't lose the game' is 100% Protection. Black's unique stuff is literally just cards that are ridiculous, especially the crazy old enchantments from back in the day, Chains of Mephistopheles for example, effects that are not really part of the colour pie, and this is where Grixis in general shines, it's got lots of effects that aren't really 'on the colour pie' because they are so weird, and Red gets the most of these crazy Chaos effects. Land destruction is under Removal and Wipes btw, and yeah Red is probably the best at this, especially hosing the living shit out of the poor Blue players with Boil. I think if you didn't count it as removal, Blue has tons of theft effects for all manner of stuff, so that's crazy unique, other decks might get stuff out of the graveyard, but Blue can just take stuff. I think Dimir is pretty much 'you can do anything you want as long as it'll help you win', while Izzet is 'you can pretty much do anything, even cost yourself the game!', put them together to create crazy and memorable games. White is openly the least unique colour for the record, it's supposed to be the 'support' colour that helps fill gaps in your deck, being 'stand out' at few things.
For the strongest colour, it goes like this: U is S, being able to counter almost anything/bounce anything and remove lots of stuff make it an extremely strong colour, it also has various extremely weird stuff like Mana Vortex and 'bounce a thing if you do a thing' effects that can be much better than most White Stax in non-cEDH games, Blue also has access to flyers/evasive creatures and has the best payoffs arguably for hitting people, it's really rough taking on an entire pod if everyone is 'out to get you', Blue does require the most skill to play though, other than maybe White. White has the highest budget generally to compete, it is never especially easy to play do to it's numerous weaknesses. Black is a very viable mono-colour, and isn't as hard to master as Blue or White, Green and Red are both very easy to play and both are quite solid with other colours to support them. I wouldn't want to play mono-Green or Red especially, but both are viable at high levels and low alike, mono-Red can be pretty skill testing in some builds at higher levels though. So, I'd go U at S, B is A, Naya is probably about equal in terms of overall power at C, quite a bit below the crazy shenanigans that Dimir can pull off. Naya is just full of Casual beaters/playable but not great cards, and if you wanted to build a powerful deck you'd build around Dimir first and foremost. I'd put W down a tier lower, but good players consistently do fine with White, so it's viable apparently. Green has ramp, but you can just run Storage Lands in other colours so who cares (I'm only semi-serious, but those are not bad cards secretly), right? Red has 2 really good fast mana cards that see consistent high level play, but you don't often run a ton of other R in a 5 colour deck, you've got a handful of staples, I just checked and Kenrith Storm on the database has 10% Red Symbols, even less than it's 11% for White and 14% Green, and this is a STORM deck, designed to storm off, at the highest level tables, and in 5 colours, and it runs very little Red. Red has big flashy staples now, but it doesn't have the guts to build with, you still want tons of Dimir. Blue in Casual as a mono-colour deck suffers mostly from having a weak board, but you can end up with a pretty wide board, and Blue is remarkably good at pulling off an upset vs an overconfident opponent, stupid stuff like Polymorphist's Jest or Mass Diminish (which is worse yet better at the same time). Blue needs it's card draw and tutors to find it's solutions in it's toolbox, but it's toolbox is very good. As far as ramp goes, Blue does have some ramp, it's also about the best colour at just hitting consistent land drops over time due to it's draw. I mean, you probably have to use a strong Blue Commander to go Mono, like Talrand or Orvar, but they do exist. I guess Talrand is just way worse Kykar, but those 2/2s coupled with various 'screw up people's swings' cards will win games if your power level isn't too high.
Ah the clickbait, as for the actual answer. I actually think Red will be the weakest color if not already in the near future The biggest thing holding White back was card draw/card advantage and Wotc so far has been exploring different ways to do so.
That Blue board wipe discussion was hilarious. But seriously Cyclonic Rift is definitely a board wipe. Its commenly said the graveyard is your second hand, so how is destroy that much better than bounce?
Richard is 100% wrong about extra turns. There is not a single mid powered deck in the game that would not be improved by adding a Time Warp to it. You don't need to be an extra turn deck to make use of what is essentially a free spell that draws you a card and gives you extra main/combat phases. There just will be incidental synergy no matter what deck you are playing.
I have a collection of the entire mystical archive, made a volo deck, stuck time warp in for the hell of it and that card is busted. I have had 2 accidental infinite combos happen with it, and it just wins games “fairly”
the discussion about what a counterspell is was very weird. how could you possibly consider veil of summer a counterspell? a counter spell has to say "counter" and "spell" on it.
For removal: White S Black A Blue B Red C Green D White is unquestionably best while black has so many great effects and even cards like attrition, blue has good spot removal that is somewhat versatile, red has great artifact removal lots of damage dealing and chaos warp, and green hits mainly artifact and enchants and only has 2 cards that deal with any permanent.
Blue also has Imprisoned in the Moon, feels good to hit a commander with it. If they got no enchantment removal, their commander is out of commission for the rest of the game lol
what in the world is this conversation you got me to reply I guess, so 7/10 Ok, first of all, your categories are not a good barometer for judging viability, you have to use something that actually translates to important play patterns instead of random mechanics: - Mana acceleration (where colorless matches or beats most of the colors so the ranking of everything except green doesn't really matter) - Resource accumulation (not running out of steam; reliable card draw generally, but you can also use recursion) - Consistency (tutors, card filtering; for decks that want to enact a specific game plan) - Reset buttons (board wipes and other methods of dealing with an overwhelming board state) - Disruption (stopping your opponent from enacting their game plan, whether removal, counterspells, graveyard hate, stax or I guess discard spells) - Protection (stops people from attempting to make your game plan fall apart, also includes counterspells) - Explosiveness (the ability to end the game or shift it into an overwhelming board state from an unassuming position; winning slowly only makes you hated out by the other players) Blue is an excellent color in EDH because it's incredible at the last three categories. Your card filtering and draw gives you a smooth early game to ensure you don't lose to the shuffler, your counterspells help ensure you don't lose to random game-ending plays, and then they help secure your victory after you play one of your own, which blue has a plethora of. Blue can randomly stumble into a dominant game state by casting a number of spells like Diluvian Primordial, Blatant Thievery, Rite of Replication, Aminatou's Augury or Cyclonic Rift that can radically overturn the board state in your favor. The color's toolkit is excellent at navigating the play patterns of EDH that favor decisive plays, which also includes the more casual spectrum. Green is competitive with blue because it has insane enough resource accumulation to possibly overpower an entire table, despite struggling with player removal. The rest are a tier below. White has a very robust toolkit, but is very transparent about when it tries to win the game. Red is incredibly explosive, but is pretty lackluster otherwise. Black is a jack-of-all-trades, reasonably competent at most things, but not outstanding.
i liked these color ranking videos alot but i think the more common and interesting ranking discussion is the 2 color pairs in commander with 2 color being pretty much the floor as the lowest amount of colors one player will averagly have in a game at this point
Rift has to be considered a wipe. Being able to redeploy doesn't mean it isn't. You're clearing the board. Plus you're almost always putting your opponents back a couple turns. The only common best case on the receiving end of Rift is you get to FULLY redeploy in 1 turn. Which usually isn't the case. Graveyards are so relevant in Commander that I feel like people can often redeploy from the grave anyways. So if people replay stuff from their grave, did you wipe the board or not? Yes. Yes you did.
Considering the graveyard being pretty much an extension of your hand in commander, it's hard to consider anything besides exiling to be true removal. Rift is mass removal just as much as wrath of god or damnation.
a very helpful category would be: best ways to win the game/ best threats. that would help to explain why green is the best color. best ramp and best threats just make it the best color. also the insane amount of card draw green got in the near past. thats why blue is the worst color. bad ramp, bad threats, okay card draw and too interactive. "oh blue player, you have only a few creatures? guess I attack you". blue lacks so many things in the midgame.
alright hot take time: Black Green (following very closely) White Red Blue Black has the most even distribution of power at the highest rate between all of the things it can do. It can tutor for anything, making deckbuilding almost infinitely flexible for Black. It could do anything moderately well so long as it's within Mono Black's reach. It has access to moderately powerful mana acceleration through Swamp synergies and Rituals, an infinitely large suite of very good creature removal (single target and mass), solid recursion for creatures. And while Commander players at large haven't caught onto this yet, targeted discard spells (Thoughtseize) are not only playable in EDH, but I'd argue they're as good as Counterspells if played right. If you think about it, it's a one-for-one that deals with a single card your opponent wants to use to win the game. Even better that these also provide yourself/the table with information on what's in their hand. They have to be used proactively, but a proactive counterspell is only worse than a reactive one because your opponent doesn't waste the mana in the cast. Additionally, since it uses life and creature sacrifice as resources, it's able to play various cards whose effects are above the curve in terms of the mana spent to cast them. No other color has access to those resources the way Black does. Everybody has mana, cards, and graveyard. Not everybody spends life and lives like Black does. Green is very strong because it's good at things Commander likes. It has the best, most permanent style of ramp, it has the best threats (in the form of creatures) and very powerful card draw. However the things it can do are far more narrow than Black. You're making big creatures, or a lot of medium creatures. And that's essentially it for Green. You can draw a lot of cards and deploy a great deal of threats, but you can't interact that well with your opponents. Green instead demands to be interacted with. Green's deal is permanents, nothing it does really works or matters if they don't have the things on the board to capitalize on them with. Return of the Wildspeaker is only as good as your largest non-human creature. If that gets killed while Return is on the stack (something that 2 or 3 other colors could reasonably do) you may wind up short a lot of cards comparatively. I'll reiterate that Green is strong, because it is, and I put it in 4th for a reason. But since it and Black are so close in power, and I'd say that Black in a way counters Green (and has much more to say for itself) that Black wins, just barely. White is good at things that are so strong in EDH that they've been made taboo in the culture surrounding it. Stax and Taxation effects and MLD are both major strengths of the color, whether it's seen as acceptable or not. It has the most versatile removal in the game, tackling all 3 of the major permanent types in very efficient ways. It has a lot of potent recursive tools, and it's getting more and more as time goes on. It's the only color other than Green which is able to accelerate its lands, which when played properly with tools like Lotus Field and Bounce Lands, will typically keep you at parity with whomever has the most lands (in terms of mana you can access) if not further beyond them. Every color can now draw cards, and what was once something that required specific synergy (notably White's synergy with Aura's and Equipment is another factor that puts it here) now can be done very easily. Being able to draw cards while Taxing or making alliances with other players is very good in a multiplayer game. White is very good, but Black and Green are better, so it goes in third. Red is where the colors start falling into the "bad-ish" spectrum. Red does burn well, and is able to very handily deal with Artifacts, which in my opinion are the most broken permanent type in all of Magic. It has decent single target removal, stack interaction, and board wipes. Chain Reaction is a pretty good card, even if nobody mentions it. Lightning Bolt *is* good single target removal. It may not be able to stop a Craterhoof turn or some huge Sea Monster, but it DOES kill a lot of hatebears. Looking at Abzan Hatebears on EDHREC, Bolt kills 83.7% of hatebears across those 3 colors. It's Fork and Redirection abilities are unique and potent tools to interact on the stack with Blue, but only really when Blue is present and already interacting. In this way it's next to Green in its ability to deal with Blue's counterspells. Because I'm reaching for good things to say about Red, it also has good Mono color tribes. Mono Red Goblins and Dragons are both potent archetypes, Goblins debatably being the best mono color tribe altogether for its ability to go aggressively under other tribes, as well as have self-contained infinite combos through Snoop lines, if that's your thing. Finally it does have explosive mana acceleration through its library of rituals, able to storm off and cast huge spells early for sure, though it will leave them emptyhanded, having appropriately and flavorfully burnt out. All colors draw cards, but Red draws them the worst possible way -- temporarily. As cool and flavorful as impulsive draw is, it's not very good, and that's why to compensate it tends to be more efficient in cost-for-effect than regular draw. Red burns out as the 4th best color. Blue does the least amount of things well, and only one of those things is relevant to the format. Blue can draw cards, sure, but I've never looked at a Blue draw spell and thought "yeah that's a card I want to run". And while that's anecdotal and subjective, it points to the fact that while Blue may not need any synergies to draw cards, it's card draw is the least impactful of all non-Red colors. Green can create self-sustaining engines for drawing cards, or burst draw on the back of a large creature, Black has various cards which exchange life for a card at the start of your turn, meaning you have access to all of your mana and more cards than normal -- not to mention just regular spells which draw cards, White draws cards by putting opponents at a disadvantage OR by creating alliances with other players, essentially teaming you up. But Blue spends a card in hand to gain more cards, which draw more very mid cards ad infinitum. Counterspells are one-for-one removal effects, and while they do uniquely interact with non-permanents, they're only truly useful in "I'm going to win and you can't stop me" or "I'm going to stop you from winning" situations. And if we're honest, the former isn't something Blue gets to say often. It does have the best Artifact synergies, and I still believe them to be the most broken permanents, but Blue is only bad *compared to Black, Green, and White*, it's still a good color imo. And since we're reaching, Merfolk are a cool tribe and Wizards are pretty decent. Lack of things to say for itself compared to all other colors puts it as the 5th best color, in my opinion.
I think Best Support Color would be a good category to add in the future. Like at 57:11 Crim said White has so much that makes it the best support color. Where as for me, Red needs a high volume of it's burst effects and lacks ramp and card advantage which makes it the worst support For me Support looks like WG UB R
I feel like you guys left out a pretty big area- how easy can a color play “unfair” Magic. The ability to cheat costs on cards, use life as a resource etc. never really came up. I think those factors probably push Black ahead of White in mono color decks. But great conversation and really enjoyed these episodes.
It was briefly mentioned due to the CEDH qualifier, but I think this whole discussion comes with a very significant disclaimer that just simply was not talked about enough throughout these discussions: The less competitive aspects present, and less money cards present, the more accurate the MTGgoldfish crew's final lists become. When you're not spending hundreds or thousands on your deck, when you're playing against three or more opponents, when your gameplay and deckbuilding is constrained by a social contract, and when you're playing sub-optimally on purpose for fun, of course Green is gonna be the best color and ramp is gonna be the most important factor. Ramp and card draw are the best possible things to have for a deck if you're looking to have consistency without playing tutors and optimized decklists. Simply put, I think you easily make arguments in favor of any color being the "best color" if you are choosing the power level and pre-deckbuilding and pre-game constraints you're working with. The crew obviously had their own ideas in mind when it comes to the power level and type of gameplay they had in mind when making the lists (see Crim's comment on land destruction), and that's okay, but I think it would have been super useful to separate the lists or set a power level or the "rule zero" rules that the crew is working with before diving into the categories. I found myself able to agree or disagree with most of the opinions if I changed the preconceived notions I was focusing on, and if one is able to do that, I think it really undermines a lot of the conclusions you can reasonably draw from it. It was an enjoyable series though, I think it would be awesome if the crew dived more into the topic at specific power levels and for different tables to see if their answers change!
They should definitely remove the top card for each category per color from their consideration, as good as some of them are, one card can’t carry mono colored deck and I think it would give a better representation of a colors power.
I agree. Especially since the top card for most things is very expensive and your average casual player won’t have it. Like last week, they said Black has good ramp because of Coffers+Urborg
dedicaded mono red player here. I play each and every enchantment removal I can grab. played the 7 mana Scour from existence, played 5 mana sorcery Introduction to Annihilation and draws your opponent a card, extremly excited for the new 2 mana one in Baldur's gate. In commander you can't be picky about spot removal
I would say Mono blue is definitely the toughest mono color to play, but it would be my first choice as a secondary color for a commander deck. I feel like you add to any color and it gets a lot better due to the amount of interaction you get
On counters they could consider stifle effects and green actually is quite good for that. I’d also argue that anti-counters is probably lumping into the same conversation as blue does Counters so uniquely, it’s a bit of a nonstarter talking about the rest. Silence and effects like that are very white which could also be brought into the discussion.
I personally think Green ruined Magic a bit. It became so ubiquitous at 'good stuff' that it is the reason for the most color pie breaks and design changes we are seeing in modern day design (such as white now getting card draw).
I think blue is misrepresented. The best removals outside of staples and counterspells: - steal stuff - exchange things - transform things - bounce things Alone that you are the main color to remove all different things from the stack, pushes blue to the top. But exchanging or stealing things is esp good in commander. On mass removals, there can be some argue that white takes first place. But for at least second place let me give you some options: - transform every creature of target player (Polymorphist's Jest should be the best) - exchange creatures - tap (and freeze) things (if you mean tap lands) - bounce different things - end the turn - wheel esp combined with bounces or meaner things (you cant draw cards). Btw most blue wheels dont just strait give 7cards. - steal things again but more! The only thing blue cant do if you ignore colorless is gravehate. But if you can just end the turn do you have an counterargue of a better removal next to playerremoval? Blue unique stuff (without counterspells): - main interaction with stack. Can also exile stack. - extra turns - tap/untap (best color) - free spells (best color) - clones - copy things - bounce - swap things - steal things - unblockable - mill - topdeckmanipulation (best color) - instandspeed (best color) Those are topics from this episode. If we talk about ramp, let me tell you some secrets: - mono blue can ramp at 1 mana (Retraced Image) - you can copy everything the other player do or even narset reversal rampspells. - you have free spells! - you can untap lands - manadrain - or what about stax? Someone will hate you for playing stasis. Ofc most of the strongest things in blue wont be used much in casual and also you shouldnt cause its mean. While i disagree on how blue is placed, i respect every member of goldfish for giving theyr opinions. At the end its about sharing experiences of a game we all enjoy :) Also my experiences in mid-power decks are that you can play a lot of those things i listed, if you talk to your group and if you dont overuse some effects (eg. Extraturns). I even have players that end the turn against me and its fine/fair for me.
Cyclonic Rift is a board wipe and Unsummon is not a single-target removal because your opponents untap after a Cyc Rift, play a couple things and discard the rest. Unsummon bounces one thing, they replay it. Nothing to the graveyard. So, where the cards end up is basically the decider. Cyc Rift ends with a lot of cards in the GY just like a board wipe does.
if I ranked colors (mid power) I'd honestly probably agree on placements with tomer at the end. The only change I would make is shirnking some of the gaps between colors, but overall I think its a pretty agreeable tier list. Also appreciated mentioning that it isnt just add and divide to find its ranking because of how important things like ramp and card draw are to functionality over something like diversity.
Tomer had them all 3 nodding hard when he couldn't stop naming good blue removal until he said something dumb about bounce.. lmao EDIT: I love how they were so about to agree on the mass removal section until they began debating the foundation of the very argument itself ahhahaah classic
Ok I'm gonna need these guys to not put black and green in the same tier for counter spells. On top of imps mischief they also forgot withering boon 2 mana pay 3 life counter a creature spell. I'm pretty sure there is a black enchantment that counters things too but I may be misremembering on that one.
White is so much better than black. You guys forgot about fateful absence, cribswap, despatch in an artifact deck and the white auras that pacify/mutate a creature to a do nothing creature. They synergize with enchantress decks too. Sure black has more quantity of kill spells but white has better overall removal spells.
also in green removal it has kenrith's transformation, which is a bad creature removal (2 mana sorcery speed) but it cycles itself and does have the upside of not sending the commander back to command zone immediately
I understand how you guys got to the conclusion based on mono-colours and I mostly agree but it's so funny seeing blue and red at the bottom and then thinking about how absolutely busted izzet spellslinger decks can be
I think part of the reason for the back and forth with other colors doing stuff and “you wouldn’t just run this card” is because, yeah, in a multiple colored deck that has the color that is best at said thing, you wouldn’t. But if you’re looking at mono colored cards, which I think is how they originally pitch it, then you have to consider the other unorthodox cards because you’re looking at that mono color as a whole. Also, commander rewards unorthodox in ways no other format can, so with spot/mass removal, bounce should 100% count toward those things for their ability to do what that color does effectively. Just because it isn’t permanent removal doesn’t mean it isn’t removed from the board (otherwise the category would be spot/mass DESTRUCTION, not just removal)
In the same vein, you could say against black reanimate, board wipes aren’t good because they can just recur from the graveyard afterward (unless it exiles), so bounce can be just as effective in certain matchups as conventional boardwipes in other matchups
Cyclonic rift, inundate, engulf the shore, kedrektant leviathan, crush of tentacles, flood of tears, devastation tide, wash out, evacuation, whelming wave, perplexing test, coastal breach, spectral dulge, displacement wave, scorlurge of fleets, profane the dead, reduce to dreams, rivers rebuke, consuming tide etc. If you build a deck correctly, blue can play 4 or 5 boardwipes that dont even impact itself. Blue might be the second best board wipe color(maybe#1 if you run seamonsters).
I think the new Jin-Gitaxias is a great example of what a multiplayer counterspell might look like. Bonus points since it's on a permanent and as Seth pointed out in a short once the reason cards like Alrund's Epiphany are so toxic is because they're not on permanents.
Cyclonic Rift is 100% absolutely categorically a board wipe.
See also Damn. Just because the single target mode gets used once in a blue moon doesn't make it not a board wipe.
@@zackkelley2940 damn is orzhov not mono black, that white pip makes it not legal in mono black.
@@atk9989 My mistake, but the point still stands. It is very much still a board wipe.
I like to think each one of them is on a sine wave of good and bad takes, but they're all slightly off-phase from each other which is what makes this podcast great to watch
@@zackkelley2940 They’re not saying it’s not a board wipe because it has a targeted mode, they’re saying it’s not a board wipe because it bounces things, which isn’t a permanent solution. They had the same take on Unsummon.
I agree that single-target bounce spells aren’t good enough to be considered removal, because the opponent can replay that one thing on their next turn and then they’re back to normal. But mass bounce spells are definitely board wipes, because they reset the board, and opponents won’t be able to get everything you bounced back down in one turn. And maybe they’ll even have to discard some of it to hand size. It buys time, which is what board wipes are supposed to do.
I get that it's goldfish and all, but every time I hear someone call Richard the fish father, I can't help but think the cod father would sound amazing
Codfather is 100% better
Mass bounce is absolutely removal, most boards can't rebuild in just one turn after a rift
It’s more that’s it’s one sided removal too as most blue decks aren’t board heavy and your opponents also loses lose all there tokens which in commander is often a lot.
Alot of blue board wipe affects blue too
I don't know how they can argue it isn't removal. I mean by definition a bounce effect is removing a permanent from the battlefield
It definitely counts as removal for token decks
The strongest part of ramp is that it has a guaranteed/reliable payoff in the command zone. Ramp's weakness in 60 card formats is not having the payoff at the right time. Having a 3 cmc commander makes playing 6-7 1 cmc mana dorks a much more powerful inclusion in the deck. Or having a 4 cmc commander out on turn 3 because of 2 cmc mana rocks. Having that guaranteed playoff takes so much risk away when committing to mana ramp (in any form)
That's a great point. Having a guaranteed spell to spend your mana on minimizes the biggest risk of ramp.
Love the way u figured out a way to present the individual tiering :) good job !
Thank you! Adding the letter ranks made things either very cluttered or very small, but adding just the symbols felt like the sweet spot :) EDIT: Only now did I realize I should've put the category titles at the top of the screen and not have them disappear, oops :(
I really like it
@@MTGGoldfishCommander incremental improvements. Thank you for the hours of entertainment. Really appreciate u guys!
Richard is such a contrarian that he really had Seth defending green spot removal when he actually ranked green higher than Seth 😂
Yep everybody knows a guy like this you can't tell him nothing yet he will bark in your ear all day about the right way to do things.
I loved that part. Also, he got Seth to say artifact removal was less important and then got him to say green is very good because it has artifact removal.
@@isaacsmith3998 just proved seth doesn't know his own opinion. Seth is also never paying the 1.
Also rating red's spot removal A lmao
Cyclonic Rift bounces 7+ turns of work that *will not* be redeployed in one single turn. It's absolutely a wipe.
Especially rewarding if you don't have a maximum hand size, which isn't uncommon in blue. It's not uncommon to see salty discard after Rift, hehe.
Also all tokens, including the increasingly common treasures, are actually whiped, hehe.
Big fan of the rankings showing up over the individual cameras, appreciate the constant improvements on this podcast!
This episode is basically an excuse for us to talk about the strengths and weaknesses of each color. Our rankings are meant to be generalized and based on our experienced power level (mid-power). Obviously there's far more factors, most notably the actual commander choice; if someone ranks Blue lower than Green that doesn't mean they think a Blue deck led by Urza is weaker than a Green deck led by Autumn Willow. CEDH is its own beast and the weight of each category would be totally different -- countermagic would be more important for example -- and not reflected in our rankings.
You could bounce something then counter it when they play it again
@@darthanakinII that's two cards and anywhere from 3 to 5 mana to remove something.
saw this title and my internal reaction was "i'm not even going to dignify this with a click" ........ but here we are
henlo my fellow clickbaited Blue players
got'em
I bet they even asked to hear your thoughts down in the comments.
@@Dawsenconway like and subscribe
I agreed with Tomer that theft spells are removal. Blue spot removal very solid.
Steal Enchantment is so underplayed. 2 mana to steal a tithe or rhystic study.
Blue also has Imprisoned in the moon which can remove a commander from the game (even a planeswalker commander) almost indefinitely for some decks.
@@anthonymcclellan6256 I didn't check steal cards assuming there were too expensive mana wise for my deck, ty for the tip off. thats amazing. theres a white one that destroys an enchantment and then every other enchantment with that name for if you're the one player st the group without the money for them or haven't proxied them, also a 2 drop.
@@matthewdevey8878 is that the one where you can exile stuff when you draw? if so I just have a hard time seeing that being allowed to stick around if you can even resolve it.
I considered adding it to my value engine deck but it seemed like it would pull ALL of the aggro.
edit: idk why I chose to Google after and confirm I was talking about a different card.
Blue being the worst makes sense for lower powered combat based metas where combo is frowned upon, but at tables where people jam the best staples of each color blue may be the best. I only play against randoms in LGSs and am always way more worried about the mono blue deck than the mono green deck. There is a wide range of power levels between the average Commander Clash deck and CEDH, which I don’t play, and saying blue is the worst color broadly in EDH is bizarre.
What color is the best in a vacuum like this vs what color you're scared of at the table is a completely different question, though. Most of what they were looking at in this video was interaction, which outside of counterspells blue has a hard time with and counterspells are generally inefficient in multiplayer formats. Green has arguably the best noncreature removal and can shore up the creature removal with fights which are often quite cheap.
The reason you're often scared of the mono blue deck has to do with the way they win rather than the strength of the deck. Mono green decks will pump out creatures and smack you with them and at any time you can wrath or murder a key creature and the deck will usually fall flat on it's face. Blue will pull some uninteractable combo and unless you have a counterspell ready you just lose. Wincons weren't really talked about at all this video, just generic cards like interaction so they don't factor into the ratings. Also most people I see running mono-blue decks are running decks that are much higher power than most of the rest of the table; borderline cedh with tons of fast mana and undercosted/free counterspells.
@@robertweavill2072 there were also issues with how they defined categories. For example; while blue ramp does rely heavily on artifacts, it is also the color that can take the best advantage of those artifacts. I’m sure we’ve all seen blue decks copy and/or untap their Thran dynamos and sol rings loads of times, which is a uniquely blue form of ramp that went totally unappreciated. Board wipes is another spot where as a mono blue player it’s much easier to keep the board clear of lethal threats with cards like cyclonic rift, evacuation, scourge of fleets, etc. while setting up a kill than if I’m the red or green player. Yes it’s largely a tempo play as they can recast their cards, but honestly a hard wrath can be making life easier for the reanimator deck to recover faster too, so there are comparable trade offs. A lot of the arguments made against blue in this video seemed to almost purposefully look past how blue decks actually operate in the wild. It is laughable to think red should be ranked higher than blue in single target removal just because chaos warp exists when blue has a huge catalogue of single target answers to pretty much anything from bouncing (too many to list) to destroying (pongify and rapid hybridization ) to transforming (imprisoned in the moon and frogify) to freezing (Frost Titan like effects) to exiling (Raven form and resculpt). If we’re exclusively talking metas where attacking with creatures is the only real path to victory, then sure blue is lacking in this category, but I’ve personally been killed much more by blue sun’s zenith x=100000 than by a craterhoof in random lgs games. It’s not just randomly vomiting out a combo that wins blue games, it wins because of it’s all around strength in the format.
@@robertweavill2072 yup, I also play with random rotating tables at my lgs and the blue and green decks are always afraid of the other in my experience. Creature players are worried about getting countered or combod and control/combo players are worried about dying before they can set up
@@frosty980 even in metas where attacking is the only path to victory, blue can be absolutely terrifying. Blue has the most flyers, and the most straight up unblockable creatures. Sure, they are usually low to the ground, but they also usually have payoffs for actually hitting. I've killed more people with Tetsuko than I have with Feather.
(Replying to the original comment) But the point is, blue decks have to go for a combo finish because they don't have other options that are as strong as the other colours. So if you're looking at what the colours have to offer in a vacuum, blue does very poorly on many metrics. That's what the commander clash crew identified here. What WotC could do is give blue more means to push towards a win then decks would exist that aren't combo and have a proper chance of fitting into low-mid power games.
Blue’s transformation removal is severely underrated. Frogifying a commander is great. Killing a commander with spot removal is card disadvantage. You lose a card in hand and they can still recast the commander. But if you frogify the commander, then they spend a removal on the enchantment, that was one-one interaction.
What blue removal is enchantment based? Pongify, kills and leaves an extra body behind. Turn to frog, only causes the creature to become a 1/1 and, lose abilities until the next turn.
@@thomasjacobs4919 Imprison in the Moon
@@thomasjacobs4919 Kasmina's transmutation, witness protection, and mystic subdual are all cheap blue auras that make a creature lose its abilities
@@thomasjacobs4919 there is an card called “Frogify” from throne of Eldraine. Turn to Frog is from magic origins and yeah I think that is a really bad card
Only problem with those effects is that they are sorcery speed. They do not protect you from combos and some commanders gain so much advantage even if they have them for one turn like the korvolds and chulanes that if you don't counter them or instant speed remove them it will be a minor inconvenience to them at worst.
Honestly, Tomer is schooling them all on Blue's removal ranking. I commented on the last podcast that if I'm building a Dimir or U/B/x deck, I'm putting in Blue's spot removal over black's. It's just more efficient, and can kill artifacts. Seriously underrated.
Agreed, though black has creatures with removal etbs it can make use of.
But instant/sorcery wise, Black has one S (Deadly Rolick) and a bunch of B/Cs, while U has like 4 As and a B.
And you only want so much spot removal.
Absolutely.
Ravenform, Pongify, etc. are all excellent. Not to mention scaleable spot removal like Cyclonic Rift and Curse of the Swine.
Agree. Not sure why everyone sleeps on Pongify. Just feel like most people think is okay or bad
@@NoNo-qt4ov I think most people are playing spot removal in Commander wrong. If they're using it to kill a Bird or something, than yeah, it's bad. But you can't do those 1-for-1's in Commander. You have to save it for game-ending threats.
@@brningpyre definitely agree. I have a Mizzix deck and it was vital that I save my Spot removal and Counterspells towards the end. Most people I see use them pretty quickly and on things that are technically strong but not worth wasting a spot removal at
Richard's targeted removal tier list is just the best 2 removals of each color, he doesn't play more then that in any given deck
thats lazy ...
Seriously. But I mean like he said, he only runs like 2 spot removal in a deck so it'd made sense he'd run the top two in the colors he's using
Which makes sense, outside of a controller/politics deck you don't want that many more.
@@MasterDoctorBenji Debatable. I personally run a good bit of removal depending on the deck I play. But I definitely agree there is such thing as too much targeted removal
@@NoNo-qt4ov when you run more removal and keep playing with the same playgroup, eventually they stop running removal and rely on you. Richard would rather run 6 birds and dousing dagger and lose than be the "police". After all he is playing with Seth, and he is never paying the 1.
In a format where the graveyard is considered a second hand I would say that bounce spells are close, though not equal, to destruction based removal.
Bounce gets so underrated. It’s very strong to hit “non-land permanent” for 2 and slow them down.
i had this same thought... like if it goes to their graveyard it is even cheaper to get back than if it goes to their hand.
Wouldn't that mean bounce spells are BETTER than destruction?
I feel like blues interaction is a bit undervalued here, and black is a bit overvalued in that sense. Pongify is strictly better removal cost wise than most of blacks removal, raven form hits artifacts and creatures, bounce spells hit almost anything and can end up timewalking someone, etc...
still think blue is lacking a bit in regards to diverse playstyles and options for "fair decks", but I dont think its nearly as bad as people seem to make it out to be either.
My problem with blue is it lacks win cons. As a secondary color,blue might just be the best for its interaction.
@@joshholmes1372 I would 100% agree on that. It does not win well, especially in "fair" "casual" games where combos are frowned upon.
Also the speed the table turns on you the second you counter something. People hate being told no.
I am definitely most scared of mono blue player at the table, because they're either Storm, an artifact combo deck, or a Laboratory Maniac/Thassa's Oracle combo deck lol
I'm beginning to realize just how influenced the CC Crew are by how infrequently they play two-card or even three-card combos as a primary win condition. I think that, more than anything, is the driver of ideas like "mono blue is weak" and "spot removal is overrated."
When you don't have to worry about your opponents comboing off at all, it definitely skews the metagame and what cards are worth playing or not worth playing
@@swirlingtoilets this is why I love blue decks like Tetsuko. It's a unique avenue to win in blue, and most people underestimate the deck.
I have to say, completely agree with Tomer as a mono blue player. Bounce is also severely unrated
Plus bounce synergizes with countermagic to be a permanent solution.
Often you don't need to permanently remove something anyways. If you bounce something extremely threatening they're forced to recast it on their next turn. You can often effectively take away an entire turn since recasting most big threats is expensive, *and* it keeps a target on their back distracting the rest of the table.
Also many threats are assembled. If you bounce a creature that has accrued a threatening number of +1/+1 counters, auras, or non-repeatable until end of effects, it often does not return as anything similar.
@@timbombadil4046 If you’re bouncing a creature, you’re usually taking _two_ turns away from them, because they’ll have to recast it next turn, and then wait another whole turn to be able to attack with it.
Richard arguing that Red has better spot removal than Black is wild, LOL.
I feel like their group in general really underplays Indestructible creatures. Every other table I've played at ALWAYS has at least one ind. creature or other permanent on the table.
There's just also a ton of cards that are good exile based removal for black, like deadly rollick and baleful mastery and sacrifice effects also are very effective.
Probably because there's so much exile in their meta due to people playing indestructible creatures and graveyard recursion in the past.
Richard is the most unhinged person on this podcast. Idk if he a contrarian or just insane.
@@NinjaPicnicers I think that's a bit much. He just has a different perspective based on his style of play.
Their group overplays removal in general, which in turn leads them to undervalue permanents of all kinds.
15 mins in: "Man, Tomer getting beaten up on Blue removal." I'm with Tomer here; Blue has enough ways to get rid of creatures. At least a B.
The other guys are massively underrating bouncing creatures. Tempo is as important as card advantage, especially in a multiplayer game like this. Having even one big blocker bounced back to your hand often means becoming vulnerable to 3 rounds of attacks before you can recast it.
@@andyspendlove1019 blue has the best reactionary removal. Its just not permanent. But pongifying chulane after its cast breaks the loops and sets them behind. Dispersing smothering tithe before the opponent draws removes 4 or more (7 on average)mana and invalidates turns. Unsummoning an urdragon removes eminence even if it was brought out by hellkite courser.
Blue is above average. At everything.
Blue is the single best color at dealing with literally all threats. It has the game's best board wipe, the largest number of spot removal spells, the hardest removal to avoid, and the most aggressively costed removal. These guys created the categories to manufacture a ranking that seems legit if you don't actually pay attention. They separated all of the categories into "blue" and then "this card type, except when it's blue those don't count".
The more i listen to this podcast the more i belive this guys don't play enough islands and manarocks.
Bouncing may not be a permanent solution but the fact that you get very cheap ones, instant speed ones and creatures attached ones. Makes blue amazing at keeping the board clean. The only real problem blue has in casual is closing out games, cause u want to stay away from combos so you are left with few, subpar, options. Also you are severely underrating mono black powerlevel.
Exactly. Blue had amazing interaction, but has limited win cons outside of comboing out. Blue is probably the best secondary color. It protects your stuff, slows down opponents, and has great cantrips for digging.
I loved this podcast so much. Don't ever change, guys. So many awesome disputes.
Weird to me Richard and Seth don't consider Cyclonic Rift as mass removal. Is literally removes everything on the board. Especially if you do it before someone's end step and then they have to discard to hand size. Its insane
Bounce isn’t removal is the take which I get. They can replay those things
As if they’re getting another turn when you Rift on the end step before your turn lol, not to mention this assumes infinite mana
@@joshuasnyder4101 They definitely have the chance to replay. But I mean as long as you do it on someone's end step and your turn is next, I assume you're going to hit them from anywhere to half their health or all of it since they have nothing. Plus I mean unless their deck is all ETBs they're going to have to spend another turn replaying everything which I think gives you plenty of time to win. Plus again, if you do it at the main threats end step they will most likely half to discard a lot of their stuff
@@NoNo-qt4ov I use cyclonic as a defensive card unless I know I win the next turn
@@joshuasnyder4101 but you're forcing them to spend mana on that thing again. Bounce is a tempo hit, and in alot of cases it is removal. Snap is one of the best removal cards that people aren't playing enough
Richard with spot removal: random with chaos warp is good
Richard with counterspells: random with tibalt’s trickery is bad
Richard is a contrarian...
to be fair choas warp can lead toward your opponent doesn't get anything valuble if the top card of there library is a land or a non permament spell. Meanwhile Tibalt will always hit a spell for your opponent to be able to cast.
Crim: Edict effects are not "spot" removal--they don't deal with specific threats, all else being equal.
Tomer's right on Blue, it has multiple, efficient, instant speed creature removal. I'd say it's above Red--which just has chaos warp+good artifact removal--and maybe even Black.
Seth is too hung up on permanently removing. Yes exile>destroy>bounce, but Rift still resets everyone else's tempo, and gets rid of tokens and counters as a bonus. Everyone has to rebuild using their mana and hand. Sounds like a boardwipe to me.
Richard: ...3-4 removal spells?
But Crim's examples are Edicts that deal with the *strongest* Threat. Make an example in particular always hit the exact card you want it to, at the very least.
great pod!
way late obvs, but for unique/strengths of each color i like:
White - lifegain, auras/equips, enchantment focus, stax, protection, go wide, flying, blink, small creatures
Blue - copying stuff, storm, flying, extra turns, artifact focus, blink, stax, mill
Black - sacrifice, graveyard focus, discard
Red - storm, copying stuff, artifact focus, burn, go wide, combat focus/extra combats, land destruction, stax, discard
Green - +1/+1 counters, enchantment focus, go wide, protection, graveyard focus
This has been a super interesting exploration of each color by itself, though I'd be curious how your answers would have shaped out if you'd ranked each color pair and wedge as well. I'll bet you'd find that a lot of color combinations that include blue end up on higher on that list.
Well, unless your opponents have a reliquary tower or similar effect granting no maximum hand size, a cyclonic rift will be getting rid of most of the permanents bounced with it, since they won't have the mana to replay everything on their next turn and will have to discard down to 7 cards in hand.
Cool black counter I did not hear mentioned - Withering Boon. It's a color-shifted Essence Capture they never see coming. Niche but not bad at all.
not really that niche, in a format with a creature on the command zone (most of the time), it's like the best counterspell for the format.
@@P3rs3cutr0ll Niche in the sense that it has narrower targets than generic counterspells that hit everything. This is why a card like Essence Scatter, also niche, does not generally see play. Also, I'd argue that the "best counterspell" for the format would hit more targets i.e. Counterspell/FoW/Counterspell. Not bad for non-blue though. It'd likely see more play if people knew about it.
I’d really like to see a ranking of the best two colour pairings. I think it would be a really interesting podcast that has a lot of connections to this one.
I kind of think they are undervaluing a lot of the things blue can do, especially artifact synergies essentially giving it ramp and recursion rivaling green.
I think blues color identity is unique in that it lets blue "bend the core rules of magic". So it interacts on the stack, it messes with extra upkeeps, extra turns, it mills cards, it has alterante winconditions based on number of cards in hand (artemsis, omniscience in some sense) or in library (jace, thassa's oracle, labman). It also has cool alternate wincons related to its mastery over artefacts (mechanical production, phyrexian vs mirrodin enchantment thingy). I think expanding this, and possibly the sphinxes as blues core multiplayer identity could be a good way of 'pushing' blue for commander, without breaking it in other formats and maybe even without making i obnoxious. I think adding more counterspells is not the way to buff blue for casual, and giving it ramp would indeed make it very unfun in casual, and break the pie which is not good imo. Give me more cards that give me weird extra phases (extra untap steps, extra end steps, extra end of combat step, whatever, bend those rules, skip steps of opponent turns, phase things in/out; interact with exile if you really want, more knowledge is power themed alternate wincons, for example if you have more cards in hand then all your opponents combined, you win)
Glad to see Crim covering for Rotwolf's absence, hope to see him again
I personally consider bounce as removal, that being said, this view only stems from the amount of graveyard recursion that every color has now. Eerie Ultimatum works when you do get board-wiped, but not if you get bounced.
Seeing the order of the colours in the video for each of you guys is so much nicer going to the link as I watched it .
Lightning Bolt is so underrated in commander. The format has gotten smaller and faster these days. Archon of Emeria, Hushbringer, Drannith Magistrate... so many problematic creatures can be delt with with a bolt.
The Cyc Rift debate had me dying XD
In my opinion, counter magic is spot removal, and because of this blue is an S in spot removal. I know y’all had a separate category for counter magic, but I wouldn’t separate that from spot removal.
Yeah, have come to see it as temporally rather than categorically limited removal. Shatter can only destroy artifacts, counterspell can only remove a threat while it's on the stack.
It kills something. If I doom blade something as soon as it etbs, that’s removal, so why does it not count if I kill it before it etbs?
Isn’t it kinda bad removal because it requires you to respond first? Like opponent A casts a blightsteel and I have a path to exile in hand. You counter it, and I still have my path in hand.
In a way, when you use them for removal instead of saving the game, you’re priority bullying yourself in a way, since you are responding at the first possible second instead of the last possible.
That’s why i personally don’t like counterspells as removal, I like them for saving my board/the game
@@Spirited_skiing alternatively isn't it better removal? Your opponent plays Dockside Extortionist, do you want StP or Counterspell?
@@Spirited_skiing you say that til a thoracle or dockside or protein hulk lands.
For board wipes it's WBU(R/G tied)
White is amazing. Black is good but only hits creatures. Blue has full board bounce (can redeploy but that's a whole turn wasted to end up less than where they were) Red and Green have good removal but it's limited in the number of cards that are worth playing to wipe.
You're only playing 2-4 board wipes in a deck, so the best 2 cards are really all that matters.
I consider bounce removal. With how easy it is to get anything back from the yard I dont see it as a whole lot worse than destroying creatures. Don't get me wrong, it is worse but destroying a creature is not even close to permanent.
1:10 "I'm here, I'm high" LMAO
37:48 Cyc Rift is absolutely a board wipe. Your opponents are often discarding some of the things that got bounced, so all the stuff that they discard was permanently removed. And none of them are attacking you next turn.
I am with you Tomer for that part about cyclonic rift, it can return more than just creatures, and it is good in removing indestructible boards
Crim's dog had the best insights in this podcast... We need more mtggoldfish dogcasts
Seth comparing unsummon to swords has me cracking up 😂😂
I needed a good laugh for that last segment. Thanks.
Blue isn't a low tier for spot removal any more, it's got lots of exile vs creatures, cheap destroy vs creatures, and can even deal with artifacts reasonably well, all this ignoring it's access to bounce, so I feel like I'd order things thusly: W is S tier again for removal due to how many good options they have to deal with essentially any card type now, Sultai is at A Tier, with each having shortfalls in it's package, Red is probably C tier as it can remove creatures, planeswalkers, artifacts and even players with it's spells/effects, but most of them require a lot of resources to work effectively. Remember, Red can generate a ton of mana and use that to burn pretty big stuff, it's issue is that it can't readily exile creatures, so Red is hardly a slouch in this area, but it's not really above what you'd call 'average'. Black technically can remove artifacts, enchantments, creatures (it's 2nd best at this, White is just better except Deadly Rollick), planeswalkers and sometimes a player, which is honestly pretty good if you've got a high enough budget to afford the good removal. It's also worth noting that Blue's best 'spot removal' is actually just Counterspell, so it's not like Blue can't deal with almost every card for UU, a big part of why Blue is not a bad colour, but apparently we're putting that elsewhere. Green has tons of naturalize effects, lots of fight effects for creatures and planeswalkers, and it has some damage based wipes vs flyers (and rarely vs other targets technically)/targeted removal for flyers, as well as having various 'destroy literally any permanent' stuff, Desert Twister is probably playable in budget mono-green, and Beast Within is a top tier card. I would say creatures and planeswalkers are the weakest area of Green's removal, but it's naturalize stuff is actually better than what you get in White generally, Green also has cheap wipes for Artifacts and Enchantments. Huh, now Tomer brings up card theft as removal, I'm actually liking that point and I've listed it thusly, stealing stuff is making it 'not a problem anymore' usually, and often turns it into an asset for you. Blue also has some pretty big 'spot removal' effects, Mental Manipulation and Curse of the Swine can be a late game spell to swing a game, either can just devastate a board, especially in a Simic deck.
Counter magic is clearly just 'Blue Removal', but okay, I'd tier is U at S, Boros at C, and Golgari at D. In other formats, you've got weird counters that can matter, but you don't run Meren in cEDH because of her sick interaction package IMHO, you'd run a Jeskai deck for that. Stack fiddling is biggest in U, but it's also present in Boros in some cases, part of why Jeskai spells decks are pretty solid inherently at very high levels, they can just interact with everything and control the board. I guess Green has stuff like Avoid Fate? Does that matter? Black has essentially nothing. I think I might agree with Richard that White has slightly better stack interaction, look at all those W Silence effects, along with various 'bad' mono-white counters like Memory Lapse, along with Rebuff the Wicked, it's not like W can't do stuff. You could even use Teferi's Protection as a sort of counter, more or less dodging an annoying (or worse) effect, and there is also Angel's Grace. Red has less, but it does have some. Maybe I'd say W is C+ and R is C-? I guess R does have stuff like Fork, and Pyroblast?
Green is good at wiping flyers, artifacts and enchantments. Ezuri's Predation is hilarious, but I use Monstrous Onslaught to good effect in OG Multani, where I can play it and deal +20 damage as I see fit, which should result in a dead player due to them having no blockers left. If you remember that Green can easily Naturalize wipe, Green is probably a bit better than you're rating it. Anyways, W is S for wipes, R is A, Golgari is B, U is C. None of the colours are helpless here, but R is arguably the least narrow colour after W, which can just wipe anything period. U is the hardest to work with, but it's mass bounce isn't bad, and it also has big spot removal like Curse and Manipulation, but Green's numerous naturalize wipes along with it's bad solutions to creatures/planeswalkers are solidly better, but not generally more relevant in a Commander game than Black's access to several very good Wrath effects. Black does suffer a ton from versatility issues, but it can also force mass sacrifice potentially, which can win the game while dealing with some problem permanents, I think Black might be worse than Green if your meta actually cares about naturalize. Red is actively good at wiping artifacts, and it's not bad at clearing the board of most creatures, and it can also blow up lands, especially non-basics, but it also has Flashfire, Boil/Boiling Seas and Omen of Fire if you really hate Azorius. Red has damage wipes galore, both big, small and versatile, so Red can be very good at controlling a board with wipes.
For uniqueness, I feel like it should be Grixis on top, Grixis gets access to all of the cards that are just ridiculous that aren't Shahrazad, they've since taken away some of the uniqueness of these colours, but White is not known for crazy/chaotic effects (it does have them I know, like mass removal that trickles permanents back into play), but chaotic effects are a viable strategy to actually win games in Grixis, you don't even need wincons, you can just steal theirs. Anyways, I'll rate as follows: R is probably A, Dimir is B, W is C and G is D. White has some unique stuff, but it's biggest features are just removing things (either one at a time or a bunch at a time) and hitting people with creatures, I guess Silence is pretty unique? Protection stuff in general I guess, but I think you should break Protection off into it's own area. Green is low on the uniqueness totem, with very few cards doing especially interesting things, often the Green card in a creature cycle's perk is being big and having Trample (more true historically I guess), with other colours getting actual abilities that are interesting, like First Strike or Flying or non-keyword stuff even, Green is super-boring but super-powerful. I don't think any of the colours are really S tier at this point, too much colour pie bleed has occurred, perhaps as I see more of the new sets (which seem pretty interesting, and offer more unique cards arguably) I'll bump one of them up. 'Can't lose the game' is 100% Protection. Black's unique stuff is literally just cards that are ridiculous, especially the crazy old enchantments from back in the day, Chains of Mephistopheles for example, effects that are not really part of the colour pie, and this is where Grixis in general shines, it's got lots of effects that aren't really 'on the colour pie' because they are so weird, and Red gets the most of these crazy Chaos effects. Land destruction is under Removal and Wipes btw, and yeah Red is probably the best at this, especially hosing the living shit out of the poor Blue players with Boil. I think if you didn't count it as removal, Blue has tons of theft effects for all manner of stuff, so that's crazy unique, other decks might get stuff out of the graveyard, but Blue can just take stuff. I think Dimir is pretty much 'you can do anything you want as long as it'll help you win', while Izzet is 'you can pretty much do anything, even cost yourself the game!', put them together to create crazy and memorable games. White is openly the least unique colour for the record, it's supposed to be the 'support' colour that helps fill gaps in your deck, being 'stand out' at few things.
For the strongest colour, it goes like this: U is S, being able to counter almost anything/bounce anything and remove lots of stuff make it an extremely strong colour, it also has various extremely weird stuff like Mana Vortex and 'bounce a thing if you do a thing' effects that can be much better than most White Stax in non-cEDH games, Blue also has access to flyers/evasive creatures and has the best payoffs arguably for hitting people, it's really rough taking on an entire pod if everyone is 'out to get you', Blue does require the most skill to play though, other than maybe White. White has the highest budget generally to compete, it is never especially easy to play do to it's numerous weaknesses. Black is a very viable mono-colour, and isn't as hard to master as Blue or White, Green and Red are both very easy to play and both are quite solid with other colours to support them. I wouldn't want to play mono-Green or Red especially, but both are viable at high levels and low alike, mono-Red can be pretty skill testing in some builds at higher levels though. So, I'd go U at S, B is A, Naya is probably about equal in terms of overall power at C, quite a bit below the crazy shenanigans that Dimir can pull off. Naya is just full of Casual beaters/playable but not great cards, and if you wanted to build a powerful deck you'd build around Dimir first and foremost. I'd put W down a tier lower, but good players consistently do fine with White, so it's viable apparently. Green has ramp, but you can just run Storage Lands in other colours so who cares (I'm only semi-serious, but those are not bad cards secretly), right? Red has 2 really good fast mana cards that see consistent high level play, but you don't often run a ton of other R in a 5 colour deck, you've got a handful of staples, I just checked and Kenrith Storm on the database has 10% Red Symbols, even less than it's 11% for White and 14% Green, and this is a STORM deck, designed to storm off, at the highest level tables, and in 5 colours, and it runs very little Red. Red has big flashy staples now, but it doesn't have the guts to build with, you still want tons of Dimir. Blue in Casual as a mono-colour deck suffers mostly from having a weak board, but you can end up with a pretty wide board, and Blue is remarkably good at pulling off an upset vs an overconfident opponent, stupid stuff like Polymorphist's Jest or Mass Diminish (which is worse yet better at the same time). Blue needs it's card draw and tutors to find it's solutions in it's toolbox, but it's toolbox is very good. As far as ramp goes, Blue does have some ramp, it's also about the best colour at just hitting consistent land drops over time due to it's draw. I mean, you probably have to use a strong Blue Commander to go Mono, like Talrand or Orvar, but they do exist. I guess Talrand is just way worse Kykar, but those 2/2s coupled with various 'screw up people's swings' cards will win games if your power level isn't too high.
Ah the clickbait, as for the actual answer. I actually think Red will be the weakest color if not already in the near future The biggest thing holding White back was card draw/card advantage and Wotc so far has been exploring different ways to do so.
That Blue board wipe discussion was hilarious. But seriously Cyclonic Rift is definitely a board wipe. Its commenly said the graveyard is your second hand, so how is destroy that much better than bounce?
Crim's pup is the goodest doggo.
Richard is 100% wrong about extra turns. There is not a single mid powered deck in the game that would not be improved by adding a Time Warp to it. You don't need to be an extra turn deck to make use of what is essentially a free spell that draws you a card and gives you extra main/combat phases. There just will be incidental synergy no matter what deck you are playing.
I have a collection of the entire mystical archive, made a volo deck, stuck time warp in for the hell of it and that card is busted. I have had 2 accidental infinite combos happen with it, and it just wins games “fairly”
the discussion about what a counterspell is was very weird. how could you possibly consider veil of summer a counterspell? a counter spell has to say "counter" and "spell" on it.
5:20 the chaos that follows the statement lmaooo
White also has like unique "Grand Abolisher" type effects or "Silence" which are key in CEDH.
For removal:
White S
Black A
Blue B
Red C
Green D
White is unquestionably best while black has so many great effects and even cards like attrition, blue has good spot removal that is somewhat versatile, red has great artifact removal lots of damage dealing and chaos warp, and green hits mainly artifact and enchants and only has 2 cards that deal with any permanent.
Blue also has Imprisoned in the Moon, feels good to hit a commander with it. If they got no enchantment removal, their commander is out of commission for the rest of the game lol
what in the world is this conversation
you got me to reply I guess, so 7/10
Ok, first of all, your categories are not a good barometer for judging viability, you have to use something that actually translates to important play patterns instead of random mechanics:
- Mana acceleration (where colorless matches or beats most of the colors so the ranking of everything except green doesn't really matter)
- Resource accumulation (not running out of steam; reliable card draw generally, but you can also use recursion)
- Consistency (tutors, card filtering; for decks that want to enact a specific game plan)
- Reset buttons (board wipes and other methods of dealing with an overwhelming board state)
- Disruption (stopping your opponent from enacting their game plan, whether removal, counterspells, graveyard hate, stax or I guess discard spells)
- Protection (stops people from attempting to make your game plan fall apart, also includes counterspells)
- Explosiveness (the ability to end the game or shift it into an overwhelming board state from an unassuming position; winning slowly only makes you hated out by the other players)
Blue is an excellent color in EDH because it's incredible at the last three categories. Your card filtering and draw gives you a smooth early game to ensure you don't lose to the shuffler, your counterspells help ensure you don't lose to random game-ending plays, and then they help secure your victory after you play one of your own, which blue has a plethora of. Blue can randomly stumble into a dominant game state by casting a number of spells like Diluvian Primordial, Blatant Thievery, Rite of Replication, Aminatou's Augury or Cyclonic Rift that can radically overturn the board state in your favor. The color's toolkit is excellent at navigating the play patterns of EDH that favor decisive plays, which also includes the more casual spectrum.
Green is competitive with blue because it has insane enough resource accumulation to possibly overpower an entire table, despite struggling with player removal. The rest are a tier below. White has a very robust toolkit, but is very transparent about when it tries to win the game. Red is incredibly explosive, but is pretty lackluster otherwise. Black is a jack-of-all-trades, reasonably competent at most things, but not outstanding.
Great episode guys!
i liked these color ranking videos alot but i think the more common and interesting ranking discussion is the 2 color pairs in commander with 2 color being pretty much the floor as the lowest amount of colors one player will averagly have in a game at this point
i love this - and mass bounce is removal - Gotta love mass bounce + windfall :D
Lapse of Certainty is actually a boros card, it's kind of worse when it's not part of a Sunforger package
Rift has to be considered a wipe. Being able to redeploy doesn't mean it isn't. You're clearing the board. Plus you're almost always putting your opponents back a couple turns. The only common best case on the receiving end of Rift is you get to FULLY redeploy in 1 turn. Which usually isn't the case. Graveyards are so relevant in Commander that I feel like people can often redeploy from the grave anyways. So if people replay stuff from their grave, did you wipe the board or not? Yes. Yes you did.
Got some word choice errors in there but y'all should get the point
blue is also the most expensive to play with a decent blue deck needing the crazy expensive counters.
Considering the graveyard being pretty much an extension of your hand in commander, it's hard to consider anything besides exiling to be true removal. Rift is mass removal just as much as wrath of god or damnation.
Black in bottom tier for counter magic:
Can't belive y'all sleeping on Withering Boon.
Dashed Hopes in Shambles
a very helpful category would be: best ways to win the game/ best threats. that would help to explain why green is the best color. best ramp and best threats just make it the best color. also the insane amount of card draw green got in the near past. thats why blue is the worst color. bad ramp, bad threats, okay card draw and too interactive. "oh blue player, you have only a few creatures? guess I attack you". blue lacks so many things in the midgame.
alright hot take time:
Black
Green (following very closely)
White
Red
Blue
Black has the most even distribution of power at the highest rate between all of the things it can do. It can tutor for anything, making deckbuilding almost infinitely flexible for Black. It could do anything moderately well so long as it's within Mono Black's reach. It has access to moderately powerful mana acceleration through Swamp synergies and Rituals, an infinitely large suite of very good creature removal (single target and mass), solid recursion for creatures. And while Commander players at large haven't caught onto this yet, targeted discard spells (Thoughtseize) are not only playable in EDH, but I'd argue they're as good as Counterspells if played right. If you think about it, it's a one-for-one that deals with a single card your opponent wants to use to win the game. Even better that these also provide yourself/the table with information on what's in their hand. They have to be used proactively, but a proactive counterspell is only worse than a reactive one because your opponent doesn't waste the mana in the cast. Additionally, since it uses life and creature sacrifice as resources, it's able to play various cards whose effects are above the curve in terms of the mana spent to cast them. No other color has access to those resources the way Black does. Everybody has mana, cards, and graveyard. Not everybody spends life and lives like Black does.
Green is very strong because it's good at things Commander likes. It has the best, most permanent style of ramp, it has the best threats (in the form of creatures) and very powerful card draw. However the things it can do are far more narrow than Black. You're making big creatures, or a lot of medium creatures. And that's essentially it for Green. You can draw a lot of cards and deploy a great deal of threats, but you can't interact that well with your opponents. Green instead demands to be interacted with. Green's deal is permanents, nothing it does really works or matters if they don't have the things on the board to capitalize on them with. Return of the Wildspeaker is only as good as your largest non-human creature. If that gets killed while Return is on the stack (something that 2 or 3 other colors could reasonably do) you may wind up short a lot of cards comparatively. I'll reiterate that Green is strong, because it is, and I put it in 4th for a reason. But since it and Black are so close in power, and I'd say that Black in a way counters Green (and has much more to say for itself) that Black wins, just barely.
White is good at things that are so strong in EDH that they've been made taboo in the culture surrounding it. Stax and Taxation effects and MLD are both major strengths of the color, whether it's seen as acceptable or not. It has the most versatile removal in the game, tackling all 3 of the major permanent types in very efficient ways. It has a lot of potent recursive tools, and it's getting more and more as time goes on. It's the only color other than Green which is able to accelerate its lands, which when played properly with tools like Lotus Field and Bounce Lands, will typically keep you at parity with whomever has the most lands (in terms of mana you can access) if not further beyond them. Every color can now draw cards, and what was once something that required specific synergy (notably White's synergy with Aura's and Equipment is another factor that puts it here) now can be done very easily. Being able to draw cards while Taxing or making alliances with other players is very good in a multiplayer game. White is very good, but Black and Green are better, so it goes in third.
Red is where the colors start falling into the "bad-ish" spectrum. Red does burn well, and is able to very handily deal with Artifacts, which in my opinion are the most broken permanent type in all of Magic. It has decent single target removal, stack interaction, and board wipes. Chain Reaction is a pretty good card, even if nobody mentions it. Lightning Bolt *is* good single target removal. It may not be able to stop a Craterhoof turn or some huge Sea Monster, but it DOES kill a lot of hatebears. Looking at Abzan Hatebears on EDHREC, Bolt kills 83.7% of hatebears across those 3 colors. It's Fork and Redirection abilities are unique and potent tools to interact on the stack with Blue, but only really when Blue is present and already interacting. In this way it's next to Green in its ability to deal with Blue's counterspells. Because I'm reaching for good things to say about Red, it also has good Mono color tribes. Mono Red Goblins and Dragons are both potent archetypes, Goblins debatably being the best mono color tribe altogether for its ability to go aggressively under other tribes, as well as have self-contained infinite combos through Snoop lines, if that's your thing. Finally it does have explosive mana acceleration through its library of rituals, able to storm off and cast huge spells early for sure, though it will leave them emptyhanded, having appropriately and flavorfully burnt out. All colors draw cards, but Red draws them the worst possible way -- temporarily. As cool and flavorful as impulsive draw is, it's not very good, and that's why to compensate it tends to be more efficient in cost-for-effect than regular draw. Red burns out as the 4th best color.
Blue does the least amount of things well, and only one of those things is relevant to the format. Blue can draw cards, sure, but I've never looked at a Blue draw spell and thought "yeah that's a card I want to run". And while that's anecdotal and subjective, it points to the fact that while Blue may not need any synergies to draw cards, it's card draw is the least impactful of all non-Red colors. Green can create self-sustaining engines for drawing cards, or burst draw on the back of a large creature, Black has various cards which exchange life for a card at the start of your turn, meaning you have access to all of your mana and more cards than normal -- not to mention just regular spells which draw cards, White draws cards by putting opponents at a disadvantage OR by creating alliances with other players, essentially teaming you up. But Blue spends a card in hand to gain more cards, which draw more very mid cards ad infinitum. Counterspells are one-for-one removal effects, and while they do uniquely interact with non-permanents, they're only truly useful in "I'm going to win and you can't stop me" or "I'm going to stop you from winning" situations. And if we're honest, the former isn't something Blue gets to say often. It does have the best Artifact synergies, and I still believe them to be the most broken permanents, but Blue is only bad *compared to Black, Green, and White*, it's still a good color imo. And since we're reaching, Merfolk are a cool tribe and Wizards are pretty decent. Lack of things to say for itself compared to all other colors puts it as the 5th best color, in my opinion.
I think Best Support Color would be a good category to add in the future. Like at 57:11 Crim said White has so much that makes it the best support color. Where as for me, Red needs a high volume of it's burst effects and lacks ramp and card advantage which makes it the worst support
For me Support looks like
WG
UB
R
I love you crim, edict isn't spot removal. Mass edict isn't either, it's a gradual form of board wipe.
Richard called it. I think Red has gotten a lot of support in the year since this came out.
I feel like you guys left out a pretty big area- how easy can a color play “unfair” Magic. The ability to cheat costs on cards, use life as a resource etc. never really came up. I think those factors probably push Black ahead of White in mono color decks. But great conversation and really enjoyed these episodes.
I'm shocked Crim and Tomer didn't mention Hibernation when listing the best blue wipes
The number of notable creatures Lightning Bolt kills in EDH goes up every time somebody asks "who would play that?"
Yea. Abrade is such an all star for this reason.
YOU CAN ABSOLUTELY SLOT IN A LIGHTNING BOLT IN A DECK AND CALL IT A DAY!
sorry for shouting, my love for bolt is too much
Because the card "Seal Of Removal" exists, I consider bounce removal.
It was briefly mentioned due to the CEDH qualifier, but I think this whole discussion comes with a very significant disclaimer that just simply was not talked about enough throughout these discussions: The less competitive aspects present, and less money cards present, the more accurate the MTGgoldfish crew's final lists become. When you're not spending hundreds or thousands on your deck, when you're playing against three or more opponents, when your gameplay and deckbuilding is constrained by a social contract, and when you're playing sub-optimally on purpose for fun, of course Green is gonna be the best color and ramp is gonna be the most important factor. Ramp and card draw are the best possible things to have for a deck if you're looking to have consistency without playing tutors and optimized decklists.
Simply put, I think you easily make arguments in favor of any color being the "best color" if you are choosing the power level and pre-deckbuilding and pre-game constraints you're working with. The crew obviously had their own ideas in mind when it comes to the power level and type of gameplay they had in mind when making the lists (see Crim's comment on land destruction), and that's okay, but I think it would have been super useful to separate the lists or set a power level or the "rule zero" rules that the crew is working with before diving into the categories. I found myself able to agree or disagree with most of the opinions if I changed the preconceived notions I was focusing on, and if one is able to do that, I think it really undermines a lot of the conclusions you can reasonably draw from it.
It was an enjoyable series though, I think it would be awesome if the crew dived more into the topic at specific power levels and for different tables to see if their answers change!
They should definitely remove the top card for each category per color from their consideration, as good as some of them are, one card can’t carry mono colored deck and I think it would give a better representation of a colors power.
I agree. Especially since the top card for most things is very expensive and your average casual player won’t have it. Like last week, they said Black has good ramp because of Coffers+Urborg
dedicaded mono red player here. I play each and every enchantment removal I can grab. played the 7 mana Scour from existence, played 5 mana sorcery Introduction to Annihilation and draws your opponent a card, extremly excited for the new 2 mana one in Baldur's gate. In commander you can't be picky about spot removal
@@fernandotanigushi8310 sounds like you have a high amount of…. Devotion to Red
@@TransformersBoss I guess you can call Fernando Devoted Druid
I would say Mono blue is definitely the toughest mono color to play, but it would be my first choice as a secondary color for a commander deck. I feel like you add to any color and it gets a lot better due to the amount of interaction you get
On counters they could consider stifle effects and green actually is quite good for that. I’d also argue that anti-counters is probably lumping into the same conversation as blue does Counters so uniquely, it’s a bit of a nonstarter talking about the rest. Silence and effects like that are very white which could also be brought into the discussion.
I personally think Green ruined Magic a bit.
It became so ubiquitous at 'good stuff' that it is the reason for the most color pie breaks and design changes we are seeing in modern day design (such as white now getting card draw).
I think blue is misrepresented.
The best removals outside of staples and counterspells:
- steal stuff
- exchange things
- transform things
- bounce things
Alone that you are the main color to remove all different things from the stack, pushes blue to the top. But exchanging or stealing things is esp good in commander.
On mass removals, there can be some argue that white takes first place. But for at least second place let me give you some options:
- transform every creature of target player (Polymorphist's Jest should be the best)
- exchange creatures
- tap (and freeze) things (if you mean tap lands)
- bounce different things
- end the turn
- wheel esp combined with bounces or meaner things (you cant draw cards). Btw most blue wheels dont just strait give 7cards.
- steal things again but more!
The only thing blue cant do if you ignore colorless is gravehate. But if you can just end the turn do you have an counterargue of a better removal next to playerremoval?
Blue unique stuff (without counterspells):
- main interaction with stack. Can also exile stack.
- extra turns
- tap/untap (best color)
- free spells (best color)
- clones
- copy things
- bounce
- swap things
- steal things
- unblockable
- mill
- topdeckmanipulation (best color)
- instandspeed (best color)
Those are topics from this episode.
If we talk about ramp, let me tell you some secrets:
- mono blue can ramp at 1 mana (Retraced Image)
- you can copy everything the other player do or even narset reversal rampspells.
- you have free spells!
- you can untap lands
- manadrain
- or what about stax? Someone will hate you for playing stasis.
Ofc most of the strongest things in blue wont be used much in casual and also you shouldnt cause its mean.
While i disagree on how blue is placed, i respect every member of goldfish for giving theyr opinions. At the end its about sharing experiences of a game we all enjoy :)
Also my experiences in mid-power decks are that you can play a lot of those things i listed, if you talk to your group and if you dont overuse some effects (eg. Extraturns). I even have players that end the turn against me and its fine/fair for me.
For counter magic in black don’t forget Withering Boon, it’s only for creatures but it’s an instant speed counter for 2 mana.
Cyclonic Rift is a board wipe and Unsummon is not a single-target removal because your opponents untap after a Cyc Rift, play a couple things and discard the rest. Unsummon bounces one thing, they replay it. Nothing to the graveyard. So, where the cards end up is basically the decider. Cyc Rift ends with a lot of cards in the GY just like a board wipe does.
Greens unique quality is seeing what cool stuff other colors have and getting it too
if I ranked colors (mid power)
I'd honestly probably agree on placements with tomer at the end. The only change I would make is shirnking some of the gaps between colors, but overall I think its a pretty agreeable tier list. Also appreciated mentioning that it isnt just add and divide to find its ranking because of how important things like ramp and card draw are to functionality over something like diversity.
Tomer had them all 3 nodding hard when he couldn't stop naming good blue removal until he said something dumb about bounce.. lmao
EDIT: I love how they were so about to agree on the mass removal section until they began debating the foundation of the very argument itself ahhahaah classic
Ok I'm gonna need these guys to not put black and green in the same tier for counter spells. On top of imps mischief they also forgot withering boon 2 mana pay 3 life counter a creature spell. I'm pretty sure there is a black enchantment that counters things too but I may be misremembering on that one.
Green is getting counterspells in baldurs gate tho
I live for episodes like this. Man wish I had friends that love this game. In BROOKLYN!!!
White is so much better than black. You guys forgot about fateful absence, cribswap, despatch in an artifact deck and the white auras that pacify/mutate a creature to a do nothing creature. They synergize with enchantress decks too.
Sure black has more quantity of kill spells but white has better overall removal spells.
It's wild seeing blue be at the bottom, but also have the most call-for-a-ban card, Thassa's Oracle.
Love the way you guys placed the colors by the cams this week. Was hard to follow some of the arguments on the last one.
also in green removal it has kenrith's transformation, which is a bad creature removal (2 mana sorcery speed) but it cycles itself and does have the upside of not sending the commander back to command zone immediately
I understand how you guys got to the conclusion based on mono-colours and I mostly agree but it's so funny seeing blue and red at the bottom and then thinking about how absolutely busted izzet spellslinger decks can be
I think part of the reason for the back and forth with other colors doing stuff and “you wouldn’t just run this card” is because, yeah, in a multiple colored deck that has the color that is best at said thing, you wouldn’t. But if you’re looking at mono colored cards, which I think is how they originally pitch it, then you have to consider the other unorthodox cards because you’re looking at that mono color as a whole. Also, commander rewards unorthodox in ways no other format can, so with spot/mass removal, bounce should 100% count toward those things for their ability to do what that color does effectively. Just because it isn’t permanent removal doesn’t mean it isn’t removed from the board (otherwise the category would be spot/mass DESTRUCTION, not just removal)
In the same vein, you could say against black reanimate, board wipes aren’t good because they can just recur from the graveyard afterward (unless it exiles), so bounce can be just as effective in certain matchups as conventional boardwipes in other matchups
The boys are back in town
Unsummon I see as a fine blue removal spell, it’s not the best removal but it’s legit
Cyclonic rift, inundate, engulf the shore, kedrektant leviathan, crush of tentacles, flood of tears, devastation tide, wash out, evacuation, whelming wave, perplexing test, coastal breach, spectral dulge, displacement wave, scorlurge of fleets, profane the dead, reduce to dreams, rivers rebuke, consuming tide etc. If you build a deck correctly, blue can play 4 or 5 boardwipes that dont even impact itself.
Blue might be the second best board wipe color(maybe#1 if you run seamonsters).
Avoid Fate is an interesting green Counterspell. True it can only hit instants and auras, but it is only one mana, I can see an argument for it.
One thing with Black is that uses the life total as a resource so it gets a bump more than any other color just by the nature of the cards themselves.
I think the new Jin-Gitaxias is a great example of what a multiplayer counterspell might look like. Bonus points since it's on a permanent and as Seth pointed out in a short once the reason cards like Alrund's Epiphany are so toxic is because they're not on permanents.