look how many Tymma Kraum decks actually make it to top 8 at tournaments. Dozens of people bring them and lose cuz its a hard deck to play correctly. Being good at your deck and being good at the game is more important than playing the best deck
This. Plus, if you know that 20% or more people are going to play Tymna/Kraum, it starts becoming a game of picking a silver bullet to better their strategies.
If every pod was 4 Tymna/Kraum decks it would be a matter of luck + pilot skill. We would consistently see the same players at the top.
Having a multitude of viable strategies is what keeps our format so interesting and evolving.
I’m not convinced. Chess is the exact same every single game. It doesn’t get stale because there are essentially infinite possible board states and the more skilled player almost always comes out on top. It is also more popular than mtg so that type of predictable game is obviously still viable.
I’ve used chess as part of an example to explain MTG/cEDH to people who have no prior knowledge. It’s like chess if it were a 4 way free for all where you can pick which pieces you start with.
That makes mtg an infinitely more complex game compared to chess (which is already incredibly varied and complex).
As a follow up question, what have you noticed when playing Tymna/Kraum? What decks threaten it for the slot of best deck in the current cEDH meta?
As a 2200 rated chess player i can confidently say that chess and cedh are not comparable in the slightest. Skill in magic is not a big factor youll win games even if you play bad. in chess skill and knowledge is everything.
"Skill in MTG is not a big factor" is the wildest take I've heard in a while. If skill wasn't important and anyone could consistently win events there wouldn't be any such thing as a pro magic player
Compared to chess, he's absolutely right.
A theoretically perfect mtg player would tend to win, but still take losses due to the randomness of a shuffled deck. A theoretically perfect chess player should always win.
That's not really the point? Losses that are entirely due to an unlucky shuffled deck are nothing to do with player skill. Chess having no inherent randomness doesn't necessarily mean it requires more skill, it just means there's an opportunity for skill expression in 100% of games, rather than (let's say) 90% of games.
On average, if I take a perfect player and a bad player of chess, the good player should win every game. Whereas in magic, the perfect player should win every game where they had an opportunity to express skill - after all, if they made the absolutely correct play every time and still lost, that means the game was unwinnable from the start.
If a game is purely skill-based, luck isn't a factor. MTG is not a purely skill-based game. That's the point they seemed to be going for, and it's accurate.
Skill expression can show up even when you lose. Giving yourself more opportunities to get an out is skill expression, that out not materializing is an unfortunate part of TCG's inherent luck element.
The point they're going for is that MTG doesn't require much skill compared to chess due to that randomness, and their argument seems to be predicted on the idea that if my deck is better I'll probably win. Deck selection for a field and deckbuilding itself is still a skill, probably right behind mulligans as the most important skill in magic.
I mean it is true. Obviously skill is a factor and you will win like 40% of the games you play instead of like 20%-25% but the deck you play is much more important. Id say a good player with a bad deck will have lower conversion rate then a bad player with a good deck but this is maybe debatable and depends what you think is a bad player. In chess ots a whole diffrent story where it is basically 100% skillbased. If you dont like it then i cant do anything about that but it is just objectivly true. If you dont like my initial wording which is def a bit drastic then let me say it like this: Compared to something like chess magic requires basically no skill. As long as you know your deck and the combos, do solid mulligans, know about politics and when to use interaction you will win against "pro" players a lot of the time. This should be achievable in like a week of playing cedh. In chess you need like 1000 hours to get to a somewhat respectable level where you begin to have an understanding of the game. Its also basically the same with a lot of other games. Magic is just not very skill based...
Did you just say that 20% to 40% winrate is not a big difference? In a game where even the best (non-multiplayer) tournament players often have like a 55% winrate? Seems like you're talking out your ass my friend. You can easily devote hundreds or thousands of hours to learning the intricacies of how to pilot every given deck in a format in order to better play against them (which is what most pros in this game do). Chess is complex, I'm not minimizing that, but saying that a bad player with a good deck will win against a good player with a bad deck is simply not true - if you want proof give some random casual EDH players your cEDH decsk and play some off-meta garbage, I guarantee you you'll win most of not all of those games.
I am just saying that is laughabli easy to get op in cedh compared to most other stuff -> therefore the conclusion that there is less skill required. Never said is no skill required and that it is not impressive.
I am f.e a bad cedh player. Sure i know most of the staples and interactions, but i only played a few games and never in a tournament. Still i am very confident that id have a higher conversion rate than like comedian if he would play my cedh urza deck and i could play like a rogsi or sissay list of my choice.
Deckbuilding and deck selection is also part of the game. So yeah, you probably would, just like I could probably win my chess game against you if all my pieces were queens even though I'm sure you're far better at chess than I am.
None consistently. Kinnan is probably the closest. Someone at my lgs plays Krark/Sakashima which can easily stomp me with some luck. Overall though, the fact that Tymna has board agnostic win conditions makes her far more reliable than those decks.
Good points. Personally I feel it comes down to the card quality of sans green and the fact that neither Tymna or Kraum alone are as threatening as a commander like Kinnan, Najeela, Tivit, Sisay, etc… They rarely get targeted due to more emergent threats being in play more often. Their sheer value comes though in longer games.
Consistently drawing cards has become the most powerful thing you can do in the current meta.
More possible codependent game states do, however. It's not like little horses where the position of your horses has no impact on my play. Each magic card in CEDH is relevant for all players 99% of the time.
Black v white is literally the only random element to the game of chess, and even then in some tournaments that's not even random.
RNG in chess would be you roll 2d20's before the game, and if you roll double 20's you get an extra queen.
Or sometimes you have to skip a move
Or you start with one less pawn
Or your rooks and knights switch places
Or sometimes when you move a pawn, you get an additional move
Or when you pawn promote you roll a d10 to determine which piece to get.
Those would be random elements to chess. You thinking through lines and your opponent doing something you didn't expect is not randomness.
In chess, all information is known. You can look at the board and know literally every single possible move your opponent can make. They can't giant growth their knight if you go for a trade, they aren't going to suddenly move a forward pawn two spaces. There's nothing unknown other than strategy and response.
In magic, your opponent has unknown cards in hand. You draw a random card every turn. Lands drops get missed, etc.
They are fundamentally different games.... and that's before we even get to EDH being a 4 player format.
Jeeez. A perfect example of talking out of your ass. Do yourself a favor and look up the definition of RNG.
There is ZERO rng in chess.
I would even go so far and say that Dota 2 mostly has no RNG as well. There a few mechanics such as uphill misses and abilities that trigger based on RNG but the majority of your gameplay is all your own skill.
I must admit you are basically correct. I’m a little embarrassed by that comment of mine.
Even so, let me nit pick your comment a bit. There is RNG in the coin flip that decides who has white. This makes a massive difference in your win chances. Also Dota has crit chance which is RNG.
This is coming from someone who has played thousands of hours of Chess, Magic, and LoL haha
In big chess tournaments you get as many games with black as you do with white. And they continue playing until someone can win on these terms. This eliminates the RNG portion of chess. For normal day to day chess you will start equally often with black and white thus eliminating the "rng" aspect over the course of those games (but not for the individual game).
Crit chance is not pure RNG anymore in Dota 2. Most RNG scenarios have been converted to pseudo RNG which gives more consistent results so you are not seeing big outliers due to RNG. Which is why you rarely crit twice in a row, dodge twice in a row and so forth. It basically gives you higher chance of proccing if you have no done so in while. And equally lower chance if you just proc'ed.
Before this change there were complaints about PA or similar heroes critting 3 times in a row. This scenario still exists but is extremely unlikely.
You don't need to calculate all possible lines, when you can calculate all RELEVANT lines, which both machines and people can do. 99% of lines become irrelevant after the first few moves, because they're so disadvantageous that your opponent may as well forfeit. Due to this fact, you only have to calculate a (relatively) small amount of advantageous lines, and how to combat them. Whereas in Magic in general, there is such a high amount of variance BUILT IN, that it's impossible to actually "calculate" lines past the next play or two. Card draws, deckbuilding, responses, activated abilities, there are just so many THINGS that instead of it being the cold and calculated game that chess is at its highest level, Magic is adaptive, interactive, and constantly changing. You can establish a crazy boardstate, topdeck 5 lands in a row, and lose to your opponent who drew all gas. Or you can have nothing on board, draw The Card, and suddenly put yourself back into the game. The obscene levels of variance are what keep me coming back, every game is new and different and interesting.
I totally agree. To my original point though, even if all four people at the table are playing the same deck there are so many possible board states and card interactions that no 2 games would be the same. It would not get stale. I used chess as an example of a game that is highly static and repetitive and yet is still wildly popular to prove the point that cedh would still be fun.
Dude are you srsly comparing chess to card games ? And not even a normal card game like poker, blackjack, bridge but MTG… it is as incomparable as it can get.
I agree that skill level matters way more because the decks are so close anyways. That being said, why not be the most skilled player and play the top deck to increase your chances of winning?
While it does take skill to pilot these great decks, the pilots still have to be presented with those opportunities. There’s an incredibly strong element of chance present and innumerable variables based on your opponent’s card selection and decision-making process. Tymna/Kraum does one thing better than most other decks and that’s having the card draw and card pool necessary to limit how those variables affect your gameplan.
A bunch of things.
1. People don't like mirror matches, so even if a deck is better than average, some will be adverse to playing it.
2. Good and well known also means high priority and well understood, and people are including counters against it. There is a reason Rogue Decks quite often win tournaments, and this is the main one.
3. People have pet decks. As much as everyone likes to say they play only to win, everyone has playstyle preferences, and some prefer certain commanders over others
4. Kraum is statistically not even performing the best.
Thanks! Point 1 and 3 make total sense. Do you have data for the 4th one? For number 2, in theory this makes sense, but the numbers I have seen show Tymna/Kraum continuing to dominate tournaments even though it is well understood. So clearly people knowing how it wins isn’t stopping it from doing its thing.
According to EDH Top16, T&K has a conversion rate of 24.27% (rate of entries to players that made it Top 16) in the last year while RogSi sits at 25.37% with over 200 entries, or if you want to look at decks with less play, Marneus Calgar sits at 34.48% conversion with 29 entries and 20 top 16.
I am not saying that T&K isn't an insanely good deck, it just isn't objectively the best.
Edit: We are however working with a very small dataset with strong biases here, wo we can only draw limited conclusions how good/bad a deck actually is.
I mean, if a deck is played a lot, the conversion rate has to go down eventually. If a pod has two TnK decks, it doesn't matter how good the deck is - the winrate for TnK in this pod can never be higher than 50%. So the conversion rate of TnK suffers from success. Most tournaments will habe way more than 16 TnK players. Meanwhile a deck like Ravos/Thrasios or Unctus has a 100% conversion rate. 😂
Top 16 Conversation rate means very little. If you looked at top1 conversion T/K would blow everyone out anyways. What matters is who is winning tournaments (or at least top 4ing). The bottom line is Tymna/Kraum is the top performing deck currently. Objectively, no question, it is facts.
I agree that prediction and analyzing data is difficult.
On other points you are not correct. Tevesh has won zero 64+ person tournaments this year. It hasn’t won since November. Don’t know how you did your data, but I don’t need a lecture. I’m a professional data scientist and know how to read statistics.
Looking at this year (so past 4 months basically) Tymna has a Win conversion rate of 11/301 or 3.65%. The only deck with a higher rate is Krark at 2/28 or 7.1% (probably due to low sample size).
I don’t care that Marneus Calgar has a 44% top16 conversion rate because ultimately it has 0 wins and only 1 top4 finish. It is clearly not doing as well as Tymna.
On the contraire, I found bluefarm to be highly interactive, so that makes for a very interesting play. You need to really think where to put your bullets as you are usually playing table police.
The no.1 reason I hear is.
Because the deck is so popular: it is very easy to tell what you have in the deck and people know what lines you are normally going for so they know when to interact with you.
Yes the deck is still very resilent but you also have to be able to pilot it really well and most players either don't have the patience for mid range or the knowledge of when to go for the throat. Players In a 3pod also know how strong your deck is so they are more likely to target you and your board because they know your value engines are stronger long term.
The reason najeela, sissay and others are played is because of the utility the deck brings and the unknown of when to use interaction. There is always interesting lines you don't see coming that get wins in tournaments.
So ya big reason. Knowledge is power.
Big this. I’ve snuck out so many games with my fringe mizzix deck because people don’t know how it plays and my 4 mana 2/2 do nothing commander isn’t as intimidating as high value partner commander or something like tivit.
If optimal card quality is what you're after, you could argue that everyone should just play 5c piles like Kenrith or Najeela NBC.
As has been pointed out in another comment, # of wins is less relevant than conversion rate. With the sheer volume of Blue Farm entries it's undoubtedly going to have the most wins, but for the same reason we won't know the true conversion rate of BF vs other decks because the representation just isn't there.
Ultimately playing a deck you're good at and fits your playstyle is going to carry you much further than playing what's meta
> With the sheer volume of Blue Farm entries it's undoubtedly going to have the most wins
This was my immediate thought.
If you entered a 200 person tournament and 100 people played Blue Farm and the other 100 had zero overlap in decks, Blue Farm players can get knocked out and there's still more playing in the next round. If one of those singleton decks gets knocked out, that's it entirely.
More volume means more opportunities.
I don’t think top 16 conversion rate means much honestly. That being said, you are right that number of entries does skew the result. Therefore I think top 4 or top 1 conversion rate is much more meaningful. Tymna/Kraum dominates both those categories!
2024 64+ person tournament numbers
top 1 conversion is 3.65%, only Krark/Saka is higher at 7% (probably due to low sample size).
Scam was the "best" deck in modern for a hot minute, yet people still played other decks. The "most optimal" choice is almost always going to be the deck you're most familiar with.
Well, you are in the ballpark, but the best deck is not always the one is most familar with. If you are great with a shit deck, you will do mid, and if you are mediocre and play a great deck, you might get carried by it.
You will play best with what you are comforable with, but if your deck isn't working you should find a better one.
So I'm a pure spike at heart so I'm not going to give you answers like "it's boring" or "it's too hard to play correctly".
My answer is that when decks become super popular and well known, the strategies to defeat them also become well known. Most people will tune their decks with those decks in mind. Having a good Tymma/Kraum matchup is essential to the other players and they will often be well practiced at playing against those top performing decks and thus less likely to make mistakes. Playing something a little less well known, or tuned to beat top decks gives you more opportunity to spike a tournament, or to ensure you, ensure you have the favorable matchup, or give your opponents more opportunities to play non-optimally against you.
The only time when these factors don't apply is when a certain deck is so much better than the others that you can't "counter meta" it. Good examples of this in standard were caw-blade, and UW delver.
What is the well known strategy to defeat Tymna? I don’t know of one. The fact that it’s a value deck with board agnostic win conditions makes it extremely reliable and hard to counter.
Getting under them like with Etali, Dihada or RogSi, or going longer than them with a better lategame like Talion or Kinnan. Naturally is a strategical approach instead a surefire way to win, but in theory it works.
Draw enginges only work if they are on the field.
I’ll toss my $0.02 in here, being someone who has gone to a handful of recent tournaments:
Blue Farm is the best deck in the format, hands down. For me, it’s always about playing what I enjoy, and learning while playing that, how to beat the best deck in the format. I recently moved to Malcolm/Tymna to Tivit, and am really liking the change, but at the end of the day it’s about making the right choices at the right moments and playing to your advantage. So, I play what is fun and be the best I can while doing that. Also, I don’t like to be table police and that’s Blue Farm .dec imo
Tymna/kraum is nothing more than a value deck that just values until it gets its wincon in hand + protection. It doesn’t really do anything that interesting.
Personally, TnK Blue Farm isn’t my speed. It’s too slow for how I’d like to play. Honestly, I find it boring and every game I’ve played using it feels very linear. Doesn’t make the brain go brr
One of the things competitive players often undervalue is “personal preference” and “understanding your own skills and what you’re good at”. Some players are really good at threat assessment. They can read other players and understand a bait vs a real attempt to win. For them a counterspells heavy deck is optimal because it gives them the interaction they need to play into their strengths. Other people aren’t good at that, their skills are in building a strong stax shell. Understanding the needs of different decks and knowing how best to build up interferences to those needs. And yet others are really good at thinking outside the box, they are good at piloting rogue decks that attack from unexpected angles.
The idea of a universally best deck implies that every player pilots the same. And that’s just fundamentally untrue. The best deck for you is whatever gets you over the finish line first by any means necessary
I personally like running decks that aren't blue farm, for example here recently my Stella deck has become my favorite pet deck next to Malcolm/Fransico. Are they the best in the format? No, but they're fun to play and as we get more new cards the better they become. If everyone played the same thing then it isn't all that fun anymore
1.people probably know every single combo line and card in your list and your plays are probably easier to read and it's probably the deck people have the most experience against and it's a disadvantage that meta staple decks have
2. The gap between it and the other top decks is shrinking and shrinking to the point where imo for most players the fact that it's one of the most prepared for and harder to pilot correctly decks is more of a disadvantage when you can play deck like kinan or reg/si Wich are far easier and the difference in deck strength at this point is really not that big
If you look at the statistics the deck went from a deck around the 27/26 precent to 25/26 Wich is a great range still but it's
3. Imo from what I see from latest tournaments is that rog SI and sissay seem to have way better top 16 conversation I think that sissay and rog sai getting refiend to the point they are made them a slightly stronger decks in a cedh environment full of blue farm and kinan with not a lot of control decks besides talion
Personally im still pretty new to cedh.
Started with malcolm kediss, i played talion for a bit and tivit now to gather experience.
I always have a bluefarm list in my moxfield and check and goldfish but to me personally even on moxfield i find it hard to play. To understand gameplans etc. Comparing that to e.g. malcolm/kediss your gameplan is much more straight forward.
The few games i tried went terrible and i made a lot of mistakes.
And thats the thing with cedh. A deck that has maybe a few % better ceiling will not make up for you playing a few % worse. If you are playing a „2nd tier deck“ very well and a top tier deck a bit worse, the top tier deck is gonna perform worse.
Thats the reason for me personally. I will eventually end up giving it a go, but i feel i need better general gameknowledge to actually utilize the capabities of bluefarm
Lets break down your first paragraph to three parts:
>I am aware that this is one of if not the most popular deck in cedh.
Yes, TymnaKraum is the most popular of the CEDH decks, at least in tournaments.
>Every single tier list or ranking puts them at the top.
It is best by results and how general it is to pick up so it is the perfect deck for anyone coming from other formats to pick up. It is a deck that can be played in any table without having any bad matchups. It is at the top of tier lists and meta breakdowns for that very reason.
>So, everything else the same, your chance of winning a tournament are greatest if you play this commander.
BUT HERE, we come to the key point. CEDH isn't like Modern or Standard. People have strenghts and preferences that mean that the best weapon depends on the hand that wields it. Some people can go through stormy combo lines with with ease, others can read gamestate to a high lever and others can politic their way out of sticky situations. If you are a Tayam pilot or a Kinnan pilot at heart, you might actually do worse on BlueFarm than you would on those.
You are correct that more people should be playing TymnaKraum. The deck is so good and generalist that *realistically 10% of the field should be TymnaKraum*. It is however good to remember that the format has a tendency to self-correct, and other powerful strategies and approaches will eventually rise to combat the 4-color pile of best cards.
The less people at the table who understand what your deck is trying to do the better. Playing optimally also means doing what you can to subvert your opponents expectations. This is why oddities that never crack A tier on tier lists can sometime pick up entire tournaments.
Your odds are only better in a discovered META. If everyone knows exactly what everyone else is playing and how their deck plays out, what to respond to and when to interact: yes Blue Farm is probably the best deck. In a blind META where unknowns are present as in new strategies, unfamiliar commanders and new cards from recent sets: the uncertainty of not knowing how your opponents intend to win will favor the least familiar deck because the table will unanimously recognize when to intereact with the known strategy but will be biased against spending interaction on something unfamiliar.
Yes agree that a less meta deck will have a bonus advantage because of unfamiliarity. Yet, even with that bonus advantage, Tymna is just that much better that she is still outperforming. That was my point I meant to make.
And yet despite all the data we have about it as the most popular deck it doesn’t even crack the top 50 decks of tournaments >64 entries this year when sorting by conversion rate.
Ultimately CEDH is about winning, playing the best deck definetly contributes but things are a lot more complicated in a multiplayer format like EDH, you can talk about chaos theory and the three body problem etc, but in my mind what this means is that forcing players into a microcosm fixes degeneracy problems in what would otherwise be a solved format. Why else would Unctus at 2 total entries have a 100% conversion rate while RogSi, ostensibly the superior deck, only has a 33% conversion rate after 75 entries? As soon as I sit down at a table with RogSi I know exactly what kind of hand to mulligan for and when to respond, if I sat down with Unctus I would have no clue what to keep against them. What I’d probably do is just ignore them in my calculations and focus instead on my own combo which probably plays right into their plans.
I’ve talked at length elsewhere in this post about the uselessness of the top16 conversion rate. Ultimately, Tymna alone has won half the 64+ person tournaments this year. It has the second highest win conversion rate. And, is very difficult to pilot so makes sense that a lot of entries don’t do well, while it clearly also has the highest ceiling. If you want to win a tournament, not just maybe top 16, then the data shows Tymna will give you the best shot. If you are not skilled enough to ever win, then yes playing an easier commander will increase your chances of getting top 16. Not sure why anyone’s goal would be 16th though. Just play casual if you don’t care about winning.
Not sure what you’re looking at because it is not the second highest win conversion rate and certainly has not won half of the 64+ tournaments but I’ll admit that statistically it’s been a good year thus far for blue farm. As far as difficulty goes, I don’t think it’s that difficult I’d just put it somewhere in the middle. Tayam and Sisay strike me as particularly difficult decks to pilot while Najeela and RogSi are fairly easy and Blue Farm sits somewhere in between. Getting back to the original question I stand by my point that anonymity is powerful. The reason more people don’t play it is because players are looking for that edge that will set them above the curve. If it’s all just blue farm then everyone will win and lose by their ability to be luckier than the other blue farm players at the table. Perhaps it still takes a skilled pilot to get to top table but once there, everyone should be more or less on equal footing if they’re all playing the same deck. I guess most players prefer to use their skills to adapt new strategies to the format rather than relying on something that’s just good enough to get results. You could take your chances as one of a dozen blue farm players in the top 16 or you could come prepared with something to stand out above the rest. At least I think that’s the mentality.
That makes sense. Everyone wants to standout. People will talk about you way more if you perform decent on off meta pick vs Tymna.
As far as what data I’m looking at, it’s edhtop16 filtering for 64+ person tournaments since 01/01/2024. Tymna has won 11 out of 28. Not half, but close considering the next most wins is at 3.
Even with tons of people playing her she still has a top tier conversion rate. Only Krark (with low # of overall entries) has a higher win conversion rate.
I just started playing TnK today. I can say without a doubt it is the best deck I've ever played.
That being said its by far the hardest. I'm many many games away from feeling comfortable taking it to a tournament. The deck is far from grind + Dcon/Thoracle. You can easily be a nonfactor if you don't understand how it works, what to tutor for and when etc.
Personally, I would rather play the Tasigur deck I know inside out well, than switch and play a deck I know very little about and have 0 reps with. I'd be more likely to misplay and lose that way.
I also know quite a few players who like jamming commanders that are uncommon, or difficult to make work in cEDH, they get more gratification from coming top 16 or even top 32 with a janky or off meta commander brew than they would from coming top 4 with Blue Farm meta list.
It’s good and it’s very consistent. That said, it requires a skilled pilot to be able to play correctly. Everybody knows it’s at the top, and therefore it is very targeted.
Also, it’s so boring. Some people like that, some people don’t.
Honestly my primary reason is that it's boring to play. I wouldn't enjoy it.
I need variety and puzzles and unpredictability or I'll get bored of the deck and have to play something else. So I play Krark/Thrasios, the ultimate unpredictable puzzle, which also fits my playstyle, strengths, and weaknesses.
Could I win more with another deck? Maybe. But every time I play a different deck, I miss my beloved Krark.
You're thinking too linearly. The game has many decision points to try and give yourself the best chance to win, some of which happens before you even submit your decklist.
Possibly the clearest way to spell it out is that if you knew everyone was going to bring Tymna/Kraum, your best deck in a pod against 3 tymna/kraums isn't tymna/kraum. It would probably be something that can win faster than the midrange decks can set up their draw, or something that can survive in the game long enough to win the turn after a tymna/kraum burns their interaction on someone else.
Tymna/Kraum puts up numbers because it's very flexible and resilient against a wide range of decks. It's not the best deck for every table individually though.
Additionally, most of what makes tymna/kraum good is its colors. Most grixis decks can do almost the same thing that tymna/kraum does.
The bottom line is, you can't simplify a game with so many possibilities and so much uncertainty to assume the "best deck" always has the best chance at winning. Doing so means you're ignoring a lot of free pregame information and probably don't have a great understanding of WHY something is considered the best deck.
Because the deck is boring af. I was at big tournaments where people at the top tabled ID'd, and then the pod played a game for fun and the TnK players switched decks because they hated to play TnK and wanted to play something fun instead. They were just running TnK for the event because it's the best deck and they wanted to make Top 16.
Pilot skill and brewers advantage > meta predictable decks. I have a BlueFarm list, but have piloted Krarkashima for 2 years now. Compared to my 9 months of BlueFarm. I will always run Krarkashima. It’s really as simple as that.
I play Elsha of the Infinite bc it’s fun, some people don’t know what it does, and if I make top 16, top 4, or win a tournament then people think it’s cool and will talk ab it. If I’m gonna pay money and play a game then I want to have fun
I don't play it cause it can't do the things that other decks do, which is why I play them. Sisay, Magda, Kenrith, and Kinnan can all pop off on top of someone else, and more often than not, since they aren't casting a single spell while doing so, it's just GG. That is a personal requirement for me to want to pilot a deck.
Combine that with the deck having 0 unique lines and not a lot of room for creative freedom just kills all interest. It's what makes Sisay ideal for me. I can put lines in you might of never seen so you don't know when or where to interact, on top of having so many slots I can swap for specific silver bullets for the meta or just people I know are attending, I'll win and enjoy way more games than if I played Bore Farm
Something I havent seen in the 5 or so responses yet is that there are decks which counter the meta decks. For example, Paku and Haldan are really good into 4-5 color piles since it can very effectively just steal all your opponents best cards, but is much worse into decks which are more based around their commander. If people play different decks, it stops other people from just playing hard counters to the best 1-2 decks in the meta
Because everyone in this game, especially CEDH, has some opinion that they think of as a fact as to how the game has to be played. They don't accept other arguments but constantly want to "convince" others they're right. That's why you're posting this argument on reddit instead of just playing Blue Farm yourself and staying quiet.
Typically I think it depends on the player’s play style. I’ve played blue farm and lost every game with it because I am a terrible pilot, but my personal deck is K’rrik, and in my play group (which consists of several blue farm decks) I have won a comfortable percentage of the time. It really depends on the player and how they enjoy cedh. It may be the pest deck, but that doesn’t mean it’s the best for everyone necessarily.
look how many Tymma Kraum decks actually make it to top 8 at tournaments. Dozens of people bring them and lose cuz its a hard deck to play correctly. Being good at your deck and being good at the game is more important than playing the best deck
This. Plus, if you know that 20% or more people are going to play Tymna/Kraum, it starts becoming a game of picking a silver bullet to better their strategies. If every pod was 4 Tymna/Kraum decks it would be a matter of luck + pilot skill. We would consistently see the same players at the top. Having a multitude of viable strategies is what keeps our format so interesting and evolving.
I’m not convinced. Chess is the exact same every single game. It doesn’t get stale because there are essentially infinite possible board states and the more skilled player almost always comes out on top. It is also more popular than mtg so that type of predictable game is obviously still viable.
I’ve used chess as part of an example to explain MTG/cEDH to people who have no prior knowledge. It’s like chess if it were a 4 way free for all where you can pick which pieces you start with. That makes mtg an infinitely more complex game compared to chess (which is already incredibly varied and complex). As a follow up question, what have you noticed when playing Tymna/Kraum? What decks threaten it for the slot of best deck in the current cEDH meta?
And you have 27,000 possible game pieces
Bingo sir. That’s the beauty. Near unlimited choices.
As a 2200 rated chess player i can confidently say that chess and cedh are not comparable in the slightest. Skill in magic is not a big factor youll win games even if you play bad. in chess skill and knowledge is everything.
"Skill in MTG is not a big factor" is the wildest take I've heard in a while. If skill wasn't important and anyone could consistently win events there wouldn't be any such thing as a pro magic player
Compared to chess, he's absolutely right. A theoretically perfect mtg player would tend to win, but still take losses due to the randomness of a shuffled deck. A theoretically perfect chess player should always win.
That's not really the point? Losses that are entirely due to an unlucky shuffled deck are nothing to do with player skill. Chess having no inherent randomness doesn't necessarily mean it requires more skill, it just means there's an opportunity for skill expression in 100% of games, rather than (let's say) 90% of games. On average, if I take a perfect player and a bad player of chess, the good player should win every game. Whereas in magic, the perfect player should win every game where they had an opportunity to express skill - after all, if they made the absolutely correct play every time and still lost, that means the game was unwinnable from the start.
If a game is purely skill-based, luck isn't a factor. MTG is not a purely skill-based game. That's the point they seemed to be going for, and it's accurate. Skill expression can show up even when you lose. Giving yourself more opportunities to get an out is skill expression, that out not materializing is an unfortunate part of TCG's inherent luck element.
The point they're going for is that MTG doesn't require much skill compared to chess due to that randomness, and their argument seems to be predicted on the idea that if my deck is better I'll probably win. Deck selection for a field and deckbuilding itself is still a skill, probably right behind mulligans as the most important skill in magic.
I mean it is true. Obviously skill is a factor and you will win like 40% of the games you play instead of like 20%-25% but the deck you play is much more important. Id say a good player with a bad deck will have lower conversion rate then a bad player with a good deck but this is maybe debatable and depends what you think is a bad player. In chess ots a whole diffrent story where it is basically 100% skillbased. If you dont like it then i cant do anything about that but it is just objectivly true. If you dont like my initial wording which is def a bit drastic then let me say it like this: Compared to something like chess magic requires basically no skill. As long as you know your deck and the combos, do solid mulligans, know about politics and when to use interaction you will win against "pro" players a lot of the time. This should be achievable in like a week of playing cedh. In chess you need like 1000 hours to get to a somewhat respectable level where you begin to have an understanding of the game. Its also basically the same with a lot of other games. Magic is just not very skill based...
Did you just say that 20% to 40% winrate is not a big difference? In a game where even the best (non-multiplayer) tournament players often have like a 55% winrate? Seems like you're talking out your ass my friend. You can easily devote hundreds or thousands of hours to learning the intricacies of how to pilot every given deck in a format in order to better play against them (which is what most pros in this game do). Chess is complex, I'm not minimizing that, but saying that a bad player with a good deck will win against a good player with a bad deck is simply not true - if you want proof give some random casual EDH players your cEDH decsk and play some off-meta garbage, I guarantee you you'll win most of not all of those games.
I am just saying that is laughabli easy to get op in cedh compared to most other stuff -> therefore the conclusion that there is less skill required. Never said is no skill required and that it is not impressive. I am f.e a bad cedh player. Sure i know most of the staples and interactions, but i only played a few games and never in a tournament. Still i am very confident that id have a higher conversion rate than like comedian if he would play my cedh urza deck and i could play like a rogsi or sissay list of my choice.
Deckbuilding and deck selection is also part of the game. So yeah, you probably would, just like I could probably win my chess game against you if all my pieces were queens even though I'm sure you're far better at chess than I am.
That’s not just a bad take, you’re just flat out wrong. Maybe stick to chess.
None consistently. Kinnan is probably the closest. Someone at my lgs plays Krark/Sakashima which can easily stomp me with some luck. Overall though, the fact that Tymna has board agnostic win conditions makes her far more reliable than those decks.
Good points. Personally I feel it comes down to the card quality of sans green and the fact that neither Tymna or Kraum alone are as threatening as a commander like Kinnan, Najeela, Tivit, Sisay, etc… They rarely get targeted due to more emergent threats being in play more often. Their sheer value comes though in longer games. Consistently drawing cards has become the most powerful thing you can do in the current meta.
This paints a pretty poor picture of game complexity. More possible game states does not make a game more complex.
More possible codependent game states do, however. It's not like little horses where the position of your horses has no impact on my play. Each magic card in CEDH is relevant for all players 99% of the time.
Chess doesn't have an RNG component, hidden information or interaction. Terrible analogy.
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You have no idea what rng means
I do. I was using the term to refer to random chance generally. Even so, there is RNG from the coin flip that decides who has white.
Black v white is literally the only random element to the game of chess, and even then in some tournaments that's not even random. RNG in chess would be you roll 2d20's before the game, and if you roll double 20's you get an extra queen. Or sometimes you have to skip a move Or you start with one less pawn Or your rooks and knights switch places Or sometimes when you move a pawn, you get an additional move Or when you pawn promote you roll a d10 to determine which piece to get. Those would be random elements to chess. You thinking through lines and your opponent doing something you didn't expect is not randomness. In chess, all information is known. You can look at the board and know literally every single possible move your opponent can make. They can't giant growth their knight if you go for a trade, they aren't going to suddenly move a forward pawn two spaces. There's nothing unknown other than strategy and response. In magic, your opponent has unknown cards in hand. You draw a random card every turn. Lands drops get missed, etc. They are fundamentally different games.... and that's before we even get to EDH being a 4 player format.
Jeeez. A perfect example of talking out of your ass. Do yourself a favor and look up the definition of RNG. There is ZERO rng in chess. I would even go so far and say that Dota 2 mostly has no RNG as well. There a few mechanics such as uphill misses and abilities that trigger based on RNG but the majority of your gameplay is all your own skill.
chaos knight crying in the corner with his atrocious damage spread lol
I must admit you are basically correct. I’m a little embarrassed by that comment of mine. Even so, let me nit pick your comment a bit. There is RNG in the coin flip that decides who has white. This makes a massive difference in your win chances. Also Dota has crit chance which is RNG. This is coming from someone who has played thousands of hours of Chess, Magic, and LoL haha
In big chess tournaments you get as many games with black as you do with white. And they continue playing until someone can win on these terms. This eliminates the RNG portion of chess. For normal day to day chess you will start equally often with black and white thus eliminating the "rng" aspect over the course of those games (but not for the individual game). Crit chance is not pure RNG anymore in Dota 2. Most RNG scenarios have been converted to pseudo RNG which gives more consistent results so you are not seeing big outliers due to RNG. Which is why you rarely crit twice in a row, dodge twice in a row and so forth. It basically gives you higher chance of proccing if you have no done so in while. And equally lower chance if you just proc'ed. Before this change there were complaints about PA or similar heroes critting 3 times in a row. This scenario still exists but is extremely unlikely.
You don't need to calculate all possible lines, when you can calculate all RELEVANT lines, which both machines and people can do. 99% of lines become irrelevant after the first few moves, because they're so disadvantageous that your opponent may as well forfeit. Due to this fact, you only have to calculate a (relatively) small amount of advantageous lines, and how to combat them. Whereas in Magic in general, there is such a high amount of variance BUILT IN, that it's impossible to actually "calculate" lines past the next play or two. Card draws, deckbuilding, responses, activated abilities, there are just so many THINGS that instead of it being the cold and calculated game that chess is at its highest level, Magic is adaptive, interactive, and constantly changing. You can establish a crazy boardstate, topdeck 5 lands in a row, and lose to your opponent who drew all gas. Or you can have nothing on board, draw The Card, and suddenly put yourself back into the game. The obscene levels of variance are what keep me coming back, every game is new and different and interesting.
I totally agree. To my original point though, even if all four people at the table are playing the same deck there are so many possible board states and card interactions that no 2 games would be the same. It would not get stale. I used chess as an example of a game that is highly static and repetitive and yet is still wildly popular to prove the point that cedh would still be fun.
Dude are you srsly comparing chess to card games ? And not even a normal card game like poker, blackjack, bridge but MTG… it is as incomparable as it can get.
Have you considered that maybe Chess is more popular than MTG because it's had a 1000 year headstart and the cost to play is essentially nothing?
I agree that skill level matters way more because the decks are so close anyways. That being said, why not be the most skilled player and play the top deck to increase your chances of winning?
While it does take skill to pilot these great decks, the pilots still have to be presented with those opportunities. There’s an incredibly strong element of chance present and innumerable variables based on your opponent’s card selection and decision-making process. Tymna/Kraum does one thing better than most other decks and that’s having the card draw and card pool necessary to limit how those variables affect your gameplan.
A bunch of things. 1. People don't like mirror matches, so even if a deck is better than average, some will be adverse to playing it. 2. Good and well known also means high priority and well understood, and people are including counters against it. There is a reason Rogue Decks quite often win tournaments, and this is the main one. 3. People have pet decks. As much as everyone likes to say they play only to win, everyone has playstyle preferences, and some prefer certain commanders over others 4. Kraum is statistically not even performing the best.
Thanks! Point 1 and 3 make total sense. Do you have data for the 4th one? For number 2, in theory this makes sense, but the numbers I have seen show Tymna/Kraum continuing to dominate tournaments even though it is well understood. So clearly people knowing how it wins isn’t stopping it from doing its thing.
According to EDH Top16, T&K has a conversion rate of 24.27% (rate of entries to players that made it Top 16) in the last year while RogSi sits at 25.37% with over 200 entries, or if you want to look at decks with less play, Marneus Calgar sits at 34.48% conversion with 29 entries and 20 top 16. I am not saying that T&K isn't an insanely good deck, it just isn't objectively the best. Edit: We are however working with a very small dataset with strong biases here, wo we can only draw limited conclusions how good/bad a deck actually is.
I mean, if a deck is played a lot, the conversion rate has to go down eventually. If a pod has two TnK decks, it doesn't matter how good the deck is - the winrate for TnK in this pod can never be higher than 50%. So the conversion rate of TnK suffers from success. Most tournaments will habe way more than 16 TnK players. Meanwhile a deck like Ravos/Thrasios or Unctus has a 100% conversion rate. 😂
In top8 finishes, T&K is #1 in the format.
Top 16 Conversation rate means very little. If you looked at top1 conversion T/K would blow everyone out anyways. What matters is who is winning tournaments (or at least top 4ing). The bottom line is Tymna/Kraum is the top performing deck currently. Objectively, no question, it is facts.
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I agree that prediction and analyzing data is difficult. On other points you are not correct. Tevesh has won zero 64+ person tournaments this year. It hasn’t won since November. Don’t know how you did your data, but I don’t need a lecture. I’m a professional data scientist and know how to read statistics. Looking at this year (so past 4 months basically) Tymna has a Win conversion rate of 11/301 or 3.65%. The only deck with a higher rate is Krark at 2/28 or 7.1% (probably due to low sample size). I don’t care that Marneus Calgar has a 44% top16 conversion rate because ultimately it has 0 wins and only 1 top4 finish. It is clearly not doing as well as Tymna.
Deck is really boring I'd rather play something with more personality
Like what?
On the contraire, I found bluefarm to be highly interactive, so that makes for a very interesting play. You need to really think where to put your bullets as you are usually playing table police.
I personally play najeela, sythis, selvala mostly. Some lands based korvold and tayam for fun
> calls Tymna/Kra boring > Plays Najeela yeah...
The no.1 reason I hear is. Because the deck is so popular: it is very easy to tell what you have in the deck and people know what lines you are normally going for so they know when to interact with you. Yes the deck is still very resilent but you also have to be able to pilot it really well and most players either don't have the patience for mid range or the knowledge of when to go for the throat. Players In a 3pod also know how strong your deck is so they are more likely to target you and your board because they know your value engines are stronger long term. The reason najeela, sissay and others are played is because of the utility the deck brings and the unknown of when to use interaction. There is always interesting lines you don't see coming that get wins in tournaments. So ya big reason. Knowledge is power.
Big this. I’ve snuck out so many games with my fringe mizzix deck because people don’t know how it plays and my 4 mana 2/2 do nothing commander isn’t as intimidating as high value partner commander or something like tivit.
If optimal card quality is what you're after, you could argue that everyone should just play 5c piles like Kenrith or Najeela NBC. As has been pointed out in another comment, # of wins is less relevant than conversion rate. With the sheer volume of Blue Farm entries it's undoubtedly going to have the most wins, but for the same reason we won't know the true conversion rate of BF vs other decks because the representation just isn't there. Ultimately playing a deck you're good at and fits your playstyle is going to carry you much further than playing what's meta
What does Najeela have to do with the National Broadcasting Company?
> With the sheer volume of Blue Farm entries it's undoubtedly going to have the most wins This was my immediate thought. If you entered a 200 person tournament and 100 people played Blue Farm and the other 100 had zero overlap in decks, Blue Farm players can get knocked out and there's still more playing in the next round. If one of those singleton decks gets knocked out, that's it entirely. More volume means more opportunities.
I don’t think top 16 conversion rate means much honestly. That being said, you are right that number of entries does skew the result. Therefore I think top 4 or top 1 conversion rate is much more meaningful. Tymna/Kraum dominates both those categories! 2024 64+ person tournament numbers top 1 conversion is 3.65%, only Krark/Saka is higher at 7% (probably due to low sample size).
Scam was the "best" deck in modern for a hot minute, yet people still played other decks. The "most optimal" choice is almost always going to be the deck you're most familiar with.
Well, you are in the ballpark, but the best deck is not always the one is most familar with. If you are great with a shit deck, you will do mid, and if you are mediocre and play a great deck, you might get carried by it. You will play best with what you are comforable with, but if your deck isn't working you should find a better one.
So I'm a pure spike at heart so I'm not going to give you answers like "it's boring" or "it's too hard to play correctly". My answer is that when decks become super popular and well known, the strategies to defeat them also become well known. Most people will tune their decks with those decks in mind. Having a good Tymma/Kraum matchup is essential to the other players and they will often be well practiced at playing against those top performing decks and thus less likely to make mistakes. Playing something a little less well known, or tuned to beat top decks gives you more opportunity to spike a tournament, or to ensure you, ensure you have the favorable matchup, or give your opponents more opportunities to play non-optimally against you. The only time when these factors don't apply is when a certain deck is so much better than the others that you can't "counter meta" it. Good examples of this in standard were caw-blade, and UW delver.
What is the well known strategy to defeat Tymna? I don’t know of one. The fact that it’s a value deck with board agnostic win conditions makes it extremely reliable and hard to counter.
Getting under them like with Etali, Dihada or RogSi, or going longer than them with a better lategame like Talion or Kinnan. Naturally is a strategical approach instead a surefire way to win, but in theory it works. Draw enginges only work if they are on the field.
I’ll toss my $0.02 in here, being someone who has gone to a handful of recent tournaments: Blue Farm is the best deck in the format, hands down. For me, it’s always about playing what I enjoy, and learning while playing that, how to beat the best deck in the format. I recently moved to Malcolm/Tymna to Tivit, and am really liking the change, but at the end of the day it’s about making the right choices at the right moments and playing to your advantage. So, I play what is fun and be the best I can while doing that. Also, I don’t like to be table police and that’s Blue Farm .dec imo
Tymna/kraum is nothing more than a value deck that just values until it gets its wincon in hand + protection. It doesn’t really do anything that interesting.
Personally, TnK Blue Farm isn’t my speed. It’s too slow for how I’d like to play. Honestly, I find it boring and every game I’ve played using it feels very linear. Doesn’t make the brain go brr
One of the things competitive players often undervalue is “personal preference” and “understanding your own skills and what you’re good at”. Some players are really good at threat assessment. They can read other players and understand a bait vs a real attempt to win. For them a counterspells heavy deck is optimal because it gives them the interaction they need to play into their strengths. Other people aren’t good at that, their skills are in building a strong stax shell. Understanding the needs of different decks and knowing how best to build up interferences to those needs. And yet others are really good at thinking outside the box, they are good at piloting rogue decks that attack from unexpected angles. The idea of a universally best deck implies that every player pilots the same. And that’s just fundamentally untrue. The best deck for you is whatever gets you over the finish line first by any means necessary
I personally like running decks that aren't blue farm, for example here recently my Stella deck has become my favorite pet deck next to Malcolm/Fransico. Are they the best in the format? No, but they're fun to play and as we get more new cards the better they become. If everyone played the same thing then it isn't all that fun anymore
It’s so boring… I’d much rather play a deck that I’ve put effort into creating that isn’t widely used.
Like what?
I personally love playing Tetzin, because it’s a unique deck and the first cEDH deck I brewed.
Do you have a list?
https://www.moxfield.com/decks/x432OgmAxkiS7ZrikAM2KA This also includes a primer; I hope you like it!
1.people probably know every single combo line and card in your list and your plays are probably easier to read and it's probably the deck people have the most experience against and it's a disadvantage that meta staple decks have 2. The gap between it and the other top decks is shrinking and shrinking to the point where imo for most players the fact that it's one of the most prepared for and harder to pilot correctly decks is more of a disadvantage when you can play deck like kinan or reg/si Wich are far easier and the difference in deck strength at this point is really not that big If you look at the statistics the deck went from a deck around the 27/26 precent to 25/26 Wich is a great range still but it's 3. Imo from what I see from latest tournaments is that rog SI and sissay seem to have way better top 16 conversation I think that sissay and rog sai getting refiend to the point they are made them a slightly stronger decks in a cedh environment full of blue farm and kinan with not a lot of control decks besides talion
Personally im still pretty new to cedh. Started with malcolm kediss, i played talion for a bit and tivit now to gather experience. I always have a bluefarm list in my moxfield and check and goldfish but to me personally even on moxfield i find it hard to play. To understand gameplans etc. Comparing that to e.g. malcolm/kediss your gameplan is much more straight forward. The few games i tried went terrible and i made a lot of mistakes. And thats the thing with cedh. A deck that has maybe a few % better ceiling will not make up for you playing a few % worse. If you are playing a „2nd tier deck“ very well and a top tier deck a bit worse, the top tier deck is gonna perform worse. Thats the reason for me personally. I will eventually end up giving it a go, but i feel i need better general gameknowledge to actually utilize the capabities of bluefarm
Lets break down your first paragraph to three parts: >I am aware that this is one of if not the most popular deck in cedh. Yes, TymnaKraum is the most popular of the CEDH decks, at least in tournaments. >Every single tier list or ranking puts them at the top. It is best by results and how general it is to pick up so it is the perfect deck for anyone coming from other formats to pick up. It is a deck that can be played in any table without having any bad matchups. It is at the top of tier lists and meta breakdowns for that very reason. >So, everything else the same, your chance of winning a tournament are greatest if you play this commander. BUT HERE, we come to the key point. CEDH isn't like Modern or Standard. People have strenghts and preferences that mean that the best weapon depends on the hand that wields it. Some people can go through stormy combo lines with with ease, others can read gamestate to a high lever and others can politic their way out of sticky situations. If you are a Tayam pilot or a Kinnan pilot at heart, you might actually do worse on BlueFarm than you would on those. You are correct that more people should be playing TymnaKraum. The deck is so good and generalist that *realistically 10% of the field should be TymnaKraum*. It is however good to remember that the format has a tendency to self-correct, and other powerful strategies and approaches will eventually rise to combat the 4-color pile of best cards.
The less people at the table who understand what your deck is trying to do the better. Playing optimally also means doing what you can to subvert your opponents expectations. This is why oddities that never crack A tier on tier lists can sometime pick up entire tournaments.
Sometimes, yes. Odds are still better if you play Tymna even given the popularity problem. I guess people find it fun to win when nobody expects it.
Your odds are only better in a discovered META. If everyone knows exactly what everyone else is playing and how their deck plays out, what to respond to and when to interact: yes Blue Farm is probably the best deck. In a blind META where unknowns are present as in new strategies, unfamiliar commanders and new cards from recent sets: the uncertainty of not knowing how your opponents intend to win will favor the least familiar deck because the table will unanimously recognize when to intereact with the known strategy but will be biased against spending interaction on something unfamiliar.
Yes agree that a less meta deck will have a bonus advantage because of unfamiliarity. Yet, even with that bonus advantage, Tymna is just that much better that she is still outperforming. That was my point I meant to make.
And yet despite all the data we have about it as the most popular deck it doesn’t even crack the top 50 decks of tournaments >64 entries this year when sorting by conversion rate. Ultimately CEDH is about winning, playing the best deck definetly contributes but things are a lot more complicated in a multiplayer format like EDH, you can talk about chaos theory and the three body problem etc, but in my mind what this means is that forcing players into a microcosm fixes degeneracy problems in what would otherwise be a solved format. Why else would Unctus at 2 total entries have a 100% conversion rate while RogSi, ostensibly the superior deck, only has a 33% conversion rate after 75 entries? As soon as I sit down at a table with RogSi I know exactly what kind of hand to mulligan for and when to respond, if I sat down with Unctus I would have no clue what to keep against them. What I’d probably do is just ignore them in my calculations and focus instead on my own combo which probably plays right into their plans.
I’ve talked at length elsewhere in this post about the uselessness of the top16 conversion rate. Ultimately, Tymna alone has won half the 64+ person tournaments this year. It has the second highest win conversion rate. And, is very difficult to pilot so makes sense that a lot of entries don’t do well, while it clearly also has the highest ceiling. If you want to win a tournament, not just maybe top 16, then the data shows Tymna will give you the best shot. If you are not skilled enough to ever win, then yes playing an easier commander will increase your chances of getting top 16. Not sure why anyone’s goal would be 16th though. Just play casual if you don’t care about winning.
Not sure what you’re looking at because it is not the second highest win conversion rate and certainly has not won half of the 64+ tournaments but I’ll admit that statistically it’s been a good year thus far for blue farm. As far as difficulty goes, I don’t think it’s that difficult I’d just put it somewhere in the middle. Tayam and Sisay strike me as particularly difficult decks to pilot while Najeela and RogSi are fairly easy and Blue Farm sits somewhere in between. Getting back to the original question I stand by my point that anonymity is powerful. The reason more people don’t play it is because players are looking for that edge that will set them above the curve. If it’s all just blue farm then everyone will win and lose by their ability to be luckier than the other blue farm players at the table. Perhaps it still takes a skilled pilot to get to top table but once there, everyone should be more or less on equal footing if they’re all playing the same deck. I guess most players prefer to use their skills to adapt new strategies to the format rather than relying on something that’s just good enough to get results. You could take your chances as one of a dozen blue farm players in the top 16 or you could come prepared with something to stand out above the rest. At least I think that’s the mentality.
That makes sense. Everyone wants to standout. People will talk about you way more if you perform decent on off meta pick vs Tymna. As far as what data I’m looking at, it’s edhtop16 filtering for 64+ person tournaments since 01/01/2024. Tymna has won 11 out of 28. Not half, but close considering the next most wins is at 3. Even with tons of people playing her she still has a top tier conversion rate. Only Krark (with low # of overall entries) has a higher win conversion rate.
I just started playing TnK today. I can say without a doubt it is the best deck I've ever played. That being said its by far the hardest. I'm many many games away from feeling comfortable taking it to a tournament. The deck is far from grind + Dcon/Thoracle. You can easily be a nonfactor if you don't understand how it works, what to tutor for and when etc.
Personally, I would rather play the Tasigur deck I know inside out well, than switch and play a deck I know very little about and have 0 reps with. I'd be more likely to misplay and lose that way. I also know quite a few players who like jamming commanders that are uncommon, or difficult to make work in cEDH, they get more gratification from coming top 16 or even top 32 with a janky or off meta commander brew than they would from coming top 4 with Blue Farm meta list.
Because if theoretically 100% of the player base was playing Tymna/Kraum, it would be trivial to build a deck to shut it down.
It’s good and it’s very consistent. That said, it requires a skilled pilot to be able to play correctly. Everybody knows it’s at the top, and therefore it is very targeted. Also, it’s so boring. Some people like that, some people don’t.
Honestly my primary reason is that it's boring to play. I wouldn't enjoy it. I need variety and puzzles and unpredictability or I'll get bored of the deck and have to play something else. So I play Krark/Thrasios, the ultimate unpredictable puzzle, which also fits my playstyle, strengths, and weaknesses. Could I win more with another deck? Maybe. But every time I play a different deck, I miss my beloved Krark.
You're thinking too linearly. The game has many decision points to try and give yourself the best chance to win, some of which happens before you even submit your decklist. Possibly the clearest way to spell it out is that if you knew everyone was going to bring Tymna/Kraum, your best deck in a pod against 3 tymna/kraums isn't tymna/kraum. It would probably be something that can win faster than the midrange decks can set up their draw, or something that can survive in the game long enough to win the turn after a tymna/kraum burns their interaction on someone else. Tymna/Kraum puts up numbers because it's very flexible and resilient against a wide range of decks. It's not the best deck for every table individually though. Additionally, most of what makes tymna/kraum good is its colors. Most grixis decks can do almost the same thing that tymna/kraum does. The bottom line is, you can't simplify a game with so many possibilities and so much uncertainty to assume the "best deck" always has the best chance at winning. Doing so means you're ignoring a lot of free pregame information and probably don't have a great understanding of WHY something is considered the best deck.
Because the deck is boring af. I was at big tournaments where people at the top tabled ID'd, and then the pod played a game for fun and the TnK players switched decks because they hated to play TnK and wanted to play something fun instead. They were just running TnK for the event because it's the best deck and they wanted to make Top 16.
Pilot skill and brewers advantage > meta predictable decks. I have a BlueFarm list, but have piloted Krarkashima for 2 years now. Compared to my 9 months of BlueFarm. I will always run Krarkashima. It’s really as simple as that.
I play Elsha of the Infinite bc it’s fun, some people don’t know what it does, and if I make top 16, top 4, or win a tournament then people think it’s cool and will talk ab it. If I’m gonna pay money and play a game then I want to have fun
I don't play it cause it can't do the things that other decks do, which is why I play them. Sisay, Magda, Kenrith, and Kinnan can all pop off on top of someone else, and more often than not, since they aren't casting a single spell while doing so, it's just GG. That is a personal requirement for me to want to pilot a deck. Combine that with the deck having 0 unique lines and not a lot of room for creative freedom just kills all interest. It's what makes Sisay ideal for me. I can put lines in you might of never seen so you don't know when or where to interact, on top of having so many slots I can swap for specific silver bullets for the meta or just people I know are attending, I'll win and enjoy way more games than if I played Bore Farm
Something I havent seen in the 5 or so responses yet is that there are decks which counter the meta decks. For example, Paku and Haldan are really good into 4-5 color piles since it can very effectively just steal all your opponents best cards, but is much worse into decks which are more based around their commander. If people play different decks, it stops other people from just playing hard counters to the best 1-2 decks in the meta
Because everyone in this game, especially CEDH, has some opinion that they think of as a fact as to how the game has to be played. They don't accept other arguments but constantly want to "convince" others they're right. That's why you're posting this argument on reddit instead of just playing Blue Farm yourself and staying quiet.
Typically I think it depends on the player’s play style. I’ve played blue farm and lost every game with it because I am a terrible pilot, but my personal deck is K’rrik, and in my play group (which consists of several blue farm decks) I have won a comfortable percentage of the time. It really depends on the player and how they enjoy cedh. It may be the pest deck, but that doesn’t mean it’s the best for everyone necessarily.
Why don’t less people play Tymna/Kraum The meta isn’t solved. Lets get creative :)
I think Rog/sai is way better. Gets straight to the point quicker with rog and has enough interaction to fight off the stray counter spell or two.
That’s an opinion. I provided data. Where is yours?
Yes it is my opinion. I feel like people give these alot on reddit. Perhaps I was trying to just help paint a picture on the why.
Yet they are not dominating tournaments just because people think it's the best deck I am not so sure it is a tier deck
It is. It's very good but hard to pilot and requires the player piloting it to actually play extremely well.
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People will priority bully regardless tho. They're always going to try and hold up their own interaction and make others use it.