Current Events > ATTN - MtG players: Most frustrating mechanic for each color?

(+) Yeah! (+)

I want to make a 5-color cube centered around on the most irritating mechanics each color focuses on. My friends love (and also hate) the idea of it - we started playing with a pretty basic 5C cube that's proven to be pretty fun, if only for the chaos getting through a game. So they're interested but in a very, "Oh man, this is gonna be gnarly" sort of way. The ones I have so far are:

White - locking down creatures/players
Blue - countering/bouncing creatures into the hand
Red - land destruction

For black, I can't decide between discarding or just killing creatures.
For green...I really don't know. Regen effects? Either that or infect, which I recognize is a more varied color but there's still a good number of cards within green that work.

I need ideas.
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Some of the effects kind of meld into other colors. White has Armageddon for land destruction. Blue has Jin Gitaxis for discard, etc.
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I'd say Hexproof for green.
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White - Limited Resources/Humility/Porphyry Nodes/Suppression Field (This is my favorite card in MTG, it fucks with everything)
Blue - Land Equilibrium/Mana Vortex/Mana Breach/Mana Maze
Green - Root Maze/Hall of Gemstone/Drop of Honey/Ritual of Subdual
Red - Impending Disaster/Blood Moon/Price of Pride/Aether Flash
Black - Contamination/Nether Void/Chains of Mephistopheles/Braids, Cabal Minion

Honorable mention, Erayo, Soratami Ascendant
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youve got it all wrong for blue. the natural inclination is to point the finger at counter cards. it's not that. it's not bounce. it's stealing. it's stealing everyone's shit. let them play their card and think it's safe because no counter

then steal it. god i hate that

infect is annoying in a totally different way than the rest of these
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For green, if you wanted to built heavily into one-drop mana dorks you could fill your land slots with a combination of cards like Strip Mine, Wasteland, Rishadan Port, Petrified Field, Fetches, Cycle lands, and Forests. And back all that land hate up with Life from the Loam, Ramunap Excavator, and Crucible of Worlds. Play a couple copies of Titania to completely take over the game once you hit five mana.
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hollow_shrine posted...

White - Limited Resources/Humility/Porphyry Nodes/Suppression Field (This is my favorite card in MTG, it fucks with everything)
Blue - Land Equilibrium/Mana Vortex/Mana Breach/Mana Maze
Green - Root Maze/Hall of Gemstone/Drop of Honey/Ritual of Subdual
Red - Impending Disaster/Blood Moon/Price of Pride/Aether Flash
Black - Contamination/Nether Void/Chains of Mephistopheles/Braids, Cabal Minion

Some of those could fit into the concept I have going.

FrenchCrunch posted...

youve got it all wrong for blue. the natural inclination is to point the finger at counter cards. it's not that. it's not bounce. it's stealing. it's stealing everyone's shit. let them play their card and think it's safe because no counter

Truth be told I was looking mostly at the cards I have, trying to avoid buying new cards if I can, which is where I got those particular mechanics for my "irritating" concept. Perhaps I could work theft into the blue side of things - I want each color to be about trying to mess up other people in their own specialized (though not necessarily 100% unique) ways. Perhaps calling it a "control" cube would be more accurate.

hollow_shrine posted...

For green, if you wanted to built heavily into one-drop mana dorks you could fill your land slots with a combination of cards like Strip Mine, Wasteland, Rishadan Port, Petrified Field, Fetches, Cycle lands, and Forests. And back all that land hate up with Life from the Loam, Ramunap Excavator, and Crucible of Worlds. Play a couple copies of Titania to completely take over the game once you hit five mana.

I have ideas for another cube for which that might work. This one is gonna be singles only.
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Didn't they fuck Blue over and got rid of a lot of removal because they wanted more and more people to play with creatures?
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green has its fair share of msesing with lands too, though some are a little overcosted maybe

plow under / uproot / various "destroy target noncreature permanent"
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I know with the older series, I used to play black decks, but they had smaller creatures with smaller mana costs.
It was easy to swarm, once you built up an army, but they'd fall quickly
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DuranOfForcena posted...

locking down, countering and land destruction irritating?

goddamn, it's ridiculous, noobish viewpoints like that that lead to WotC deciding to constantly fuck over Control for the last 10 years.

Control is a boring archetype for people who dont actually want to play the game
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Bad_Mojo posted...

Didn't they fuck Blue over and got rid of a lot of removal because they wanted more and more people to play with creatures?

It's more they made spell based permission weaker and weaker to the point it can't really keep up with both aggro and mid-range strategies. In Innistrad standard it kind of came back for the blink of an eye because of cards like snapcaster mage and tempo decks like delver. But then things shifted back to tap out control. People don't like permission decks because it doesn't feel good to play against something that just prevents you from playing. But what many of those players don't realize is that control decks have to play games with resources too, and they literally cannot afford to trade you card per card. So by playing things which are too inexpensive to be worth countering and that are unsatisfying to remove and whittling them down you can pressure them into prematurely using up their live cards. Furthermore cards with hexproof or shroud, or resilient effects like recursion or regeneration force them to play board wipe spells on to underdeveloped boards which means they may no longer have them when they need them.

Playing differently and playing cards designed to frustrate their efforts to play efficiently go a long way to beating annoying permission decks.
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you want a really irritating deck, my favorite was one that tried to cast as many copies of Shahrazad as it could (with fork and twincast), and then cheat in and protect Divine Intervention.

very little as frustrating as playing a dozen drawn games before even getting back to the original game to start the cycle again.

not a cheap one, though. Shahrazad is triple digits these days. plus DI, Force of Will and three dual lands... maybe leave that one to history.
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Well played. You win. I'll play through anything but Shahrazad.
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DuranOfForcena posted...

and here we have an even more ridiculous and noobish viewpoint. the noobishest, actually.

This is a very niche gimmick you got going on.

The "I don't understand how levels of irritation work within a card game" gimmick.
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hollow_shrine posted...

Bad_Mojo posted...

Didn't they fuck Blue over and got rid of a lot of removal because they wanted more and more people to play with creatures?

It's more they made spell based permission weaker and weaker to the point it can't really keep up with both aggro and mid-range strategies. In Innistrad standard it kind of came back for the blink of an eye because of cards like snapcaster mage and tempo decks like delver. But then things shifted back to tap out control. People don't like permission decks because it doesn't feel good to play against something that just prevents you from playing. But what many of those players don't realize is that control decks have to play games with resources too, and they literally cannot afford to trade you card per card. So by playing things which are too inexpensive to be worth countering and that are unsatisfying to remove and whittling them down you can pressure them into prematurely using up their live cards. Furthermore cards with hexproof or shroud, or resilient effects like recursion or regeneration force them to play board wipe spells on to underdeveloped boards which means they may no longer have them when they need them.

Playing differently and playing cards designed to frustrate their efforts to play efficiently go a long way to beating annoying permission decks.

This was like my MTG education when I first got into it. My buddy had a deck that outside of land had only 4 Changelings as creatures, just a few direct damage cards, and literally everything else was counterspells, discards, all manner of cards designed to exert control over how things play out to his benefit, mostly a heavy blue deck. That shit made me a good player overcoming it.

I probably wouldn't even recognize MTG since the last time I played it :/
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DuranOfForcena posted...

EnragedSlith posted...

DuranOfForcena posted...

locking down, countering and land destruction irritating?

goddamn, it's ridiculous, noobish viewpoints like that that lead to WotC deciding to constantly fuck over Control for the last 10 years.

Control is a boring archetype for people who dont actually want to play the game

and here we have an even more ridiculous and noobish viewpoint. the noobishest, actually.

Don't be so quick to judge. The wording may be unclear and there are a couple ways to interpret that:

"Control is a boring archetype and those that play it don't actually want to play the game."

Or

"Control is only a boring archetype for players who don't actually care to play the game and want to just resolve their spells and attack steps without interaction."

Most experienced MTG players would roll their eyes at the first sentiment. But it's entirely possible we're misinterpreting it.
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VectorChaos posted...

hollow_shrine posted...

Bad_Mojo posted...

Didn't they fuck Blue over and got rid of a lot of removal because they wanted more and more people to play with creatures?

It's more they made spell based permission weaker and weaker to the point it can't really keep up with both aggro and mid-range strategies. In Innistrad standard it kind of came back for the blink of an eye because of cards like snapcaster mage and tempo decks like delver. But then things shifted back to tap out control. People don't like permission decks because it doesn't feel good to play against something that just prevents you from playing. But what many of those players don't realize is that control decks have to play games with resources too, and they literally cannot afford to trade you card per card. So by playing things which are too inexpensive to be worth countering and that are unsatisfying to remove and whittling them down you can pressure them into prematurely using up their live cards. Furthermore cards with hexproof or shroud, or resilient effects like recursion or regeneration force them to play board wipe spells on to underdeveloped boards which means they may no longer have them when they need them.

Playing differently and playing cards designed to frustrate their efforts to play efficiently go a long way to beating annoying permission decks.

This was like my MTG education when I first got into it. My buddy had a deck that outside of land had only 4 Changelings as creatures, just a few direct damage cards, and literally everything else was counterspells, discards, all manner of cards designed to exert control over how things play out to his benefit, mostly a heavy blue deck. That shit made me a good player overcoming it.

I probably wouldn't even recognize MTG since the last time I played it :/

Changeling? Would this be Chameleon Colossus? Because of how it's power scaled with it's controller's available mana and how it couldn't be targeted by black spot removal (Path hasn't been printed yet) this would be an ideal control finisher. I even think this might have been a deck because I remember hearing about this card around my LGS nearly eleven years ago. I think this deck is en vogue a year before I started playing, circa 2006, but Chameleon Colossus made a pretty big splash because it couldn't be blocked by Bitterblossom tokens, and wrapped up games really fast once it was allowed to start attacking.
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hollow_shrine posted...

and they literally cannot afford to trade you card per card

I don't see why not, they're by definition playing the best carddraw colour
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kirbymuncher posted...

hollow_shrine posted...

and they literally cannot afford to trade you card per card

I don't see why not, they're by definition playing the best carddraw colour

Yeah, but not all card draw is created equal (for example, divination is almost always bad). If the card draw gets too good and available the aggro decks start playing brainstorm, ponder, and preordain too and now you've got BUG or RUG delver with just enough permission to out tempo you and make your life difficult.

Kidding aside, you usually don't have the freedom to just refill your hand with a big draw spell until you've stabilized. So you have to land that big wrath blow out first, and then use stroke of genius/sphinx's revelation. That last example is special because gaining life let's you better manage the opponent's crack back if they've got a creature on board they can swing with.

There are a handful of stupid powerful draw spells through that completely break games in half. Windfall is an infamous one from the combo winter days of Tolarian academy. Fact or fiction is another. Impulse at instant speed is also probably too good to see a modern or standard reprint. Memory Jar is another contemporary of windfall and academy. Gifts ungiven could instantly find answers to a variety of situations or set up reanimation targets by choosing dread return and one huge creature and putting them both in the yard. But these kinds of cards seldom see printing anymore.

When I was playing the strongest draw engines were combinations of cards. Ponder alongside fetch lands, squadron hawk and jace the mindsculptor, birthing pod decks designed to pod into sun titan for never-ending value, stuff like that.

Edit: phrased another way, if you're constantly forcing them to blow prime spell real estate on unsatisfying targets they'll never be getting maximum value for any of their spells, and that includes draw spells which can't be comfortably cast without significant risk. If I have to pop sphinx's rev for two instead of four just so I can threaten control against your next play, never get room to breathe, things are going to fall apart for me sooner or later. Maybe i'll find an answer for whatever is on the board now, but I've just lost a prime digging tool for finding further answers to the next thing you drop. Maybe you drop a creature with hexproof or relevant protections because I tapped out to mind spring for five, and now the only thing that will stabilize this board is one of maybe three wrath spells. I may easily die there because I got greedy.
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I like control, but it's proponents are sometimes conflicted. They like control because it makes them feel "smart" but they want control to be good enough that they don't have to make any decisions.

That's the main reason why Counterspell/Mana Drain/etc. would be awful to have in a standard environment. Because they hit everything and are cheap enough that you aren't punished keeping them up.

Control is at its "best" when a player can do a good job predicting the tournament meta and spike, but that it isn't the default choice.
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Bullet_Wing posted...

Green - tokens?

I haven't played for years, but I remember squirrels nest and elf token spam getting rather annoying

"Anytime you post on GameFAQs, place 4 1/1 Green Sapling tokens on the field under your control!"

DuranOfForcena posted...

locking down, countering and land destruction irritating?

goddamn, it's ridiculous, noobish viewpoints like that that lead to WotC deciding to constantly fuck over Control for the last 10 years.

Kismet / Stasis is a top tier legacy format.
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Anteaterking posted...

That's the main reason why Counterspell/Mana Drain/etc. would be awful to have in a standard environment. Because they hit everything and are cheap enough that you aren't punished keeping them up.

That's probably true for standard right now. Well Mana Drain is insane and should never have been printed in the first place. That card was uncommon, and the only reason it didn't ruin the standard format in its day is because the overall power level of legends was shit. Ironically, two mana counterspells are too slow/greedy for legacy.

Mana Leak was probably too good for standard back in Scars-Innistrad, especially next to Snapcaster Mage. It is less true for modern though, where Mana Leak stops being a hard counter depressingly early, but it still probably the hardest counterspell available in the format, and that's actually really bad for a format where big mana decks like Tron are constant boogiemen. The problem with card-for-card permission in modern is that the powerlevel of individual cards means you can't afford to sit back on spot removal and a counterspell. If anything even moderately resilient/evasive resolves, you're suddenly desperately digging for the four mana board wipe and hoping they don't crack back with something truly backbreaking.

For most of modern's history combo decks and tempo decks like infect have had access to cards like Gitaxian Probe too, to look at your hands and know when you had game and when you didn't. And your best answer to those decks, Mental Misstep, is banned because a free hard counterspell for one drops nearly erases all aggro from the meta (zoo, RDW, infect, boggles). Game balance is hard.

And I actually suspect counterspell is probably perfectly fair for modern right now. There's just no way to print it in modern without also printing it in standard, and that's never going to happen, probably. I don't know. Strong removal tends to result in strong aggro metas, because you need to play creature that work quickly but are simultaneously expendable. Counterspell might be alright in a standard meta like that.
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hollow_shrine posted...

DuranOfForcena posted...

EnragedSlith posted...

DuranOfForcena posted...

locking down, countering and land destruction irritating?

goddamn, it's ridiculous, noobish viewpoints like that that lead to WotC deciding to constantly fuck over Control for the last 10 years.

Control is a boring archetype for people who dont actually want to play the game

and here we have an even more ridiculous and noobish viewpoint. the noobishest, actually.

Don't be so quick to judge. The wording may be unclear and there are a couple ways to interpret that:

"Control is a boring archetype and those that play it don't actually want to play the game."

Or

"Control is only a boring archetype for players who don't actually care to play the game and want to just resolve their spells and attack steps without interaction."

Most experienced MTG players would roll their eyes at the first sentiment. But it's entirely possible we're misinterpreting it.

It's more that control players are largely entitled crybabies who demand options that enable greedy decks impervious to player interaction.

Yes, it's an important archetype, but I've been involved in LCG/CCG communities long enough to have witnessed this common behavior. God help your community if control is at a low point, because then the nostalgia breaks out and people talk about abandoning the game.
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With the exception of the scars-inn standard season, I never really played a draw-go style control meta which is what a lot of people think of when they think control. But at the same time, there is always a control deck in our metas (at least in theory). When a lot of these players complain about the lack of control, they're just complaining that the style of control is different from the one they know and love. But there is always a control deck in the meta, even if that control deck is something as unorthodox as death and taxes in legacy or mono-g control in modern (which isn't actually all that good, but can still catch people with their pants down when they don't expect Plow Under and Mwonvoli Acid Moss).
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hollow_shrine posted...

With the exception of the scars-inn standard season, I never really played a draw-go style control meta which is what a lot of people think of when they think control. But at the same time, there is always a control deck in our metas (at least in theory). When a lot of these players complain about the lack of control, they're just complaining that the style of control is different from the one they know and love. But there is always a control deck in the meta, even if that control deck is something as unorthodox as death and taxes in legacy or mono-g control in modern (which isn't actually all that good, but can still catch people with their pants down when they don't expect Plow Under and Mwonvoli Acid Moss).

https://www.mtggoldfish.com/archetype/modern-g-46332#online

I've never seen this before. Sort of feels like a worse version of Ponza, even though they have lots of dissimilarities.
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Yup that's the mono green control list, complete with Eternal Witness to loop Primal Command. Real cute.

I would like to point out though that it makes up .11% of the competitive modern meta.
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